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Topic: Sony Classical Masters: All 24/88?

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 03-21-2011
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I have a box set of Günter Wand conducts his North German Radio SO with 4 Brahms symphonies. It is celebrated recording from beginning of 80s. I like it but it always sound to me like play critical mass of Brahms without any finesse-Brahms. My version if from 2001, the special edition 96/24 re-mastered…

Last week I bought in UK a new Sonny release of the same performance, but I bought only 3 and 4 symphonies that I feel Wand plays better than first and second. I got it as it is some kind of new Sony Masters Series from 2010 and I was wondering what the hell it was.

I got it today and I literally did not recognize the Wand play and the NGR sound. It was so surprisingly wonderful that I played the CD twice and still was sorry that I stopped. Taking about the finesse sounding Brahms!!! It has right dynamics, it has right tone, it has very proper presentation of micro events, it just sounds spectacular. It does not have that boom-tzza-tzza Brahms with mosquito-thin stings and generic lower end belching. It is well balanced and when clarinets play with cellos then they sound like musical intimates but not like somebody wipe wooden table with old newspaper. Where all that sound was before!!!!!!!!!!

The answers is the apparently Sony did read my site. Do you remember I pritched for years that any sound engineer that does mastering at 96/24 (or any 48x) and then releases CD at 44X need to be put to death? Here is come – the new Sony Masters Series from 2010 is the case to prove it - the new 2010 CDs are mastered at 88.2kHz. 

SonyMasters_88K.jpg


 

Posted by mats on 07-14-2011
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The Brahms is indeed a lovely 24/88 remaster.  I also ordered and received the Wand Bruckner 1-9 box from the new Sony series, and there is no mastering information on the package as far as I can tell.  Does anyone know if these are remastered or just repackaged?  Are the individual cd's perhaps remastered, and not the box sets??
Presto Classical has a nice page where the entire series is listed:  http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/s/Classical+Masters

Mats

Posted by Romy the Cat on 07-16-2011
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 mats wrote:
The Brahms is indeed a lovely 24/88 remaster.  I also ordered and received the Wand Bruckner 1-9 box from the new Sony series, and there is no mastering information on the package as far as I can tell.  Does anyone know if these are remastered or just repackaged?  Are the individual cd's perhaps remastered, and not the box sets??
Presto Classical has a nice page where the entire series is listed:  http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/s/Classical+Masters[/quote

It is very difficult to say how anything was mastered nowadays. The Morons make technical comments on the CD boxed but it very much might not be true. Since there is no control and not way to verify what they do then can go away with absolutely anything. For instance they claim that the CDs were 24/88 remastered but what the purpose for them to re-master anything if they have the remastered dubs at 96K year before?

You see, a try re-mastering is an expensive process and they would not invest into it if ii would not give any selling benefits. So, they did invested an additional resourced into 88K re-mastering in order to have budget version CD in addition to the full-price 96K version, does it make sense to anybody? It is not to mention the Wand’s recording is from beginning on the 80s when all analog sources were converted to 16/44. I would not be surprised if those 16/44 first dubs were used as the source for this release.

Saying all of it I do admit that Brahms CD and particularly the 4th symphony has good sound. Of course the NDR Sinfonieorchester shines first, listen the closing of the last movement! Wand has the phrasing articulation in Brahms as great as Mravinsky in Tchaikovsky in 50s. This is how Brahms shall be played!

The Bruckner 1-9 box in my view does not have Sound do great, I would say very average. The performance-wise it also has very much mid on the road performances, nothing super interesting, though of course it is a great box set. There is one exception however. The 1st symphony in there is that best I heard, not Sound (wish is still not bad) but the interpretation and presentation. In fact I pulled the CD from the box set, put it in a separate box and put it in my shelf with the best performances ever recorded. Listen for that 3rd movement, can you belie that it was a first symphony for a person. Well it was not truly the first symphony for him but it does not matter.

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

Posted by Paul S on 07-16-2011
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Isn't the bulk of the "digital" classical music currently available originally recorded, and/or transferred, and/or archived in 16/44?   It has been my understanding that most of the current "upsampled" stuff is actually scrambled from what was (at one time, anyway) 16/44 archives.  Not to mention that high digital numbers have nothing to do with the quality of a recording...

It would take more good examples before I started to believe that "remastered" digital was any more likely to improve things than "remastered" LPs.  I can quickly think of one good example of digital re-mastering, but I think this was actually taken from tape, or maybe even the early equivalent of tape:  Music and Arts, Furtwangler, 1943 Beethoven 9.  However they did this, I wish they would do more the same way, including early Gieseking.  No harm in starting with a world-class performance, either...

Best regards,
Paul S

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