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It's an absolutely fantastic release. I love every note of the complete score, though for listening I tend to prefer the album version (also included, rebuilt).

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I did clean up the clunky analog edits a bit for our new master.

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Eric Paddong:
MASTERS NOT DESTROYED BY UNIVERSAL FIRE: Reports that this weekend’s fire on the Universal Studios back lot destroyed a video vault which housed thousands of original Decca, MCA and ABC recording masters, including a wide range of music from Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters to Judy Garland and the Carpenters, are unfounded. A UMG spokesperson insists: "Thankfully, there was little lost from UMG's vault. A majority of what was formerly stored there was moved earlier this year to our other facilities. Of the small amount that was still there and waiting to be moved, it had already been digitized so the music will still be around for many years to come. And in addition to being digitized, physical back-up copies of what was still left at that location were made and stored elsewhere." (6/2a)

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"We have duplicates of everything," said NBC Universal President and Chief Operating Officer Ron Meyer. "Nothing is lost forever."

Meyer estimated there were 40,000 to 50,000 videos and reels in a video vault that burned but said duplicates were stored in a different location. Firefighters managed to recover hundreds of titles.

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"Fortunately, nothing irreplaceable was lost," [Ron Meyer, chief operating officer of Universal Studios] said. "The video library was affected and damaged, but our main vault of our motion picture negatives was not."

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Roger:
"Universal has been cooperating for years now and the fire was not related to any audio they had.

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Where does this information come from?

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I’m sorry to say that all evidence suggests the elements are gone. Bruce recalls that he ran only digital on the album sessions and that there was no analog. He had two interlocked U-matic 3/4” machines so that he could record 3-channel audio, so that’s what I wanted to find. Bruce remembered finding them at his facility, Pacific Ocean Post, in the early ‘90s and giving them to Steven’s post-production supervisor. So I worked with Amblin to look through their inventory and also checked Paramount and Universal and anywhere Dreamworks material had been moved over the years, and came up with absolutely nothing. When I got the AFM reports for the album sessions, I was disheartened when I saw that they had been contracted by MCA Records, whereas the film sessions said Universal Studios. So that meant that the 3/4” U-matics may also have been labeled MCA Records. I reasoned that if this was the case, then if anyone had come across them in the ‘90s they might have been sent to Universal Music Group, which had a building on the studio lot, which they kept even after they became a separate company in 2004. That building was destroyed by fire in 2008. I could see it from my house and I was heartsick when I heard music elements were kept there. The fire is sometimes used as a convenient excuse when something can’t be found, but in this case I believe that’s where those masters ended up.

Naturally I checked with Universal Music Group as well and they physically looked at everything in their vaults. They found that they had no original album master for E.T. in the United States at all. NONE whatsoever. That meant that a Grammy-winning album, at that moment, only existed on CDs manufactured in the ‘80s. In digging further I learned that with UMG you need to check all territories because the inventories are not merged … so that means inquiring with Japan, Germany and the UK separately. That’s how I located a 1/4” tape in the UK which was used to cut lacquer for the original LPs and make cassettes. We had that transferred at 192k/24bit and that’s what we used. A digital master would only have been at 44k/16bit. The original recording tapes would also have been in that format, but we would have had the material in 3-channel. But without that, and only stereo to work with, we were better off with a hi-res tape transfer than with a 35 year-old digital master that probably would have been full of ticks and dropouts. It was better to use the 1/4” tape all the way through rather than reconstruct three of the tracks but not the other five.

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