Watch Iron Maiden’s Catalog Being Mastered for iTunes

Most major albums have been remastered more than once at this point, and not always for the better. The team behind the new "Mastered for iTunes" versions of the Iron Maiden catalog is aware of this, and says it worked hard to give fans their money's worth.

You can watch the band's studio crew in action in the above video, which goes behind the scenes with engineers Tony Newton and Ade Emsley. Both men insist that while they're aware of how easy it is to be cynical about remastering jobs in the digital era, the new versions of these classic Maiden titles get closer than ever to the way the band originally heard the recordings in the studio — and they've even been somewhat future-proofed in order to anticipate for whatever newer, even more hi-res formats surface in the years to come.

"I was very keen for the Maiden albums to be mastered in this way," enthuses founder Steve Harris. "The records have been available digitally before, when this medium first became a platform for music distribution, but that was mastered with CDs in mind. The iTunes process involves a different approach, and it's great to finally deliver the music to our fans in as close to a pure and accurate sound as we could possibly achieve."

"When a lot of these tapes were last captured it was in the 1980s — early days of digital, and only 44.1khz/16bit files were possible. On top of this, the new A/D convertors are far superior now, and, of course, it is possible to produce files of far higher resolution. The result of this is that the songs now sound more defined with added depth and warmth," adds Newton. "I was very excited to be asked to be part of this project. I honestly feel that there is a massive improvement in the quality of these classic albums."

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