FFS - apropros of nothing in particular, today I procured the 2009 remastered CD of Kraftwerk's AUTOBAHN, and album I have known inside out since boyhood (and owned since the late 80s on unremasterized CD).

Ripping WAVs off both with ExactAudioCopy and doing A/B comparisons of them in my DAW, I can barely believe what I'm hearing! It's bloody AWFUL!!

Theyt wisely haven't loudness-warred it - no flattening of the WAVs to be seen - but my GOD have they gone overboard on noise reduction.

Quite pattering tracks like Morgenspaziergang are now afflicted with a digital gurgle-wurgle artefact mess. It's totally egregious.

Now "to be fair", on my mid-80s CD, the same track has fairly audible broadband hiss, and even a bit of mains hum.... but to strip this away over-aggressively and replace it with pumping gurgle-wurgles.... What the HELL were they thinking?!? Is Ralf Hütter clinically deaf now or something?!?

What total d1cks!

Krafterk: can you please in future send all your album masters to me for approval first, so that you don't make any embarrassing c0ck-ups like this again? Oh my life!

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

They've also cocked up the index point between Kometenmelodies 1 und 2...

On the 1985 CD, Kometenmelodie 2 starts with a visceral raw-lemon suck filter zing explosion...
on the 2009 remaster, they've shifted the place where the track changes, so it now starts with the limp trailing end of the zing. Duh.

Plus they've censored Wolfgang Flür's head from being on the artwork. AHINE!

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Where have you been?? Kraftwerk's breathtakingly awful 'remastering' of their back catalogue for that 2009 release has been decried in all 4 corners of the Internet. The only one I can bear to listen to is Man Machine, and even then I had to get it on 180g vinyl before my projectile vomiting stopped. And you thought Death Magnetic was bad??

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Spanky

I expect that the removal of Mr Fleur from the artwork is another step in an escalating hissy fit in which Florian is trying to assert that Wolfgang wasn't actually in Kraftwerk, and that two of the four blokes wrote all the tunes and made all the decisions, and everyone else was just a hanger-on and not nearly as important, and isn't entitled to any money, and is just frankly not attractive enough.

If that reads like an out-take from Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno, or a summary of a bitching session between a flutter of uptight, gay German hairdressers, then I have got the flavour about right.

Fleur's book 'I was a Robot' desperately reprints photos of the band on stage taken over several years to try to prove that he was there all the time. Apparently there is another spat over who actually invented the electronic drums that they used. I am attempting to give a damn, but failing. It's an entertaining book, partly for reasons that are unintentional. Their output was interesting for its time, and straddled (that gay thing again) the art music and pop worlds with some aplomb. But the thread title is on the money: they are a bunch of w@nkers.

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Instant gratification is actually pretty good. It's fast as well.

Florian left Kraftwerk. It's Ralf and only Ralf left. Oh .. and three other guys to make up the numbers..

In the 70s, they were 4 musicians actually playing the music. I have zero interest in watching 4 people fiddle with laptops running all the songs as sequences - they really _should_ just send the robots out if the want to do that. For me, Kraftwerk finished after Electric Cafe. If you think like that then they were great pioneers who lead the way in electronic pop music. That's the thing that I like to concentrate on - everything post then is vapid and pointless imho.

Oh ... and remember that there was doctoring of photos due to lineup changes going back all the way to Autobahn.

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Veni, Vidi, Aesculi
(I came, I saw, I conkered)

It seems that the music business is (and always had been) plagued with liggers.

For every individual that has genuine talent, there are several others who appear to have no function other than exploiting the talent of others.

Anyway, I have a solution to the OPs problem. Eject the newly remastered CD and insert your original "unremasterized CD".

Cheers easy

Quote MonkeySpank:

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Where have you been?? Kraftwerk's breathtakingly awful 'remastering' of their back catalogue for that 2009 release has been decried in all 4 corners of the Internet. The only one I can bear to listen to is Man Machine, and even then I had to get it on 180g vinyl before my projectile vomiting stopped. And you thought Death Magnetic was bad??

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I freely confess to having been oblivious to any criticism online! Ahine!

One thing's for sure: I am no longer longing for them to finally bring out their first 4 albums on CD! Cos they had even more hiss that Autobahn. It would be hell.

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

I'll stick to my original vinyl's then

But honestly really annoys me when they do this kind of audio butchery, if they wanted to cash in they should leave the mastering alone and just release some un-released mixes or something to go with the original release instead of messing the audio up

Quote SecretSam:

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I expect that the removal of Mr Fleur from the artwork is another step in an escalating hissy fit in which Florian is trying to assert that Wolfgang wasn't actually in Kraftwerk, and that two of the four blokes wrote all the tunes and made all the decisions, and everyone else was just a hanger-on and not nearly as important, and isn't entitled to any money, and is just frankly not attractive enough.


Fleur's book 'I was a Robot' desperately reprints photos of the band on stage taken over several years to try to prove that he was there all the time. Apparently there is another spat over who actually invented the electronic drums that they used.

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My understanding is sthg along the lines of:
Wolfgang told the story in his autobiography of how he built the first electronic drum pad set that the band used.
Florian went apoplectic about this, not simply because he was a parsimonious git, but also because it turned out that the krafty devil had taken out a US patent on electronic drum pads, without telling any of the rest of 'em!
And so Flür's testimony risked invalidating this lucrative patent...

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote vinyl_junkie:

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I'll stick to my original vinyl's then

But honestly really annoys me when they do this kind of audio butchery, if they wanted to cash in they should leave the mastering alone and just release some un-released mixes or something to go with the original release instead of messing the audio up

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The bizarre thing with this remaster of Autobahn is that they HAVEN'T done any of the usual egregious things like brickwall limiting and multiband compression, or EQing a new set of bollocks onto it - it's all very reasonable and sympathetic in that department, really.

It's just that someone has set the "depth" and "threshold" way too aggressive on "Waves X-Noise" or summat like that. It's a total schoolboy error, and should have been blindingly (deafeningly?) obvious to the ears of anyone who calls themselves a "mastering engineer".

And even if the REALLY did feel that "HAD" to do something about excess hiss and hum on those tracks, the most sensible approach surely would have been to simply digitize the original multitracks and remix it digitally - something like Morgenspaziergang would be a doddle to do that for, it's only got about 4 or 5 parts at most, and no particularly radical mix operations going on - you could mute hissy tracks when they weren't be used and denoise them individually. It would be straightforward to replicate the original mix, just without so much hiss and hum. Silly buggers.

I mean, even the very start of the whole album, where they slam a car door and rev the engine, now has digital gurgle wurgle artefacts that about about 25% as loud as the actual music! WTF?!?!

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote SecretSam:

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If that reads like an out-take from Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno, or a summary of a bitching session between a flutter of uptight, gay German hairdressers, then I have got the flavour about right.
[/Email]

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I love that

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The only excuse we have for making music in the first place is to make it differently..vis-a-vis our own difference (Glenn Gould)

That's interesting, Feline. So do Nord and Roland pay the Krafty one for every ddrum or TD4K ?

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Instant gratification is actually pretty good. It's fast as well.

Quote SecretSam:

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That's interesting, Feline. So do Nord and Roland pay the Krafty one for every ddrum or TD4K ?

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we can but wildly speculate...

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

I like Steve Hillage (one of my guitar hero's), mainly his non vocal tracks (similar era I guess, well for his hey day as a solo artist) and I have a version of a track I bought online as an MP3 to show support and a similar tale. Sadly the warmth of the sound is retained better on a Youtube video that was uploaded.

Just check these drums in the intro for example, class recordings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i5EaE5fr9g

When music you love gets re-mastered in a way that you feel is ill fitting it really does make you feel who was in control and instructed the changes, not to mention disappointing.

SafeandSound Mastering

Quote SecretSam:

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That's interesting, Feline. So do Nord and Roland pay the Krafty one for every ddrum or TD4K ?

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A few weeks old thread I know but, a) the patent expired around 1991 or thereabouts and b) No-one ever actually made drums similar to the patent, it is a somewhat unique but cumbersome system

Quote Reiknir:

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Quote SecretSam:

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That's interesting, Feline. So do Nord and Roland pay the Krafty one for every ddrum or TD4K ?

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A few weeks old thread I know but, a) the patent expired around 1991 or thereabouts and b) No-one ever actually made drums similar to the patent, it is a somewhat unique but cumbersome system

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Replace "patent" with "Kraftwerk" and "drums" with "a band" in the above, and enjoy much wry lulz

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~