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.

Dear Contrapunctus, I suspect too that this is a PCM remastering (just using the 192khz/24bit tape transfer)- the same as on Blu-ray release
Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Karajan


Qoute from the Blu-ray release Decca Classics 4787819:

'THE EDITION: Successfully remastered at Abbey Road earlier in 2014, and as part of their celebration of ‘50 Years of Pavarotti on Decca in 2014’, Decca proudly presents this iconic recording on 2CDs+1 Blu-ray Audio (permitting true 24-bit / 96KHz playback).'

'THE SOUND: Remastered in ultra-high quality 96kHz 24-bit audio at Abbey Road Studios under the supervision of
long-term Decca balance engineer Philip Siney.'

The performance is superlative; this is my favorite "Butterfly." The astronomical price is for the packaging, of course. Like StereoSound did with their issue of those archival Solti Ring tapes they discovered. I personally don't have any objections to the earlier Tower/Decca Japan SACD, but we'll see if anyone hears this new issue and says it's an improvement.

A digital version (192Khz/24bit) was released on July 25, 2025.


https://www.prostudiomasters.com/album/page/383020

Both 24/192 remasters of La Boheme and Madama Butterfly are also available on Qobuz and if you subscribe to their sublime service you can have have both for about 10% of the cost of the SACDs.

onenairb> With Quobuz, I know they took over e-Onkyo Japan's service. e-Onkyo used to have a lot of DSF files (like, a lot.) I've seen just a handful of titles available on Quobuz in the past. If it's something you look for, have you noticed a lot of these? e-Onkyo had a ton of Universal labels, Sony/RCA, Exton, etc. DSFs.

Classical music albums available to download in DSD (as of today's date):

NativeDSD: 2,645 classical music albums in DSD. 388 recorded in DSD256, 937 recorded in DSD64, 38 recorded in DSD128. Many others recorded analogue or DXD.

Mora.jp: many hundreds of DSD downloads in the classical and jazz genres, sales restricted to Japan (a VPN could circumvent that restriction).

ProStudioMasters: 433 classical music albums in DSD.

Qobuz: 53 classical music albums in DSD (or DXD).

HRAudio lists over 11,000 classical music physical SACDs. Clearly, many titles issued on SACD are not available as DSD downloads and might never be. There are also many classical music albums being released as DSD downloads that will never be pressed on physical SACDs. The dearth of SACD manufacturing plants and the financial disadvantages of printing and distributing physical media have led inexorably to a reduction of new SACD releases. The demand for reissues of audiophile perennial favorites, classical and jazz titles, is probably keeping the SACD medium from going extinct.

As has been pointed out, the 2025 reissue of Madama Butterfly is now available in 24/192 from several vendors. If you own a computer-based audio system and you don't need a coffee table book to accompany the music, the 24/192 download would be the better option. For a 1970s-era analogue master tape, remastering in 24/192 is not inferior to DXD or DSD64. If there are acoustic cues in the analogue tape sufficient to position the singers accurately and to reproduce the width and depth of the orchestral soundstage (bearing in mind the use of multiple microphones and mixing), 24/192 provides enough dynamic range and frequency extension to capture and reproduce those positional cues.

Thanks, Mark, for the listing. I’d like to add that not all HRAudio SACDs are of superior quality, but for connoisseurs seeking the best in surround, few download sites offer what they want. Native DSD is a notable exception, and if 24/192 is acceptable, eClassical has excellent BIS releases in surround as well.

As far as I know, none of the Qobuz DSD files are native. Chandos does surround, though only FLAC and ALAC files, and there may be others doing similarly, although some might be up-sampled lo-res files. I suspect that not everyone will agree that for a 1970s-era analogue master tape, remastering in 24/192 is not inferior to DXD or DSD64.

Even if the recent flux of remastered oldies is stereo only - and Mark is right in suggesting that they keep the format afloat - HRAudio remains, for the time being, the site to go to for 'hand-held' choice and quality in surround.

If the producers (or Labels) did not want to release hi-res files, the sacd format represent a good compromise between more expensive LPs and Redbook CDs.

I did a listening comparison between the new 24/192 transfer and the 2017 Tower Universal Vintage SACD (Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Karajan). To match the sources as closely as possible, I converted a 24/192 track to DSD64; at the point of listening the comparison was DSD to DSD. The test focused on track 1 on the 24/192 and the 2017 SACD, “Introduction – E soffitto e pareti”.

Within the first few bars it was apparent that the 24/192 transfer sounds more vivid than the 2017 SACD, with a deeper front-to-back soundstage, better separation of instruments and more low-frequency impact in the bass viols and timpani. Those qualities should be audible in the Decca SACDs contained in this set, since the SACDs were authored from the 24/192 transfer.

The differences between the two reissues could be attributed to the use of a duplicate (production) tape by the engineer of the Tower Universal SACD, vs. the original master tape by Decca’s mastering engineer, Ian Watson at Classic Sound Limited, but that’s just speculation. I’m more comfortable asserting that remastering of old tapes is getting better, a ray of light in a dark time when labels are discontinuing or reducing their rate of SACD production. Recent 24/192 reissues of Byron Janis and Antal Dorati Mercury recordings sound better to me than the early 2000s Mercury Living Presence SACDs of the same albums. This may well be the ‘golden era’ of remastering.

It is frustrating that Universal Music chose to release the 2025 transfer on SACD in such an expensive package, but that’s their marketing strategy. If this box set sells out quickly, perhaps UMG will forego reprinting the book and repress the SACDs without the extras.