John Smyth responds to my: >>Does this mean the companies are expecting us to buy hideously >>expensive SACDs of all the stuff that's already been reissued on >>CD? Here's one person who won't be! > >No performance after 1960 is ever good enough for you guys, yet when >a company tries to give you the best remasterings they can from those >wonderful days of yore, no one will pay 'cause it's too expensive. My >goodness. I'll forgive John's sarcasm but I must take issue with his apparent characterisation of me as a rusted-on Luddite, if that's what "you guys" is meant to imply. Or perhaps we guys are those who are old enough to have been collecting for many years, have shelves groaning with LPs, tapes and CDs, are faced with the prospect of yet another gee-whizz, look-ma-no-hands sound carrier format, and are wondering what it's likely to mean, quite apart from the need to upgrade audio equipment and to move into the garage to allow room for all the new shelving. I'm happy to buy SACDs when that's the only available format for a new release and, in passing, I find the design of the cases a big improvement on the standard jewel case. I am sufficiently ancient to have started in the age of 78s, and still own some, although not the means to play them. I have lived through various experiments such as electronic stereo, quadrophony and other short-lived ways of getting more money out of us. It has long annoyed me that re-releases of some older recordings were full-price if the particular performance was one the company in question thought it could make some extra money on. Most of the usual costs don't apply: the performers have been paid, the recording venue rent has been taken care of, and on and on. How much does it cost to remaster a recording and reissue it as a CD, a SACD or whatever? The performance that gave rise to this continuation of the thread was George Szell's 1963 Cleveland recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. To take one online outlet's prices, in $US, the CD version costs $6.65, the SACD will set you back $16.75. I have not heard the SACD. If I played it on my Marantz player, it may well sound better than the CD. Using appropriate equipment, it probably sounds sensational, but that price difference! What all this means is that the companies seem to have seen a way of making yet more money from their back catalogues. Call me a jaded old cynic, but I get the feeling that these people want to rip me off, and I don't like it. Richard Pennycuick