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.