“The Best of Pezband” is available online through Pavement Music. The vinyl version features 10 Pezband tunes; the compact disc, expected to be out sometime in February, will include 23 cuts.

Pezband co-founder Mimi Betinis used the word “legacy” several times as he talked about the recent release on vinyl of “The Best of Pezband.”

Betinis, the band’s guitarist, along with bassist Mike Gorman, guitarist John Pazdan and the late drummer Mike Ruane, aka Mick Rain, started out back in 1971 in the basement of Betinis’ childhood home on North Grove Avenue in Oak Park. There they labored to learn songs from Fleetwood Mac’s “Kiln House” and other artists. It was the beginning of what would later be widely acknowledged as the seminal American power pop group.

By 1976, with guitarist Tommy Gawenda, who replaced Pazdan, they had a contract with Passport Records, and moved to the East Coast, and traveled to London to gig and record their second album along with a live EP.

By 1979 however, for a number of reasons, the band had run its course. But the music they crafted remains for the world to enjoy.

“The Best of Pezband” is available online through Pavement Music. The vinyl version features 10 Pezband tunes; the compact disc, expected to be out sometime in February, will include 23 cuts.

The vinyl hasn’t sold strongly so far, but Betinis and Gorman hope and expect that sales will be better when the CD version is released, and later, when the album goes up on streaming platforms.

The album isn’t just about Pezband’s best songs — “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Stella Blue,” Stop! Wait A Minute” and others — but about the best those songs could sound. And the two musicians say their songs have never sounded better.

With 21 of 23 songs completely remixed by recording engineer John Pavletic, who was the sound engineer on their last album, “Cover to Cover,” Betinis said he found himself falling in love all over again with the music.

Hearing the remixed songs he crafted long ago has been something like rekindling an old flame, seeing her with new eyes, or, in this case, new ears.

“Some of the tracks sound so much more powerful,” Betinis said. “I fell in love again with the music. It feels great. It captures the power of the band better than the old records did.”

While the music is Betinis’ and Gorman’s, the sound engineering is all Pavletic’s, and they are effusive in their praise for his work.

“This couldn’t have happened without John,” Betinis said.

As Pavletic explains it, there’s remastering and there’s remixing. “They just tweak it a little bit,” he said of the common remastering process. Remixing effectively involves creating a new master tape.

“Remixing is basically like starting all over,” he said. “We basically remixed all the songs like we’d just recorded them in the studio.”

Guitars, bass, drums, vocals and other instruments each had their own track, and Pavletic pulled it all apart and put it back together, with input from Betinis and Gorman.

“With digital you can adjust the mix a lot better,” said Gorman, who has a general idea of what Pavletic does, but not how he does it. “Pull the drum part out, pull the bass out.”

“Half of the art of recording a record is remixing it after recording,” Pavletic said. He talks easily about arcane technical things that few people who buy music will ever know or really care about, like EQ and compression and “noise gates.” Things that make all the difference on a record.

So, while the record is “The Best of Pezband,” it’s also a sort of “Best of John Pavletic.”

“If we didn’t have John, we couldn’t have done it,” Betinis said. Although just a few years ago, Pavletic could not have done what he did technically. His task wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen quickly. The master tapes for the first three Pezband records on Passport records were lost when the label went out of business.

“The (original) master tapes are gone forever,” Pavletic said. “We had to sort of forensically reconstruct them. I had to take the original vinyl, digitize it and (go from there).”

“They’ve got software that didn’t exist five years ago,” he said. “I was able to do things they couldn’t do back then.”

“I manually de-noised stuff,” he said of the new record.

“It’s the noise between the notes,” Pavletic said, referring to the fuzz and odd tones that crop up between guitar chords and drum beats on a record. “You hear it a lot in live shows.”

The remix made the good stuff better, and corrected various flaws due to mediocre production, and the second Pezband record had its flaws, despite 1978’s “Laughing In The Dark” being cited by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the top records of the year.

“I thought the production on the second album was quite poor,” Betinis said.

The inexperienced producer on that second record, Pavletic said, “left in all sorts of vocals that were out of tune. There’s some cool songs on it, but there’s all sorts of mistakes pitch-wise.”

Betinis was always happy with the sound on Pezband’s first album, “Pezband.” He likes the remixed songs even better.

Pezband always had a reputation as a great live band live. But some songs didn’t come across as well on record, in need of having certain guitar parts punched up, stronger drums, clearer vocals.

Pavletic said only two of the 23 vocal tracks tracks — the two live numbers — weren’t remixed.

“Everything else has been ripped apart and fixed,” Pavletic said. The live recordings didn’t have the vocals on separate tracks, so there really wasn’t any ability to remix them, and he left well enough alone.

“‘Hippy Hippy Shake,” that was recorded at Dingwall’s (Music Hall) in England (and) Mimi was screaming his butt off there,” Pavletic said. “We decided to leave it in, warts and all.”

That’s just fine with Betinis. “When you hear ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ in London, the group sounds great,” he said. “The group was on fire.”

“The same with “Lovesmith,” Betinis said. “Live stuff is live stuff.”

Gorman leaned back in his chair and grinned as he recalled looking at Pavletic after hearing bass lines he played long ago come out of the speakers remixed and sounding all shiny and new.

“I was like, did I do that?” he said with a grin. “And he was, yeah, that’s you.”

Whether vinyl, CD or streaming, Gorman said, the sound quality on CDs has markedly improved in recent years. “They’ve gotten more sophisticated (regarding) how they mix the music.”

“You gotta get it right,” Pavletic said of the often-tedious process of mixing recorded music. “We got it as right as we could get it.”

The question has come up whether the band, now just Betinis and Gorman (Ruane died in 2021) will do a show to celebrate the record’s release.

“It’s not out of the question,” Betinis said. “It’s just the logistics.”

It doesn’t appear likely, though. Besides finding a drummer and a second guitarist and scheduling all the rehearsals, Betinis said he’s feeling content with a record he believes genuinely conveys the very best of what Pezband created in the ’70s.

“There’s a part of me that wants to leave it as kind of an enigma,” he said. “I think we’d prefer to leave it like that for now.”