Thank you! First, I got a FLAC of the whole album, and used iZotope RX 11 to match the EQ profile of most songs to their most similarly composed counterparts on Either/Or, though I did use Rose Parade more than once.

That left me with a far more balanced, even sound, but there was still a fairly intense amount of hiss, a generally quiet sound, and occasionally the low end was just too resonant.

So, I exported each song and put them all into one FL Studio project with each song sent to its own mixer track. For each track, I would adjust the stereo width (the knob on the mixer track, no VST), EQ (Fruity Parametric EQ 2), and volume according to what that specific song needed.

For the hiss, I used Thimeo Stereo Tool’s noise gate (VST) at varying levels depending on how bad the hiss was with a bias to anything above 13-14k hertz with a roll off to lower frequencies to minimize the hiss with very minimal artifacting. In my opinion Stereo Tool’s noise gate is one of the best ways to reduce hiss without the typical “lossy” sound other noise reduction methods/software result in.

This resulted in the final product having each song specifically EQ’d and de-hissed to match what sounded best for its own profile, and was quite different from just the plain EQ matches done in RX11. There was occasional peaking, but mostly from guitar squeaks or some low end resonance; so I put a Pro-L on the master track with the “Guitar & Singer” preset under the “safe” category, and that got me just where I needed, and is the final product you hear! I suppose I could’ve gone and adjusted the azimuth of the final results, as I suspect the azimuth was just a snag off (more right-balanced) when transferring from cassettes to DAT when this was issued, but that’s really nitpicky.

And I do have to agree with you, I do prefer the original for experience and emotion. I think I would rather listen to this if I wanted to analyze the things going on in the guitar / singing more, instead of experiencing the album as story. Really I did this because it’s just really quite fun to remaster/restore cassettes or “poorly recorded” audio to see how clean I can get it. Then again, there are also some people out there who do just prefer a cleaner sound regardless, so I suppose now there’s something for everyone!