Hi Anakin!
Sometimes the recording itself cannot be faulted if various errors occured during the mastering phase. Remember the odd sounds all over The Last Castle CD ?
For instance, when I bought the first Varèse release of The Final Conflict in 1986 I was appaled by its terible sound quality: it sounded horribly compressed, with almost no high-end, very tiny sound for such a landmark score. It was really distracting and didn't do justice to this incredible score. Only when Varèse reissued it in 2001 with remastered sound and this time mixed from the original multi-track masters was I able to savor the incredible dynamic range of Eric Tomlinson's recording. In the early years of CD, a large number used to to be mastered very low: a CD like Glory, for instance needs to be cranked up if you want to really hear something. Something to do with sample rate, if I'm not mistaken. That's why many audiophile collectors maintain how LPs sound better as far as dynamic range is concerned.
I haven't heard the Prometheus release you mention, but maybe it was not mastered from the original masters but from some kind of second generation mixdown.
Then, some scores are just badly or oddly engineered.
RCA's SE of ROTJ doesn't sound good to me. Muffled, unfocused with very week stereo separation. Oddly, The earlier boxed-set SW anthology had much better sound. Why ? I wish I'd know.
Cheers!
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