Four of the early, groundbreaking albums of Brian Eno have been digitally remastered and reissued in special edition digipak packages as part of a series called “Original Masters”.

Very often when albums are remastered, the tapes are re-equalized, remixed, in other words altered from the way they were originally delivered by the artist. Not so with the albums in the “Original Masters” series.

Using Brian Eno’s original analogue masters as the source, remastering engineer Simon Heyworth has employed Class A’ Analogue Electronics combined with the most advanced Analogue to Digital conversion techniques available. Using an ATR analog mastering deck with Aria Reference Series class A discrete electronics, Simon Heyworth was able to coax a higher level of fidelity out of these recordings than ever before heard, while keeping the orignal mastering intact.

“What I quickly learnt was that many of the EQ’d Production Masters at the time were absolutely ‘spot on’,’ says Heyworth, “and why shouldn’t they be when you think about it, this was the end of a long artistic endeavor and are we saying that they didn’t get it right at that point? This is nonsense of course because if it was a landmark recording and sold lots of albums it must have been right! The Artist and Producer all decided at the time that this was ‘it’. Should we be tampering with that piece of art-after all we don’t go around saying let’s Re-master a great painting.”

The result is a clarity and depth of sound to these albums not heard since their initial playback in the recording studio. And more important, no attempts have been made to re-equalize, remix or in any way tamper with the original EQ’ed analogue production masters. These “Original Masters” sound just as Brian Eno originally intended them to be heard.