This is not a release you sit and listen to...this is something you experience. It's not 33 minutes of seriously high-quality mastering; it's 33 minutes of "Patsy is in my listening room". You don't just hear her crisp vocals echo in your sound field; you feel every bit of emotion she's putting in to it.
A late reply...
I had that same feeling about the Elvis 24 Karat Hits on 45 RPM vinyl that was released by Analogue Productions. Keep in mind I'm not an Elvis fan...but a chance to own an "ultimate" version of it was too tempting to pass up. While Elvis may not exactly be
in the building, it's hearing every nuance of his voice, every bit of the sound of the studio, one of the Jordanaires coughing (in "Love Me"), that RCA reverb...it's so clear, especially on the mono recordings, you feel as though you're not listening but
witnessing. The SACD version is pretty much this, to a slightly lesser extent (although not by much). I just get the sensation that layers of "crud" were stripped away and we're hearing this much as they did in the studio during recording.
AP's other releases have been similarly revelatory--I have two of their Mancini titles on 45RPM releases (Peter Gunn, and Pink Panther). Like the Elvis, they are RCA recordings, and Peter Gunn being from 1959, I can hear into the band
so much clearer now. I don't even know if these had an SACD equivalent but if there are, I should probably look at getting them pronto. Sort of like having a good backup of it. (Although my 24/96 needle drops of these are excellent.) I talked with Chad briefly, and sadly he isn't doing any more of the Mancini titles, although he sort of suggested that
Hatari! might get a 45RPM treatment (where it's a 33-1/3 currently). But again, if it's on SACD, I probably should jump on that one even though it's not one of my favorites. Chad did say "that son of a bitch sounds fantastic," so it's on my short list for certain.
AP does try to use the original masters whenever possible, so my money is on Patsy's being from the master tape from the Greatest Hits album. One thing to point out--this may not even be
the original masters. A hits compilation, if it has not been re-performed by an artist (as a handful of hits collections are), is compiled from a copy of the original tapes. Think about it. Would Columbia (?) license out their original tapes for all of the albums or singles on this record, have AP cut them out of the reels and splice them together for LP and/or CD mastering, disassemble that after mastering, and reassemble back to their original reels? Not likely. Having said that, if this is from a compilation, it must be in damn good shape, and a single generation dub at that! Quite impressive for AP to make it sound this good!
It's just a shame the record labels themselves can't seem to pull off this sort of mastering on their catalogs. For every Patsy record that sounds this good, there are probably hundreds of other records out there that will never get exposed to a good, clean mastering from the best tapes available.