I bought five of their tapes. They came (from China) to California within two weeks. I got the Starker Cello Fury, Perlman, Royal Ballet (two tapes) and Voices. Quite fancy packaging - with engraved and numbered reels out of 300. Mine were 120/300, 130/300 etc. The boxes were very nice looking - with album material. Some misspellings, as is often seen in items originating in China. Playing through the tapes - they definitely sound like dubs of running masters - quite excellent. I have the Perlman original on vinyl (it was taken from two different EMI recordings) and the Classics reissue of the Royal Ballet (there were some selections left out to fit the 64 minute running time). The tape has you are there quality that the records do not. I had a problem with a short section of the first Royal Ballet tape, which they are currently investigating - got a reply to my query within 8 hours.
I paid through paypal - the five reels (all between 32-34 minute, so very full) cost $1750 - or $350 each, with $140 for postage.
The first tape of the Royal Ballet had some dropouts and funny edits on the Nutcracker session. All the other tapes were fine as well as the rest of the first RB tape. I contacted them and heard back that the problems were in the master tape they had.
The following is speculation on my part, but my surmise is that ABC Int'l has a copy of the master tape. Companies would make master tape copies and send them to subsidiaries in different countries who would cut vinyl or CD's from those tapes. Chad is planning to reissue RB from the master tapes as part of his new RCA releases. It was original engineered by Decca for RCA and Decca still owns the original master tapes in Germany IIRC. RB is one of many superb recordings that Decca did for RCA (Classic Records reissued many of them in the '90's.) They are considered by many among the very best RCA's ever released. The great Decca Engineer Kenneth "Wilkie" Wilkinson did RB.
I got some ABC tapes (about 5 albums) from my local audiophile store here. Here are some comments:
- Unknown tape source . Some tapes quite impossible to be in China . What is the master that they used ?
- Illegal . ABC inc. is in mainland China which is very close to Hong Kong but almost all titiles of ABC tape not available in Hong Kong. Even in the big hifi show in HK. I think they have license problem.
- Some sound good , some bad. I found the same as above comment that RB got drop out in Nutcracker track.