Last night, I was on Qobuz, and I noticed a recently reissued hi-res version of Ormandy conducting the Prokofiev symphonies, which had long been out-of-print anywhere else. I gave them a try, and have to say the sound quality blew me away, at least as streamed at 24/96 via my computer audio system. What surprised me is that these were not from Sony Classical, as I had been assuming, but from a label known as Classical Music Reference Recording, run by an Alexandre Bak, who appears to hail from France.
I checked out the website, and found that they have 24/96 downloads of some very famous recordings (think Karajan's 1962 Beethoven cycle) as well as some Klemperer recordings that were initially made available from EMI as high-res downloads, but which got dropped in favor of Redbook-only versions when Warner took them over. Interestingly, although they are all touted as "newly remastered," no provenance is given, and every release seems to be of an album originally issued 60+ years ago (by which time, in Europe, the copyright would have expired). They must be sufficiently above-board to at least meet Qobuz and Tidal's standards for carrying them on their platforms.
Does anyone know this label, or how they operate? I'm tempted to assume this is someone working similarly to HDTT, but there is no mention of the sources these are mastered from. All I know is that, based on what I heard from the stream last night, if they all sound as good as the Ormandy Prokofiev, M. Bak must be doing something right.
I checked out the website, and found that they have 24/96 downloads of some very famous recordings (think Karajan's 1962 Beethoven cycle) as well as some Klemperer recordings that were initially made available from EMI as high-res downloads, but which got dropped in favor of Redbook-only versions when Warner took them over. Interestingly, although they are all touted as "newly remastered," no provenance is given, and every release seems to be of an album originally issued 60+ years ago (by which time, in Europe, the copyright would have expired). They must be sufficiently above-board to at least meet Qobuz and Tidal's standards for carrying them on their platforms.
Does anyone know this label, or how they operate? I'm tempted to assume this is someone working similarly to HDTT, but there is no mention of the sources these are mastered from. All I know is that, based on what I heard from the stream last night, if they all sound as good as the Ormandy Prokofiev, M. Bak must be doing something right.
