Month: August 2020

Stephane Grappeli / David Grisman – Live

  • This superb live album finally arrives on the site, earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • These sides are exceptionally low-distortion, lively, solid and dynamic – just what this music needs
  • Stephane Grappelli’s jazz violin stylings and David Grisman’s “Dawg music” fuse into a magical, swinging acoustic combo
  • “One of the most exciting of the many Stephane Grappelli recordings, this live session… teams the veteran violinist with mandolist David Grisman’s band, an ensemble that (in addition to its leader) boasts hot solos from Mike Marshall on violin, guitarist Mark O’Connor (who switches to violin to battle Grappelli on a memorable “Tiger Rag”), and bassist Rob Wasserman.”

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Elton John – Caribou

Not the most consistent of Elton’s albums in the ’70s, but the best tracks — Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me and The Bitch Is Back spring to mind — are killer, right up there with the best work the man was doing at the time.  

This Super Hot Stamper original British DJM pressing has some of the best sound we have ever heard on Caribou. There’s a good reason you’ve practically never seen this album for sale on our site. In fact there are quite a number of good reasons.

The first one is bad vinyl — most DJM pressings of Caribou are just too noisy to sell. They can look perfectly mint and play noisy as hell; it’s not abuse, it’s bad vinyl. (Empty Sky is the same way; out and out bad vinyl, full of noise, grit and grain.) (more…)

Mendelssohn/ Symphony No. 4 & Music from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – Colin Davis

Here’s a great Philips LP! Davis really does Mendelssohn right.

A lively performance and this copy sounds MUCH BETTER than others we played.  It had much less of the smear and opacity that characterizes most Philips records. At most one out of ten is any good in our experience. 

This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review

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Bob Brookmeyer – Bob Brookmeyer And Friends

Another Record We’ve Discovered with (Potentially) Excellent Sound

More Vintage Hot Stamper Pressings on Columbia

  • This original Black Print 360 pressing was one of the best we played in our recent shootout
  • Stan Getz is the real standout on this album, a very pleasant surprise since exceptionally good recordings of his music are so hard to find
  • Another example of the phenomenal sound quality found on so many recordings made at CBS’s 30th Street Studios in New York
  • Wikipedia notes: “Another way to view this all-star rhythm section would be as Miles Davis’ piano and bass player, Stan Getz’ vibraphonist, and John Coltrane’s drummer.”
  • “Stan Getz, known for his ‘lyrical’ style, is in top form throughout and brings out the best of his cohorts, including two young musicians, Gary Burton on vibes and Herbie Hancock on keyboards…” 

If you like the sound of relaxed, tube-mastered jazz — and what red blooded audiophile doesn’t — you can’t do much better than Bob Brookmeyer And Friends. The warmth and immediacy of the sound here are guaranteed to blow practically any jazz septet record you own right out of the water.

Getz and Burton have always been magical together. Their work on Getz Au Go Go is legendary. Every time I play that record I am astonished at how good it is, one of those very special jazz recordings that are easy to get lost in. (more…)

Tchaikovsky / Concerto For Violin and Orchestra / Karajan/ Ferras – Reviewed in 2008

Near Mint original DG German Import with FABULOUS SOUND!

This large tulips label pressing has the sound only hinted at by the reissues. (This same recording is in the 6 LP Box set.) Lots of hall, with the kind of rich orchestral sound you don’t find on most DGs. Ferras is superb and Karajan is a master as well.

Letter of the Week – “Very spacious, perfect mids, full of details, tonal balance to dream of…”

More of the Music of Sade

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

This is just to give you a short feedback on the Sade “Love Deluxe” record. The sound is really outstanding, a completely new experience for me. Very spacious, perfect mids, full of details, tonal balance to dream of…

Yes, the record is quite expensive but worth all the money! I’ll be back for a further purchase… for sure…

It must be a lot of work to find such records!

Cheers, Florian
from Germany

Yes, Florian, it is! Glad you liked the record as much as we did.

Tom

Brahms / Concerto for Violin and Cello – Reversed Polarity on LDS 2513

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity.

The orchestra is its typical shrill self. The cello and violin sound wonderful most of the time. When they really get going the sound can be a bit much. At moderate volumes the record is very enjoyable.

If I’m not mistaken, reversing your polarity will help the sound some.

This is a famous recording for having distortion and congestion in the louder orchestral passages. There is no such thing as a copy of this record that doesn’t have those problems as far as I know.

You listen to this record for the wonderful interplay between Heifetz and Piatigorsky and not much else.

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Horace Silver Quintet – Serenade To A Soul Sister

  • This copy was clearly cut with super-low distortion mastering equipment, and boy does it help the sound
  • Rudy Van Gelder did an outstanding job as usual engineering these 1968 quintet sessions, some of which include one of our favorite tenor men, Stanley Turrentine
  • 4 1/2 stars: “One of the last great Horace Silver albums for Blue Note, Serenade to a Soul Sister is also one of the pianist’s most infectiously cheerful, good-humored outings… it’s hard to argue with musical results as joyous and tightly performed as Serenade to a Soul Sister.”

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Rossini et al. / William Tell and other Overtures – Bernstein – Reviewed in 2008

More of the music of Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)

Our Favorite Performance of Rossini’s Overtures – Maag and The PCO

This is a SUPERB SOUNDING Columbia Masterworks LP of favorite overtures, energetically conducted by Leonard Bernstein. It’s exceedingly rare to find a Columbia pressing with sound like this: there’s tons of tubey magic; the string tone is surprisingly good; there’s huge amounts of depth and the overall presentation is tonally rich, sweet, and correct in the best golden age tradition.

There’s a bit of compression in the loudest passages, especially on side two. But this is a small price to pay for an otherwise wonderful sounding, beautifully mastered and pressed Columbia 360 Label LP.

Carl Stern plays the cello solo on the piece by Suppe and the sound is to die for, every bit as good as the famous Mercurys and RCAs we know so well. Truth be told, the quieter passages on this record are the most wonderful. The sense of real musicians playing in space is palpable, especially on side one.

The other pieces on this record are Zampa Overture, Mignon Overture, Raymond Overture and Poet and Peasant Overture.

Boz Scaggs – Slow Dancer

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Boz Scaggs

  • A KILLER sounding copy with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from the first note to the last – this Blue Eyed Soul Music is working its magic
  • The brass is lively, the strings sweetly textured, the bass prodigious – what’s not to like?
  • The better copies like these have choruses that get big and loud without straining
  • Allmusic raves that “Slow Dancer features just as many catchy melodic tunes [as Silk Degrees] that meld a kind of boogie pub rock with an organic urban soul… Scaggs delivers some of his best performances…”

This is an album of wonderful white soul music. As a bonus, it also happens to be very well recorded. The problem we ran into on copy after copy was a brighter than ideal tonal balance, hard vocals and, on those copies that don’t extend fully on the top and bottom, a somewhat squashed, peaky midrange.

The better copies deal with those issues and, for the most part solve them. There’s lovely texture to the strings, plenty of punchy rich bass, and all the elements of the recording are properly balanced, something they still knew how to do back in the all analog days of 1974, I’m glad to report. (more…)