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Choosing between Reissue and Original pressings

Reissues have been common since quite some time but these days as vinyl has picked up momentum again, there have been some very high quality reissues from labels like Classic, Analogue Productions, Speakers corner, MFSL, Boxstar etc. For any particular album how do you decide whether buy a good reissue or get a good copy of original pressing from ebay ?

For the sake of discussion lets keep out exceptions where the original pressing is too hard to get or too expensive. In most cases it is possible to buy a copy of original pressing for sane amount of money if one shops carefully on ebay but I have also found that quite a few times a high quality reissue can sound better. Whats the general thought among hardcore vinyl followers here ?
pani

Showing 2 responses by viridian

viridian's avatar
viridian
4,184 posts
 
I think that everyone has missed a critical point in the reissue game. Many tapes from 30-40 years ago and older have degraded to the point that you can run them through a pure tube mastering chain like Tim de Paravicini's and it really won't help a bit. Add to that many masters being lost and the reissue folks are working from thrird and fourth generation safety masters which likewise have degraded.

Much of this stuff is gone for good, due to poor storage and volatile tape formulations and all the wishing in the world is not going to bring it back.
viridian's avatar
viridian
4,184 posts
 
In the industry they are referred to as "safety masters". As in assuring that the nit wits in the country that I am shipping this tape to will not have the opportunity to ravage the master tape.

They are generally made from the master or a couple generations removed from that. Unfortunately, the record business has been a bit of a seat-of-the-pants enterprise and a substantial amount of the masters of our musical heritage have simply been lost, mis-filed, or severely degraded due to volitile tape formulations, or incorrect storage.

In those cases, safety masters may be the best extant masters. And worse, in some cases, all tapes have been lost.

My copy of Mosaic's "The Complete Pacific Jazz Chet Baker/Russ Freeman" is actually recorded from vinyl records played back as some of the masters were lost. Even more embarrasing, my original 10" Chet/Russ recordings are in better shape than the ones that they used to make the records. Go figgur!
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