Phil Collins’ entire back catalogue of eight solo albums was recently remastered at
Abbey Road studios and is being re-released by Warner Music digitally, on CD and
on special half-speed-mastered vinyl throughout 2016, with the digital and CD
versions featuring previously unreleased demos and live versions. The entire
project has been curated by Collins himself.

Long-time Collins collaborator, Grammy-nominated Genesis producer and soundman
Nick Davis oversaw the nine-month remastering project with Abbey Road Mastering
engineer Miles Showell. “Miles and Abbey Road were a great combination for this
project as their attention to detail is second to none. I know I can trust Miles to do
excellent work and the technical excellence of Abbey Road Studios means I trust the
files are in good hands,’ comments Davis. “The albums were a delight to work on
as there is so much great material on them, a depth of music that goes far beyond
the mainstream singles. Miles was my first choice for this remastering as I love his
half-speed vinyl cutting.’

The tapes for Face Value and Hello, I Must Be Going were the only two analogue
album masters in Phil’s back catalogue. The rest, with the exception of Collins’ 2010
covers album Going Back, which was a higher-resolution digital master, were
recorded to Sony digital tapes at the CD standard sampling rate of 16-bit, 44.1kHz.
Paradoxically, this meant that the tapes recorded more recently were sometimes
more troublesome to remaster than the oldest two albums in the series. “Those old
digital tapes can be very problematic on playback,” explains Showell. “If the
machines have crunched the tape at some stage in the past, and there are
dropouts, if they’re bad enough that the error correction on the machine can’t
reconstitute the bit stream, there’s nothing you can do to retrieve the audio
information.”

Because of these challenges, the first thing Showell did was to record high-
resolution versions of the albums on the SADiE 6 workstation in his studio at Abbey
Road, so he could work on the albums without having to keep playing the potentially
problematic master tapes. The two analogue-mastered albums were mastered to
24-bit, 96kHz files via Abbey Road’s externally word-clocked Benchmark Audio
converters, and the later digital album masters were upsampled to 96kHz.

2016 Abbey Road Phil Collins Remasters

• Face Value (1981)
• Hello, I Must Be Going! (1982)
• No Jacket Required (1985)
• …But Seriously (1989)
• Both Sides (1993)
• Dance into the Light (1996)
• Testify (2002)
• Going Back (2010)

More information on the release dates for these reissues can be found at www.philcollins.co.uk. For more about
mastering at Abbey Road and the studio’s on-line mastering service, see www.abbeyroad.com/online-
mastering. For more specific information about Miles Showell’s work for the
studio, see www.abbeyroad.com/engineer/miles-showell.