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Posts: 322
Joined: November 17, 2001
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I'm afraid you're entirely misinformed on this topic.
As one of the co-founders of Classic, I can guarantee you that every title that was cut in the first 3-4 years up to say 1997 (when I left) was cut 100% analogue from the original master tape. In quite a few cases we were actually cutting from original three track masters played back on a 3-track head that was specially built by Bernie's in house tech department for his Studer. Classic cut almost a 100 titles during that time including a large number of RCA LSCs and LSPs, a bunch of Verve and Epic jazz titles, and several of Decca owned RCAs aka UK RCAs like Royal Ballet Gala and Witches Brew. Those UK RCA tapes were flown into LA and hand delivered to Bernie's studio by one Tony Hawkins, the senior Decca mastering engineer of that time. And these were definitely original masters displaying hand written notes from some of the actual Decca engineers (including the legendary Kenneth Wilkinson).
With regards to the titles cut after my departure, I'm not in a position to comment but, as a regular client of Bernie's in all the years since then and through to the demise of Classic, I spent a lot of time in his cutting room and saw a lot of master tapes licensed by Classic sitting there: rock titles, jazz titles, classical titles and these were the years where original masters were still being released to the 3rd party licensees by the various major labels.
As far as the so-called digital masters or DATs that you say are being offered for sale online, I have no idea what those are all about! And who is the vendor? What is their actual provenance? Even if these were authentic one should also recall that Classic released a bunch of Gold CDs and then later switched to the DVD-Audio format for several other titles so digital files and masters for those formats would most certainly have been around. Once again, most of these digital titles were released after I left but I personally have very little doubt that almost all the Classic vinyl releases were cut from the original analogue masters by Bernie Grundman.
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