The World has gone mad. Who in their right mind could even consider buying this release?

Charging this much for a withering SACD format will only hasten its demise.

I suspect the execs looked at how much (lo-fi) LP re-releases go for and thought they'd create another slice of the action.

I would agree hiredfox. I got excited to see this release only to be shocked at the £/€120 price tag. Seriously! For a 2 disc release! Sadly I won't be purchasing at this price and I suspect they will find many copies sitting on their shelf gathering dust.

I agree the price is dumb, but it should be pointed out that the La Boheme release of the same type that preceded this sounded phenomenal; better than Esoteric. If this one sounds as good as Boheme, I might consider getting it. Has anyone listened yet?

I've not heard this but the improvement of the equivalent Britten War Requiem release is astonishing; it could have been recorded yesterday.

I imagine it is a standard 96/24 recording, nothing special.

Quoted from Presto:

' New high definition 24-bit 192 kHz transfers from the original 1975 master tapes.'

and form JPC:

'The recording has been remastered from the original 1975 tapes and is now available as a hybrid SACD with a resolution of 192 kHz / 24 bit.'

Maybe it will sound good.

Thanks for the info EugenF. That is certainly a step in the right direction but is not DXD or DSD.

Indeed hiredfox, DXD or DSD will be the ideal for an audiophile, but 192/24 is better than nothing.
Maybe they keep the DXD/DSD transfers in their vaults for another 60-70 years until an accident will destroy them.

What worries me: the price of another twin release of Decca Classics, La Bohème - 4870503 (2 sacd discs) - is still high on amazon.de (130 Euros).
So the demand is big.

And the Bluray-audio version (La Bohème Decca Classics 4830930) of is now impossible to be found.

I’m more from the musical than the technical side, but what I do not understand is that a recording from half a century ago can be artificially enhanced as though it were ‘new’. Filling in the missing bits to come closer to a sine wave is not the same as what can be done by today's hi-res recording standards. And what about tape hiss? Half a century ago, I used to have a noise reduction machine. It led to another problem: a pulsating sound pattern, which also needs to be ‘remastered away’. Magic?

BTW, isn't it the same as Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Karajan? Or this one: Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Karajan, which is still digitally available at Presto's.

Although I'm certainly no great fan of opera, I feel compelled to chime in, as the core issue being discussed is something I’ve often wrestled with myself. In this case, I have the SACD remastered by ClassicSound UK for Tower Records. It's worth noting that this remastering was done directly in DSD, unlike the latest release which, as far as I can tell, went through PCM. I suspect that the new version was remastered by a different studio than ClassicSound—just an observation, for what it's worth.

More importantly, I'd like to point out that while the Tower Records SACD sounds decent, it's still miles away from the sonic quality of a modern recording. With all due respect to the folks at the remastering studios, the age of this recording is quite apparent. In fact, there are a few technical shortcomings that, in my opinion, no remastering in the world could truly fix. Chief among them is the choir, which sounds extremely distant—honestly, it's murky and lacks definition.

I’d be very surprised if the new remaster improves the choir's presence in any meaningful way. In any case, I’m not at all inclined to purchase this reissue.