Is Led Zeppelin’s new album, Mothership, a rip-off or a revelation? Released
this week, the two-CD best-of heralds the Seventies rock gods’ live reunion
with a track listing remarkably similar to their previous two-CD best-of.
Remasters, released in 1990, sold in airshiploads, thanks to the acclaimed
restoration work by the band’s guitarist, Jimmy Page. Seventeen years later,
he has done it again, with a new remastering engineer. Has some 21st-century
sonic hoodoo been applied to these blues-rock anthems? Are all previous
versions of these songs now second-rate, redundant? Or is this remastering
lark all just a bit of a gimmick?
Opinion, so far, is divided. The album is a must, argues Uncutmagazine, “for
those who wish to hear Zep at their heaviest, deepest, softest and
crispest”. The influential American music site pitchfork.com also digs the
new sound – “revelatory,” it assures us, “on even the s****est stereos”. At
amazon.co.uk, though, at least one little boy reckons the emperor has no
clothes: “You’d have to have ears like K-9 to hear any perceptible hike in
quality from Remasters.”
So who’s right? In the Abbey Road studios, North London, the chief remastering
engineer, Peter Mew, and I are trying to find out. Using Mew’s 40 years of
experience and his seriously expensive playback equipment, we’re searching
for the ultimate listening experience. We have Mothership, Remasters and –
just for fun – some old LPs to compare. And we’re not leaving the room till
we figure out if Led Zep are really rocking harder than ever before.
One thing’s for sure: they’re rocking louder than ever before. We start off
listening to the 1990 version of the hard-riffing 1971 number Black Dog. Mew
listens intently, then nods approvingly: “Fairly close to the original
master tape,” he says, “without much done to it.” It’s dynamic, clattery,
rock ’n’ bloody roll. Then we stick on the new mix. It comes out of the
speakers like a steam train. “Which one do you prefer?” asks Mew. Well, the
new one is more initially appealing, I say. More powerful. Then again, maybe
it’s just louder. “Yeah, it’s louder,” shouts Mew disapprovingly. “And to
make it louder, you have to compromise on some of the detail, because
there’s only so much information a CD can process.”
The current trends for CDs is to make them VERY LOUD. Mastering engineers do
that by reducing the difference between the very quiet bits and the very
loud bits, so that everything occupies a muscular middle range. It reduces
subtlety and finesse. But, like television adverts – which use similar
compression techniques to be louder than the programmes they interrupt – it
sure as hell MAKES AN IMPACT.
This becomes clear when we play Good Times, Bad Times from 1969. On the LP,
the drummer, John Bonham, sounds like a hyperactive giant swinging a
sledgehammer around a quarry. Then we hear the 1990 CD version. “Doesn’t
quite make it, does it?” says Mew. It doesn’t. But I can’t quite work out
why. Mew explains that the sonic compression means that when the snare drum
kicks in, the cymbals fade. There’s not enough room for both of them at the
same time. That still happens when we hear the 2007 version, but less so.
This time the detailed, upfront sound really delivers. “Not bad,” Mew
concludes “It’s better than Remasters, not as good as the vinyl.”
We play the Middle Eastern-infused Kashmir, first released in 1975. Mew raises
a weary eyebrow at the 1990 version – “not a very powerful sound” – but we
both find the new version irresistible. It’s more vibrant, more articulated,
LOUD but not careless. “It’s got more life to it,” says Mew. “Doesn’t really
need the extra level though.” Then we stick on a crackly vinyl version. It’s
not as in-yer-face, not as detailed, but it has a flow and a sense of space
that you didn’t realise you were missing before. It gives me goosebumps.
“You could listen to that all day, couldn’t you?” agrees Mew. But why?
“Because it hasn’t had digital things done to it.”
Mew does digital things to old albums for a living. He has remastered David
Bowie, Deep Purple, Bob Marley, Syd Barrett. His aesthetic, he says, is not
to get as close to the vinyl version as possible, or even necessarily to the
master tape, but to what the engineer and producer heard at the time, “maybe
with a little bit of updating”.
What does updating mean? “Fashions in sound change,” he says. “People expect a
slightly more compressed sound, slightly brighter.” So has he mastered CDs
that improve on the original LPs? “I have had people come back to me and say
that they are as good as the vinyl but without the clicks and pops.
Sometimes people tell me it doesn’t sound as good as the vinyl – well, hey,
I try my best.
“I have to make my judgments based on selling as many records as possible.
That’s my brief. So even though there might be audiophiles who say you
shouldn’t do this, well, I’m sorry, audiophiles, you’re a very small part of
the market.” The leader of the audiophiles is the maverick American
remastering engineer Steve Hoffman. I wonder if Mew has been on Hoffman’s
internet forums (www.stevehoffman.tv),
where his own work has been chastised? “Don’t talk to me about Steve
Hoffman!” says Mew. “I don’t want to criticise other people, but – hold on,
yes I do, he hates me.”
Hoffman’s heresy is to suggest that the less you mess around with the original
master tapes, the better the remaster. Which means, he suggests, that some
1980s CDs – thrown out by their owners once a rinky-dinky new remaster came
along – actually sound better than their upgrade. You just have to turn them
up a bit. So if you’re reinventing a back catalogue, as Mew did for David
Bowie, or as the producer Nick Davis has done for Genesis, mind your back.
“It hurts me when I listen to some things on the Hoffman forum,” says Davis,
“they’re so offensive.” He has spent the best part of three years remixing
all of Genesis’s albums, helped by the band’s keyboard player, Tony Banks.
Working for new formats such as 5.1 and SACD, which boast twice the
frequency range of CD, they’ve gone back to the original multitrack tapes –
“remixing” rather than “remastering”.
Their aim, suggests Banks, was to make the songs sound superficially similar
to the old versions yet offer more depth and detail on a closer listen. But
the further you depart from the vinyl versions that your fans grew up with,
the more you risk polarising opinions. “I went on Amazon,” Banks says, “and
I read five-star reviews, and then I saw one guy giving one of the new
versions zero stars, complaining it was too highly compressed! I honestly
think there was something wrong with his system.” Perhaps they should have
tried the Hoffman way, saved themselves some grief, just transferred the
tapes flat? Davis sighs. “That,” he says, “just sounds awful.”
Back at Abbey Road, listening with Mew to the various versions of Messrs Page,
Plant, Jones and Bonham, one thing becomes apparent. While the vinyl soothes
the soul, they all sound pretty bloody good. But as soon as you change
formats, suggests Mew, you have to intervene. “I’m trying to second-guess
what the original engineers would have wanted with these modern facilities
at their disposal. All the time you have to make judgments.”
Mew is fairly impressed with Mothership – he would have made it less
in-your-face, he suggests, “but that’s just personal taste”. Further
listening, he suggests, should reveal a cleaner sound than Remasters, more
detail. But while he finds Mothership fatiguingly loud, he admits he would
have upped the volume from Remasters. Why? “Because of fashion. No other
reason.”
So current ideas of how a record should sound can seep into even the most
loyally archival process. “We tried not to do too much of that,” says Tony
Banks, of Genesis, “but I suppose part of what we’re doing is making
something old acceptable to a contemporary ear. Maybe in 20 years’ time
someone else will come in and change it again.”
Should loyal Zep fans rush out and buy a bunch of songs they already own?
They’ll certainly get a different take on them, albeit one that, after a
while, they’ll struggle to differentiate from the last ones. “It’s true,”
says Mew, “it only takes about 30 seconds of listening to something and it
sounds like the best one.” But if you miss this Mothership, don’t fret.
There’ll be another one along in a couple of decades.
Mothership is out now on Atlantic
