Best way to get a true good remaster is from the org master tape. Of course even that can be screwed up by the person picked to re-master. Sometimes they need a little help to clean that master up but nowadays they seem to want to add 10db and take all the life out of them. How many times have you put in another cd without touching the volume only to be blasted because of that wonderful remaster or a new cd. Listen to some early cd from the 80's and to the new cd's now. Now sometimes they work out like LZ Mothership. A little loud but a pretty good job otherwise.
There is no master tape in the recordings I mentioned. They were direct to disc, back in the days when people played records at 78 rpm (the recordings were all made on or before 1930). They are all mono, and all have record surface noise. On the plus side, however, they did not have the technology at the time to compress the dynamic range of the recording artificially (if they wanted more or less dynamic range, the musicians simply played with more or less dynamic range). So they are surprisingly "natural", in certain respects, though the record surface noise and the frequency response limitations detract from the experience. Of course, when mastering for CD now, they could, if they wanted to, screw up the dynamic range. But no one seems to be doing that, as far as I know. Some companies do try very hard to get rid of the record surface noise, and there is simply no way to do that without adversely affecting the sound quality of the music that is recorded.
You might wonder, of course, why anyone would bother with such old recordings. The thing is, no one can play like Louis Armstrong in his prime, and no one can sing like Caruso. So either one listens to an old recording with problems, or one listens to a mere mortal instead of a musical god.
