Hi Dave,
First, please accept my apologies for taking so long to respond. I just finished
my work on the Bolet radio program I previously posted about, and am just
starting to catch up on my emails.
Second, thank you very much for your very kind compliment. It's extremely
gratifying when a top professional such as yourself thinks so highly of my work.
I did not work on the recent Reiner box, I'm afraid. Even though the Horowitz
set I did last year has received a great deal of attention and universal praise,
Sony appears to no longer be interested in my services. As a matter of fact,
that's the only project they've given to me in recent years. Obviously, I'm
disappointed and disagree with their decision, but it's their company.
However, many of the transfers in the Reiner set are my work, including some
that don't have my name on it. Their policy, for the most part, is to take pre-
existing transfers when they exist, and reuse them in the big sets. In 2010, I
convinced them to let me use the best existing transfers in such cases, rather
than just copy the one's used in previous sets. Since then, their policy has
been to use the most recent remastering, which is usually, but not always the
same thing (in order to use the best existing transfer, they would need to
consult with someone such as Dennis Rooney or myself, and they're clearly
not interested in doing that).
Mark O-T is correct that Sony only reproduces the CD layer of the SACDs that
Soundmirror did for BMG for inclusion in their sets.
I worked on a number of the XRCD transfers for BMG. The way those were
done, the edited master tape (called a workpart in RCA parlance) was used to
make a two-track analog mixdown at 15 ips on 1/4 inch tape (work done in
New York City), using Ampex 102s and 440s through JVC's proprietary
equipment, and then that two-track mixdown was taken to Japan for mastering
to digital.
Please feel free to ask me any other questions that I failed to answer here.
--Jon Samuels
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