I apologise if a similar thread has been done before but how comes most digtal hi res stereo mixes are still being released compressed?

[KG10]

Richard Wright of Pink Floyd sometimes complained how much audio fidelity was lost on the LPs compared to the master tape.

Wonder what he would have thought of the 2018 remix of animals? For the 2019 mix of a momentary lapse of reason I expect he would have rerecorded his contributions rather than having to use live recordings.

 

[KG10]

laziness, inefficiency, unavailablility of original tapes - it's always been chaos with the major labels, and still sometimes a problem to find the actual material.

It's always been an issue frankly - 90% of the time mastering restrictions had a negative effect on how the original audio had sounded in the studio when it was mixed. Very few LPs sounded anything like the original recordings - yes it sometimes added a certain character, but ultimately this has to be about making great records, rather than great recordings!

I believe SW said in an interview one time that the orignal mix down tapes would often be marked "do not use".