Hey @Spuckler 

The content of the entire music catalog is supplied by the respective publishers or the music industry. The remastered versions are also delivered from there. Deezer does not change / edit songs.

 dee_dirk,

Thankyou for that fast response & useful to know who does the remastering.  It does sound as though they are just crashing them out, raw digitised.  Shame.

Hardly anyone directly remasters from vinyl records in the music industry, the studios doing the remastering use digital master tapes and HDDs if available or the analogue ones. It may happen that if even these are not available anymore due to some storage facility burning down in the past that they use the vinyl albums, but that is not the rule. But then they would use specialised software for that process, not Audacity which I also use for our band demos. 

All streaming sites including Deezer receive the “Remastered” albums from their distributors, also the lossy encoded versions, as far as I know.

“Remastering” often is used as a term to describe what is both a way to milk money out of fans (when bands don’t produce new stuff, “remaster”s are a way to re-publish the same old material over and over again) - and of “remixing” (often done by the original producers to, see above, milk money out of old material).

A “real remaster” (which you really don’t see that often) would try to change the acustic “makeup” of a publication to match with different playback devices, since “mastering” is the process of shaping the mix into something that “sounds good” (or “as intended”) on different devices (from mobile phone speakers through car audio up to high end home theatre setups). Mastering is an art of its own, even a “perfect mix” can be ruined by a bad mastering.

So, “remastering” *should* be something that tries to make (older) music “sound better” on modern devices. Unfortunately, often the material available to do the remaster just does not meet the technical requirements for this, so (some) producers use what uneducated journalists call “AI” (basically, statistics based forumlae) to introduce harmonics, subharmonics and even vocal parts that are lost.

That can, sometimes, lead to:

> … but some of the track remastering is so low quality that it can’t compensate for it …

… because, most of this “AI” nonsense is really just this: nonsense. It’s based on “machine learning”, but since the material used to train the models has been preselected by humans, most of it is extremely biased (this is a common problem with “AI” based “human resources management”, where you just can’t get an “unbiased” set of training material to be “fair”).
And it HAS to be human-preselected, because, after all, what we want to get in the end is “sounds better”, where “better” is a very subjective thing.

To sum it up: In a perfect world a “remaster” would enhance the audio quality for some devices but MAY introduce problems with others. In the real world, a “remaster” usually is making money.

Where in Deezer can I find the original, non-remastered albums? 

Some interesting info in the replies & I have learned a lot!  But let’s be clear, if a track was originally  recorded digitally I would assume there is no need to remaster it to make it “sound” like the original is there?  So, we are talking about digitizing older analogue recordings & almost without exception they are awful.  They are not processed to compensate for the loss of mid & low frequency that occurs when using an audio digital converter.  These remastered tracks are so bad they really are not worth making them available for streaming, no self respecting listener would give them the time of day let alone letting the track finish.  FF!  It just seems to me to be a total waste of time, effort & money to put these tracks out for streaming. If I see (remastered) against the track name I just hit the skip button!  A bit of a rant I know, but Deezer should not be accepting/paying(?) for what is total audio rubbish.

A lot more original masterings are available on some other streaming services. However, it should be noted:

1. Specific productions are placed with this or that streaming service at the whim of artists/management/publishers according to their business model, and services like Deezer can’t generally pick and choose specific versions.
2. They will not necessarily sound better to your ears, and may sound subjectively worse. Public tastes and reproduction technology are constantly evolving, and new remastering are generally prompted by perceived deficiencies in earlier versions (check out the very different sounding 1994 remastering of part of the Led Zeppelin catalogue, which Deezer carries alongside the more recent remasters).
3. Fresh remasters can also be excuse for monetising a mass of newly available, variable quality archive material which I and many others regard as a good reason for seeking out the original track listing. Recent remasters may also interfere with classic cover art, which many 70’s music buffs find offensive.
4. Some remasters are also remixes, where the original artists or a hired engineer have used modern technology to tweak the clarity and the position of individual voices and instruments in the mix. These can be very revealing as to the artists original intentions which may have got buried in the original mix — check out the Steven Wilson remixes/remasters of classic rock releases by Yes and Jethro Tull. But they can make a favourite song seem jarringly unfamiliar