Allow me a little rant, if you don't mind.
In my Facebook feed, posts whining about "digital masters" and "pressed from CD" turn up from time to time. (From the "lesser" vinyl groups, of course.)
I'll be the first to praise any artist or producer who takes the time, makes the effort and has the dedication to do everything with analogue tools, record to tape and and edit/mix a record the old fashioned way. I understand that this makes everything more "solemn", and that everybody has to step up their game a bit because it's more important to get it right the first time. There's no cheating and fewer ways to make problems go away. I love this! It's Effing cool! My best example of this is The Foo Fighters' awesome album "Wasting Light".
I LOVE vinyl records and record players, and I want my signal chain 100% analogue, because.... well: just because!
However: In this day and age, the most practical, cost effective way of recording an album is to record and store the music digitally. That's the way 99.999% of all studios are set up.
In the eighties, digital recording was in it's infancy, and if a record was recorded with every track in 16bit/44KHz, without any headroom or excess, then EQ-ed, panned, mixed and mastered, loosing resolution every step of the way, then of course the stereo 16/44 end product will have lost something along the way, but today: If tracks are recorded with high resolution and dynamic range - and the engineers do their job well - a digital master has the potential to sound as good or probably better than one made on analogue equipment. The lacquer master/mother/matrix made from it will be just as good as if the master was made with an analog master tape.
It will sound good if it's been made using good craftsmanship.
If the work has been sloppy, it won't! Just like analogue masters.
Anyway, in the end our vinyl records still sound like VINYL records.
The end product, which is what we (should) care about, is great.
...And "Mastered from CD" probably just doesn't happen. Maybe from semi-pirate or "public domain" reissue labels or bootlegs, but not from serious companies. Maybe some people don't see the difference between "pressed from CD" and "digital master"?
I love collecting first pressings, because they are cooler (IMO) to own and often sound better than reissues. Yes, they ideally are pressed from the original master tapes, but the reason they sound better is because the master tape was pristine and fresh, the lacquers and matrices were new and unworn and nothing was degraded yet.
Storing tapes also degrade them. If a label wants to reissue an album and manage to source the original analog master tape (or more likely a second gen. safety master) that has not degraded (demagnetization, tape echo, etc...) they certainly will digitize it with super high resolution ASAP, because of the reasons stated above.
My point is this: If a reissue sounds worse than an original, it's because of bad choices, degraded source material or a bad/unnecessary remastering job (Loudness war?). Not because it's been stored and worked on with digital tools in the process.
There! Sorry about that.
