More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
The Speakers Corner pressing earned something like a “B’ grade from us, which makes it one of the better releases on that label. (I would guess that one or two out of ten would rate a “B.” I also don’t know of any record of theirs that rates a higher grade than “B.”)
It’s overly rich, a case of being too fat in the mid-bass, but otherwise it mostly sounds right.
As you may already know, we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl pressings of any kind in 2011.
By then, the quality of our playback and record cleaning had improved to the point that even the best Heavy Vinyl LPs were no longer competitive with the vintage vinyl we were then offering as Hot Stamper pressings.
What to Listen For
As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer.
Linked below are records that are good for testing each of those qualities.
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to have more compression.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to have more smear.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
Sublime Sonics
Audiophiles have known of this recording’s sublime sonic qualities for decades. As our stereos get better, so do amazingly natural recordings such as this one.
The rich, textured, rosin-on-the-bow lower strings on this recording are to die for. Find me a modern record that sounds like this and I will eat it. And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings.
NO ONE alive today can make a record that sound even remotely as good as the best pressings of this recording. To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: they can’t compete.
After more than twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples, the engineers of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful and life-like as the best vintage London and Decca originals and reissues.
Price Versus Quality
Speaking of cheap reissues, we are on record as being fans of a great many budget reissue classical LPs, for decades as a matter of fact. My catalogs from the 90s were full of reissues with exceptionally good sound.
Now that we do things differently, we’ve discovered some budget pressings that are so well-mastered they have the potential — accent on the word potential — to win shootouts.
Vintage Vinyl
Plenty of the records we audition suffer from bad tube mastering, a quality we have no trouble recognizing and criticize at length regularly on the blog.
In that respect we have little in common with the True Believers who seem to want to defend analog regardless of its shortcomings.
We don’t hesitate to criticize new records that have bad sound and old records that have bad sound. Bad sound is bad sound no matter when the record was pressed.
With that in mind, vintage classical records with weak sound can be found here.
And modern records of all kinds with weak sound can be found here.
Further Reading
- Best orchestral performances with top quality sound
- Hot Stamper Decca and London pressings available now
- Well recorded classical albums from the core collection available now
