VHS release for Alien: Romulus

[Leo Enticknap]

And once you've also bought the amplifiers and speakers needed to do it justice, the amount you've spent would likely enable you to go to concerts/gigs to hear your favorite music performed by leading professionals live, regularly, and for the rest of your life.

[Steve Guttag]

Why bother, nowadays, they are playing the tape anyway and just miming the show (check out Wings of Pegasus on YouTube). In fact, the labels are going back through their catalogs and pitch correcting those recordings...even the likes of Queen and the Bee Gees are getting pitch corrected.

If you haven't heard a master tape (or a close copy), you'd be amazed at how close that puts you to the performance versus other forms of the performance/recording. $500/tape is not too high, in my opinion for a 1st generation master tape. Those are being recorded real-time and even the tape itself is not cheap. There are going to be only so many passes the holders of the master tape are going to allow so the market has to be small (I presume that they are making a duplication master of the original to make these copies). Every pass of the original master is going to affect its HF response.

[Mike Blakesley]

As for a major studio releasing a VHS in 2024. I'm stumped. Must just be the collectors market "for fun/because we can" aspect as others speculated. Plus now people can complete their ALIENS set, those 3 people that held on to their ALIENS franchise vhs tapes that is.

When CDs were becoming the hot item and displacing vinyl, I remember seeing Elton John on TV and he said he made sure his new album was also released on LP because he didn't like the idea of a whole collection full of the tall vinyl albums with a short little CD package at the end.

[Mark Ogden]

There are going to be only so many passes the holders of the master tape are going to allow so the market has to be small (I presume that they are making a duplication master of the original to make these copies). Every pass of the original master is going to affect its HF response.

That's absolutely correct, and it stems from an incident in the 1990s. For years, the record album that was considered to be the best sounding LP of all time was the soundtrack of the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale, as released on Colgems Records (and for the truly anal, specifically the discs made at RCA's Indianapolis plant, which were somehow identifiable from markings in the dead wax). This was the so-called "test disc" for most audiophiles and audio gear critics, noted for its clarity, dynamic range and sound staging. But at some point the master was lent out to a reissue label and they wound up ruining it from too fast rewinding, causing tape cinching and oxide loss. I remember the audiophile community being shocked at the news, and the cost of used copies of the album, already high, skyrocketed.

I see now that records, CDs and tapes (like the ones mentioned above) that claim to me "from the master tape" are in reality from an intermediate of some sort. The audiophile record company Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab got caught on this a couple of years ago. They were advertising a super high end vinyl series that were supposedly created from the master tape directly to the cutting lathe. They had a lot of people fooled, but one record collector with golden ears heard something fishy, and did some snooping. It turns out that MFSL was actually mastering from a hi-rez digital intermediate without telling anyone. There was a lawsuit over it, but I don't know what became of it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music...gital-scandal/

[Leo Enticknap]

Why bother, nowadays, they are playing the tape anyway and just miming the show (check out Wings of Pegasus on YouTube). In fact, the labels are going back through their catalogs and pitch correcting those recordings...even the likes of Queen and the Bee Gees are getting pitch corrected.

DSP pitch correction would have been a career saver for Florence Foster Jenkins, had it been around when she was. This recording is considered by opera buffs to be one of the most infamous in the history of the genre. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before someone tries to pitch correct it for comedy purposes.

In classical music, something similar has been done, for fraud. In the 1990s, a record producer with a long history of semi-legal and illegal (tax dodging) wheeler-dealing, released a series of CDs, purportedly of his wife playing some of the most challenging works in the mainstream classical piano repertoire. These made quite a splash, with critics describing her in terms such as "the greatest pianist you've never heard of." Eventually, an amateur music enthusiast tried some forensic examination of one of the records, and discovered that it was in fact a copy of a better known performance, digitally manipulated to change the speed but not the pitch. Shortly afterwards, the dam burst and the fraud was exposed.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

You guys have it all wrong! You just need a video card with this chip on it. Then the video is converted to 4K in real time.