An uncompressed media is all worthwhile. I go afar that the reissue is a pain in the neck. If care is not taken to obtain the uncompressed media, you stand to lose the detail of the recording. No matter what you do, you will never recover what is lost in the signal. Burnt copy from an original copy is cheap but suffer a loss of detail, of course, if you care about the quality of playback. Thus, it is worth your effort to search for the uncompressed particularly those tracks you're emotionally connected to.
Often, I'm caught in a dilemma between performance and recording. On one hand, I wanted a good performance, but on the other hand, I wanted a clean and natural recording. But if push comes to shove, the performance will come on top. It's a love-hate thing. Granted, there are quite a significant number of good performance, poor recording particularly classical recordings in the early era.
Chinese recordings? Unnaturally equalised, with a noticeable boost in the lower treble to highlight presence and details. This has lent me to assume that this trick would work great on the low-resolution systems on the mediocre system, given their relatively low income per capita. However, this will throw off the balance of the sound and if you used these recording to tune your system, your system stands to go terribly wrong. The other issue I often encounter with the recordings, the western recordings are not excluded, are the phase issue. This is something the recording industry has to do a little more on standardizations, phase and loudness where some recordings are way over to top in loudness while others went to opposite polar. In addition, we, the listener is being screwed with the loudness war since the early 90s. Wiki explains that modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness, therefore, can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The extreme dynamic and details have been clipped. See the video below.
This is the ugly side of digitals. Take a look at http://dr.loudness-war.info, key in your search album. Take Michael Jackson's Thriller, for example, the world's best selling album by a far margin. It recorded 47.3 million copies sold worldwide. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=michael+jackson&album=thriller shows that the list of reissues of horrible dynamic compression indicated with red and yellow ratings. Vinyl of the same title is superior. So, do your check before you buy even though some claimed that some remastered vinyl is better than first pressing vinyl.
The tone is all that much better if the digital recording is done with AAD or ADD, I could discern the difference. A is the acronym for Analog and D is digital. The first alphabet represents the master format, mixing format follows and the last is digital transfer. Modern recordings now are digitally recorded due to low cost and irony that we, the audiophiles on the receiving end trying to squeeze every musical information out from the recording.
In general, it is so easy to be misled that the same-titled CDs produce an identical sound, it is not. Just key in your favourite artist and album title, you will see the result. Ironically, see what Wiki says "Despite the lower dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios a vinyl or tape record can achieve in theory (>60-80 dB versus 90-96 dB for CD recordings), vinyl records may still be preferred for their greater dynamic.
We are being screwed for the promise of new technologies time and time again. The audio industry is constantly looking for new growth to reap a profit. Vinyl had returned, R2R has returned, CD transport has returned, what say you?
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