Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now
These Beethoven “Appassionata” And “Funeral March” sonata recordings have never impressed us sonically.
On the Shaded Dog pressings of LSC 2545 that we’ve auditioned, the piano is too thin.
Who likes a thin sounding piano?
If you have big speakers that can move air with authority, the kind needed to reproduce the size and power of a concert piano, then check out some of the titles we’ve found to have especially weighty piano reproduction.
The sound is not awful — you could certainly do worse — but we do not see the value in this title considering it will be neither cheap nor quiet.
We say pass.
Lewis Layton is clearly one of our favorite engineers, but this album does not seem to be up to his usual standards, or ours.
There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with noticeable shortcomings.
For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.
Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.
Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)
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