Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now
Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
Probably more than ten years ago we had written the following:
The famous TAS list recording. The Decca 180 gram version is very good, but those of you who appreciate the qualities of the original mastering will want to have this one.
Now jump ahead five years to five years ago. We played three or four copies of the album and none of them quite worked for us.
The sound was a bit opaque, a bit dry, and not nearly as tubey as we would have liked. (Many Decca recordings suffer from dry strings, a shortcoming that is apparently rarely noticed by audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them.)
A good record, not a great one, and for that reason really not worth cleaning up and doing a shootout for. The best copy would not pay for the labor to discover it.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar 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
To this day, some of the records on the TAS list seem to me better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an Old School stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore. For a more complete list of those records, not just the ones on the TAS List, click here.
The following three things are best kept in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should:
- Our standards are quite a bit higher now, having spent decades critically listening to vintage classical pressings by the hundreds if not thousands
- Our stereo is dramatically more revealing and more accurate than it used to be.
- Since no two records sound the same, maybe the one from long ago actually did sound as good as we thought at the time.
With all of the above considered, the current consensus is that Spartacus is very unlikely to be as good a record as we used to think it was.
Which means that it’s an example of a mediocre-at-best record that I used to like.
I clearly was not able to judge this record properly back in the day.
- I needed better playback quality.
- I needed better cleaning technologies.
- I needed to learn how to do shootouts properly.
In short, I needed to follow the advice found in a commentary I wrote after finally managing to put all of those things in place: