I own multiple CD and/or digital copies of a lot of albums. The original CD, the remaster, sometimes a deluxe edition or an anniversary box on top of that. They all sit in the same library in Roon, and every time I hit play I’m implicitly choosing one of them (Roon sets one of the copies as “primary”). This bugged me because I didn’t know which one would objectively sound better (I clearly have problems). So I decided to stop guessing and measure it to help me: which version of each album is the most dynamic?
The short answer is that the original pressing usually wins, and the exceptions are super interesting, so I thought I’d write it up. (This post is about CD/digital remasters—I know vinyl is a whole different ballgame.)
How I measured
My CD collection is ripped losslessly (mostly FLAC files), a little over 2,100 albums across 603 artists. For every track I calculated crest-factor dynamic range, the same DR measurement the Dynamic Range Database uses. Take the difference between the loudest peaks and the average level of a track, in decibels. A DR13 album has quiet verses and loud choruses. A DR6 album is loud all the way through.
All of the measurements live on The Shelf, a small site I built to browse the results: every album and every pressing I own, with the measured numbers side by side. That’s also where the comparisons in this post come from, so you can check my work.
One caveat before the numbers. DR measures dynamics, and dynamics are one ingredient of how something sounds. It can’t tell you about tonal balance or tape sources, and two masters can share a DR value and still sound different. What it captures well is compression—and compression is the mastering decision you can actually hear as fatigue. It’s also the defining sound of the loudness war: from the mid-90s onward, CDs were mastered progressively louder so they’d stand out on radio and in shuffle mixes, with the peaks flattened into the average. By the 2000s this was an open fight, with Metallica’s Death Magnetic as the famous casualty. Many of the remasters in my collection come from exactly that era.
What the numbers say
Of my 2,100 albums, 127 exist in two or more versions. In 79 of those the gap between the best and second-best version is at least one full DR point, which is my threshold for caring.
Remaster-type releases win 16 of the 79. That sounds like a respectable showing until you look at who those winners are.
Seven of the 16 are Genesis albums, and they’re my favorite finding in the whole dataset. The winners are the 1994 Definitive Edition Remasters, and the versions they beat are the 2007 and 2009 remixes, rebuilt from the original multitrack tapes, by 3 to 5 DR points each. And Then There Were Three is the widest gap: DR13 for the 1994 remaster against DR8 for the 2007 remix. The older product wins because the newer one was made at the height of the loudness war. That’s the whole war in one discography. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust makes it eight, with the 1990 remaster beating the 2012 one.
Five more winners are audiophile pressings from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, including Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, and Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer. No surprise there. Gentle mastering is the entire reason those pressings exist, and it shows up in the measurements exactly as advertised.
That leaves three cases, out of 79, where an ordinary label remaster beats the original CD. Porcupine Tree’s In Absentia is the standout. The 2017 remaster measures DR11 against DR7 for the notoriously loud 2002 CD, a rare example of a remaster undoing loudness-war damage. The other two are Metallica’s Master of Puppets (the 2017 remaster) and the 2023 remaster of Dire Straits’ On The Night.
There’s one hopeful pattern below the threshold too. The recent wave of anniversary editions (Dookie at 30, Dark Side of the Moon at 50, the Kid A reissue) mostly ties the originals. Reissues seem to have stopped making things worse, which after two decades of the opposite counts as progress.
What I do with this
My buying rule used to be a vague preference for original pressings. Now it’s a measured one: the earliest CD is the default choice, an audiophile pressing is worth it when the gap is real, and a remaster needs evidence before I go near it. I will now check the DR Database before I buy—it’s crowdsourced and covers most pressings of most things.
I really wanted “remastered” to mean “better”, but for years I suspected that wasn’t really the case. Now I know for sure. The good news is that the originals are, for the most part, much cheaper second-hand than the remasters, so at least there’s that.