A part of my subconscious nags me that replacing it is kind of like "revisionist history," but I shrug it off pretty easily. The original low-res files were just too ugly.
Good! Shrug it off entirely. You are remastering in the full sense of the word.
For decades, the 1961 pop hit song Runaway by Del Shannon was plagued with the audio distortion known as “flutter”—every version, from the original Big Top Records single through every oldies compilation. Somehow, somewhere, someone got the actual original master tape and ran it on good-quality modern equipment: no flutter. The first time i heard it like that was either the 1980s or 1990s. Same song, sounding better like it never before had (to the general public at least).
It was very well remastered, like your PW 2020s releases.
It is a shame that disk space, and server space, was so limited back then - and I wish I'd kept the original scans. C'est la vie!
(Laughs) oh yeah. I was doing phonograph record digitizations then, and there just wasn’t enough space (that i could afford) for storing the raw digitizations, much less any of the intermediate processing steps prior to the final. I often couldn’t even save the final file(s), other than as the actual final standard CD-DA audio CD-R. I knew this was a problem at the time; figured i’d just have to re-digitize the record(s) some future year, if necessary.
At least you have enough to do the remastering and make PW and friends come to life for a whole new generation (and those like me who somehow missed it the first time around).
