ABC 15ips Tapes

[russe41]

Does anyone have an opinion on the ABC tapes, sound quality packaging etc?
Looks like some decent recordings if they are well done.

[astrotoy]

I bought five of their tapes. ABC Int'l is based in southern China, so the tapes will come from there. I bought the two Royal Ballet tapes, the Itzhak Perlman Sarasate tape, the Janos Starker Cello Fury tape and the His Masters Voice Audiophile Reference Voice Record tape. In general, they are quite fine. I did have problem with the first of the Royal Ballet tapes. Two of the sections of the Nutcracker excerpts end very abruptly, cutting off the reverb of the final note of the sections. I asked them about the problem and they responded that this is what they have on the running master tape. It is not what is on the record. Also the Royal Ballet is about 90 minutes long on 2 records and the tapes are about 60+ minutes long, so about 2/3rds of the album is included on the tapes. The Perlman tape looks like it came from parts of two different albums that he did for EMI. (I have the original vinyl of those two albums). The Voice albums are excerpts from several different albums by different male and female singers (Eva Cassidy, Aaron Neville, Esther Ofarim, etc.)

The packaging and tape reels are the finest that I have gotten from any company - better than TP or Chad's new tapes. They use RMG SM900 studio mastering tape for the copies. According to their literature Studer A80's were used for the master and duplication machines.

They say that these are copied from the master tapes. My best guess is that this is not true. They may come from safety masters. For example, Chad Kassem is reissuing the Royal Ballet from the original master tapes which are in Germany. They are not also in China. However, well done copies of safety masters can be really fine. You have to decide how important provenance is.

The tapes are not cheap, when I ordered them two or three years ago, they were more expensive than most. I think the prices of most everyone have gone up since then. Haven't looked at their website recently.

Larry