hprill0

I bought five of them (all except the Art Taylor) and they all sound marvelous -- full, warm, extremely well balanced analogue sound. Better than the CDs that I own. Great vinyl quality too, not the slightest hint of surface noise, very unlike those other BN vinyl reissues.

You should be able to tell them apart by the catalog number: The US edition is 0946 3 11494 2 9, whereas the EU edition is 0946 3 11495 2 8. If the printed artwork and the disc have different catalog numbers, then someone somewhere made a swap.

Thanks for the list, Big Al, but I noticed that one item is missing: Steve La Roca's Basra (4205) was issued as an RVG Edition in Europe (apparently not in the US?) on March 7, 2005.

Looks as if they are planning to release Here and There as an RVG at a later date.

There was a Blue Note press release earlier this year which said that the Connoisseur Series would be continued.

I first saw a couple of them in shops a week or so ago... I found one reference to a 23 March 2009 release date, so if this date is correct, they may not have arrived everywhere yet. Where I've seen them, they're priced exactly the same as the OJCCD/RVG Remasters/Keepnews releases. Actually, one shop sold them at €2 less. As I said, they're not remastered, just repackaged editions of previously available OJCCD titles, so they'd better not be any more expensive.

Anyway, here's the list of these 50 titles:

My guess is that these are the releases that are being reissued in Europe as the "Collectors Choice 50" series. This series consists of 50 semi-obscure titles, repackaged in super jewel cases, with brief liner notes by Richard Cook (taken from the Penguin Guide). They are not newly remastered, nor did they get new EAN/UPC barcodes, so except for the new packaging they are exact copies of the previously available OJC titles. Interestingly enough, even though I've held several of these in my hands, I haven't found any reference to the series anywhere on the Internet yet.

Finally got around to check this... It seems the Japanese are better at quality control and at figuring out how to index this CD. Both TOCJ-4137 and TOCJ-6609 are indexing the tracks correctly, but both have the same slight drop-out in sound quality around 4:08 in "Blue Rondo" as the new RVG. Methinks this is an issue with the original master tape.

There's also a version of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch with part of the original liner notes missing... this was corrected with subsequent pressings, but it's still poor quality control.

I have to correct myself here... the faulty RVG edition is also on the EU market. I just received a copy of the EU edition as a birthday present - same problem as the one described here. Let's see if I ever get a replacement for it.

At least this explains why I have been unable to get the new RVG from any local or other European retailer. Even Amazon Germany and Amazon UK are not shipping it and do not list an availability date. Seems the faulty version never made it to the European market. However, all this talk has made me slightly paranoid, so I will now check my two TOCJs (4137 and 6609) for mastering problems...

Sorry, I've thrown them away. In case it happens again, I'll send you a photograph. Not that I'd really want it to happen again though. Those used different dyes in the reflective layer; the Ricoh ones were gold (from around 1993), the Sony ones a greenish silver (from around 1999), but yeah, they were obviously of poor quality. Neither would I; neither did I. Well, duh. If you find blanks that won't ever fail, they won't ever fail. Can't contradict you on that one. I don't know about any studies. I talked to the person in charge of the music department personally during a conference on long-term data preservation. He did not seem amused. The quality of some CDs from the mid-80s seems to have been less than perfect. I have no link, just a colleague who works there. It's not a widespread problem, mind you, but some audio CDs have given up on them. I don't know about that. It's the magazine that said that there are huge differences between CD-R manufacturers, and that some are significantly less durable and produce significantly more read errors than others. They also once did a 15-year longevity test that was passed only by one manufacturer. I do agree with Claude though, that much of what they write seems to be in some correlation with what ads are placed in the magazine.

Silly me. Say "Miles Davis", and for some reason I automatically think Tony Williams. It's Jimmy Cobb of course.

There have also been studies done that show the opposite. The German magazine Stereo has just published an article to that effect in its 12/2008 issue. This is a moot point.