More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Reviewed in 2009 in our pre-shootout days.
This Minty London Blueback LP has a WONDERFUL Tubey Magical Super Hot Stamper Side One. I have never heard this music sound better. Of course Ansermet is exactly the right conductor for these light and colorful orchestral pieces; the performances are uniformly superb.
But as audiophiles we want to make sure the sound is what it should be, and here side one does not disappoint. The string tone is perfection. I defy anyone to find a Heavy Vinyl reissue with string tone even remotely as good. In my experience there is simply no such record.
With vintage classical records there are always trade-offs of course. Here the loudest passages suffer from compressor distortion, so common on these early pressings. A small price to pay for sound this lovely I say.
The Zampa overture by Herold is probably the best sound on the album — it’s gorgeous!
Side two is not quite as good. We rated it A Plus, with real weight and energy but a bit too much compression in the loud passages to be completely satisfying.
Side One
Le Roi D’ys
The Black Domino
Zampa
Side Two
La Belle Helene
Fra Diavolo
Orpheus In The Underworld
This is an older classical/orchestral review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.
The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading