When it comes to old music (pre 60's), the best quality is found on the movie DVD (although it's running at a 4% speed gain), it contains music from the actual score. But the actual source (in the form of spools) is lost to create the movie audio and all other formats like vinyl record or CD are analogue mastering and copying from the DVD audio. And there's a hell lot of meddling in that.
Sometimes the tuning is bad, pitch is increased, Speed shift 2-4%, digital tempo cleaning etc.
And that highly depends upon the mastering engineer and what the team deemed suitable for listening at that time.
I've purchased around 550+ HD music files from saregama. My purchases can probably go as a test case here that the music quality is very dynamic with majority of it on the worse side. (Jagjit Singh's Kahkashan is much, much better on the CD, so are songs from hum kisi se Kim nahin)
Check this post by Venkatcr:
Click here
Some timeless classics are very well mastered and you may feel that they are better in quality at Saregama, but wait till you hear the DVD audio, you'll start identifying the differences... Instruments and the natural grunge/heaviness/subtly in a singer's voice are clearer and more recognisable in the DVD audio of even Sholay.
As described by prepress
here, A good example of this is the movie "Daag" (Rajesh Khanna). All songs has double echo/vocal which is very annoying (Mere Dil Mein Aaj Kya Hai)
But in
video, all are in single vocals and sounds amazing
So as far as buying from Saregama is concerned.
Simple avoid and forget about it. It's pathetic and a waste of your money.
The same amount of money invested in CD or Vinyls will provide you a much more satisfactory listening experience (even if you're not keen of HiFi listening system)
