For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR 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.
The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.
The notes for the FR original pressings we played read:
- Less spacious, more bright and flat.
They’re not bad sounding, they’re just not as good sounding as the RFR reissues, which, incidentally, won the shootout.
We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but we make it a point to never give out the stamper information for our shootout winners, as finding those very special pressings has been the work of a lifetime and is certainly not something that should be given away for free.
Rules of Thumb
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?
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.
But the right reissues of this Mercury — again not the ones you see pictured — is indeed an exceptionally good sounding record.
This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, assuming that owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in great detail, free of charge.
Have You Noticed…
If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them don’t sound very good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.
But did you? Or did you buy into the hoopla surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound? Perhaps you made the same mistake with Heavy Vinyl.
There is more than enough hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and some of them are downright awful.
It seems as if the audiophile public has bought completely into the idea that these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings offer superior sound quality. Audiophiles seem to have made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly?
Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear the shortcomings of Blue, Aja and Thriller, just to mention off the top of my head three badly remastered albums with single word titles. (A more complete list can be found here.)
Back to Mercury
I would say Mercury’s track record during the 50s and 60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so. (Here’s an absolutely amazing one.)
But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog.
The big takeaway: there are a lot of dogs in every label’s catalog.
To see the 50+ Living Presence classical titles we’ve reviewed to date, click here.
Further Reading
- More on the uses and abuses of rules of thumb
- Records that sound best on the right reissue pressing
- Vinyl arcana – specialized knowledge and deep secrets
