Wow to the WOW.
I have finished listening and testing this wonderful recording. Not only did A B C do it right, he really gets it. It was fun to play my vinyl apples to apples with some of these tracks. I have been remastering, remixing, and otherwise fiddling with recordings for years, and I can truly say that this goes beyond any run of the mill patch job. There is no discernable wow and/or flutter issues from the vinyl rips by SeventiesFilmNut, which tells me that the rips were achieved on top-notch equipment, such as a direct drive turntable with pitch control and a DJ-quality stylus. No ghost noise was detected on my equipment either, meaning the records were played in a quiet location with no noise from speakers or loud events. One time I worked on a recording that picked up the person on the phone while ripping, so silence is golden. All 3 parts of this collection held their own in every way on my THX-Certified speakers. First, I played each track one at a time with Media Player Classic's FLAC encoding. Second, I burned the FLAC files to CD and played them on my Blu-ray player via HDMI. Then I came back to the computer and imported some of the files to ACID Pro so I could visually inspect the dB levels. Lastly, for gits and shiggles, I used dBPoweramp to convert selections to 320 kb/s mp3's and played them on Windows Media Player.
The results? Absolutely fantabulous on ALL fronts. The brass is finally tempered to where it belongs and no longer blasts out the rest of the instruments. The low-key and silent moments shine and find themselves appropriately in the mix. The percussion is also noteworthy, as it confidently finds its place and no longer sounds like it was somehow imported from elsewhere or was an afterthought (as the original recordings sometimes did this). The only so-called "complaint" I could come up with is that the tracks are not "properly tagged" to make things all nice and pretty on playlists. This is frowned upon in BitTorrent circles, but I say big deal. I don't have a problem putting tags and cover art in the tracks manually with dBPoweramp.
Many, many thanks to A B C for this. What better way to spend my birthday than with one of my favorite scores of all time? It was like revisiting an old friend, and while I will always love my vinyl and CD collection, this is absolutely the most definitive collection of the music from The Empire Strikes Back I have ever heard.
-JT