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Ironically, the Gould recordings are now out of copyright in the UK.

http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.111247
"Not available in the United States, Australia and Singapore due to possible copyright restrictions"

Out of copyright in Canada, too. (Fifty years' term).

-Gareth

Ironically, the Gould recordings are now out of copyright in the UK.

http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.111247
"Not available in the United States, Australia and Singapore due to possible copyright restrictions"

'How in blazes does a *retroactive* copyright extension encourage the creation of the work? Has everybody in power forgotten the whole frapping point of copyright??'

It'll even discourage the creation of better versions of the original work. Right now, companies like Naxos are doing audio restoration jobs on out of copyright recordings that often shame the original label's CD release (if it's even available):

http://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_thorn.htm

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Until we (and the rest of the EU) approve this draft legislation:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

Which will be a terrible shame for the thriving re-issue industry that currently gives us reasonably priced high-quality CDs of pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock recordings, especially as the budget labels that do this often treat the material with much more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

I think the record companies are scared to death that the early catalogs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, etc are going to start coming out of copyright in the UK over the next few years. They want to you be more like the US, where Enrico Caruso is still under copyright!

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Unfortunately an EU-wide extension to 70 years is already at the draft stage:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

This is particularly annoying as we currently have a thriving European re-issue industry, where budget labels often treat pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock with more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Until we (and the rest of the EU) approve this draft legislation:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

Which will be a terrible shame for the thriving re-issue industry that currently gives us reasonably priced high-quality CDs of pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock recordings, especially as the budget labels that do this often treat the material with much more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

First off, mp3 is simply not good enough for Classical. If you must buy digital, go for 320 kbps or lame alt-preset-extreme equivalent. As a giant Classical snob (I listen to Classical exclusively), the only way I buy music is physical CDs, and then rip to FLAC once it arrives.

For purchasing physical media, I enthusiastically recommend ArkivMusic. They have a pretty damn good selection, and a really good sorting method where you can browse by composer, conductor, orchestra, soloist, et al., in a very granular fashion. I too checked the local brick-n-mortar stores in Atlanta when the recent re-release of Golijov's Passion of St. Mark hit the shelves only to find no one carrying it. I ended up ordering it from ArkivMusic.

Naxos also has a pretty decent online presence. You can buy from their comprehensive catalog on their site, as well as pay a subscription fee for unlimited mp3/radio quality streaming off their site from their entire collection. While the performers on Naxos aren't always the highest quality, I'd be willing to bet that Naxos has the most comprehensive Classical catalog of any publisher on the planet. Considering the breadth of their collection, if you just want to try new music, the streaming subscription is a pretty damn good deal, poor to middling quality or not.

I don't necessarily disagree that the remastering is not copyrightable, but see the link in my other comment - basically, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet, at least in the UK, and there are legal arguments both ways, perhaps depending on the amount of 'intervention' that's gone into the remastering process. While the major 'reputable' companies selling historical CDs work from the original discs or masters, some certainly seem to be happy just to rip a track from a competitor's CD if the original recording is out of copyright.

I would disagree that there's nothing creative about audio restoration - it takes a good musical ear and a lot of experience to make the (largely subjective) decisions required to make a decent transfer, and there's still vigorous debate about what level of intervention is acceptable. Remove all the hiss from a 78 and you risk killing the high frequencies of the music itself, but leave too much in and it'll distract the listener. Do you want the CD to reproduce the experience of listening to a shellac disc on a bakelite gramophone as closely as possible, or do you want to go beyond what the original technology allowed and process out noise that could not be removed at the time? There is no 'perfect job' here, and there are widely varying versions of some major historical recordings on CD (e.g. Schnabel's Beethoven piano sonatas) where the restorers have made quite different decisions about how best to deal with these problems. To my ears this guy does a pretty good job, by the way:

http://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_thorn.htm

Things become a lot more clear cut if you have an excuse to do a remix, of course. The next digital iteration of the Beatles albums will probably sound quite a bit different to the current CDs, which should keep sales of the official versions healthy for another few years after the copyright on the current versions expires...

The schools could just contact Naxos who would probably offer them a very good, non-RIAA deal on classical music.

That depends on what record label you listen to. I routinely buy new classical CD's for $5-8 dollars.

Maybe I'll go and get some more classical music from Naxos instead.

You could also try a label like Naxos. There's a lot of really good classical and jazz for ~$6/disc. Is promotion and songwriter royalties, which Naxos admittedly mostly avoids, really on the order of $10/CD???

all on cdrs and played in a Recording Studio on:

• B&W Nautilus 803, Marantz CD14 with amp PM14 (Straightwire Pro cabling and extra's) [DM30000- so bit more than $15000]
• Sennheiser Orpheus Electrostatic Reference-headphones with tweaked accompanying amp (digital and analog out) [>$10000]

Now how realistic does that sound? The article I referred to in my first post obviously shows that there actually are people who have this kind of expensive devices in their houses, but how many percent of the total population is that? So how does this laboratory test translate to a home situation in which someone has Winamp play some tunes while typing in Word?

This is exactly what I meant. People don't listen to MP3 because of their quality, but because the ease of use. Sure, you can buy expensive software to make almost-perfect MP3's, but what's the use? Who'd want an MP3 that's twice as big as a normal one? The people who really want this quality (whether they can actually discern between a good and a bad one or not) will not bother to do so: they'll simply feed their CD-player with a good CD. I'm not talking about Naxos and the likes, more about Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, but you seem to know about differences in quality.

And please don't make it look like I said things like but I can always tell the difference! and Ogg is better because... because I didn't say that. I tried quite some different encoders in the past and I indeed could hear the difference between a few of them (Xing was terrible), but none of them could encode at 256kb/s and of course I didn't have the expensive stuff that C'T used. I didn't say that Ogg was better either, just that this is one piece of software that you can use the way you like, no strings attached. Ever tried the Fraunhofer encoder? I did, but it took me quite some time to have it cracked (yeah, sure, as if you're really going to pay for it...). Ogg is better in that it's free from whatever registration or content protection whatsoever. And that's a thing I treasure, as do a lot of folks here on /.