Amazon Remastering Music With Universal and Warner Music

[Lone Mountain Audio]

I have some comment as I know some of the folks involved on the music side.  Amazon is not driving this- Universal is.  Universal wants to go back at an amazing catalog of titles and release them in higher rez and ATMOS.  Amazon is just the delivery channel.  That in and of itself is a fantastic development, that a company that size wants to buy higher rez music because they think we'll buy it.  Tidal is lovely, but my kids have zero awareness of it without me saying "listen to this".  They are already using Amazon or Apple or Spotify- these are sources they know and as more and more big music companies get with it, we'll get a lot of content redone.  Hopefully this Universal Music project will make money with such content and cascade into more and more investment in hi rez music and delivery systems.  I expect there will be some silliness and some very nice new material.  Abbey Road in ATMOS is amazing- and remixed/created by Giles Martin, an extremely talented son of the original mix engineer.  That mix is available on Blu Ray in the Abbey Road Anniversary release.  

 

Some of this is the drive to remix back catalog in ATMOS, which when done correctly represents a move from 2 dimensional to real 3 dimensional audio.  You need a wider bandwidth to deliver all that, so its forcing the music delivery people to figure out how to increase bandwidth- AND resolution.  

Its top level engineers being hired to do this work, it being done at Blackbird Studios, Capitol, the old House of Blues in Nashville.  There is a challenge in figuring our how to master in ATMOS, so many of the ATMOS/Hi Rez titles are not mastered at all.  Imagine, for the first time, just remixed and released.  In many cases it has deep involvement from the original artists or family if they are no longer with us.  This is not the 70s and 80s when record companies (mostly all gone) controlled everything.  Loudness wars these days mostly impacts pop music destined for top 40 play and playback systems with extremely limited dynamic range (10dB maybe?). 

 

I cannot imagine why people would not encourage this work, for we are actually removing the corporate involvement in many of these record decisions and giving it back to the artist and engineer to build something new.  Expect to see all delivery systems to creep toward high rez and some will embrace ATMOS as more and more playback systems adapt this 3D format (played back mostly through headphones I expect).  I suspect one day everyone will be offering 24/96 as a minimum.

  

Brad