How much sonic tinkering goes into creating these new editions of Elvis’ albums, and specifically the live albums?
We re-transfer the music from the original album masters. We’ve learned which tape machines work best for re-transferring recordings from various time periods, which pre-amps to use, and all those sorts of technical issues. We work as a little group, and all the other people in that room are a lot smarter about this stuff than I am. Basically, what we’re trying to do is to get the sound as close to what Elvis and his engineers heard when they sat in a room listening to the playback in 1969. That’s interesting to me, particularly in contrast with the Beatles’ remasters that were released to such celebration last fall. Part of the excitement came not only with the fact that the new CDs sounded far better than Capitol’s initial CD issues, but that the wholesale remastering made the tracks sound better than they ever had before, in any format. No similar desires with the Elvis material? You know, you could remix this material and make it sound more modern, but that’s not the aim of this Le
