Sir George Solti - Das Rheingold

 

180-gram triple vinyl box set

The most honored classical recording in history!

Remastered in HD sound at 24 bit/192kHz from the original 2-track stereo master tapes

Lacquers cut using half-speed mastering by Miles Showell, Abbey Road Studios

First all-new transfer in more than 25 years!

First-ever stereo production of Wagner's Ring cycle

Pressed to vinyl at Optimal in Germany

Slipcase with foil accents

Lavishly illustrated booklet featuring technical information on the remastering and original recording

"Here is the greatest achievement in gramophone history, yet." — Gramophone

"No one has bettered Solti's Decca Ring in terms of sweep, scope, grandeur, dramatic immediacy, and sheer adrenalin." — Stereophile

Marking the 25th anniversary of conductor Sir Georg Solti's passing, for this 2022 edition Decca Ring cycle, Decca Records has utilized a competely new set of high-definition 24 bit/192kHz transfers of the original master tapes.

Decca's landmark recording of Wagner's 15-hour epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Sir Georg Solti is the most celebrated classical recording in history. Today Decca is proud to announce a brand-new series of sumptuous releases — remastered using the latest technology to bring this gold-standard recording to a new generation.

It is both the most celebrated, and the world's best-selling opera recording — a recording project on a scale without precedent and the first-ever studio recording of Wagner's masterpiece, it took seven years to record from 1958 to 1965.

Significant strides forward have been possible thanks to these new transfers at this resolution and a more sophisticated set of remastering tools. The glorious new recordings of each opera are presented in new deluxe editions-on half-speed vinyl with lavish packaging.

These transfers were made as part of Universal Music's preservation project at the Arvato facility in Gütersloh, Germany. Overseen by Andrew Wedman, formerly of Emil Berliner Studios, the tapes were aligned and played on Studer A820 machines coupled with Weiss analogue to digital converters and a proprietary workstation to record the output.

Working with 38 reels of original mastertapes -some up to 65 years old and spanning 7 years of recording — there were inevitably instances where some individual tapes needed edit repairs or suffered oxide shedding. Tapes in poor condition were baked for ten hours at 55°C to restore their integrity. The playback alignment was greatly helped by the fact that the first tape reel in each opera has an announcement from engineer James Brown or, in the case of Die Walküre Culshaw himself, with left/right identifiers and a series of tones to ensure the correct calibration of the tape head. Decca's 1950s Ampex-designed AME noise reduction circuit — a precursor of the Dolby circuitry to reduce tape hiss — was not deployed such that Decca could use the very latest noise reduction software at the remastering stage.

The result is a set of HD transfers which are like photographic RAW files with little or no processing to create as pure a starting point as possible before remastering.

The Decca Ring has always been about the sound. Our endeavour with this new transfer of the original master tapes has been to do the best by Solti, by producer John Culshaw and his chief engineer Gordon Parry, and ultimately by Wagner. "Here is the greatest achievement in gramophone history yet", wrote Alec Robertson in Gramophone in 1965.

Now it is time to deliver Solti's Ring to the new generation of Wagnerians and introduce this remastered recording in a sumptuous series of definitive editions.

 

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