More of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
The pressings we’ve played of SR 90279 over the years tended to have crude and shrill sound. The string tone was bright and steely.
In our most recent shootout for the work, since we happened to have one in stock, we figured we would give the Mercury one more chance, just in case we had finally stumbled on some good stampers or that other improvements to our playback would allow the hidden virtues of the recording to be revealed. (Yes, thankfully that is still happening. So is the reverse; some records don’t do as well in shootouts as they used to, a reality every audiophile has to be on the alert for, a subject we discuss here.)
It probably lasted less than five minutes on the table.
It was simply too unpleasant to be played on the revealing modern equipment we use.
It seems that many early Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings. My guess would be at least half, maybe even closer to two out of three.
Waking Up
If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way some audiophile systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up, bright and aggressive sound to bring it to life in no time. (If you’re a fan of MoFi pressings from the 70s and 80s, you definitely have a much smoother top end than we do. Most of the records they made in those years are way too bright and full of the kind of phony detail that some systems need to wake them up. I should know; I had one of those systems myself, but of course I didn’t know it at the time and would have gone to the mat to deny the accusation.)
There are scores of commentaries on the site detailing the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is now good enough to show you the difference.
With a too-forgiving system, you will most likely continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you clearly don’t know you’re missing.
My advice is to get better equipment and spend as much time as you can learning to tweak and tune it. That will allow you to be better at recognizing bad records when you play them.
The Heavy Vinyl Route
If more vintage Mercurys had sound as bad as this one, we would happily admit that going the Heavy Vinyl route might make sense.
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 and then some.
Beyond this Tchaicovsky title, there are plenty of others we’ve run into over the years with too many sonic shortcomings. As a public service, here are about 60 of them, 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.
We also have an audiophile record 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
