The lavishly-produced CD sets contain high quality booklets, each more than eighty pages long. Among other documentary material, these booklets contain specially commissioned essays and excerpts from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2nd Edition. The first step in restoring original 78 RPM recordings using CAP 440 is optimal playback of the original source material. The stylus selection process involves a series of blind tests to avoid subjective bias when a stylus with a distinctive shape and size is selected for a given disk. This process involves careful control of the playback speed, as well as the precision re-centering of the spindle hole of the master disk.
Playback speed is a particularly important and often ignored issue.
Using a combination of musicology and engineering, the CAP 440 team has effected a properly pitched transfer. The second phase of CAP 440 is the digital remaster creation process itself. Careful frequency equalization is also utilized, taking into account not only the recording's original engineering but also the types of instruments featured and the acoustic setting of the recording location. Through implementation of CAP 440 at every step of the transfer process, andante is able to restore historic recordings to their maximum fidelity, allowing these landmark performances to be heard as never before. Copyright 2001 andante Corp.