Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets
Sonic Grade: Regular MoFi LP: F / UHQR: D
Years ago we auditioned an excellent sounding Decca Purple Label British import LP, the same performance, the same recording that Mobile Fidelity remastered (#510), but, thankfully, it sounded a whole lot better.
I just listened to both and a catalog of the faults of the MFSL pressing would be quite lengthy. I won’t waste your time listing them.
Although the recording is far from perfect, the Decca pressing shows it in its proper light. It finds the right balance between the multi-miked sound of the super disc List Mehta and a vintage recording from the Golden Age such as the famous Boult.
The sound is very dynamic and the brass has tremendous weight.
Not the MoFi. It’s thin and bright.
Their UHQR is somewhat better, not quite as thin and phony up top, but not really very good either.
Avoid them both.
Our Recommendation
Our favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.
Many of Solti’s recordings from the Seventies are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our audiophile record hall of shame, for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading