Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London
There are plenty of Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played over the years that were disappointing, and some of them can be found here.
What was most striking about this shootout was how poorly the original London Bluebacks (CS 6061) fared when going head to head with the best vintage reissues. In fact, they were so obviously inferior I doubt we would have even needed another pressing to know that they could not possibly be considered Hot Stampers.
The two we had were crude, flat, full of harmonic distortion, and both had clearly restricted frequency extremes.
In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.
But I remember liking the Blueback pressings I played ten or twenty years ago.
Did I have better copies, or was my system not capable of showing me the shortcomings I so clearly heard this time around? Since this is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty, we’ll have to leave it there.
Our favorite performance of the work is this one with Krips and the LSO, but on a much later reissue pressing produced by Decca in the 70s. Imagine that!
Heavy Vinyl and Transparency Loss
We used to like the Speakers Corner pressing of this recording, but it has been close to ten years [make that more than twenty] since we last played one, and I rather doubt I would feel the same way about it now.
So often when we revisit the remastered records we used to like we come away dumbfounded — what on earth were we thinking?
That was the case with this vintage pressing as well.
Further Reading