On 3/18/2014 10:11 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
> Prestige, Riverside and Pablo were bought up by Fantasy Records, later
> called Fantasy Group. To their credit, the folks at Fantasy kept many
> titles in print through the 80s and 90s, under the Original Jazz
> Classics label. The tradeoff was paper-thin vinyl and early-era digital
> remastering (in Fantasy's case, this usually meant copying the analog
> master tapes to Mitsubishi X80 digital tapes and cutting records and CDs
> from those). Some OJC stuff sounds better than other OJC stuff. George
> Horn and Joe Tarantino and a third guy whose name I forgot were all good
> mastering guys. Their main limitation was primative early digital gear.
> I have to say that, despite the thin vinyl, most OJC reissues of
> Prestige LPs that I have sound better than original Prestige because
> Prestige cheaped out on pressing. The titles I'm comparing are mostly
> late 60s acid-jazz, and to be fair most American pop/jazz vinyl was
> cheap and noisy in that timeframe (think late 60s Mercury classical and
> jazz pressings).

Likewise the Original Blues Classics LPs were often better than the 
original pressings. I'm not sure whether they used the Mitsubishi on those.

Peace,
Paul