Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now
Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
Sonic Grade: F
An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records Classical LP debunked.
Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played some of their classical reissues should have expected. Their version is dramatically more aggressive, shrill and harsh than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.
In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price.
Apparently, most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a top quality classical recording. If they had, Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us way back in 1994. I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled, but I can say that we weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases.
We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the we was wrong entries to prove it.
The last review we wrote for the remastered Scheherazade, which fittingly ended up in our Hall of Shame, with an equally fitting sonic grade of F.
TAS Superdisc List to this day? Of course it is!
With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, their records have managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop buying them in 2007.) That ought to tell you something.
Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of bad records. At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths and beauty of good records.
Which of course begs the question of what actually is a good record — what it is that makes one record good and another bad — but luckily for you dear reader, you are actually on a site that has much to say about those very issues.
There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.
With an old school audio system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled twenty and thirty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We would love to help you find it.
One amazing sounding orchestral Hot Stamper pressing might just be what it takes to get the ball rolling.
Verdi / Aida
1. Act II – March & Ballet
Saint-Saens / Samson & Delilah
2. Act III Bachanale
Rossini / William Tell
3. Act I Passo a sei
4. Act II Soldiers Dance
Moussourgsky / Kovantchina
5. Act IV – Dances of the Persian Slaves
Further Reading