Scott Sedillo: Preserving U2’s Rarest Deep Cuts

Hollywood, CA (November 22, 2024)—There are big projects, and then there’s transferring, restoring and remastering nearly 90 rare tracks by one of the world’s biggest bands—tracks that were originally created on a broad variety of often obsolete and sometimes obscure formats. That’s the challenge that mastering engineer Scott Sedillo of Bernie Grundman Mastering has been facing as he assembles and remasters U2 To Love and Only Love – Deep Dives and B-Sides.

The project, which kicked off in April, has seen 14 different single collections from the band’s history get the digital EP treatment, with associated remixes, B-sides, live renditions and more becoming available in a digital streaming format for the first time on multiple streaming platforms. The various tracks previously appeared on vinyl, CD and cassette singles released before the digital era, so the resulting massive playlist brings them into a new format and introduces them to younger generations of fans.

To make the project happen, Sedillo—U2’s go-to mastering engineer for more than a decade—has been assembling an arsenal of vintage machines capable of playing rare masters in their original legacy forms and formats for new streaming releases in both 16- and 24-bit formats.

Sedillo explained, “The late 90s and early 2000s was an era of recording medium proliferation. Analog tape was still the commercial studio staple, but new digital tape formats and DAWs were making inroads. This new campaign of 14 EPs consists of 89 songs [and] nearly every song is stored on a separate format, which includes analog tape (1/4″, 1/2″, Dolby A/SR/none, etc.), DAT, DA88HR, 1630 3/4” U-matic, various audio file formats (sd2, aiff, WAV) and CD.

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“The obvious reason for remastering is the higher resolution capture that modern converters offer today,” he added. “We have digital tools for removing unwanted noises and the ability to apply final post-production edits to the earliest generation sources—and we at BGM continue to evolve our analog playback and processing equipment to resolve the sources’ reproduction in the first place. This past year has been challenging, but also gratifying here at Bernie’s. It’s exciting to pull these hits out of the past and move them into today’s listening world.”