Reissued for the 17th time with greatly improved sound!
PH-50-NC
| Southeast USA
| 07/26/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Great recording. I'm not going to review Gould's playing here.
Amazon's editorial copy states "Perhaps best of all, the remastered sound is much better than that on previous issues of the disc". The "Glenn Gould Edition" from 1992 touted "High Definition Remastering", with Sony's patented "Super Bit Mapping" system. The implication was that all those craptacular late-1980s CD rushed to the market simply to fill the retail racks were a thing of the past, and Sony was doing it right--doing it, well...Super!!
Sigh...since that supposedly definitive "Glenn Gould Edition(TM)" of 1992, there's been the "70th Anniversary Edition" and a new "Sony Masterworks Edition". Always with the promise of better sound than the last time you ponied up for the same recording. I wish instead of touting basically meaningless jargon like "High Definition Remastering", CDs would come with disclaimers like "Engineer Joe Smith bumped up the upper-mid range frequencies to make the recording sound warmer, and added a touch of reverb as well", or "Engineer Mary Johnson stripped away all previous post-production effects and mastered this CD with completely neutral equalization, as her preference is for a dry, clean sound". That's what remastering comes down to--personal preferences by audio engineers as to how to equalize a give tape. It's not an objective science, something that is always improving as more digital bits become available in the equipment (mastering equipment hasn't improved at the breakneck pace that, say, laptop computers have over the last two decades).
This reissue may well sound better than the 1992 Glenn Gould edition. Or it might just sound different. I sure wish Sony (and all the major labels) would play it straight and simply tell people what the differences are, if they expect people to buy the same CD in three or four different editions.
Edit: In the case of the 1955 Goldberg variations, I prefer the sound of the earlier Glenn Gould Edition release to the recent 3-CD package that includes both of Gould's versions [though the 1981 'Goldberg Variations' did need to be remastered using the analog backup tape, and at least there Sony gave a clear description of the problem and rational for a reissue]. For the 1955 version, the earlier edition just sounds clearer and less tampered with, while the recent release sounds more distant and the notes less defined."
