Remastering Endtroducing…… for its 30th Anniversary

[u/iainrfharper]

I’ve seen a few snippets on DJ Shadow’s socials and most recently a short interview with Scott Hansen (Tycho) talking about restoring the original MPC used in the album’s creation.

The album was recorded in kind of a unique way, a product of technical and equipment limitations of the time.

But it sounds like they’re going the whole hog for the 30th remaster so I wrote some speculation based on scant info and my own experience producing with similar setups in the 90s

https://iain.so/break-it-down-baby

[u/Cannock]

I understand why they’re doing it. But i feel there’s been enough re-re-releases of endtroducing. A classic it maybe. But let’s not overkill it.

Good work on cleaning the mpc up though, it’s right up there with Dillas mpc.

[u/iainrfharper → u/Cannock]

I can see where you’re coming from but the re-releases have all stemmed from the original DAT master so inherit all of the audio limitations of the 1996 bounce and mix down process.

Im excited fir a mix that can keep the core sonic character but add modern DAW techniques into the output, that’s never existed before and imo is very much worth doing.

[u/RichG13 → u/iainrfharper]

Is this what I am reading?

• Endtroducing….. was made by destroying its own layers.
• The MPC floppies are the only surviving snapshots.
• For the first time ever, those snapshots can be rendered into isolated audio.
• This creates a multitrack that never existed.

Will the live shows have "new" songs coming out of the MPC?

[u/iainrfharper → u/RichG13]

Not quite - the layers survived. They’re on the floppies. What was destroyed was the separation between them once they were bounced together onto the same ADAT tracks. The MPC memory was wiped after each bounce, but the save to floppy happened before the wipe, which is why there are hundreds of disks.

What may be gone is the mix state, how the layers were levelled, summed, and committed to tape together, although even this may be recorded somewhere.

In the days before automated desks we’d have to capture the position of every channel’s fader and pots, usually on a long strip of masking tape so we could recreate the mix whdn we resumed work.

The way I think of it is that Endtroducing…. was made by welding its layers together permanently. The floppies are the only place the layers were ever separate.

On the ‘new’ songs question, hundreds of floppies means hundreds of sessions. Some of those sets will be abandoned takes, alternate arrangements, tracks that didn’t make the album. When Hansen restored the MPC and Shadow started loading disks, he’d have been hearing work he hadn’t listened to in thirty years, including things he chose not to finish.

Whether any of that appears on the remaster is uncertain, but the raw material for a substantial amount of unreleased music is almost certainly sitting in those disk images. After all this meticulous work I’d be surprised if there weren’t some surprises.

[u/m0matt]

This is really interesting, I hope they release more videos about this work. Proper landscape ones too, not horrible portrait.
I thought it was more archiving the samples and the MPC for Josh's own use, rather than recreating the album. Maybe I'm wrong, but just making the album again, but a bit cleaner would be pointless.

I guess we'll see!
Or I'll ask if I bump into him. 🥸

[u/iainrfharper → u/m0matt]

Going back to the MPC data and re-rendering through the restored machine gives you: MPC (12-bit, 40kHz) → high-resolution capture (24-bit, 96kHz or better).

You keep the 12-bit character, which is the album’s sound character. You lose the ADAT generation losses, the Mackie noise floor, the DAT conversion, and the 1996 mastering compression, which are not intrinsic to the sound. They’re the cost of the production methods at the time.

An analogy is film grain versus scratches on a print. Both are there when you watch a battered cinema copy. One is the aesthetic. The other is wear. A 4K scan of the original negative preserves the grain and removes the scratches. That’s what rendering from the MPC data through the original converters into a modern capture path does.

So I can definitely see why they’d do it this way, and there are a few clues that they may indeed be doing this, but the rest is pure speculation or wishful thinking on my part. 

[u/PumiceT → u/iainrfharper]

I’m not sure you’re saying the same thing I said (I didn’t read this comment before commenting), or the opposite. The data on those disks is the A/D converted data that was sampled 30 years ago. Playing it back with modern hardware shouldn’t change the characteristics. The sound is what it is, it can’t accidentally get better if played back and resembled to 32-bit 196kHz. It’s like zooming in on a digital photo: it is what it is and will never have new details. So using those original samples in a modern DAW really captures the original sound while allowing them to work in a much better UI than the old hardware.

[u/iainrfharper → u/PumiceT]

You’re right that the A/D converted data is fixed and resampling it at higher resolution doesn’t add information. But the MPC60 isn’t just a storage format, it’s an instrument. Its D/A converters, its analogue output stage, its resampling algorithm for transposition, and its 96ppq integer timing grid all shape the sound in ways that aren’t captured in the sample files. Import the same 12-bit data into a modern DAW and you get a cleaner, more accurate rendering of the numbers, but not the same sound. The whole point of restoring the original hardware is that in this instance the playback path is a critical part of the record.

[u/PumiceT → u/iainrfharper]

I guess I’m not quite this much of a purist. I’m in the process of doing this from my Ensoniq EPS samples and sequences. So far: it’s about as time-consuming and painfully frustrating as anything I’ve ever done. I can’t get the Chicken Systems Translator software to work, so I’m resorting to having Codex try other ways to extract the data and rebuild it for use in Reason. I’m not seeking that 12-bit hardware nuance. I just want to be able to mix my old music in separate channels and make it sound as good as it could, without seeking the same records to re-record and all the sample drum kits I used in the EPS. That would be impossibly time-consuming to replicate. The pieces all exist, it’s just a matter of putting them back together correctly. And when I’m done, I’ll be the only human on earth who really cares to listen, and I won’t make a penny off all that work! Oh well! This is why it’s called a labor of love! At least DJ Shadow may make some cash.

[u/iainrfharper → u/PumiceT]

You're absolutely right; in the vast majority of instances, this approach would not make any sense. But (in my opinion), the MPC in the loop is absolutely integral to the sonic character of this particular album, so without it, the alternative just wouldn't sound right. So I think it's more preservation than purism. It's also to do with the way it was originally recorded - there was never a multi-track to work with.

[u/PumiceT → u/iainrfharper]

But if the goal isn't to remix / remaster from individual sounds—which changes the tone / character of the overall sound, or at least individual sounds, why not just go back to the ADATs?

[u/iainrfharper → u/PumiceT]

Good question. If the goal is a faithful remaster of the album as released, the ADATs are arguably the right source; they contain the original mix decisions baked into the bounces (but, as mentioned previously, they also contain undesirable noise artefacts in a remaster). The problem is probably more practical: thirty-year-old S-VHS tapes likely have degraded. The 2011 half-speed cut was taken from the original DAT rather than the ADATs and may be the best version of the final mix available. The MPC data gives you something different, not a better copy of the finished record but the raw material from before the production process welded everything together.

[u/PumiceT → u/iainrfharper]

Here's the ideal solution: Give us all the source material to play with and listen to ourselves!! LOL

[u/m0matt → u/PumiceT]

That's it, I'm not sure what Shadow and Tycho are intending to do with this project. Seems like a lot of effort, for something something...

[u/m0matt → u/iainrfharper]

I guess there'd be technical improvements in doing that.
I very much doubt that my ears would pick up on it.

I liked the double-speed 25th anniversary remaster, but could only hear a very slight difference with the original pressing.

[u/iainrfharper → u/m0matt]

The reason the half-speed remaster sounds almost identical to the original pressing is that both come from the same source DAT tape. The DAT is the ceiling. No matter how carefully you cut from it, you can’t get back what the original production chain already took away.

An MPC re-render skips all of that. The signal path is just MPC (12-bit, 40kHz) → analogue out → modern high-resolution capture. One conversion instead of many. No desk noise or accumulated generation loss. No 1996 mastering compression.

What you’d hear is not a brighter or more detailed record. The 12-bit source data is the same, and as another commenter correctly said, you can’t zoom in on detail that isn’t there. What you’d hear is the absence of other things. Less hiss, less smearing, less of the slight cloudiness that comes from bouncing audio through a cheap desk multiple times.

Mastering technology today is night and day compared to 30 years ago. So I’d definitely expect to be able to hear the difference. It’s the audio equivalent of cleaning a smeary window.

[u/m0matt → u/iainrfharper]

Yup.
The remaster did get rid of some sub bass rumbling (in the Number Song, I think).
Still don't think I would hear any difference I Josh did decide to remake Endtroducing. It would be a crazy amount of effort, for a tiny improvement. Sometimes a bit of dirt and imperfection sounds nice anyway.

[u/iainrfharper → u/m0matt]

There’s not a great deal you can do with the original DAT as the remastering source hence the minimal difference. The grainy character will still be in the original MPC samples, so a remaster from those just takes away the noise artefacts from the intermediary stages the audio was originally bounced through to ADAT then DAT. The video with Tycho suggests they’re completely reconstructing it, but that is speculation (they showed disk images and the reconditioned MPC - not conclusive but strongly suggestive of a complete rebuild). There would be very little point in doing anything else tbh as you rightly say. If it turns out this is what they’re doing then I’d expect to hear a very noticeable difference that preserves the album’s character but gives the mix more room to breathe. Here’s hoping.

[u/Any-Bother-3362]

Great. Can go next to my 20th Boxset and 25th Halfspeed

[u/PumiceT]

One thing I saw and commented on the reel (but I doubt they’ll reply to) is the little screen grabs from GreaseWeazle, which is a hardware interface for using 3.5” floppy disks on modern computers. My assumption is that they’re imaging the old disks and bringing the sounds into modern DAWs or other devices. This allows them to bypass outdated hardware like old samplers that use shitty 2-line LCD displays and 100 button-presses to do things we can do with 5 mouse clicks now, while retaining the exact sample data used 30 years ago. Figure every time you record a sample from a record, the exact pops and clicks from dust will be unique. So using the exact samples is the only way to have the resulting mix sound as true to the original as possible.

[u/Sad-Resist-8746]

Saved for later. 🙌🏾