Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now
This TAS List Super Hot Stamper pressing of one of the greatest and most famous Orchestral Blockbuster Soundtracks ever recorded more than lives up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done RIGHT.
As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious ANALOG!
The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.
The layering of depth is really something to hear on this copy, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep. Transparency – a quality you find on both sides of this copy — is what makes this all sound so REAL.
Side One
So big and rich! This is why audiophiles love these records! A little more extension up top and you would have yourself a nearly flawless record. (The harps and bells aren’t quite as clear as they should be.)
Side Two
Again, a little more extension up top would have helped. Listen to how the trumpets just JUMP out of the soundfield! What a record!
Opacity Vs. Transparency
Note that we have been especially anti-heavy vinyl in our recent commentaries for their consistently opaque character, the opposite of what is necessary in order to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear ALL the instruments, even the ones at the back.
Try that with any Classic Record or Speakers Corner pressing. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those labels and the others like them.
Tubey Magic with Clarity
Yes, Decca in 1977 managed to keep its lovely Tubey Magical analog sound without getting mired in the muck of too much tube smear and thickness, the kind that bedevils so many pressings from the ’50s.
Couple that with real bite to the brass and texture to the strings and you have the best of both worlds!
Wikipedia’s Entry
Miklós Rózsa (18 April 1907 – 27 July 1995) was a Hungarian-born composer and conductor, best known for his numerous film scores. Along with such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Max Steiner and Franz Waxman, Rózsa is considered to be one of the “founding fathers of film music.”
Rózsa was one of the most respected and popular composers working in Hollywood. He is also regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers of all time. In a career that spanned over fifty years, he composed music for nearly 100 films, including Spellbound (1945), Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961).
Rózsa is one of the most nominated composers in Oscar history: he had 16 nominations and three Oscars. He also had three Golden Globe nominations, and a Grammy Award nomination for the MGM Records album of Ben-Hur.
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 developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.
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 Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.
There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
100% of the records we offer on our site have been cleaned, then auditioned head to head against a number of other pressings under rigorously controlled conditions. We award the copies in the shootout sonic grades for each of their sides, and then condition check the best sounding ones for surface noise before listing them on the site.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which requires a highly trained staff. 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 do the work we do, not at scale anyway.
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 audiophile 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.