In the fine art world, 'provenance' is crucial. For a painting or sculpture to be sold as being the work of a given artist, evidence to support the claim is needed. Often this consists of a paper trail documenting previous sales, ownerships, etc. In the case of modern artists, ideally it extends in an unbroken chain back to the artist. Is it time for those of us who enjoy old audio recordings to join this club? I ask this question because in the last few years I've been paying more attention to two related areas. One is the stream of commercial reissues of 'remastered' old recordings on CD and as 'hi-res' files. For some years, Hi-Fi News has published the results of its technical checks on 'hi-res' digital files [see p 100]. But what about remastered LPs? How do we check the technical quality of these?
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