Heaven and Earth BluRay and DVDA issues – An update from David Singleton

Thank you to everyone for your patience while we have worked to resolve the BluRay and DVDa issues with Heaven and Earth. We have inevitably also received a few angry emails – but no-one could be more angry than us. Everyone works incredibly hard to make these boxed sets the treasures that we all wish them to be – and for a few of the included albums (all mastered perfectly at our end) to then appear incorrectly on the final BluRays and DVDAs was forgivable (anyone can make mistakes) but totally unacceptable.

A few people have chosen to interpret my original remarks as “it doesn’t matter – it’s only a small problem, it’s only a few geeks.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is correct, as I pointed out, that almost all the material affected was never originally intended for inclusion and was only added at the last minute as bonus material. But anyone who thinks that I would tolerate any amount of music being roughly a semitone sharper than the producers or musicians intended does not know me well.

Others have also worried that they have been penalized in buying early copies, as later buyers would get corrected versions. If that were the case, this could have been more easily solved long ago. Unfortunately, we are usually only able to manufacture these boxed sets once, and there is therefore sadly no opportunity to remanufacture the material.

The solution has taken much longer than expected, partly because in this 50th anniversary year of all years, everyone’s time was already over-committed, and we found ourselves unexpectedly needing to check, clean up and understand someone else’s mess, while building a one-off solution. This has inevitably had some serious ongoing ramifications, both philosophical and practical, which I will address separately.

The good news for those kind souls patiently waiting is that the necessary web-pages are now being tested. An announcement should be made shortly.