I often see people saying they cannot post links because of varese? what is this?

Varese Sarabande a record label located in Studio City,CA been around since 1972 or so.

Google them you can find out a bit and be sure to visit their website they have and awesome selection of music.

The are "the go to" filmscore record label

NO. No they are not. Intrada and la-La land records. Then maybe varese. Maybe.

I am biased by a few of their decisions and releases. They are crooks and thieves in my book. When they charge what they do for a non-remastered, previously released album with no new music. Fuck them. :)

NO. No they are not. Intrada and la-La land records. Then maybe varese. Maybe.

I am biased by a few of their decisions and releases. They are crooks and thieves in my book. When they charge what they do for a non-remastered, previously released album with no new music. Fuck them. :)

I have to disagree, Varese are the founding fathers of soundtrack labels, just look at the sheer volume of LP and CD releases. (Var�se Sarabande - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varese_Sarabande)) And, it could be argued there would be no Intrada, FSM, La La Land etc. if Varese hadn't been around.

Varese re-issued Vibes as a sort of "revisited" album. No new music. No remastering, just a new-ish cover, but full price. Theft. And when you look at early releases, like Seaquest, 33 min of music for 20 bucks? FUCK them hard. :)

They released alot of soundtracks to movies and TV shows such as Home Alone 2, Die Hard, Star Trek and Into Darkness. As well as Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, the Young Indiana Jones, etc

Yes, but it is not the quantity butthe quality. Whjile many recent deluxe editions are quite nice, many others, especially older ones but sometimes still the newer ones are essentially rip-offs and garbage. I am stating my opinion, and I stand by it. Y'all are of course entitled to yours....

VS just does okay.

Their deluxe albums often lack a lot of original content and just suites and mixes.

The Star Trek (2009) deluxe album is missing a lot of what we hear in the final mix for the film version.

The end.

---------- Post added at 04:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:31 PM ----------

VS also does a lot of really old soundtracks for really old people.

I didn't know you had to be old to appreciate older soundtracks.

I may have to re-read the "Soundtrack Listening/Purchasing" manual rules and regulations.

I often see people saying they cannot post links because of varese? what is this?

It is the last name of music composer Edgard Varese... but i've read somewhere that Varese is the first name of some music labe! lol :D




I have to disagree, Varese are the founding fathers of soundtrack labels, just look at the sheer volume of LP and CD releases. (Var�se Sarabande - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varese_Sarabande)) And, it could be argued there would be no Intrada, FSM, La La Land etc. if Varese hadn't been around.

yeah it was the first music label to specialize in soundtracks. They have my appreciation for that and thankfully they are not alone because some other labels specialized only in soundtracks showed up after Varese. I believe Lalaland is the most interesting soundtrack label nowadays.




Varese re-issued Vibes as a sort of "revisited" album. No new music. No remastering, just a new-ish cover, but full price. Theft. And when you look at early releases, like Seaquest, 33 min of music for 20 bucks? FUCK them hard. :)

ouch that's one post surrounded of bad vibes :laugh:

Well i think you missed the point because Vibes is another release from a batch of CD series called Varese Encore, that only aims to reissue out-of-print titles but with new sound mastering and updated package. This series never adds new music, unlike the Varese Deluxe editions.

In the case of Vibes, it is actually remastered (like all the Varese Encore CD's anyway) and comes with a new booklet (FYI: there are 6 pages of new liner notes and with Horner comments about the score), so it's not just a change to a new cover but to an overall new CD package in sound and booklet contents, for a fair price in my opinion.
If you look there is now an auction of the old edition of Vibes CD on ebay with the current bid at $180, yet you can buy the new edition for just $18. That's ten times less!

If there wasn't a reissue around your only option would be to buy a second-hand used CD at an inflated price, for a lesser sound quality and worse package. That's why i think a reissue edition of an out-of-print CD (whether it has new music or not) is always preferable than nothing at all.

pft. I picked up the original album at a used music store last week. It was all of two dollars. E-bay is never your only option....

Besides, I never read liner notes. I just want the music..

And I know the Encore concept but personally disagree about it. And if you look at older releases (like Seaquest) you see about 30 min of music where they could have fit 70-ish yet they charged the same price. And yet they callUS pirates. Hence the...dislike...of the company in general, though I do admit some of their newer Deluxe albums are nice.

... And if you look at older releases (like Seaquest) you see about 30 min of music where they could have fit 70-ish yet they charged the same price. And yet they callUS pirates. Hence the...dislike...of the company in general...

I've also noticed, and have been disappointed by this regimen for distributors to master CDs which can potentially hold either 74 or 80 minutes of CD audio, but to fill less than half. It's lame, especially considering some of my favourite collectables of other genres release double CDs as almost a standard procedure.

Regarding Varese being the 'top' company, it is irrelevant. "Good business is where you find it."

I'd buy that for a dollar. Sorry, I'm hung over from another thread.

I think the amount of music to put on a CD score depends on various factors.

There's the film studios, who view soundtrack albums as another marketing tool, so much that they dictate what and when a soundtrack can be made sometimes to the point that soundtracks are released before their recordings are over, so you can only listen a part of a score and often with different edits and mixes compared to the music in the film version.

Other times, especially for TV series, the score could be created by more than one composer and performed by more than one orchestra and therefore with different musicians involved. For the soundtrack labels this means means that when they want to release the CD with music by these various composers, they are obliged to pay the licence permission of more than just one composer or orchestra, so consequently the re-use fees increase when there are more people involved, and then more costs for the labels to produce the CD and more expensive for us to buy the CD.
I believe it's for this reason that when soundtracks from TV series are released, they are generally limited to the pilot episode score.

But i guess that are other factors for CD's with a short running time. There are examples where the score is complete and already recorded everything to the CD regardless how many issues were made, or to the contrary for scores where the recorded tapes, other than the one used in the original album, were lost or damaged, making impossible to add unreleased music for new issues.

Yet the most important factor depends by the person who has the final word of what music he choose to be included in the album, and that person is the composer. So the CD duration may be limited for artistic concerns as well, determined by the person who composed the music.
Any composer can create two and more hours of music for a movie, but if the compser has this notion that only 45 minutes of those minutes are really worthy, then it's only that music that is on the CD...
Sometimes a composer prefers to have everything recorded for the album, but there are others who are more selective in the tracks they pick.

Regarding the duration of the Varese albums, i think they are no different than any other music label around. I've seen Varese albums with 30 min, as many others from them with 45, 60, or 75 minutes. I only guess the duration time for each album depends to a lot of different factors.




pft. I picked up the original album at a used music store last week. It was all of two dollars. E-bay is never your only option....

Besides, I never read liner notes. I just want the music..

And I know the Encore concept but personally disagree about it. And if you look at older releases (like Seaquest) you see about 30 min of music where they could have fit 70-ish yet they charged the same price. And yet they callUS pirates. Hence the...dislike...of the company in general, though I do admit some of their newer Deluxe albums are nice.

You know that the original album of Vibes was limited to 1000 copies on its release and it went out-of-print for almost two decades? That is an extreme case of a good fortune that you found it last week after all these years, even if it's for an used CD! I think you should've played the lottery that day too haha :D

yeah now to be serious, you must take into account that not everyone were fortunate enough to find the original CD, let alone for that price, for all these years.
For many of them (including me...) the announcement of this reissue was a great occasion. And knowing that it came with a new mastering and updated package was just the cherry on the top of the cake :)
I wasn't around when the original CD was released back then. It was only some years ago when i watched the movie for the first time that i tried to locate the CD to buy, but obviously i couldn't find it on any store. I could only find the CD for sale in the net but for a ridiculously huge amount of money.

Half disagree with you about the liner notes though. Of course no one will buy CD's just to read the liners. When someones buy a CD is for listen the music in the first place, but when you buy it you also expect to acquire a quality product and not a CD in a cheap package. It's like a bonus, and the labels that specialize on soundtracks provide that for the special editions.

For me i find it to be interesting to read the liner notes with the composer's insights of their music, their creative process made in the composing of the score and the behind stories. Sometimes the liners even has a track-by-track music guide, which is always helpful for you to relate to the score music themes and choice of orchestrations, while you listen the music at the same time.
But i understand that for a lot of us this is not very important.

I did know it was OP. I occasionally peruse the store's selections. They buy, sell and trade used books, movies, music and games. I have got many Horner cd's that way. Perhaps the original owner had no real idea of it's worth? As far as Varese, it's just a personal opinion I have had since before I found this place...

Let's not forget that Varese is the label that masters CDs from 128kbps MP3s and sends abusive email to people who complain. They are the label that "remaster" good sounding albums into bad sounding albums. They are the label that release garbage score after garbage score and push them with almost comically exaggerated marketing-speak. LLL and Intrada, by comparison, are the labels that strive for quality and even order a re-pressing of a whole album because one track has a barely perceptible artefact.

As for the short running time problem, at the time (primarily the late eighties, early nineties, although there are incidents later into the nineties) scores recorded in the USA were licensed by the minute, due to contractual obligations. Doubling the running time would have doubled the production cost - and certainly wouldn't have doubled sales. Recognising that 99% of soundtrack buyers were principally interested in the main themes and "centrepiece" cues, they did what they had to do to make a financially viable product: They ruthlessly cut scores down to the bare essentials and nine times out of ten, all of the cues you were interested in were on the album. Sometimes they weren't, but that was the name of the game back then. Those short length albums were designed for good listening - many a score's flow is spoiled on CD these days by including every single fart and squeak and alternate and synth demo. Don't get me wrong, I do love "complete" releases but there are two audiences here; the listener who wants a full and comprehensive document of music used in the film, and the listener who wants a good CD to play which contains some tunes they recognise. Varese, as the American "mass market" soundtrack label, catered (and still do, to a certain extent - if a modern score is released nine times out of ten it'll be on Varese) to this group and did exceedingly well.

Additionally, when they were releasing on CD and LP simultaneously, they were undoubtedly keeping an eye on the running time of an LP (~40 minutes) - again for the sake of economics. If the LP edition was 40 minutes and the CD edition 70 minutes, people would moan. If the LP edition was two records it would cost twice as much as the CD, and people would moan. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Unfortunately, it's a different marketplace now. Re-recordings are completely dead from a commercial perspective although they are still made very occasionally as labours-of-love by Silva Screen, etc. The era of 60 minute "great movie themes" compilations performed by the LSO is long passed. How about Varese's 1999 Superman - two CDs with the RSNO. Never, ever, in a million years, would they do anything like that today. Everything that's worth being re-recorded (or, to put it another way, needs re-recording because the masters are gone / tied up in rights issues / degraded / incomplete) has been already. Varese, once the label that released the cream of the crop, and well-loved for their RSNO series, have turned into the label that releases modern crap that sells reasonably well, with the occasional lacklustre "expansion" (three minutes of extra music) or straight re-pressing of an old album. LLL and Intrada - that's where the magic happens. And Silva Screen, from a British perspective, is a Godsend. :)

That's interesting info, tangotreats. Thankfully, I haven't experienced such tomfoolery, but passing off 128k mp3s as 16-bit 44100Hz PCM files is a shocking indictment on the lack of basic competence to produce audio CDs, or an indication of willful docile consumer thrashing for the sheer hell of it. Either way, it kind'a defeats the purpose of owning an audio CD.

I remember one of the titles which Varese mastered the CD using a lossy source was GI Joe. I think not so long ago there was another title by them where they used a lossy source too, but i just can't remember the soundtrack title now. They are not the only label that do it though!
Silva did the same thing on Lesbian Vampire Killers and Lakeshore the same on Monsters Vs. Aliens. So quite likely there are others CD's out there made from a lossy source.

This makes me wonder how many of the CD's that we buy are actually mastered from a legit and verified source?
Certainly the bulk of them are done right with the master intact and all that, otherwise more cases would be known especially in this age of technology where it's fairly easy to spot a sound anomaly, but the few cases that are the exception to the rule is something that should not be taken lightly, on account of require the music labels to produce and improve the CD with the best quality possible for buy.

Indeed, sometimes mistakes are made. I judge the label by how they react.

Varese, regarding GI Joe, denied everything and abused the buyers who noticed.
Silva, regarding Lesbian Vampire Killers, acknowledged the error, apologised profusely (I even got a personal apology from the actual person who made the mistake) and they offered a few freebies as compensation.

You gotta love those companies that don't like uppity well informed consumers.