Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
I’ve never liked this recording of the Grand Canyon Suite, but not having played a copy in twenty years or so, I thought we should get one in and give it a spin before we give up on it entirely.
That was money down the drain. The sound was thick, bright and crude.
Definitely not our sound, and we hope not yours either.
Lots of Morton Gould’s recordings for RCA from this era have been disappointing. We’ll add this one to the list.
If you want to avoid records with these problems, click on any of the links below to see the titles we’ve found over the years to have the same issues.
There are quite a number of pressings that we’ve played with crude sound. It’s unlikely that anyone reading this blog would be happy with such crude sounding pressings.
Here are some with thick sound and here are some with bright sound. Audiophiles would do well to avoid all of them.
Lewis Layton is one of our favorite engineers, but this album is clearly not up to his usual standards, at least it isn’t on the copies we’ve played.
Waking Up a Dull Stereo
If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way old school systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up sound guaranteed to bring it to life in no time.
There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than the average vintage pressing, or Heavy Vinyl counterpart: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.
With such a stereo you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and audiophile pressings, as wall as vintage Golden Age classical records that don’t sound good, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled: some stereos make it difficult to find the best sounding pressings
My advice is to get better equipment, and that will allow you to do a better job of recognizing bad records when you play them.
Have You Noticed?
If you are a fan of Living Stereo pressings, have you noticed that many of them – this one for example – don’t sound very good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have. But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare (and not so rare, as in the case of this title) LSC pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
I would say RCA’s track record during the ’50s and ’60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.
But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one of them.
Further Reading