Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now
Both the Chesky [1] and Classic reissue pressings of LSC 2446 are just plain terrible. Embarrassingly, the latter is found on the TAS List.
There is a newly [2013, time flies!] remastered 33 RPM pressing of the album garnering rave reviews in the audiophile press. We didn’t like it either. It fails the violin test that we wrote about here.
Please note that in many of the reviews for the new pressing, the original vinyl used for comparison is a Shaded Dog pressing. In our experience almost no Shaded Dog pressings are competitive with the later White Dog pressings, and many of them are just plain awful, as we have noted previously on the site.
UPDATE 2024: Now that we know which stampers have the potential to sound the best in our shootouts, the Shaded Dog originals have lately been winning top honors, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good, just not as good.
The “original is better” premise of most reviewers renders the work they do practically worthless, at least to those of us who take the time to play a wide variety of pressings and judge them on the merits of their sound, not the color of their labels.
[A fairly embarrassing example of live and learn.]
Missing the Obvious
The RCA White Dog with the best side two in our shootout had a very unmusical side one. Since reviewers virtually never discuss the sonic differences between the two (or more) sides of the albums they audition, how critically can they be listening? Under the circumstances how can we take anything they have to say about the sound of the record seriously?
The sound is obviously different from side to side on most of the records we play, often dramatically so (as in the case of Scheherazade), yet audiophile reviewers practically never seem to notice these obvious, common, unmistakable differences in sound, the kind that we discuss in every listing on the site. If they can’t hear the clear differences in sound from side to side, doesn’t that call into question their abilities at the most basic level?
Heavy Vinyl
For us it is this glaring obtuseness that best explains the modern audiophile reviewer’s infatuation with Heavy Vinyl. Poor reproduction or poor listening skills, it could be one or the other; most likely it’s some combination of the two (they clearly do go hand in hand, no surprise there). We can never be sure exactly where the fault lies. But do we really need to concern ourselves with the reasons for their shocking incompetence?
One final note of honesty. Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still somewhat enamored with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings (not many of the Living Stereo reissues I hasten to point out). If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last ten or fifteen years perhaps we would find more merit in the reissues these reviewers prefer.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and worse.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. We know that many of our customers feel the same way.
[1] Chesky proudly touted their approach to mastering as simply making a flat transfer from the original tapes, but not just any original tapes. Rather than use the two-track master that RCA had used to make the record in 1958, they opted in this case to use the work parts, according to Discogs:
Audiophile reissue of RCA LSC-2150. Produced from the original 3-track master session tape.
If you know much about records, you know that these session tapes were never supposed to be used to make anything but a two-track stereo master and a one-track mono master. Chesky thought they would get “closer to the source” by transferring the one-generation-earlier session tapes, and doing it without EQ, limiting, compression or whatever other interventions might have been deemed necessary by those who do this sort of work for a living.
Chesky records fooled a lot of audiophiles back in those days, but I’m glad they never fooled me. Even back then I knew a bad record when I heard one. The first Chesky I ever heard, Prokofieff’s Lieutenant Kije (RC10), played at an audiophile friend’s house around 1990, had the kind of flat, lifeless, pointless sound that I would continue to find on hundreds of other reissues put out by one so-called audiophile label after another, right up to the current day.
Flat transfer of master tapes is an idea that holds great appeal to the kind of hubristic and misinformed audiophiles who think they know something real mastering engineers never could figure out. This guy comes to mind, but there are no doubt plenty of others out there in Audiophile Record Land just like him, and plenty to buy the awful sounding records he’s made.
Further Reading
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