Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now
This shootout was many years in the making – we’d been trying to do these wonderful overtures for about five years, which just goes to show how hard it is nowadays to find records like these in audiophile playing condition.
We also just debuted a Decca recording with Ansermet at the helm under the title French Overtures featuring two of the pieces found here, and it’s every bit as good.
Which one is better is probably a matter of taste as they are both head and shoulders better than any other recordings of the music that we’ve come across in the last five or ten years. This is often what you are paying for when you buy a White Hot Stamper pressing — the best sound we know of for the music.
We admit that “we know of” is doing a good deal of heavy lifting in the preceding sentence, but the world is full of records and we can’t have played them all, so in the unlikely event that we find something better down the road, do not be too surprised, it happens.
Side One
- So huge and tubey
- 3D and spacious and extending high and low
- Lush strings
- More realistic and dynamic
- Big low end
- Tubey
Side Two
- 3D, tubey and lush
- Huge low end and brass
- Realistic space and cymbals
- Not hot at all
Let Me Ask You This
Who else is finding incredible Demo Discs like this EMI from 1972 nowadays?
Harry Pearson used to.
Sid Marks reviewed plenty back in the day (reviews which I mostly disagreed with, but still).
Jim Mitchell (now long-forgotten) wrote about them back in the 80s.
Moon and Gray published a book full of the best sounding Deccas and Londons full of valuable information.
Anybody else?
Are the audiophile reviewers of today picking up the baton that the giants of the past have dropped as they left this mortal coil behind?
I see little evidence of it. [1]
Not to worry. Better Records has taken on the job that no one else seems to want to do.
Not only have we set a higher standard for audiophile-quality records with our vintage Hot Stamper pressings, but we’ve endeavored to provide a great many other benefits to the audiophile community as well.
One of the things we’ve made an effort to do on this blog is to point out the manifold shortcomings of the audiophile reviewers writing today, whether on websites or youtube.
It is our belief — backed up by mountains of evidence in the form of LPs — that these individuals have been misinforming and misleading our fellow enthusiasts for years. They needed to be called to account. We figured that was a job we could do as well as anyone. Better if I may say so.
We also criticize the mastering engineers who are doing woefully shoddy work these days, criticism which some find objectionable.
We, however, see this as just another one of the many services we are uniquely qualified to offer the audiophile community, especially in light of the fact that no one else seems interested in this kind of work other than our friend and fellow record lover Robert Brook.
We’ve heard with our own ears thousands of amazing sounding vintage pressings — plain old records which make a mockery of the vinyl pressed today. They are yet more proof that the purportedly-superior sound of remastered LPs is rarely if ever more than a sham.
We regret that we waited until 2007 to wash our hands of these modern mediocrities, long after our stereo was good enough to make their shortcomings obvious beyond question.
Yes, we were late to the party, but the fact is there is no party being held to celebrate the demise of the badly-mastered audiophile record.
Since no one else in the mainstream audiophile community will follow our lead, I guess we will have to limit the guest list to those who have acquired some of our wonderful Hot Stamper pressings, a somewhat smaller group but one that makes up for their lack of numbers with boatloads of enthusiasm. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
[1]
The TAS List, a list that, back in the 70s when I was starting out, comprised a great many excellent records that were not widely known, has been going downhill for a very long time. When Classic Records pressings of the great Living Stereo recordings started showing up there, we knew the standards of the old days were gone. (Although, to be fair, there were always plenty of questionable titles on the list.)
Now the list is populated by one Heavy Vinyl mediocrity after another, a sad state of affairs if you ask me.
There are probably more records on the current list that do not qualify as Super Discs than those that do, but I can’t say I am inclined to calculate the ratio.
And many of these albums contain music that is far too esoteric to be taken seriously. Harry always said the list was about sound, not music, so this criticism has never struck us as fair. We happily concede that many of the titles on the list have the potential for excellent sound. We just couldn’t care less. As long as the music holds no appeal for us, we have better things to do with our time, time which we spend discovering amazing sounding pressings of music that never goes out of style.
For our purposes, as purveyors of albums commanding prices well into the hundreds of dollars, we do not have the luxury of considering only the sound quality of the records we offer.
However, there is still one uniquely valuable service we can offer those who are still fans of The Absolute Sound Super Disc List.
We can join in the fun and offer the TAS-head a fairly good selection of Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, all 100% guaranteed or your money back.
