Michael Cooper on my question about the cost of remastering:

>Similar question and answer about the cost of pharmaceutical drugs.
>Relatively cheap to manufacture, but costing millions to research and
>develop. And, likewise, sometimes new technologies (like new drugs)
>are short-lived, being supplanted by new and better technologies (or
>drugs), as you have noticed, and this gives the companies limited time
>to recoup their investment.

A reasonable analogy, I suppose, but I have some doubts about whether
the costs of R&D are as much as the companies would like us to believe.
I've bought only a few SACDs, which cost the same as CDs on the same
labels.

Coincidentally, I read a review by Jerry Dubins in Fanfare of a Brahms
chamber music DVD-A on MDG.  He was hugely enthusiastic about the new
technology, the realism of the sound and so on.  Go back twenty or so
years and we had similar raves about what was then new, the CD.  Go back
twenty or so years before that and we had simultaneous releases of mono
and stereo versions of the same recording (although sometimes they were
different performances, which gave rise to discussion of their relative
merits as *performances*).  I doubt that the birth of the LP produced
laments about the demise of the 78.

I haven't heard any DVD-As.  There don't seem to be very many available
yet but all things, including price, being equal, you'd expect them to
be more popular than SACDs because more people have DVD players - even
I have one!  - and wonder whether it's worth upgrading the CD player.
Unless companies start phasing out CDs as they did with LPs and continue
to release *new* recordings in parallel formats, we may be able to
maintain something like the status quo.  In the meantime, I'd be interested
to hear from any lister who's had a chance to compare the same performance
in different formats, especially SACD and DVD-A, or do I mean DVDA?

I notice MDG has released the first DVD-A in its new series of the
Shostakovich symphonies, the equivalent CD of which was reviewed
recently at Musicweb.  A sign of the times, perhaps.

Richard Pennycuick