Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Doug, Roger, Intrada:


I thank you for your 25 year search, Because it was well worth it.

The AVA Collection sounds nothing short of superlative!!!

_________________
Robert M Eastman

This one arrived today. Beautiful booklet. WOW. Have not had a chance to listen to even a snippet of it, but boy, everybody says the sound of these is so good, I'm quite excited. I have not heard some of these for more than 25 years. I'm looking forward to reading the notes and giving these discs a spin this weekend.

Wow. The sound of these CDs is noticeably better than any of their other reincarnation attempts. Better than the original vinyl releases too, I think.

The delicacy of To Kill a Mockingbird is a real treat, and I am so glad to have Walk on the Wild Side again.

Too bad that Baby the Rain Must Fall recording ignored the delicate score in that film. The upbeat stuff was fairly backgrounded in the film, with only the last album track starting to resemble a film arrangement.

I just love this collection, one of my all times favorite releases!

_________________
Robert M Eastman

Hi Intrada/Doug,

I'm a longtime Intrada customer, own many Intrada releases, and buy most of my Intrada CDs via Amazon Marketplace direct from Intrada's storefront. I usually buy new CDs, and have had few surprises over the years. One of the more memorable was with another label's 3-CD set (I won't name the label or the title) where one of the discs was missing from a new set, and by the time I opened it the set was out of print (I've since made it a habit to immediately open multi-CD sets upon receiving them!). I contacted the label and luckily they were able to replace the whole set for me. What I'm about to describe, however, is a first for me in over 20 years of collecting film scores on CD....

On June 6, I purchased Elmer Bernstein: The Ava Collection on Amazon Marketplace from Intrada's storefront along with several other Intrada CDs. Yesterday, June 10, I received them.



I immediately noticed that, while the set was shrink-wrapped with an Amazon Marketplace "New" sticker covering the back bar code, the side that opens (to the right of the front cover) had packing tape applied along its edge, which left a residue behind when I peeled it off (circled in red below).



Then, to my horrified astonishment, upon opening the set I discovered someone had swapped the original three CDs for three CD-Rs from, yes, Circuit City!! (Smilies illustrating my progressive emotional state upon discovery: )





But the final coup de grâce was the replacement of the booklet with three rectangular cutouts from a saltines box!!



The mind boggles as to why someone would do this...and with such a beautifully produced set of music to boot! I mean, they left the front and back cover intact—what's the point of stealing the contents? I don't get it. It can't be piracy, or else they would've just copied the discs and put them back; but the discs and booklet were stolen and replaced.

Assuming the contents were swapped after the set left Intrada, I see one of two possibilities: either a customer purchased the set, swapped the contents, (clumsily) re-shrink-wrapped it, and sent it back to Amazon as still new/factory sealed; or, a disgruntled Amazon warehouse employee committed theft/fraud. The more I think about it, the more my suspicions lie with Amazon's warehouse.

I hope this is an isolated incident. I'd like to continue to buy Intrada's releases through Amazon. I hold Intrada blameless and Amazon as suspect, and will continue to support Intrada. I thought Intrada should know about this in the hope that no one encounters a situation like it again.

I'm returning this set for a refund, and have ordered a replacement set from Intrada's Amazon Marketplace store, which should arrive tomorrow (and hopefully complete and unmolested!).

This sounds positively weird... I mean, who is replacing a booklet with cut outs from crackers? The question is, of course, what's on the CD-Rs? If they actually contained the AVA recordings, it would be double weird, because, as you mentioned, when it's piracy, it seems more logical to copy the music and slip everything back in its proper place. But perhaps whoever did this did not have the time to make CD-R copies and simply grabbed the booklet and swapped the CDs for some other CD-Rs.

That really is bizarre.

It seems quite possible for it to have been some jerk who ordered it and repackaged it for a return so he can have the discs and booklet for his own use without need for the tray cards or case.

The whole saltine cracker thing would be really funny if a theft wasn't involved.

I can't say I have any guesses. Doesn't even sound like something anyone at Amazon would do. Disgruntled or not, what employee at one of their countless warehouses would take time to pull a set of CDs out of literally millions of pieces of inventory of all manner just to cleverly re-package everything just for the fun of switching the contents and shrink-wrapping the set again. If it's a grumpy worker, I would think just throwing the set away would be less time consuming. And surely anyone there that would just happen to be interested in Elmer Bernstein movie music would probably already be supporting the stuff, not spending all that time being deceptive. But what do I know? I thought Circuit City went belly up ages ago. Who has stacks of Circuit City blank media sitting around? I guess the same person who sits around in the Amazon warehouses eating crackers.

All that trouble can't add up to the cost of the set in the first place. Almost sounds like a joke being played on a co-worker or something that ended up back in the Amazon stock room.

Yes, of course, throw it back at them. We'll sort it out at our end with our Amazon account. They're usually pretty quick and painless regarding returns. However, if you have any troubles, let Jeff know here via our main Intrada email address. Either way, we'll make sure you actually get what you ordered from them.
--Doug

P.S. After all the trouble they went to, I probably wouldn't play the CDRs they re-wrapped. Just blank discs? Maybe viruses... some other kind of crap? One never knows.

You can't get a virus just playing a CDR, especially in a normal CD player (unless you put it into a computer AND said computer has auto-play on).

FWIW I may in fact have some CC CDRs laying around, or at least ones from the time before it went belly up.

Thanks Doug,

Fortunately, my new set arrived today and everything is as expected. Now this is the set I was expecting, and it is awesome indeed. Thanks so much for producing it! The sound is fantastic!!!

Meanwhile, I'm sending back the "Circuit City version" (LOL) to Amazon for a refund. Out of curiosity, I did put disc three, the only CD-R without major scratches or gunk on the recording side, into my computer's optical drive. It was formatted as an audio CD (so no viruses possible). I sampled a few of the tracks on my Mac. All I can say is: I'm sorry, but bad rock music with clicks from careless ripping is no substitute for Elmer Bernstein's film music!

I agree it was a lot of work to go to for relatively little gain, but thieves don't always operate under the best logic, and I suspect someone at the Lexington, Kentucky Amazon warehouse from which it was sent to have committed an act of petty theft. If no one previously bought and returned that particular set to Amazon (which Intrada should be able to investigate from its seller account), that is the only other possible explanation. I've been reading recently that Amazon overworks and underpays their warehouse workers (which doesn't make me feel good about shopping there: see ), so maybe this is one employee's way of getting back at them. Or at stiffing their customers. Who knows?

So, I've learned two things from this...I'm now much less likely to use the Fulfillment by Amazon program to warehouse media I want to sell; and somewhere out there is a saltine-eating, Circuit City CD-R-carrying petty thief, potentially targeting Elmer Bernstein multi-disc sets (*gulp*). You have been warned!

Okay, I know it's bad form for one label to comment on another label's product - certainly we've had that issue with certain folks talking about our product - but I don't care. I'm commenting on this damn Ava set and no one's going to stop me.

It is, simply put, one of the great film music releases in the history of film music. If someone doesn't like that they can meet me at the flagpole immediately. When I was a teenager, I had every album on Ava/Choreo - they were prize possessions, great sounding records, and the recording of Mockingbird, especially, was sublime. As Doug mentions, we ALL went after the Ava recordings back in the 80s. At Bay Cities we met with Tammy Shad, who was a peculiar woman - she clearly had not a clew as to what she was sitting on. We came close to striking a deal, but in the end she went her own way and the result was so hideous, with barely acceptable CD releases, and Mockingbird especially sounding so poor that one could not even listen to it. But things have a way of coming right and though it's taken a few decades for that to happen, with this release all is well with the world. The sound is, of course, superb - some of the most beautifully engineered recordings ever. The Mockingbird is the best recording of that score - no other recording is within a country mile of it, save for the original film tracks, which probably don't sound as good. And the film tracks orchestra would certainly not have been much larger than the re-recording orchestra - in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same size - there is nothing chamber-like or small sounding in the Mockingbird - it is exactly what Elmer wrote. The later re-recordings capture none of the magic. The Bernstein Film Music Society re-recording came closest, but it's no cigar compared to the Ava. I have played this repeatedly since getting it. Over and over again. This is what great engineering is all about - the people who did these were the best. I only wish I'd gotten some Saltines cardboard with my set, but you can't have everything.

There is one major downside here - we need all the other Ava recordings - ALL of them, but especially David and Lisa, which I'm sure could be paired with something else, like House is Not a Home or whatever. I know my merely mentioning will of course worry Doug so much that maybe he'll just do it so we or others don't get it. Whatever it takes. Do it, do it now.

In the meantime, if you haven't purchased this set you are not worthy of being called a film music fan. It's that simple. You heard it here.

_________________