I was just listening to a pop recording from 1980 and the hi-hats are mixed just a couple smidges too high for modern equipment.
Then I remembered there are tools to fix tonal balance using EQ on a consistent and automatic basis. Anyone that's played around with DAWs or in the recording / mixing world knows about iZotope Ozone, which is a an all-in one mixing / mastering tool. IME it's pretty decent. One of the tools is to automatically adjust tonal balance and even dynamics to match a given reference track.
So, you can take XYZ song you think is mixed really well as a reference, and feed a poorly mixed album through Ozone to get it to sound similar. In theory, this can fix (to an extent) the biggest bottleneck in sound quality, which is the quality of the recording itself.
It is worth emphasizing that this operates on the fully mixed track, so you don't need access to stems, etc. for it to work. And it also works in realtime with moderate latency, it's not an offline process. You do need to feed the song through the software once to develop the set of filters / compressors / expanders / etc. But I would say you could keep the settings the same for an entire albumin most cases.
This software is not cheap, but it's cheaper than a lot of gear that does less to improve sound quality.
I think this approach would be pretty controversial for most audiophiles. But I'm wondering if anyone has tried this, or might consider trying it. It's good enough for the people who mix your records after all...
Then I remembered there are tools to fix tonal balance using EQ on a consistent and automatic basis. Anyone that's played around with DAWs or in the recording / mixing world knows about iZotope Ozone, which is a an all-in one mixing / mastering tool. IME it's pretty decent. One of the tools is to automatically adjust tonal balance and even dynamics to match a given reference track.
So, you can take XYZ song you think is mixed really well as a reference, and feed a poorly mixed album through Ozone to get it to sound similar. In theory, this can fix (to an extent) the biggest bottleneck in sound quality, which is the quality of the recording itself.
It is worth emphasizing that this operates on the fully mixed track, so you don't need access to stems, etc. for it to work. And it also works in realtime with moderate latency, it's not an offline process. You do need to feed the song through the software once to develop the set of filters / compressors / expanders / etc. But I would say you could keep the settings the same for an entire albumin most cases.
This software is not cheap, but it's cheaper than a lot of gear that does less to improve sound quality.
I think this approach would be pretty controversial for most audiophiles. But I'm wondering if anyone has tried this, or might consider trying it. It's good enough for the people who mix your records after all...