The remastering for CD would be from the original recording which were usually 24 IPS (or was it 39?) AMPEX tape. Those tapes held massive amounts of sonic data

The remastering for CD would be from the original recording which were usually 24 IPS (or was it 39?) AMPEX tape. Those tapes held massive amounts of sonic data so remastering for CD was really a step down. Since the target medium was one where you didn’t have such strict dynamic limits in the last ten minutes of a side (eg: you weren’t going to make the needle jump out of the groove of the dynamics exceeded the limits of vinyl) you can get a fuller sound all the way through the album. This attention to detail of the constraints was something that was in the minds of the songwriter, composer, the performers, and the engineers. These day... “record at 96khz and we’ll fix it in post” but no amount of post-production can fix an inferior composition.