When the RCA SACD reissues were curtailed, I bought the 2010 bargain box of Rubinstein's stereo Chopin. These 2010 releases have '24 bit remastering' claimed on the box, as opposed to the 20 bit on the full Rubinstein edition. Last year I bought RCA Japan's Rubinstein Chopin stereo nocturnes, sonatas, waltzes and mazurkas. These were released in 2012, under the 'Best Classics 100' tag on 'blu spec CD 2'- i.e. CD reputedly pressed with blu ray tech. These are claimed as '24 bit 192 kHz remasters', though it isn't clear whether this remastering differs from the international bargain box sets.
There's a small improvement over the bargain box set releases. The piano tone is more rounded, less 'digital', though there's still a large gulf to the rich, possibly over resonant piano sound in Hewitt's set of the nocturnes on SACD. With the cost of this SACD release and unknown remastering provenance, I would suggest sampling one or two of these less expensive Japanese CDs.
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