Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
LSC 2612, released in 1962 on the Shaded Dog label, offers Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks with Stokowski conducting, engineered by one of the greats, Robert Simpson.
The sound is terrible however.
The copies we had on hand were loud and crude, with steely strings and not much in the way of hall space. In other words, LSC 2612 seems to suffer from the “old record” sound that we’ve found on many of the hundreds of vintage pressings we’ve auditioned over the years as we were looking for top quality recordings to put in our Hot Stamper shootouts.
If you want a good Water Music, the right stamper pressings of the Philips recording with Leppard are the best we’ve ever played.
The Shaded Dog of LSC 2612 might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.
Leave this RCA to the collectors. Some audiophiles are of the opinion that vintage Living Stereo recordings on the original label can do no wrong, but we have never subscribed to that view.
There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, 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
1962 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles as of 2024, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.
When it comes to classical and orchestral titles, more than a dozen are so good that we would consider them Must Owns.
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