Thread: Decca/Universal a pattern emerges in Blu-ray releases

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Post by Links April 2, 2014 (21 of 25)
Kal Rubinson said:

I am afraid that I see this effort, so far, as another cynical effort to remonitize their back catalog with minimal investment. Despite that, I do hope that BD-A has a future as an alternative to SACD.

Exactly.
Remember all those London/Decca RBCDs with the sticker 96/24 mastered?
Well, you are getting those original 96/24 files now, on Blu-ray.
(Unfortunately, when the Solti Ring was last captured it was at 48/24 because DECCA did not yet
have the capability to do 96/24 and when they finally could, the masters were too
damaged to do another capture,)

Post by Fitzcaraldo215 April 2, 2014 (22 of 25)
Links said:

Exactly.
Remember all those London/Decca RBCDs with the sticker 96/24 mastered?
Well, you are getting those original 96/24 files now, on Blu-ray.
(Unfortunately, when the Solti Ring was last captured it was at 48/24 because DECCA did not yet
have the capability to do 96/24 and when they finally could, the masters were too
damaged to do another capture,)

Well, yes. But, the Solti Ring has never sounded anywhere near as good as it does from the BD-A, and I have owned the LPs since the late 70's. And, the BR player necessary to experience this today can be dirt cheap.

Post by Links April 2, 2014 (23 of 25)
Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Well, yes. But, the Solti Ring has never sounded anywhere near as good as it does from the BD-A, and I have owned the LPs since the late 70's. And, the BR player necessary to experience this today can be dirt cheap.

I agree,
DId not mean to imply that the Ring sounded inferior in any way.
I too have the LPs the Esoteric set and the DECCA Blu-ray which is amazing.

Post by feinstei April 2, 2014 (24 of 25)
Thus, any claim by Esoteric that their SACD Ring Cycle was captured from the analogue masters is untrue.

Post by Links April 2, 2014 (25 of 25)
feinstei said:

Thus, any claim by Esoteric that their SACD Ring Cycle was captured from the analogue masters is untrue.

Quite right.
Plus the DECCA Blu-ray has a couple of fixes from secondary analogue takes
that the Esoteric set does not have.

Off topic but of some interest to me anyway.
In 1970 multi track analogue + Dolby A was available to Decca when they recorded
the Solti Tannhäuser.
I didn't have the smarts back then to ask if more was done in this manner, but
I heard a Venusberg scene at a private party in Los Angeles in discrete quad.
Christa Ludwig, as Venus, and the Venusberg ambience (provided by the adjacent ballroom
to the Sofiensaal studio) were in the rear channels, with the orchestra and René Kollo
in the front channels.
This may have been a one-of experiment by the Decca engineer who supplied this tape.
If only the whole thing had been saved in this format.
I suspect that the original multitrack tapes are long gone.

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