Have to agree with the value of good remasters - trouble is you never usually know until you have your paws on 'em! Haunted by the memory of a deaf, forgetful Bruce Botnick’s Doors remasters from about 20 years ago… 
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I guess if you’ve been called on to remaster something, there’s probably some sense of a need to make an impact, over and above the previous version. And that can obviously so easily result in just over-cooking it. The real long-time Greats of the mastering world, will have the wisdom to overrule that instinct, but these days mastering studios are everywhere, and everyone wants to get in on the action. I think it’s become the perceived elite skill of the music industry. The so-called “black art”.
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A good remaster can clean the sound up and make it a better album but I well remember the stone roses remaster and all the fuss over it due to it being such a popular album. The original CD was so much better all the remaster seemed to be was too loud and squashed the dynamics.
The only, and I do mean only, deluxe edition I have enjoyed was the Allman bros at fillmore east where they added to missing tracks and put it back in to the correct sequence rather than the sequence used to fit tracks on a certain record side due to their length. The length of the tracks wasn’t a problem in the digital world and it should have been corrected in the first place.
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Sorry the original CD release.
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Says the man with the 10LP edition of 1999 
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Have you bought any of their releases ?
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I’m nearly in agreement with this. The deluxe reissues on CD of back catalog by New Order and Joy Division a few years back was an exercise in how not to do this stuff, horrible mastering, dropouts, typos on the sleeve notes etc. There are the odd exceptions though. The recent New Order Box Set for Movement(vinyl, CD and DVD) and not-so-recent deluxe reissue of Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space were excellent as was Slint’s Spiderland reissue.
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Not quite a deluxe edition thing but here seems as good a place as any to post this.
I went to see Isobel Campbell the other night and was quite surprised by how few people were at the gig.
She has a new album out, or rather it is not out, it should have been released on 31st Jan presumably to coincide with the tour so a major cock up there.
On the merch table they had a few albums in plain white covers…
It turned out that there were 50 test pressings of the new album, they had been numbered (eg 17/50) and signed by Isobel Campbell.
They wanted £50.00 each for them.
Is that just a canny Scot seeing that she could make £2500 cash out of something she got for nothing or does that represent a decent deal?
Only £2500 if they all sold. Did they?
Seems quite savvy to me if people are willing to pay for them. Imagine how long it would take to make that through streaming royalties!
There were 3 left
Did you buy one?
No
A few years back I was heavily involved with the re-release program for the Durutti Column back catalog. We were pressing between 1500 and 3000 copies of each LP, which were sizeable runs at the time. We were given 5 white labels to approve the masters and then a further five white labels to approve the pressing. It seems pressing additional ‘white labels’ is now quite lucrative. I got mine as a Thank You for carefully and repeatedly listening to each of the LPs for flaws in mastering or pressing. This was a process almost designed to make you never, ever want to listen to something again.
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I had a mate who worked in a pressing plant in the 70s/80s and would send me white label albums. Several went missing (along with a few other rare pressings) when my flat was broken into (I know who it was 
).
All but a couple were excellent versions that were much better than the official releases.
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This should be true of the pressing proofs as they are first off the stampers. The mastering proofs can be…erm…shite.
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