#1..........Best Packaging!

#2..........Excellent Sound!

#3..........Incredible Deluxe Editions!

#4..........Delicious Club Releases!

#5..........More good releases than any other company! (over half the CDs in my collection are from Varese Sarabande)

#6..........Goes through hellish re-use fees for the fans!

I just love the feeling of walking into a store and picking up a brand-new sealed Varese CD. There are some CDs that are packaged so well, I wish I wanted them (i.e. THE TIME MACHINE).

There are many CDs that I have purchased mainly because it was a Varese CD. However, I made sure I at least remotely liked the score. For example, if it were not for them I would never have purchased their FROM HELL album. I liked the score a little bit, so that helped. Besides, I feel I owe it to Varese Sarabande to purchase their releases. They've done so much.

If I ever become a composer, I am going to try to have every commerical release produced by Varese Sarabande!

That goes to RCA for the SW:SE:LEs.

#2..........Excellent Sound!

Varies. Since the recording is done primarily for the movie, I don't think Varese have a lot of influecene on that. I agree though that the Deluxe Editions sound spectacular - but then, most of them are Goldsmith (i.e. recorded by Bruce Botnick), and Aliens was recorded by Shawn Murphy I believe (who was still great at that time), so it's no surprise they sound great.

#3..........Incredible Deluxe Editions!

Let's hope they'll do Great Train Robbery soon!

#4..........Delicious Club Releases!

I still don't have any of them.

#5..........More good releases than any other company! (over half the CDs in my collection are from Varese Sarabande)

#6..........Goes through hellish re-use fees for the fans!

I think Varese's discs have bowed to the "all-digital, less-volume" brigade (something Townson apparently appreciates, given his POS Scottish re-recordings), as after listening to Elektra's The Sum Of All Fears, which is mixed BEAUTIFULLY, I somehow doubt it would've sounded this loud on a Varese disc. Every new Goldsmith score that they release is in the "turn it up 5 notches" pile.

Varese's From Hell is one of the best sounding CDs I have.

quote:

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Originally posted by Shaun Rutherford:
I think Varese's discs have bowed to the "all-digital, less-volume" brigade (something Townson apparently appreciates, given his POS Scottish re-recordings), as after listening to Elektra's The Sum Of All Fears, which is mixed BEAUTIFULLY, I somehow doubt it would've sounded this loud on a Varese disc. Every new Goldsmith score that they release is in the "turn it up 5 notches" pile.

Pardon me while I vomit profusely,

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What's the problem, is your volume control broken?

Look, I don't get into 'rerecording' and sound mix and crap like that, I'm just in it for having the actual score. Were I more musically knowledgeable, perhaps, but I'm just a film-score junkie and that's that.

So, for me, going out on release day (tuesday) is not about "oooh, the latest set of random songs not on the last album is out from that group!" it's "sweet, the INSOMNIA score!".

And I, too, have over half Varese in my collection, they were the reason I got into it by being able to own LEVIATHAN or THE FLY II and listen to them over and over,r ather than trying to tape them off of the videotapes I had and make a really crappy homemade score...

I actually much prefer the old brown spines, for much the same reason someone above brought up - much easier to find in Used shops or places that don't have the newer ways of peeling through CD's in the racks. I still to this day am able to find stuff in used bins or markdown or 'all encompassing ya takes what ya finds' boxes, etc...just the other day, I found a real rarity just by happening to glance thru such a bin. The few non-score artists/albums I've been seeking are much much much harder to find b/c they don't have something simple as Ye Olde Brown Label to look for. I'm just not aesthetically comfy w/that white (with tiny brown smudge at the corner) new Varese Label yet. But it's a small thing to bitch about so I shan't...

Everyone's got their reasons for buying/not buying/not liking something, but I try to lap up pretty much every score I can unless A) I know it to be all crashing stuff or very synthy stuff, unless I happened to like it in the movie, B) it's a composer I just cannot listen to (of which there's hardly a one, but a couple I don't prefer who shall remain nameless)...to the point where I'm usually buying scores before I even see the movie, something else Varese got me to do, b/c I'm such a fan of score music. So that they can work over and above whatever crappy movie they might be in - being that I see like 80 percent of everything that comes out, eventually I'll hear the score and go "yeah, it works in this film" or "wow, this film is bad but the score's ok", etc. I rarely return anything and if i'm even at all iffy I do tend to give it a listen before I buy - for example, no matter how many times i see that ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN Bill Conti cd, i can't bring myself to buy it...no matter how low the markdown gets!

Just some varese thoughts. Peace.

For the price of a (regular) Varèse Sarabande disc, I get a Chandos CD. With superior sound, excellent performances, superior artwork, and superior liner notes... (though I'm not sure how Chanods liner notes can be superior to Varèse liner notes since you can't compare "something" with "nothing")

Long story short, I can't believe nobody else understands this damned volume thing.

Guys.

Come on.

I applaud Varèse for releasing A LOT of scores that would never see the light of CD day, and for releasing more than they used to. True, some years ago, they seemed to be only releasing 25-minute albums, but I have to applaud them for releasing more music in each single scores on average, or so it appears to me.

I say kuddos and shame on everyone who has to nitpick them all the time and cry like babies because their personal preferences aren't answered by a company which, should you need to be remembered, does not need to put itself out there and actually release this kind of music that only few people actually buy.

Shaun, I think I understand the "volume thing," and this is my cure to it:

1. Don't mix and match CDs since we're never going to have a standard recording style. Recordings by Dennis Sands are going to sound vastly different than those of Dan Wallin. This is a fact of life and will require different volume adjustments on your equipment. Every time I do a "mix CD," I have to mess around with the volume of every track before I burn the thing. It's a pain, but a fact of life. Some recordings have more dynamics than others.
   
2. For the Scottish recordings, turn the volume up so you can comfortably hear the quiet parts of the score, and then really enjoy it when the orchestra struts their stuff. Your neighbors might not like it, but oh well.
   

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Originally posted by Shaun Rutherford:
The "volume control" comment is frustrating. Put Unbreakable, Krull, Crimson Tide, Hollow Man, and Monsters, Inc. on shuffle.

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You might as well blame Varese for the weather. That's just how CDs work. You could blame them if you had to change volume when listening to tracks on the *same* CD, but that's not your complaint.

BTW, many PC music players have a auto-volume-control feature which attempts to match subjective loudness between tracks. I don't know if consumer CD changers have this feature or not.

It's hard to put into words, I guess.

BTW -- anyone notice that on the Last Orders CD, Varese misspelled Paul Grabowsky's name on the spine, but have it spelled on the back insert? weird.

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Originally posted by El Cid:
You might as well blame Varese for the weather. That's just how CDs work.

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Ok. So how come "some" companies manage to make it work better than others? If that's "just how CDs work" then all CDs should sound like **** .
Let's leave Varèse Sarabande out of it. Let's take another company with the same "low volume" crap: EMI Classics.
Old EMI discs sound great. New EMI stuff sounds like **** . The recorded sound is perfect. The CD volume is awful: it's inaudible.
So how come Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classical can make CDs which are perfectly recorded, and have higher CD volume, but EMI can't? Easy: they don't want to. Different opinions. Apparently, EMI thinks that everyone gets to live in a house separated from all civilization, equiped with a 10000W sound system where they can push up the volume as high as they want without fearing the wrath of neighbors.

Same goes for much of Varèse Sarabande stuff. Their Scottish rerecordings are perfectly engineered. But the volume mastering is purely and simply bad.

In my view, Varese has taken the route of “bare bones” release for most of their score releases. But who the hell cares? They probably do that so they can release as much as possible, as cheaply as possible to make as much money as possible. That is a fair balance in my view, one I wish a lot more companies would pursue.

I'm afraid I'm of the "40 minutes of Scorpion King is better than none" school (or more accurately, "40 minutes of legitimate, licensed Scorpion King and a few black and white stills is much better than 85 minutes of stolen edits from a pirated DVD from the far East slung together in 86 minutes by a 15-year-old onto two CDRs with at best some colour inkjet inlay sheets for the same price"). And while someone else might have picked up Scorpion King (not that I'm holding my breath for it that much) no-one else is going to bother with Last Orders, Fierce Creatures, Jawbreaker or Halloween 6/7/8, or yet more Marco Beltrami...

Oh, and my rating is 29.5% (number of Varese / number in collection).

NP: LONE WOLF McQUADE (Francesco De Masi) - Varese re-released this one, but I have the Italian Beat CD. I want more music like this.

quote:

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Originally posted by Dinko:
Ok. So how come "some" companies manage to make it work better than others? If that's "just how CDs work" then all CDs should sound like **** .
Let's leave Varèse Sarabande out of it. Let's take another company with the same "low volume" crap: EMI Classics.
Old EMI discs sound great. New EMI stuff sounds like **** . The recorded sound is perfect. The CD volume is awful: it's inaudible.
So how come Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classical can make CDs which are perfectly recorded, and have higher CD volume, but EMI can't? Easy: they don't want to. Different opinions. Apparently, EMI thinks that everyone gets to live in a house separated from all civilization, equiped with a 10000W sound system where they can push up the volume as high as they want without fearing the wrath of neighbors.

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All music does not - should not - have the same dynamic range. It's part of the music. Why should everything be dumbed down to sound good in the car or for "late at night" listening?

But many albums have high dynamic ranges without falling into the inaudible category.
You can have CDs with "normal" volume levels, and high dynamic ranges.
You can also have CDs with high dynamic ranges and no volume.

quote:

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Originally posted by El Cid:
All music does not - should not - have the same dynamic range. It's part of the music. Why should everything be dumbed down to sound good in the car or for "late at night" listening?

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quote:

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Originally posted by David Maxx:
This thread is about how good Varese Sarabande is, not about problems with sound.

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There's no way to control the course of a thread. That's both a good and a bad thing.

Good because you generally want to encourage conversation, bad because sometimes the topicicity is lost, sometimes even to the point od the thread being hi-jacked to forward some one person's agenda or obsession.

Now we are discussing sound, a natural outgrowth of Shaun's comments on what he perceived as "bad" sound on some Varese releases.

It is an organic outgrowth of what you started, What's the problem?

But if it makes you happy, I like Varese releases despite what I perceive as flaws.

I think Varese, especially recently, has started to just release every shyt score for every shyt movie, and so long as it keeps the funding alive for the club stuff, that's cool. That doesn't mean they're the best label ever.

If you don't like Varese Sarabande, that's fine, but don't bring down a topic because of such.

That sounds like an invitation to me!