Anyone care to elaborate on how bad the Necrophobic "Nocturnal Silence" current CD edition on Hammerheart is? Original pressings of the CD aren't too easy to find for less than $50 right now.

I've put off expanding my Black Sabbath collection simply because there are so many different versions around and i want to know which sound good or not. Too much choice is sometimes a bad bad thing.

...Also, the remasters of the first six Black Sabbath albums and the first two with Dio by Sancuary records are awesome remasters. Better than the black box remasters. I would say there are GOOD remasters out there, but unfortunately there are shitty remasters as well. You just gotta do some research.

...I've narrowed it down to either the '96 Castle remasters, or the new ones from Sanctuary....

Anyone care to elaborate on how bad the Necrophobic "Nocturnal Silence" current CD edition on Hammerheart is? Original pressings of the CD aren't too easy to find for less than $50 right now.

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I'd love a remastering of Breeding the Spawn.

I disagree. The '80s Iron Maiden CDs are very, very good. The 1986 Japanese CD of Powerslave (slightly different from the original US version) is much better than the remaster and perhaps the best-sounding CD I have ever heard, and the remaster of Somewhere in Time utterly butchers the sound of the album to the point of being a wall of noise.

It needs a remix. Not a remaster. A remaster would just make the mud louder. People get remastering and remixing confused all the time I noticed.

Could you or someone else clarify this for me? I'm one of those people who constantly gets those confused. Is remastering simply boosting the volume, while remixing is fundamentally changing the sound of the record?

To me, absolutely Nattens Madrigal. And I listened to the original for years back when that was all that was available.

There's more to mastering than just the volume, though volume boosts are fairly typical of remasters. You've basically got the idea - mixing involves modifying the sound of each instrumental track on a recording and trying to balance them so that each one is audible, while mastering is basically a final touch-up of a completed mix. Remasters are cheap, easy, and often lazily done, while remixes (like the aforementioned Cruelty and the Beast Remistressed) involve much more substantial modifications to the sound but aren't nearly as common.

Cradle of Filth's Cruelty and the Beast re-mistressed (...) has become my favorite version of that album and gave me a newfound appreciation for it. Just getting rid of the original's drum sound raises the score by several points

Yup.

I ranked that album near the top of their discography even when it had those awful "typewriter drums." The new version fixed the original's most obvious problem without breaking anything else.