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1 of 1- Brunswick78
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Offline - Registered: 17/5/2017
- Posts: 21
Digital downloads of Holiday Inn & White Christmas
Nothing new for collectors, but Univeral Music Group have issued these albums as digital downloads with the original Decca covers. Holiday Inn has the 78rpm album cover, and White Christmas the 78/LP cover.
One interesting snag: Holiday Inn has the film soundtrack version of Easter Parade, not the Decca 78 recording. This is presumably because they've cloned the download album from the 2002 CD release on Universal. Reviews on Amazon and Allmusic point out that producer Ken Barnes substituted the Decca version, on which Bing had a cold, with the film soundtrack version. The latter is about thirty seconds shorter, and has a more "film-like" arrangement and sound. A bit shoddy to use that version and have the Decca cover, which doesn't represent what was on the original album set.
- Richard Baker
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Re: Digital downloads of Holiday Inn & White Christmas
Thank you "Brunswick78" for that helpful information.
You say that UMG have issued the downloads, but the links you give go to qobuz.
This is a streaming and download service originating in France. I believe thay are well established and would think it likely that they have licences from the likes of UMG and others but I don't think there is any direct connection.
The advantage for British and European users (I don't think the service operates elsewhere) is that they claim higher audio quality than Spotify and others, with a FLAC option instead of MP3. If they have genuinely recoded the recordings in that format there should certainly be an improvement.
However the subscription is considerably greater. Whether the improved audio quality is meaningful for older recordings is questionable, though it should certainly make a difference for recordings made into the stereo era, and qubuz also carry a number of Bing's other albums
The service had a reasonably favourable review from the magazine "What HiFi?" a couple of years ago which is available on line here
In general most other streaming and download services offer MP3 files, where even the best are highly compressed, with some loss of audio quality, which can be detected in the case of full range stereo recordings played on good equipment.
- Brunswick78
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- Posts: 21
Re: Digital downloads of Holiday Inn & White Christmas
Yes, I just linked to my preferred download service. As you say, Qobuz offer lossless CD quality file formats, unlike other digital stores. For the last few years I have stopped buying mp3 etc when I download and only bought lossless. The albums are also on Amazon and Spotify too. I don’t think UMG have a website which details their download releases.
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