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Tangerine Dream / Japanese virgin-era reissues on SACD

By Paul Sinclair

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phaedra

Tangerine Dream‘s first four albums for Virgin Records, Phaedra (1974), Rubycon (1975), Ricochet (1975) and Stratosfear (1976) will all be reissued in Japan next month as SHM-SACDs.

Each album is newly remastered for 2015 from the original UK analog master tape and as usual these sets will be packaged as fully blown mini-LP CD / vinyl replica / paper sleeve editions with an OBI strip replicating the design from the very original Japanese LP.

These SACDs aren’t hybrid which means you have to have an SACD player to enjoy them, but like the forthcoming Roxy Music sets the same new masterings will be utilised for compatible-with-all-CD-player SHM-CD editions (‘platinum’ and standard).

The packaging will almost certainly follow the previous template with SACD and platinum SHM-CD securing the mini-LP CD in an outer box and the standard SHM-CD having no outer box.

All four albums will be reissued in Japan on 25 February 2015.

phaedra

Phaedra

SHM-SACD mini-LP

Platinum SHM-CD (compatible with all, outer box)

SHM-CD (compatible with all, no box)

rubycon

Rubycon

SHM-SACD mini-LP

Platinum SHM-CD (compatible with all, outer box)

SHM-CD (compatible with all, no box)

ricochet

Ricochet

SHM-SACD mini-LP

Platinum SHM-CD (compatible with all, outer box)

SHM-CD (compatible with all, no box)

Stratosfear

Stratosfear

SHM-SACD mini-LP (hi-res with outer box)

Platinum SHM-CD (compatible with all, outer box)

SHM-CD (compatible with all, no box)

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14 Comments

14 thoughts on “Tangerine Dream / Japanese virgin-era reissues on SACD”

  4. These lidded boxes are used to separately house the disc, Japanese notes/lyrics, mini version of the sleeve plus inserts. You could also place the disc on to the inside lid of the box if you chose to. They are a bit over the top in terms of packaging, but that’s the Japanese for you!

  6. As per the other Japanese SHM-SACD packages these will probably be flat transfers of the original master tapes. That is, there won’t be any mastering of these transfers. They idea is to keep the reproduction to as near the master tapes as follows. Also, I think I read somewhere that the new batch of SHM-SACD’s being released; Tangerine Dream, Roxy Music and VdGG to name a few will not be packaged in the boxes the some were lat year. I think that approach has been abandoned in preference to the standard papersleeve packaging, but I could be wrong on that.

  7. Not sure that’s true anymore, Mark. For example, all the SHM Yes releases had the bonus tracks. All the Tull SHM’s have the bonus tracks etc.

    True many of them don’t – but these days they seem to be following the releases in the West, and are including them.

    I bought all the TD releases last time around, and won’t be upgrading to SACD. Still, it’s good to see the Virgin years being given some love. In the UK these albums are treated very very poorly in general. Esoteric reissued a bunch of early TD in recent times, and they were nice – but the Virgin years gets those horribly generic (every damn release has the same liner notes for the most part!) liner notes and ads to buy other releases – just horrible.

    Of course, Froese doesn’t own the rights to the music in the Virgin years – in an affort to get some level of control he went on a campaign to “reimagine” them, which doesn’t really ever work for the better (as was the case here).

    The TD releases are worth getting on Mini LP due to the cover art – it was mostly great, and works wonderfully in Mini LP format – the inserts (including singles, balloons, and inner sleeves), the great gatefold art from Mrs Froese….. wonderful stuff.

    I wish these would get a proper release in the UK – but alas, Virgin keeps these locked up……

  8. Anybody know if these had quad mixes when they first came out in the 70″s. Virgin did like a quad version those days .
    If so , is it on these new SACD ?

    1. Highly unlikely. Most Japanese paper sleeve reissues consist of the original track listing only. Occasionally one gets some bonus tracks, though that depends on the issuing label. Anything above and beyond that (i.e. quad or 5. 1 mixes) is unheard of.

  9. I have a question on these Japanese CD reissues, haha! I’ve actually been very interested in buying a few of them, but I wanted to know if any of these formats offered here are compatible to be imported on a MacBook Pro. I mean, I figure they should be, but y’know, just to be safe, haha!

    Also, what really is different between the formats offered for each album?

    1. You cannot import the sacd into a computer. You can import the shm-cd or the platinum shm-cd, which are both produced to be playable on ordinary cd players or cd drives. The material of the discs themselves are what is different from ordinary cds (SHM=Super High Material) to ensure more preise data reads.

  10. I assume the SHM- SACD edition should sound better than the SHM-CD. I’d hate to buy these on as the SACD version and we get a multi channel mix later on but I’d guess that would be highly unlikely? Or just the risk one has to take.

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