Abbey Road's tradition in the field of classical remastering can be traced back directly to the founder of the Gramophone Company. Recordings that span he entire 20th century by artists such as Caruso, Patti, Gigli, Bjorling, Beecham, Barbirolli, Karajan, Callas and Barenboim, are all preserved in the EMI studios group archive. These original analogue recordings, whether on tape or 78 disc, are used to reproduce masters for the modern digital age. They are some of the most significant milestones in recording history, and the know-how that created them has been passed down the generations of Abbey Road engineers since 1931. This heritage, coupled with the huge range of unique equipment at our engineers' disposal, enables us to offer an unsurpassed classical remastering service. Our approach to remastering is to transfer the original analogue source from as good a replay machine as possible to a digital workstation, using the best analogue-to-digital converters.
We can then work with issues of tape hiss and extraneous noises, and remove unwanted artefacts to get the recording as close as possible to what was heard in the studio at the time of the recording. We don't enhance or change; this is not the aim of the process. Equalisation may be used sparingly to aid the restoration. The original master tapes would have been edited together from different takes, and although these edits are inaudible on a vinyl disc as they are masked by surface noise,they can be heard on digital masters. Wherever possible we can significantly improve these audible edits with digital editing tools.
We have worked on all of the EMI Classics Great Recordings of the Century Series, and the Great Artists of The Century releases. We also contribute to other EMI Classics series: EMI Classics Historical, British Composers, Encore and Gemini. We are currently remastering the Lyrita catalogue, an important collection of reworkings of works by British composers.
