Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings Featuring the Violin
About ten or fifteen years ago we came across a puzzling Shaded Dog pressing of the Bruch / Vieuxtemps recording from 1962 with Heifetz, LSC 2603.
We were surprised at the time how much worse one side sounded than the other. That had rarely if ever happened back in those early Living Stereo shootout days.
We sold the record as a one-sided disc with one complete performance in top quality sound, The Scottish Fantasy. Obviously the Vieuxtemps / Concerto No. 5 wasn’t worth playing; the sound was sub-par, a pale shadow of the sound of the other side of the record. You can read all about it here.
Well, we ran into those stampers again, or at the very least we ran into a copy with the same bad stampers for side one, 5s. Something sure went wrong somewhere, as you can see from our notes below.
At the time we described this curious pressing this way:
The violin is captured beautifully on side two. More importantly there is a lovely lyricism in Heifetz’s playing which suits Bruch’s Romantic work perfectly. I know of no better performance.
The performance of the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 is also wonderful, but the sound is not. Want proof that two sides of the same record can have vastly different sound? Here it is. Note how oversized the violin on side one is, how smeary the orchestra, how little texture there is to anything in the soundfield. This side one is no Hot Stamper.
All true, and now that we know that 5s etched stampers are responsible for the bad sound and not just some pressing anomaly, we can all sleep peacefully once again.
Bonus Stamper Information
But wait, there’s more. The Red Seal pressings are uniformly awful on this title, as they are on most Living Stereo records with very few exceptions. Accounting for the change in sides, 11s is every bit as bad as 5s on the Shaded Dog — grainy, bright and dry — and side one of the Red Seal with 12s stampers is even more hopeless: so thin, dry and lean. This is not our sound. We do not sell records that sound this way!
Below you will find links to other records we’ve played that had the same problems as this RCA.
As an audiophile, you should consider avoiding these titles, including those that are pressed on premium-priced Heavy Vinyl.
At least RCA had an excuse for making records that don’t sound good: they were cheap reissues.
If you wasted $150 on a crappy sounding pressing of Aja, or $100 on Thriller, or even just forty bucks on The Cars, what else would you feel other than ripped off? Sadly, to my knowledge none of these companies offers refunds.
We do, however, so feel free to return any record that doesn’t live up to your standards. We only want satisfied customers.
Further Reading
I listened to my four-track tape of this title tonight. On the tape, the Bruch is on sequence A. The violin sound is as sweet as ever. The other great recording of this piece is by David Oistrakh on Decca. Uncharacteristically, Heifetz took the opening with a slower tempo than Oistrakh, with beautiful phrasing and expressiveness. This is in stark contrast to his Mendelssohn violin concerto, which sounds rushed and cold. I agree that this recording is amongst the best violin recordings, and also one of the best RCAs. It was of course recorded by the Decca team. On the B side, the Vieuxtemps does not sound any different to me. The tone of the violin, the ambiance, the balance between the soloist and the orchestra are exactly the same as on the Bruch. The soloist is a bit too prominent, but as John Dunkerley, Kenneth Wilkinson’s last disciple at Decca, explained in his book “Classical Recording”, their aim was not to recreate the concert hall experience but to create a new home audio experience. I guess the tape is a better bet than the LP if you want a good analog recording of the Vieuxtemps.
Hi, thanks for writing. I will have more to say soon.
Best, TP