Hot Stamper Classical Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Mercury Classical Recordings

SUPERB Nearly White Hot Stamper sound on side two. With a grade of A++ to A+++, this is clearly the best sounding Romeo and Juliet we have ever heard. Rich lower strings, clear horns, big cymbal crashes, zero smear — rich and tubey but clear, right up there with the best of the RCA’s and London’s. And Dorati turns in a top performance with the London Symphony.

Was We Wrong?

We played an Orange label late reissue of this title a while back and had this to say about it:

DEMO QUALITY thanks to superb low distortion mastering. Another very exciting Mercury recording. Some of these Orange Label pressings, which are cut with much better cutting equipment than was available when the original album was released, can show you just how good the master tape really is. This kind of sound is not easy to cut, and it appears that the amplifiers of the day just weren’t up to it. This copy gets rid of all the cutter head distortion and coloration and allows you to hear what the Mercury engineers accomplished!

Dorati breathes fire into the famous Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet on side 2. Unfortunately, the mastering on this copy is not very good. The sound is bright and dry.

This work frequently is recorded with harsh sound; the orchestration must be difficult to capture on tape. But Mercury here seems to have managed a feat few others can claim. I’m guessing the earlier pressings have too much cutter distortion to get this one right; I don’t recall the other copies I’ve heard sounding this good.

This RFR early Colorback pressing — is there an FR pressing? Don’t know — has superb mastering for the Tchaicovsky, so in that sense we can say that the old cutter heads were doing just fine, thank you very much.

But side one is awful — crude, harsh and full of the old school cutter head distortion we decry above. So which is it?

Both I guess. Depends on the record, right? That’s why you have to play them to know. Which we don’t mind doing as long as we can charge $150 for our trouble (not to mention what it takes to find a pressing like this nowadays).

TRACK LISTING

Side One (Khachaturian)

Gayne Ballet

Side Two (Tchaikovsky)

Romeo and Juliet