Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Warning about BIS SACD intg. of Bach's organ music

I received an hour ago some SACDs (actually, 3 separate shipments that were supposed to be spread over 3 weeks... 24 disks total!). Amongst them, there was a complete recording of Bach's organ music on SACD. After having heard Ton Koopman play 70 minutes of it on DVD-a, I was salivating in advance...

Grrr. I was suspecting that it was way too inexpensive to be true (I had forgotten how many CDs a complete recoding of Bach's org. mus. represents!). It turns out that they put 16bit CD audio on those SACD, but they cram about 4 hours per disk! So, overall, it means 20 hours of music (not too badly played by Hans Fagius as far as I can tell after 2 tracks) for about 45$.

So, this can still be a great buy, but be warned that those are not "real" SACDs in the sense we can expect them to be.

That's really unfortunate. I would have never thought to research the resolution but this is a lesson learned for me.

Actually, if I had read the "reviews" on the Amazon site, it was clearly mentionned.

It's not that bad since I only had 3 disks. It's just that organ music in surround hi-res is so mind blowing!

So, for me too, lesson well learned... luckily it was just a 45$ boxed set...

Hey, I have the Ton Koopman Bach DVD-A, too. I like it.

I enjoy Bach's organ works on occasion, but 20 hours would be a bit much for me. A more selective collection with excellent performances and sound is Hurford's 2-disc set .

As far as the BIS set, I'm not familiar with it, but it's of course nothing unusual for older recordings such as those to be transferred to SACD. What is unusual is BIS's rather creative and generous use of the available SACD room, as discussed on their site. The room for at least seven SACD channels(e.g. 5.0 multichannel plus 2.0 stereo)is available, so for stereo material alone about 3 1/2 times the usual length can be provided, hence the four hour discs. Applying DPLII, etc. to the stereo analog outputs generally provides a very helpful spatial effect.

To avoid starting an SACD panic, it is important to note that, apart from this specific example, I have not come accross another dump of a CD and an SACD (and I have over 40 of them). What they do for older recordings (it depends on the age) is go back to the digital masters (which have been 20/24 bits for as long as I can remember) or to the analog masters (which are of very high quality) and restart from there, sometimes matching pretty well the older CD mix. The end result is also a new CD (that I can tell since I had a few CDs--of the exact same performance--that I now own on SACD and the CD portion is slightly different).

The only ones I am wary about (and I have 2 coming in the mail this week or next week) are those said "Enhenced". What the heck do that mean&? Steroids?