Hi Naturelover. In the last three or four years there has been a spate of big comprehensive box sets re-issuing recordings at very attractive prices. A lot of which box set you choose may depend on what you have already....and what genre of music you like. Archiv is a subsidiary of Deutsche Grammophon (DG) focusing on early music label and mostly on authentic instruments. The recordings are superb but of course of a much later vintage than the RCA Living Stereo ones or indeed the Mercury Living Presence sets too. I don't think they overlap very much in terms of repertoire, but I will have to pull out the boxes and double check.
I like the Decca sets in general as they have always had very good artists in their stable and also made very good recordings. The Analogue box though is particular (it reproduces early Decca recordings and even the choice of music is not all mainstream to avoid duplication for collectors). The analogue Collection is music almost entirely from the 19th and 20th centuries. There's no Bach, only one Beethoven and Brahms, but a lot of Dvork, Kodaly, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Saint-Sans, and Sibelius, with smatterings of Bloch, Borodin, Britten, Enescu, Faur, Franck, Glazunov, and Hindemith, to name a few.
Perhaps a better set (if you are just commencing collecting Western Classical music) is a set called The Decca sound. It has complete works of all types of repertoire (including a little opera)... wonderful music, wonderful recordings by wonderful artists.
However, with all these box sets you need to check how much duplication you will have.
If you visit Bangalore ...drop by and we can make some detailed comparisons.
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