Digital remastering of CD's

"Why do the record companies not smply remaster all of these older recordings to either 24 bit or HDCD?"

Celtic66 is spot on. The vast majority of the music-buying public are after quick internet or store downloads of compressed files to their mp3 disc/ipod/cell phone to play at ear-bleeding volumes.
There's simply not nearly enough CD buyers out there who would buy remastered discs to justify their time and expense. Changing the CD format to 24bit/96kHz is something that should have been done a decade ago to help prolong CD's, but the market couldn't even embrace 20-bit HDCD.

Carl109 - HDCD is 16-bit. Bit #16 (LSB) switches dynamic range of the signal represented by only 15 bits.

Yes Kijanki, technically correct.
(From Wikipedia: "HDCD encodes the equivalent of 20 bits worth of data in a 16-bit digital audio signal by utilizing custom dithering, audio filters, and some reversible amplitude and gain encoding."

My point was that the market ignored a very good, backward compatible improvement on standard CD's (HDCD) back when CD's were still being sold in high numbers. The proliferation of digital compressed music in the mass market will eventually spell the end of redbook CD's, let alone any high-res discs.

Carl109 - I have bad suspicion that the only thing that drives them to create new standard is desire to implement copy protection and raise pricing. SACD has pit modulation technique where watermark of CD is implemented by modulating sizes of each pit. It can be read only by specific device and therefore cannot be copied. What they failed to do is to lower price first to sway people into new standard but instead they put prices over $30 on CD that cost the same to manufacture as regular CD. They shot themselves in the foot but we all are suffering.

In my opinion they will never release 24bit/192kHz recordings since it would deliver perfect master tapes to all countries where copying for sale is done at large scale. I remember even record I had once that was made in Cuba. Russian government was copying for years records from all over the world since they did not sign international agreement. Formats released are always "equivalent" to 20 bits and not more. SACD is equivalent to 20-bits as well even though they store master tapes in wide DSD that contain at least 4x information.

I have never heard master tapes nor I have equipment to appreciate them but I read posts of people who did and they say sound is out of this world.

It is all very sad that bureaucrats and marketers control progress of an audio but I would even settle for SACD if I could afford $30 CDs.

Both HDCD and SACD contain not more than 4000 titles each but HDCD wasn't as expensive as SACD and the sound was decent (never heard one).

Thanks for all of your responses. It's really too bad that it has to be this way. I'm curious what Absolute Phase Tweak is? Can you explain this Hifisoundguy?