Elvis is sounding better than ever on compact disc, thanks to the magic of digital remastering.
Digital technology is exhuming the work of past masters for transfer to compact disc, according to the Hearst magazine Popular Mechanics, including such jazz greats as Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Eddie Condon, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway, and such moderns as Elvis, James Brown, Ted Nugent and Miles Davis.The old tapes and records produced by these artists couldn't stand the ravages of time. Old 78-rpm records are a bygone medium given to loud clicks, pops and background noise. Recording tape is subject to a 20-year life span.
Digital technology can transfer these works to compact disc, but the transfer process is anything but simple. A big problem is that the small imperfections on these old recordings become enormously magnified on compact disc.
Complicating matters is the fact that portions of the music may be missing. The pops and clicks on 78-rpm records effectively mask the music affected. On tape the magnetic particles holding the musical information may have literally fallen off. Deterioration stops once the music has been put on CD.
In recent years the work of engineers such as Rick Rowe at RCA, Dennis Drake at Polygram, Toby Mountain at Rounder, Bill Ingland at Arista and others has come to read like music history.
Releases include a James Brown collection, "The CD of JB"; the Velvet Underground's "White Light-Heat"; two albums by the Monkees; a greatest-hits collection by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes; and another greatest-hits collection by Elvis Presley, as well as Presley's early "Sun Sessions" and "The Memphis Record."
The Beatles have benefited from digital remastering on the CD reissues of their albums. The "Columbia Jazz Masterpieces" series was recreated to reissue the work of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and others. Time-Life is releasing 27 remastered CDs chronicling the rock 'n' roll era from 1954 to 1964.
Other releases include the work of Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and the remastered soundtrack to "Hair."
Most restoration involves popular and jazz music. Fewer classical titles have been remastered since the initial recordings were apt to be more technically pristine, and popular and jazz re-releases are considered more commercially viable.
To assist digital editing, a San Francisco firm, Sonic Solutions, has developed a computer that learns what the unwanted sounds are on a recording and then simultaneously reproduces the exact opposite of the sound, canceling both.
Sometimes material must be added from scratch, as RCA's Rick Rowe found. He is developing a reputation as a witch doctor able to sonically resurrect what's long been given up for dead.
When RCA was remastering Presley's "Young & Beautiful," much of the first four seconds of the song were missing and no acceptable copy or outtake was available.
Rowe was able to reconstruct the missing seconds from similar but not exact phrasing and bits of words appearing near the end of the song. Within the first four seconds, Rowe made 36 electronic edits.
Recreating can mean more than tinkering. Rowe said Presley's "The Memphis Record" is "so different from the way it was when it originally came out. It's cleaner, fuller, has more dynamic range and is musically truer to what the musicians intended. It's not true to what the original producer wanted. I was not faithful."
Rowe said the initial recordings were toned down at the time to make Elvis more acceptable to the public.
"There's no way for me to know what Elvis wanted, the watered-down version or the full-meat of what he had done," Rowe said. "I did know that the full-meat version hadn't been out."