Hot Stamper Pressings of The Pines of Rome
More Reviews and Commentaries for The Pines of Rome
The Prevatelli on London you see pictured was way too compressed to be taken seriously by us.
When the music is supposed to get loud at the end of the Pines, it never does!
The Stereo Treasury you see below was equally bad sounding. It did not last more than a few minutes on our turntable.
If more vintage Londons had sound as bad as the three or four copies we had on hand (it’s a fairly common used record, now I know why), we would happily admit that going the Heavy Vinyl route is a good idea.
And there certainly are a lot of bad vintage pressings — we should know, we’ve played them by the hundreds — but the number of bad Modern Heavy Vinyl pressings would give them a run for their money.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with sonic shortcomings.
Here they are, broken down by label.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances
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 Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but the music is weak. These are also titles you can safely avoid.
We also have an Audiophile 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