Why are so many albums poorly remastered onto cd

what about the obvious:

the master tape ages and when it is used to create a cd, the result is less than pleasant. this would be true for poorly maintained or old master tapes, maybe acetate-based.

Music is compressed for a reason. Grand piano, for instance, has dynamics close to 100dB impossible to reproduce on typical low cost system or boombox (not to mention whole symphony orchestra). CD mastering is targeted for average buyer. Audiophiles, being small group, have no buying power. In addition old analog tapes were converted long time ago to digital with jittery clocks. It is type of jitter that cannot be removed or suppressed unless it is digitized again (if analog master still exists).

07-09-12: Mrtennis
what about the obvious:

the master tape ages and when it is used to create a cd, the result is less than pleasant. this would be true for poorly maintained or old master tapes, maybe acetate-based.

Have you heard the remastered 45 RPM vinyl of Louis Armstrong, "Under The Stars," recorded in 1957?

There are more than a few new recordings that pale in the face of this early technology. "Satchmo Plays King Oliver," is stunning as well and equally old.

Your point is valid, some tapes have deteriorated but much was either bad to begin with or made worse by poor remastering.

So many of these remasters are meant to grab someone's attention -- on an iPod, in a car, on a boom box, over the stereo system in a barroom -- not to be appreciated by an audiophile sitting down in a quiet listening room. Just as our daily political "discourse" has been reduced to shouting masquerading as debate, so much music is seeking to do exactly the same thing: getting someone to pay attention, if only for a split second.
"Notice me!" shouts the guy on Fox News or MS-NBC. "Buy my tune" shouts the singer on the latest remaster.
Remember when the word "digital" was used as a positive marketing term? Audiophiles soon enough learned the truth. Perhaps the same kind of thing is happening with remastered recordings.
-- Howard

Yes, there are some reissues that suffer from tapes deteriorating over time, and a whole lot more reissues and new issues that suffer from shoddy and indifferent mastering/production.

But, I would guess that the primary driver for the pervasiveness of bad sounding recordings is public demand--"we" want compressed music to listen in high noise environments (car, subway, airplane, etc), "we" have become accustomed to, and prefer MP3 sound (a blind study showed that most young listeners prefer MP3 to CD).

Of course, by "we" I don't mean those of us who are concerned about sound quality, but, that "we" are in the minority. Perhaps, some day, those same listeners who don't care about sound quality will come around, and in that case, the recording industry will be more than happy to resell their catalogue in a higher quality format. In other words, the industry will make more money by selling crap recordings, as well as more expensive "audiophile" recordings, than it would make by making all issues decent in sound quality.