So I've wondered what this remastering actually means and wanted to get a before-after comparison. Luckily, archive.org is also saving youtube videos, although

So I've wondered what this remastering actually means and wanted to get a before-after comparison. Luckily, archive.org is also saving youtube videos, although not all of them and not every time. But I could find an old version of a now remastered video [1] here [2] with the raw video URL here [3]. I've downloaded the original via youtube-dl -k and got the vorbis/webm version before it got transcoded. Both are encoded as 128 kbit 44100 Hz 32 bit sampled vorbis audio with the encoder string both set to "Google", verifying that there was no transcoding in either after the download from YouTube. The first difference you can notice is that the old version sounds kinda metallic, while the new one actually contains details. The second difference, opening it in audacity, is that there is a slight time offset between the two versions of about 500 ms, the remastered version being "later". This of course has implications to old links that point to parts of the music video at specific offsets and in other music videos the offset could be larger. After I've manually synced the file, and normalized both waveforms, I've made some screenshots of the waveform and fft at around 7 or 8 seconds covering the 5-6 second long part where he sings "I could lie to myself but it's true" [4]. The stereo channels of the new version are above while the old version's channels are below. You can notice that they have reversed some effects of the loudness war here: the old sample has far more dnymic compression than the new one. In the FFT plot you can see much more detail, especially in frequencies above 2kHz. Except for the offsets, they've done a great job! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKO5ozLVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKO5ozLVo [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190402133747/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKO5ozLVo https://web.archive.org/web/20190402133747/https://www.youtu... [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110930072812oe_/http://o-o.preferred.sjc07s15.v20.lscache1.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?sparams=id%2Cexpire%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Cratebypass%2Ccp&fexp=901803%2C913525&itag=44&ip=207.0.0.0&signature=CBBAC9C850DC4EAD6F1C6D6F8A09BC3693A67007.99BB0F2CDFEBA9561D07E258A818397097841672&sver=3&ratebypass=yes&expire=1317391200&key=yt1&ipbits=8&cp=U0hQTFNUT19FSkNOMF9LTlNDOk44cC1rNUg5MEZj&id=77f44a3b9a332d5a https://web.archive.org/web/20110930072812oe_/http://o-o.pre... [4]: https://imgur.com/a/rsmb49r https://imgur.com/a/rsmb49r