was the title of a great John Miles track from a 1976 John Miles album called Rebel. Strangely although I loved that track, it was one of the many I for the most part gave away, or sold for next to nothing in the Spring of 1983 when I moved to New York. I can remember to this day renting an estate car for the day and loading up the vinyl I wasn’t going to keep, and driving down to Kentish Town in London and offloading it all at some used record shop.

Of the some 2,000 albums I have now, I’ve been working through the general soul, jazz, dance, and disco albums from A-Z, over the last 2-years. I’ve learned a lot, and often go back and remaster favorite albums.

Remastering music, often involves compromises, since we’ll never hear the music as clearly as the musicians and engineers did at the time of recording. Not only don’t we have the instruments in front of us, we don’t have the same range of speakers. Even the music on standard commercial CDs is encoded at 16 bits, versus 24-bit recording in the studio.

Still, I think I’ve finally made a breakthrough. I’ve always recorded at 4800hz, 24-bit, but finally I did an album today that’s as good a the same album on ripped from the CD version at 24/4800.

Vinyl to digital: final it’s taken me from Alexander O’Neil to late in the P albums to finally re-master a vinyl album to what I consider to be nearly as good as the CD version.

Phyllis Hyman – Under Her Spell – Greatest Hits
https://t.co/MuUQ233JnS

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018

I figure that’s some 200 albums. Many of them were poor quality, scratched up, a couple definitely smelt of party beer from the 70’s (I don’t like beer!) and even with a rigorous cleaning, they were never going to sound like CD’s.

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018

Every now and again I buy an MP3 Version of a track from Amazon to compare with the ones I’m doing. While most are good, or better than mine, some from Amazon are poor quality copies of vinyl albums, you can even hear the clicks, amazingly.

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018

I know I’m saving to MP3 which isn’t optimal, but it works everywhere. M4A would be a better choice, smaller files, and better quality. However, they won’t play in my car, so MP3 it is.

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018

That said, I keep all the original recordings of albums in .WAV format files, which means I can always start over. Also, since I keep the Audacity project files, I can also export M4A files if I want.

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018

The great thing about keeping the Audacity project files, is it’s simple to resave files after making the changes based on what I’ve learned, like todays breakthrough. #audacity #remastering #vinyl #vinylcollection #remastering

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) October 13, 2018