SOUNDS BETTER THAN EVER ... FOR NOW : THE (RE)ISSUE: `HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU BUY THESE THINGS?'.

Byline: Howard Cohen Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Say ``Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,'' hello to the new, new, NEW ``Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.''

In 1973, MCA released the classic two-LP set by Elton John, and fans - more than 6 million of them - bought the record.

Ten years later, when CDs first arrived on the market, MCA issued a two-CD set of the album. It sold 236,000 copies.

Then, about three years ago, Polydor issued an improved version of ``Road,'' squeezing it onto one CD and restoring the original LP's elaborate artwork.

Earlier this year, Rocket Records revamped that edition, calling the newest dub the ultimate for sound. SoundScan, a point-of-sale computer system that tallies record sales, has tracked an additional 497,000 CD copies sold of the recent issues.

So let's see: We buy CDs to replace our vinyl. Then we buy CDs to replace the CDs we replaced the vinyl with. Now we're asked to buy CDs to replace the CDs that replaced the CDs we replaced the vinyl with?

There's little question that, for the record industry, selling remixed and repackaged material to a ready-made market is simply great business. But what has technology actually given music consumers?

Side-by-side comparisons of ``Your Song,'' the hit from John's eponymous 1970 album, reveal differences. ``Your Song's'' familiar piano intro competed with heavy tape hiss on the MCA CD. On the Rocket copy, Elton's piano notes ring clear, free of hiss. Ditto ``The Bitch Is Back,'' a rocker from his 1974 ``Caribou'' CD. The Rocket version is brighter, with crisp presence and separation among instruments. Once buried in the mix, Davey Johnstone's guitar leaps forward with a resounding sting.

The idea of selling old music in new packaging hit a peak when Led Zeppelin sold an unprecedented 1 million copies of its 1990 self-titled four-CD box set. The $65 item dramatically improved upon the original's sound (Zep guitarist Jimmy Page was involved in the remastering), and, despite its hefty price tag, proved competitive by landing in the top 40 of Billboard's album charts.

But the revamping is most extreme in John's case. This will be the third go-round for his catalog on CD, which originally was released by MCA in 1983. Those CDs featured fair sound and skimpy liner notes. About three years ago, Polydor upgraded them and claimed to use ``Original British Masters.'' While that batch restored the liner note artwork and improved the sound significantly, listeners were still a victim of semantics. ``Original British Masters'' was clearly not original enough, it seems.

Rocket Records, John's current label, aimed to top the Polydor copies, obtaining the remastering services of the albums' original producer Gus Dudgeon, who says he used the original mixes to run off these copies.

``It never ceases to amaze me, where were the master tapes before?'' asks Bob Perry, president of North Miami Beach's Blue Note Records, a store that stocks current and hard-to-find releases. ``I find it amusing that people will come out and get the remastered ones. I'm thinking, `How many times can you buy these things? You bought the LP, the cassette, the CD, then traded it in for the remastered CD with its bonus tracks.' Where does it end?''

Yves Beauvais, vice president of artists and relations and special projects for Atlantic Records, says the end is near: ``We've learned to use the flat master copy, the actual mixdown tape.'' Beauvais produced box sets for Led Zeppelin, Ornette Coleman, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.

A brief history is in order. In the pre-compact disc era, an artist would mix 24-track master tape to a two-track stereo tape, which then would go to a mastering house so records could be created. Sound level changes - equalizations - would be necessary.

Some of the bass would have to be eliminated because vinyl couldn't handle booming low frequencies - needles would jump out of the groove. Also, the inside track (the last song on either side of an LP) had to be cut quieter, with less dynamic range, because of vinyl's limitations. Once a needle gets near the center of a record, centrifugal force tries to fling it off. On a record's groove, high frequencies appear as a jagged line, bottom end appears as a fat, wavy line. These couldn't be cut too prominently near a record's innermost portion because the pressure of the needle trying to navigate the tighter circular path would cause a skip.

When these adjustments in sound were made, producers would copy them onto a tape and this would become an EQ production master, one generation away from the original master. It was this EQ tape that would serve as the source of the record itself, and this is the sound listeners became familiar with until CD removed the limitations.

``Some companies, including ours, felt it was safer to preserve the artistic intent and used that EQ master rather than the original master,'' Beauvais said.

For U.S. fans it was even worse. Elton John's original tapes were in vaults in England.

To bring John's '70s albums up to '90s standards, Dudgeon passed the sound of the originals through modern digital processing equipment. But good old-fashioned elbow grease and taking the time to locate the original masters accounts for much of the improvement. Dudgeon reportedly spent 15 to 20 hours working per track.

Still, many listeners aren't that demanding where sound is concerned. If they were, how would one account for the 35 million audio cassettes purchased this year alone? (By comparison, CDs, a vastly superior sound carrier, accounted for 89 million units, according to SoundScan.) Perry, for one, says he isn't about to upgrade once he has a favorite record. ``Once I have an album, that's it.''

But there is a market for these reissues. John's 1974 ``Greatest Hits'' collection sold 891,000 MCA copies on CD; the Rocket version moved 1.3 million copies and remains a fixture on Billboard's catalog chart (total sales for the title top 13 million).

In fact, joining ``Goodbye Yellow Brick Road'' are five other popular '70s Elton John albums in stores now; the next batch of six (to feature the No. 1 ``Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy'') follows on May 14.

In addition to the Elton John material, Atlantic Records recently upgraded a number of titles in its pop/rock catalog: Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Foreigner, Genesis, Yes and Bette Midler; Columbia gussied up some old Barbra Streisand albums.

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Photo: Comparisons of ``Your Song,'' from Elton John's debu t 1970 album, reveal differences in sound quality between MCA's 1983 CD and the latest reissued Rocket CD. ``Your Song's'' familiar piano intro competed with heavy tape hiss on the '83 CD. On today's Rocket copy, Elton's piano notes ring clear, free of hiss.

Lori Valesko/Daily News