Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now
Reviews and Commentaries for Mercury Classical Records
For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings) on the plum label are the way to go, right?
In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.
And the FR pressing of the Rachmaninoff record you see pictured above may indeed have the best sound.
The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.
(We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping this title closer to the vest.)
Note that we had FR1, FR2 and FR3, all originals, yet none of them could be considered good enough to offer our customers.
It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.
Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.
Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?
Certainly not us, not until we had done the shootout.
The difference between the way we do things and the way others do them boils down to this: We assumed that the original could be the best, and then we tested that assumption and found out we were wrong to assume it.
Since this is a famous TAS Super Disc title, we could have just said Harry Pearson must have had an off day when he put it on his list. Nothing new there. We think a fairly large number of records he liked had no business being called Super Discs.
But the right reissue of this Mercury — again, none of the ones you see pictured pictured — is indeed an exceptionally good sounding Super Disc.
This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.
We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.
I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them.
Further Reading
- More on the uses and abuses of rules of thumb
- Records that sound best on the right reissue pressing
- Important lessons we learned from record experiments
