Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now
For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings), in stereo, on the original plum label are the best way to go, right?
In many cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here. (Both beat the pants off the awful Classic Records pressing.
But sometimes the RFR pressings — which, as I am sure you know, can be the earliest stampers for some titles — are nothing special on one side or the other. That is exactly the case here.
Keep in mind that the stamper numbers you see above belong to a different album.
We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping the identify of this title close to the vest.
We are not able to predict what stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.
It turns out that the FR pressings did not sound as good as some of other pressings. The RFR stampers came in somewhere in the middle of the pack, an average of 2+, but a hard record to sell with such very different sounding sides.
This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.
We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.
I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them, painful and costly as those experiences may have been.
When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing little of such information on the site, for a number of reasons we discussed in a commentary we wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution. (Ahem.)
However, in 2024 we decided to reverse our previous policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:
Please to enjoy.
Some information has been left out, the specific stamper numbers for our Shootout Winners for example, and in the cases where we give out the stampers for the top copies, we do not identify the title of the record with those stampers.
As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.
We are more than happy to give out some tips — plenty of them in fact.
However, if you really want to find the best sounding pressing of any given title, you have to do the work we did, and that means buying, cleaning, playing and evaluating a big batch of pressings of the same album.
It may be expensive, it’s definitely a huge amount of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to do it.