Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
I have never heard a copy of LSC 2489 sound better than decent. We would say the sound quality of this Dvorak title is most likely to be passable at best. True, we haven’t played all that many copies, but the copies we did play were either unimpressive or not good at all.
It certainly is very unlikely to have the wonderful sound of the best Living Stereo pressings that you can find on our site, each of which has been carefully evaluated to the highest standards.
If you can get one for cheap, under five bucks say, go for it. Otherwise we recommend that you pass if what you are looking for is audiophile quality sound.
Perhaps the poor recording quality (I’m guessing; obviously I’ve never heard the master tape) explains the poor sound of the Classic Records remastered version from 1994.
Not that that stopped anybody from buying those awful 180 gram pressings! They may have been mastered by one of the greats, Bernie Grundman, but he was well past his prime when he was working for that awful label, as we explain here.
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 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 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