CD sound quality: original pressings vs regular remaster vs MFSL, etc

THe original CD master of "The Present" CD by The Moody Blues is particularly bad.    The remaster fixes that.  Night and Day.

I recently found there is a disc from Japan called Blu-spec and Blu-spec2.  Both produce redbook CD using Sony blue-ray production equipment and have been available since 2008.  The process was improved in 2012.  As an experiment I purchased the same most recent  remastered version on regular CD and Blu-spec2 of Blizzard of Oz by Ozzy Osbourne.  The regular CD new was $7 and the Blu-spec was $23.  The difference was night and day.  Like Tommy Lee Jones said about the disc in the original Men in Black movie "Oh well, I'm going to have to buy the White Album again".

THe original CD master of "The Present" CD by The Moody Blues is particularly bad.   The remaster fixes that. Night and Day.

Mapman I haven't got this at all and there were only two, but I find it hard to believe it after seeing how compressed the remaster is.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Moody+Blues&album=The+Present

Cheers George

I like both Blue-spec and MoFi ok, as a rule. I tried comparing the Blue-spec and Mofi versions of Billy Joel's Turnstiles CD.

The Blue-spec was Wayy open sounding...like way more than most. The vocals sounded ok, but not like the original vinyl back in the day. A sort of nice, if over-hyped, uber-detailed kind of sound overall.

But, the Mofi was comparatively more closed in sounding, almost comparatively plain sounding at first. No uber detail. But, it sorta took me awhile to understand what it was I had in front of me, exactly, by way of the comparison, since the two masterings were so plainly different in character.

After a few listens, I could tell that the Mofi version was vastly more in line with what I could recall from the LP. If anything, the Mofi was faintly more closed-in than the LP, but that might be the only difference other than a slight improvement to everything overall (my tt setup back in the day was modest).

By comparison I had to conclude that the Blue-spec mastering was Way off, so much that it seemed tonally 'stretched' somehow so that the vocals were no longer accurate. It seemed to have slightly more dynamics to the vocals, that uber detail and "air" and "space" in spades. But, having heard the original vinyl before, I could tell that the sound was all 'spaced out' just too bizzarely to be the real thing. I know for one thing, that whatever studio sound Joel was aiming for, it probably was Not something as hyper-real or as somehow psychedelic as the Blue-spec edition. Not for this material. Nor in the rest of his albums.

But, I can almost see someone being tricked into thinking that that version of the album was superior, since some of its sound characteristics are seemingly better in the head-to-head. But, I'm glad in this case I'd already heard the vinyl, otherwise the comparison, with no guide, might have had me confused for some time.

But, like others, I just don't put much stock in the recording-house/label technologies - it may be nice, but none of that matters if the mastering/remastering is no good.