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More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
One minute into The Tale of Tsar Saltan I knew this was a winner of the highest order. I was not prepared for the low end whomp factor as you call it.
The tonal balance of this wonderful recording is off the charts. the triangles just seem to float in the mix with a delicate presence that works so beautifully with the rest of the orchestra.
The strings and brass have this immediacy to them that feels like the orchestra is in the room with you.
This is the best classical recording I have ever heard both musically and sonically. So glad I fortunate to own this masterpiece!
Thanks
Rob
Fantastic news, we liked it too. Thanks for your letter.
BTW, don’t try to play any heavy vinyl classical for a while, it might just be too big a shock to your (nervous, not stereo) system!
TP
Ha! I just never realized how much I have been missing or accepting, until I played this album : )
Rob
Rob,
Nobody does. Nobody can know what they are missing until they hear it. This explains every audiophile forum and every idiotic review by Michael Fremer and his uninformed and misinformed colleagues. These people simply don’t know any better because the approach they have taken to finding and auditioning records produces consistently second-rate results.
We explain — for free! — how anyone can find better records here.
If you want to know what you’re missing, there is only one approach that works, and it involves two things that have made the modern world what it is today: empirical findings based on the use of the scientific method.
Any other approach is doomed, not to failure, but to mediocrity.
We are the only record dealers who use the scientific method, and that one fact, more than any other, explains why we can sell the best sounding pressings in the world. We alone are able to show you what you have been missing. Or, put another way, the second- and third-rate sound you have been living with because you didn’t know anything could be better.
We didn’t know much better either until about twenty-odd years ago.
Before that, we had raved about the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan. Its shortcomings are glaringly obvious to us now, but they weren’t back then. We didn’t have the stereo, we didn’t have the cleaning system, and we didn’t have the critical listening skills to be able to recognize its manifold faults.
Then, in the early 2000s, we started doing shootouts.
These “Record Experiments” taught us many important lessons.
The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and cataloging the differences we heard made us better listeners.
We took our critical listening skills and applied them to our stereo in order to get as many colorations and limitations out of it as possible.
Through all this work we came to have a much deeper understanding of The Fundamentals of Record Collecting.
However, without a staff of ten finding, cleaning and playing records for you, you will have a hard duplicating our results.
But you can certainly do a lot better using our approach than any other. It won’t be long before you know more than all the audiophile reviewers and forum posters in the world put together.
You heard the record we sent you soar above all the stuff they’ve been telling you was good, so now you know two things: their approach produced middling-at-best results, and our approach produced the best sounding classical recording you have ever heard. The choice is yours!
That’s the purest expression of the empiricism we champion. Let the best record win.
And ours did!
TP
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