Month: July 2023

Tchaikovsky / Serenade for Strings – Munch

The Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Outstanding Living Stereo sound for Munch’s recording with the Boston Symphony, with both sides of this original Shaded Dog pressing earning Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • The 14 minute long Elgar piece on this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Surely one of the greatest performances ever recorded, more powerful and emotional than any with which we are familiar
  • “In his conception of the Serenade, Tchaikovsky envisioned a work which falls somewhere between a symphony and a string quintet. The work is as personal as any of the composer’s symphonies and as intimate as his chamber music.”

The texture and harmonic overtones of the strings are near perfection. As we listened we became completely immersed in the music on the record, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity the performers brought to the work in 1958, as well as the quality of RCA’s engineering.

The overall sound is rich, sweet and Tubey Magical. For those of you who have only the Cisco pressing, you are in for a world of better sound. After playing these sides, you may be inclined to take all your heavy vinyl classical LPs and put them up on ebay, or at the very least, in storage. None of them, I repeat not a single one, will ever sound the way this record does.

Quality record production is a lost art, and it’s been lost for a very long time.

(more…)

Eric Clapton – Unplugged

More Eric Clapton

  • With two outstanding Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Reprise pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides have close to the best condition grade we give out, Mint Minus – there may not be another record on the site with vinyl that quiet!
  • The sound of this superb import is rich, full-bodied, lively, and warm, with solid bass and breathy, clear vocals
  • There are a number of records that Eric Clapton has made over the years that are Must Own titles, and we would have no problem putting this album on that list
  • Consistency has never been the man’s strong suit, but you will simply not be able to find a bad track on this live album from 1992
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Unplugged is the concert and album that established the MTV program as a classy, tony showcase for artists eager to redefine themselves via reexamination of their catalogs, which is what Clapton cannily did here.”
  • If you’re a Clapton fan, this unplugged album from 1992 surely belongs in your collection.

(more…)

Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) / Solti

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Both sides of this original copy were giving us the rich and Tubey Magical Decca / London sound we were looking for, earning excellent Double Plus (A++) grades
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than most of what we played
  • A top performance from Solti and the Vienna Phil – it’s classic Solti: fast-paced, exciting and powerful
  • Solti’s Beethoven recordings from 1959 are superb, with the 5th and 7th being every bit as good — it’s his later recordings, the ones from the early 1970s, that we find lacking

(more…)

Stevie Wonder on Heavy Vinyl – Is This a Well-Engineered Album?

More of the Music of Stevie Wonder

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

This commentary was written more than ten years ago. I’ve just gone to this reviewer’s website to make sure the quote below is accurate, and everything you need to see is still up and as misguided as ever.

Some audiophiles never learn, and a great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles avoid the errors this reviewer and others like him have been making for decades. In the mid-90s I wrote my first commentary about the awful audiophile records this person had raved about in a review printed in one of the audiophile rags. In the years since it seems that nothing has changed. Bad sounding audiophile pressings make up the bulk of this person’s favorable reviews to this day.

How it is possible to spend so much time doing something, yet learn so little in the process? It is frankly beyond me.

I put the question to you again:

Is This a Well-Engineered Album?

How on Earth could anyone possibly know such a thing?

Some background. Years ago our first Hot Stamper shootout for Songs in the Key of Life had us enthusiastically singing its praises:

HOT STAMPERS DISCOVERED for one of the funkiest and most consistent double albums of all time! It’s beyond difficult to find great sounding Stevie Wonder vinyl, but here’s a copy that proves it’s possible if you try hard enough. So many copies are terrible in so many different ways — we should know, we played them. And just to be clear, this copy is far from perfect as well, but it did more things right in more places than we ever expected it would or could. And that means it showed us a great sounding Stevie Wonder record we never knew existed.

But a well known reviewer says it’s a bad recording. Does he know something we don’t?

(more…)

Ballet Music From The Opera – How Much Tubey Magic Is Too Much?

More on the Subject of Tubes in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The hall is HUGE — so transparent, spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA. (Many of Solti’s recordings from the decade are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.)

EMI recordings may be super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out-of-phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And often so mid-hall and distant. Not our sound, sorry.

We strongly believe that there will never be a modern reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found on the best of these Living Stereo original pressings.

Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses we noted on a copy we played way back when.

Side One

Big and lively. The Tubey Magical colorations are a bit much for us, with too much tube smear on the strings and brass to earn more than a single plus. 

Side Two

Even bigger and more spacious, with some smear caused by the serious amounts of tube compression being used, of course, but the quiet passages are magical. [Which is precisely what heavy tube compression is designed to accomplish.]

The Victrola Reissue

We much prefer the sound of the Victrola reissue, VICS 1206, which came out in 1966.

As for the Victrola pressing, we’re guessing — how could we possibly know for sure? — that less tube compression was used in the mastering.

It’s still plenty tubey, but more to our taste for not being overly tubey.

Plenty of the records we audition suffer from bad tube mastering, a quality we have no trouble recognizing and criticize at length all over this very blog.

In that respect we have little in common with the True Believers who seem to want to defend analog regardless of its shortcomings.

We don’t hesitate to criticize new records that have bad sound as well as old records that have bad sound.

Bad sound is bad sound no matter when the record was pressed.

Too Many Tubes?

(more…)

Joni Mitchell – Growly Cellos and Solid Pianos

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Joni Mitchell

The growl of the cello on Rainy Night House can clearly be heard behind Joni, with the wood of the instrument sounding real and correct. The kind of You Are There immediacy and transparency of the best copies has to be heard to be believed. 

Listen to the piano Joni plays throughout the album. This is not the thin and hard-sounding instrument that accompanies her on practically every LP you have ever had the misfortune to audition, hoping against hope that someday you would find that “elusive disc,” the one with sound worthy of such extraordinary music.

No, this piano has real weight; it has body; and it’s surrounded by real, three-dimensional studio space.

This side two is warm, rich, and sweet in a way that we’ve only heard on a handful of other copies in the past. Joni’s vocals just couldn’t sound any better; they’re full-bodied, breathy, textured, and shockingly present. This is the copy to play if you want Joni Mitchell singing to you right there in your listening room. What could be better than that?

With the transparency of the better copies comes the sound of Joni’s right foot on the pedal. It’s clearly audible through most of the takes, something the engineers no doubt never heard.

Of course, they didn’t have the kind of high-res equipment we take for granted today. 6 thousand dollar phono stages have a way of bringing out these things.

Or they heard it and ignored it knowing that the Old School stereos of the day could never reproduce it.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.

(more…)

The Eagles / The Long Run

More Eagles

More Joe Walsh

  • A vintage copy with a rockin’ “Long Run” like you have never heard, earning killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is full, rich and vibrant with impressive punch down low and nice extension up top
  • The best songs prove that the Eagles were still at the height of their powers, at least some of the time…
  • The first two songs on both sides are practically as good as it gets for mainstream rock from this era – they’re playlist staples of Classic Rock stations from coast to coast to this day
  • “The Long Run is a chilling and altogether brilliant evocation of Hollywood’s nightly Witching Hour, that nocturnal feeding frenzy first detailed by Warren Zevon on his haunting Asylum debut (Warren Zevon, 1976) and the equally powerful Excitable Boy.” – Rolling Stone

The last song on side two, “The Sad Cafe,” is also standout. Others, as they used to say in school, ‘need improvement.’

But five Killer Eagles songs is nothing to sneeze at. This is an album that belongs in your collection, even if you choose to only listen to the best material on it.

(more…)

Dark Side of the Moon Overview

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Customer Testimonials for Dark Side of the Moon

I admit to some bias when it comes to DSOTM. I must have played more than a hundred copies over the last forty-odd years. Whenever I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, again and again I would be proved wrong.

We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five or six years ago. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think still makes for some good reading almost twenty years later.

It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality-controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are those without.

Our Take on DSOTM Pressings

The domestic pressings we have auditioned over the years have never made it into a real shootout. They have always sounded far too flat and veiled to be taken seriously. There are some very good sounding Pink Floyd pressings on domestic vinyl — Wish You Were Here and The Wall can both sound amazing on domestic vinyl — but Dark Side is not one of them in our experience.

The Doug Sax-mastered Heavy Vinyl version from 2003 we played when it came out was way too bright and phony to these ears. We hated it and made that clear to our readers at the time.

We came across a very early British pressing about fifteen years ago, the one with the solid blue triangle label, but it was not as good as other pressings we were playing back then and we never bought another one.

We’ve liked a lot of later UK pressings over the years, but we don’t go out of our way to buy those anymore now that we have heard the really amazing pressings we like now.

As I said, we discovered the killer stampers about five years ago, and that showed us an out of this world Dark Side we had no idea could even exist.

We have a name for records like those. We call them breakthrough pressings, and we used to award them a sonic grade of more than Three Pluses from time to time.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “I recently changed my entire system and now all of my Better Records are sounding spectacular.”

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

More Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Eric Clapton

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I just listened to the Eric Clapton Unplugged White Hot Stamper I purchased from you.

All I can say is AMAZING. I’ve been a customer of yours going back about 15 years ago. I recently changed my entire system and now all of my Better Records are sounding spectacular.

I can’t wait to hear the Crosby, Stills, Nash White Hot stamper I just purchased from you.

Thanks

Dave

Dave,

We could not be happier to hear that news!

The better your equipment, the better our records sound, a fact attested to by you and hundreds of our other customers. With better playback, all those Heavy Vinyl imposters get left further and further behind. Some give up on them completely.

Your letter is what progress in audio is all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly trying to make improvements to our playback.

Hope you like that CSN album, it’s a bitch to find a copy that sounds like the ones we sell. It’s no demo disc but it is real and correct in a way that not one out of a hundred copies are.

Best, TP

(more…)

The Eagles / The Long Run – The True Test for Side One

More of the Music of The Eagles

More Records with Specific Advice on What to Listen For

Want to know if you have a good side one on your copy? Here’s an easy test.

Timothy B Schmit’s vocal on I Can’t Tell You Why rarely sounds right.

Most of the time he’s muffled, pretty far back in the soundstage, and the booth he’s in has practically no ambience.

On the good copies, he’s not exactly jumping out of the speakers, but he’s clear, focused, and his voice is breathy and full of emotional subtleties that make the song the heartbreaking powerhouse it is.

This is why you need a Hot Stamper. Most copies don’t let you FEEL the song.

And the rest of the band is cookin’ here as well. From the big, full-bodied bass to the fat, punchy snare, the best sides are doing practically everything we want them to.

Further Reading

(more…)