2004 Star Wars Sony DSD remasters.

I bought the Star Wars soundtracks Sony DSD remasters as soon as they came out.
There's a question I've wondering since then.
If they as supposed to be "new DSD remasters", how is that the booklet credits the mastering to be done by Dan Hersch at DigiPrep between April and June in 1996 right as the previous 1997 20th Anniversary RCA release? There is no credit for the new remastering.
Were the 1997 20th Anniversary remixed to digital (Star Wars A New Hope obviously is) from the original multi-tracks tapes and remastered?
If the new Sony DSD remasters come from a new mix-down PCM digital master, what's the benefit of remastering those masters to DSD to down-convert later to 44.1 Khz/16 bit for redbook release even if you use Super Bit Mapping Direct? PCM to DSD to PCM? Sounds nuts, doesn't it?
These new editions sound subtlety better.
Anybody has any idea or George Lucas and Sony got our money one more time with the same stuff.

 

Congratulations, you've been had. These are no different than the RCA issues that came back in 97.

The surprising thing to me is that almost nobody would care about the dsd remaster even if it was true. Those that would probably number fewer than those who frequent this site. Why it's touted is beyond me.

 

I think the masters used for both releases are the same, but the new DSD remasters sound a bit louder, bass has a little bit of more punch, and treble seems to be a bit higher, but all these differences are almost negible.
There's definetely something different on the Sony remasters, but I can't figure out where this difference comes from.

 

Resurrecting a nine-year old thread, because I did some searching and didn't see an answer. My questions are:

(a) What do people think of the 2004 DSD Remasters versus the 1997 remasters? Is it even a real remastering?
(b) Is the version in the current 8-CD complete editions the DSD remaster?

 

In order:
a) I'm not an audio engineer, but it is my understanding that the 2004 releases are the 1997 remasters plus DSD processing. I don't know if that constitutes a remastering or not because I don't know anything about the DSD process.
b) It is also my understanding that the 30th anniversary set utilizes the 2004 DSD version, although I don't personally own a copy to check on that.

 

Well, DSD is an audio format/resolution, defined as 1-bit by 2.8 MHZ data rate, the idea of using it is to transfer the original master tape at DSD resolution to a digital storage medium, and then to downsample it to CD resolution, the idea being that this gives a better sounding, less "digital" sound than transfer at a lower resolution. So it doesn't really make sense to talk about a remastering being processed through DSD - I guess you could take the 1997 digital master and upsample it to DSD and then downsample it again, but that sounds kind of pointless.

Sony Classical seems to have stamped "DSD" on almost all their CDs released in the mid-2000s. At the same time, certain CDs, most notably the first Bernstein Mahler cycle, really sounded much better than the previous CD issues.