Why are so many albums poorly remastered onto cd

So many of these remasters are meant to grab someone's attention -- on an iPod, in a car, on a boom box, over the stereo system in a barroom -- not to be appreciated by an audiophile sitting down in a quiet listening room. Just as our daily political "discourse" has been reduced to shouting masquerading as debate, so much music is seeking to do exactly the same thing: getting someone to pay attention, if only for a split second.
"Notice me!" shouts the guy on Fox News or MS-NBC. "Buy my tune" shouts the singer on the latest remaster.
Remember when the word "digital" was used as a positive marketing term? Audiophiles soon enough learned the truth. Perhaps the same kind of thing is happening with remastered recordings.
-- Howard

Yes, there are some reissues that suffer from tapes deteriorating over time, and a whole lot more reissues and new issues that suffer from shoddy and indifferent mastering/production.

But, I would guess that the primary driver for the pervasiveness of bad sounding recordings is public demand--"we" want compressed music to listen in high noise environments (car, subway, airplane, etc), "we" have become accustomed to, and prefer MP3 sound (a blind study showed that most young listeners prefer MP3 to CD).

Of course, by "we" I don't mean those of us who are concerned about sound quality, but, that "we" are in the minority. Perhaps, some day, those same listeners who don't care about sound quality will come around, and in that case, the recording industry will be more than happy to resell their catalogue in a higher quality format. In other words, the industry will make more money by selling crap recordings, as well as more expensive "audiophile" recordings, than it would make by making all issues decent in sound quality.

Don't tell me I'm in the minority in thinking that most remastered CDs I listen to are actually done pretty well, often better than ever before.

Mapman,
For me it is a mixed bag. Some are great, others mediocre.

Mapman,

I generally find classical reissues to have good sound, often better than the original vinyl issue (e.g., DG recordings from the 1970s). A lot of jazz reissues sound good too. For me, much of the pop/rock catalogue sounds quite bad in recent reissues. I think it is a deliberate--trying to match the loudness of current recordings via heavy use of compression.