More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.
Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.
London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.
The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.
The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!
DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.
Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.
We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
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