Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Strauss Available Now
As you may know, this is one of the earliest RCA stereo recordings, dating from 1954 and the same sessions as the famous Reiner recording LSC 1806. This two microphone, two-channel recording, however, was never released in stereo on vinyl until the Victrola era ten years later.
We used to like the RCA Half-Speed pressing of the work, but playing it recently made me realize just how dark, smeary and thick it is.
Don’t know what I ever saw in it to tell you the truth.
We Make Mistakes
The first is that anyone who has been on an audio journey for very long has made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when we were wrong. You might say we are even proud of the fact that we used to get so many things wrong about records and audio.
Our experimental, evidence-based approach, requiring that we not only make mistakes but that we embrace them, is surely key to the progress we have made in understanding recordings and home audio. One of our favorite quotes on the subject is attributed to Alexander Pope.
“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
To say that few audiophiles have followed our approach is not to admit defeat. Rather it is simply to say that the approach we use to find better sounding pressings involves a great deal of tedious, expensive, time-consuming work, work that few audiophiles seem interested in doing.
There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.
Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances, including many on the coveted Shaded Dog label
Further Reading
Idiot. This is a great recording and performance
Dear Sir,
You seem to have misunderstood my review. The recording is great, the performance is great, but the Half-Speed mastered pressing is not great.
You’re not really saying you like the Half-Speed, are you?
TP