A great album of soft rock, blues and pop country with incredible audio. All of the instruments are sharp and crystal clear as is James Taylor's voice.From the review by allemande:"Fire and Rain" includes a cello part which I have always believed was meant to be more felt than heard. On the Warner CD the cello sound is uneven, surging at times, then fading and becoming barely audible. In this new mastering there is smoothness and consistency in the cello line. It is present always, but subtle, lending body to the whole but maintaining a proper sonic perspective.That description indicates one of the problems with "remastering." The changes in the loudness of the Cello are most likely due to someone attempting to boost a small set of bass frequencies, catching only a small part of the Cello range at the boosted range. Note that this CD is not advertised as "remastered." Considering the above quotation, I think the producers went back to the old mastered tapes and simply produced a digital master with no messing around with the audio spectrum.In the CD world, "remastering" is somebody sitting down with an equalizer and tuning the sound to suit their ears, their audio equipment, their listening environment and their preferences in audio spectrum. If you want remastering, buy an equalizer or get Audacity for free and tune the music to suit yourself or set the tone controls on your amplifier to suit your tastes. You don't need somebody else messing with it. Besides, if you get an equalizer and set it for your preferences or adjust your tone controls, all of your CDs will be presented to suit your tastes, not just the few "remastered" CDsThe only time (re)mastering can be done is if you have the audio in many tracks, one for each microphone. You can then create a mixed audio stream in which you choose where each track appears in a stereo mix and the relative loudness of that part of the music. Once the music is in mixed, you can't alter one part of the music without altering other parts that infringe on the target frequency range. The so-called "remasterers" apparently don't understand this simple fact and, so destroy one part of the music in an effort to empahsize another part. I will admit that one can make very subtle changes to enhance certain features of a track, but most remasterers take a sledge hammer approach to equalization adjustments.