Information about the remastering:
From Mark Donahue at SoundMirror:
In the process of mastering the Living Stereo title Mahler: Das Lied von
der Erde, DSD engineer Dirk Sobotka and I noticed that there was a
change in the sound of the orchestra between the movements featuring
contralto Maureen Forrester and those featuring tenor Richard Lewis. We
discovered that, at the original recording session, one channel of the
three-track master tape was recorded out of phase. The problem was
discovered after the first day of recording and corrected for the second
day.
What made this problem so difficult to identify was that it appeared and
disappeared throughout the program. The symptom was that the imaging of
the orchestra behind the voice (which was firmly anchored in the center
of the stereo image, due to the use of a microphone just for the
soloist) would change in perspective. The solution to the problem was
simple: we needed to invert the phase on the channel in question. The
difficulty, however, was that the material from the first and second
days of recording were liberally edited together, thus distributing the
problem throughout the master.
Once this problem was discovered, we went through the master, edit by
edit, and determined which session each bit of tape was sourced from. We
then went through the three-track master and flipped the channel back to
its correct polarity. Once the repaired three-track master was complete, we
created a new stereo mixdown of the restored master for the SACD and D layers.