Saregama Revival series

[HDDCS]

You're so right. There has been some discussion on the forum on how these guys at HMV/Saregama have had little or no knowledge how to transfer the music onto CDs and have ended up with mp3 versions on CDs.

Even at this age of technology they manage to dish out mediocre products. That is very sad!
From my experience, CDs on Universal label like Qurbani even sound much better than a movie like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun that came out after a decade.
It is very clear from most of their compilation discs that they effortlessly use old scratched vinyl records or cassette tapes. Maybe even mediocre DVDs and VHS tapes. They sometimes even forget to tune the audio correctly. So many albums have a speed shift of about 2% or something, and others have a whopping 4% speed shift.
Some albums have pathetic audio quality that you'd wanna break your system. The DVDs of such movies have much better audio. I have always noticed this in the case of songs from the 1950s and 1960s. The DVDs are surprisingly clearer than the CDs. In fact, even the DVDs of the 70s and 80s have poorer audio than that of the 60s.
Therefore, I personally think ripping audio from DVDs, manually correcting 4% PAL speed up (if any) is the best option for now. Even if there's slight hissing in the audio, it'd be much more appreciable than the horrid noise reduction Saregama crooks use.

 

[Amarendra]

The problem with Revival is that the orchestra comes ahead of the vocals which seem to be somewhere behind the instruments. Its as if the vocals are behind a veil, but again some people may like it. I prefer the original ones.

 

[HDDCS]

Revival for me is better than the atrocious remastering by Saregama for the original songs. But I usually rip songs from Film DVDs and equalize them properly for better results. I would choose equalized DVD rips over the others

 

[soulforged]

A few years back, I had used the HamaraCD (saregama's website, now defunct I think) to create an audio CD of songs that I selected individually. A couple years later my apartment builder gifted all owners a CD collection of old Hindi songs. The collection was created by saregama using, I suspect, a similar selection process as mine. Today I ripped FLACs (using EAC) of the song 'Ye Raat Ye Chandni' from both these CDs and opened them in Spek.

Below are the results...

The image on the left is the CD that I had got. You can see a sharp cutoff at 16khz. Guess they were storing the file in MP3 format (at least 320kbps I hope) and just transcodified it while creating the audio CD.

The one on the left is the collection I was gifted. This seems worse! Most listenable parts are below 6khz and a lot of noise going up to 20khz!!! WTF is this!!! Copied from a cassette or a 96kbps mp3?

net-net I don't think I can hope for a decent quality CD/digital file for the songs that would love to have...gotta guard my vinyls like a hawk

 

[Sunil.M.J]

Came across some CDs from Saregama which are part of what they have called "Revival" or "Classics Revival" series.

The blurbs on the CDs say
"Classics as they were meant to be"
and
"Original Voices, Original Music, Original Compositions.
Carefully re-recorded, in a modern studio, using the original instruments, and then overlaid with the original voice track.
So, these are not modern remixes or imitative recorded versions. Everything is original, as good as new."

Most of them say "Made in UK" and some in Singapore and India.
The ones that I have seen are from 2001.

Am sure many FMs will be familiar with this series. Would be curious to know how Bollywood music lovers have reacted to it.

Any opinions? They do sound very close to the original with slightly more emphasis on the instrumentation.
Some more information on them would also be welcome.

Hi,

This Saregama Revival Series is nothing but a marketing Gimmick.They play instruments over the Original Recording and make it still worse,a true Audiophile will not go for such things, These were not popular and the Company had huge unsold stocks,which they later sold by giving a huge discount.

 

[Naturelover]

Revival for me is better than the atrocious remastering by Saregama for the original songs. But I usually rip songs from Film DVDs and equalize them properly for better results. I would choose equalized DVD rips over the others

What bit rate do these "DVD rips" have?

 

[prepress]

On DVDs, mostly songs are good than actual CDs. The reason behind is, in the movie the song was mixed from actual source (say spool or tapes) which is as it is. But the actual source is lost to create audio and companies using online MP3s to make their ACDs.

I have purchased their Solid Gold Kishore Kumar and really it is really bad. Digitally cleaned and the tempo/pitch is higher than actual song.
Even I extract many old songs from video.

I have another good example of this. You remember the movie "Daag" (Rajesh Khanna). All songs has double echo/vocal which is very annoying (Mere Dil Mein Aaj Kya Hai, Ab Chahe Maa Ruthe Ya Baba).
But in video, all are in single vocals and sounds amazing. Check it here and also compare it with yours

 

[HDDCS]

I found that prominent in the song "Jab Bhi Jee Chahe" as well. At first, I thought it was a group of girls singing the song. But when I watched the film, I realized that it sounds a lot better.

 

[kingajit]

On DVDs, mostly songs are good than actual CDs. The reason behind is, in the movie the song was mixed from actual source (say spool or tapes) which is as it is. But the actual source is lost to create audio and companies using online MP3s to make their ACDs.

I have purchased their Solid Gold Kishore Kumar and really it is really bad. Digitally cleaned and the tempo/pitch is higher than actual song.
Even I extract many old songs from video.

I have another good example of this. You remember the movie "Daag" (Rajesh Khanna). All songs has double echo/vocal which is very annoying (Mere Dil Mein Aaj Kya Hai, Ab Chahe Maa Ruthe Ya Baba).
But in video, all are in single vocals and sounds amazing. Check it here and also compare it with yours

I agree that the DVD's are sounding a lot better than the Saregama Cd's . Recently I was hunting for the CD - woh kaun thi and it is difficult to find it. I found the the number i was looking(Lag Jaa Gale) for in another of lata's collection. Unfortunately the Saregama Cd sounded like a 128 kbps MP3 with no dynamics. The DVD had noise but the dynamics were intact. Wonder if it is worthwhile to extract the audio songs from the DVD's and if this is feasible? Any suggestions?

Cheers
Ajit

 

[prepress]

^Yes, you can do it easily. There are lot if video players in which you can do it, even in very famous one . After extracting the audio from DVD, you can improve the sound quality (removing hissing sound, noise etc.) in audio/sound editing softwares (Google is your friend).