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I'm with Lon on the ORG Music The Shape Of Jazz To Come hybrid SACD. Get it while its around. They aborted their SACD program after only three jazz titles (The Bridge, My Favorite Things) and all are excellent.

Strictly in my opinion — perhaps others could chime in — I think Stellar Regions is strong enough to have made Expression a double album. The only track I'm not crazy about is where Coltrane plays alto. I think the Penguin review would equally dissuade a newcomer from buying Expression. There is some very strong material on Stellar Regions. The fact that it is the complete date (15 February, 1967) including three alternates might give the impression of a bundle of scraps.

Please give us your thoughts. I never bought any Platinum SHM-CDs myself, and for earlier Coltrane albums like A Love Supreme and The Coltrane Quartet Plays I prefer the APO Hybrid SACDs.

Maiden Voyage SHM should be delivered to me in the next seven days. The BN Works was supposed to have been made from Japanese tapes. That one sounds better than the McMaster and RVG.

CD Japan states that these discs are available within 3-7 days. I received an e-mail today informing me that Sun Ship and Stellar Regions would now be available within 3-4 weeks. Has anyone here had any luck actually receiving items from CD Japan when this type of availability update occurs? Such delays more often than not lead to cancellation in my experience.

As soon as your disc begins to play Track 1, hold down your scan button to go back. There are some (I forget exactly how many) seconds of studio chatter and playing before Track 1. They're not essential by any means, but I've always found it curious why they were appended in this "hidden" manner. I would have never known about them if Michael Fitzgerald hadn't posted here some years ago about their existence. Now I have to dig out my copy of Interstellar Space and listen to those seconds (!) again. That's exactly what I tried, but it never worked. I first had a European pressing, bought upon release. That disc became scratched and I replaced it with a US pressing some years ago.

Well, I've only seen him in three films - Capote, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and The Master - but he was pretty remarkable in all. Ironic that in the second he played a wealthy and apparently successful man who was secretly addicted to heroin. You've never seen The Big Lebowski? I thought that was required for board membership at one time... That will not stand, man! I've seen The Big Lebowski so many times at one time I could practically recite the dialogue for the whole movie from memory without interruption.

I've never been able to access that hidden track. How did you? My NAD didn't recognise it, neither does my current Marantz. It also did not show up on the secure rip I made on my iMac with XLD.

Lots of tunes from that album made it onto Jim Alfredson's Patton Tribute. I'm awaiting the arrival of that one myself.

holy smokes! that's insane! how awful. You want insane, the price of "international" shipping to Canada is the same as to Europe. Tell me that's fair when it's being trucked up from Seattle or Buffalo or some such place. It used to be $1 more than domestic shipping. The import duties to the Netherlands have recently gone insane, defying all logic of value and can be best described as ascribed by someone under the influence of the latter stages of brain syphillis. Of course, some couriers are notably worse than others, which only reinforces IMCO that the duties are imposed arbatarily depending on the night before, the time of the month, or inclement weather, or whoever is detailed with that job on that day and hour. As an example, I recently purchased one of the Ivy League oxford cloth button down shirts designed by Graham Marsh from Kamakura shirts: declared value $59.95, import duties €117.00! Needless to say, I wasn't willing to pay that and fortunately the shirt company was sympathetic to this and agreed for the shirts to be returned and to try again. As an exercise in stopping the consumer from purchasing from the States and Japan, this attack on global trade and the common man is not working according to plan, not with me on the case! At least yet, but it does pose serious threat to the positive aspects of globalised business. At least at grunt level. What was the carrier, TNT? I thought the law stated €13 + 21% over the value of the goods plus shipping together. This for imports (from outside the EU) over €22.

Hans, these ten SHM studio albums definitely sound more like the 1987 Crescent CD I have than like any of the other subsequent releases. Only, they're better. There is no lifted, muddy, zooming bass on Meditations, no harshness in the tenor sounds (as difficult as that is to believe for this particular date). Quite soft on the ears. Easy listening, really.

holy smokes! that's insane! how awful. You want insane, the price of "international" shipping to Canada is the same as to Europe. Tell me that's fair when it's being trucked up from Seattle or Buffalo or some such place. It used to be $1 more than domestic shipping. Capitalism works .... for the rich.

I'll echo Lon in agreeing that you have hit the nail on the head with this observation. It is quite annoying that its taken the music industry 25 years to finally offer decent sounding CDs of this music. I seem be guilty of plagiarism in my post above.

I do not think you will regret it. Lots of talk in the past on the Hoffmann forum (post#65). The Japanese seem to have recreated the Japanese vinyl mix (with its added reverb) for both Agartha and Pangaea as closely as possible. That is was made it to the Blu-Spec. The 2009 Complete Columbia box used that recreation for Agartha. For Pangaea Wilder used the earlier mix of the complete concert instead (Mastersound). Hence the very different sound of the two concerts in that set. I guess I'm not a fan of the original vinyl sound and by ordering the first Mastersound of Aghartha, SRCS 9128-9, I'll get a matching set (sort of). You will probably get a matching set of vinyl mix recreations for which they apparently even used the original engineer to make things as authentic as possible. People seem to think highly of these editions.

Of course! Of course not!

I finally got the Nichols in from Japan. I agree, a bit loud, and some bloated bass, but to be honest I always hear that bloat on this album, and everything else sounds really good on this one especially the piano and the snare drum. Glad I got it. Yes, the bass sounds similarly bloated on the 1994 bethlehem release. It must be the recording. I did feel it has been lifted out of proportion. I'll listen again and concentrate on the piano and snare drum. Update: Yes, the piano and snare drums are more clearly present and sound quite natural. To a certain degree the same can be accomplished by raising your amp's volume on the older CD. The bit loud mastering is more of a problem with the stereo material, the Waldron being a case in point, containing both mono and stereo versions on a single disc. I feel a bit ambivalent about the Japanese Solid discs. They are 'blink and they're gone' Roadrunner releases. What if the same titles will eventually be released in the US for a fraction of the cost with even better sound?

They seem to ship in bulk to the EU. Individual parcels don't enter the posting system until they've crossed EU borders.

Late 2012, USPS doubled their rates, Amazon followed. Shipping a single CD to the EU now costs about $14.

My history of Blue Note collecting has resulted in a love-hate relationship with previous EMI releases. I started collecting Blue Note in 1999 with the release of the first batch of RVGs. I bought the Shorters among others. I naïvely believed that remastered was better and never bothered with early McMasters that were still around. Early on I also bought Connoisseurs like Shorter's Schizophrenia. I learned about Mosaic and briefly entertained the idea of importing a box or two from them. In the end I did not buy their product until much later. I never really enjoyed the sound of the discs, but blamed my system for not being good enough. When the copy protection scheme hit in 2003 I stopped buying Blue Note altogether until 2009. I did import a few titles like the Coltrane Monk discs from 2005. Then when the copy protection scheme was dropped, the RVGs were cheap all of a sudden. Just €5 a piece at Fame in Amsterdam. Then I started reading more on the internet and buying McMasters second hand as well as importing Connoisseurs I'd missed in the mean time and TOCJ BN Works titles. I also illegally download FLACs and burn to CD-RW to make informed buying decisions. The APO SACDs and Audio Wave XRCD24s then opened my eyes to how much crappy product I've been misled into consuming over the years. The problem with these two series is their uninspiring choice of titles. I've always preferred buying second hand McMasters and Connoiseurs from US sellers, so the (more than) doubling of shipping costs hit hard. A second hand McMaster from the US can now cost as much as €15 to import, a price I'm not willing to pay. The Japanese SHMs are exactly what I've been hoping for. For the above reasons my Blue Note collection is modest at the moment. So my preferred previous Blue Notes are XRCD24, Hybrid SACD, and early McMasters.

Basically I consider the ten discs above of possible interest, especially the studio titles. I've never owned Jupiter Variation or Cosmic Music before, but three of the tracks from Jupiter I'm familiar with from other releases. Cosmic Music I know from the Hip-O Select. I downloaded every Originals and Hip-O Select release that wasn't already in my collection and burned them to CD-RW to compare. In my opinion every studio title from the list of ten improves on the Originals/Hip-O release, US/EU digipaks. Meditations quite dramatically imo. My intention is to share my experiences, not to make recommendations for purchasing. Think carefully before you buy if you wan't to take the risk and spend the money. Most titles are already OOP. Indeed. I wasn't inferring that I had a problem with that. I didn't mean to imply you were. Sorry for the confusion.

"By God, sir! I will not abide another toe!"

I generally don't have a problem with that. It's the quality of the end product that matters.

Same here. I wonder which sources were used for these CDs. It is a question I have no answer to.

I never expected this. I feel like I've just been handed a toe. R.I.P.

(After burning the downloaded FLAC Mastersound to CD-RW.) The drums are more present in the mix throughout the Mastersound and I like to hear what Al Foster is doing. I think Mark Wilder made a mistake not taking the complete concert in the Mastersound mix as the basis of the 2009 Complete Albums box version. The bass sound is different between mixes and my first reaction was I prefered the 2009 Wilder, but ... the feedback ending also works very well imo. A quick comparison made it evident that Al Foster is also better audible on the 2009 box version of Pangaea, which is also the complete concert. No need to upgrade that one then. I therefore just bought a copy of the Mastersound of Agartha. I simply can't go on listening to the 2009 version now that I've heard better.