Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year. Far from it.
The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.
It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.
But wait a minute.
Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.
How did they get this one so wrong?
We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.
Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.
One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.
We actually like testing records, and we refined* a method for doing it that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.
*As far as I know, my friend Robert Pincus was the one who invented the record shootout. His approach was to evaluate each side of a record independently against other copies of the same album, taking notes that described the strengths and weaknesses he heard on each copy he played. He assumed nothing, and neither do we. Our rigorous controls, blinded experiments and use of the scientific method to arrive at reproducible results are simply advances on his original approach.
Yes, there are some mysteries we can solve, but they are the kinds of mysteries that have an answer amenable to our testing methods, like what is the best stamper number for record X, or what mastering engineer cut the best sounding pressings of record Y, and such like.
But why a specific record sounds bad? That is just too complicated, even for us.
Might there exist pressings of the album with good sound that we didn’t have a chance to play? Of course. We can’t have auditioned every pressing of the record; that would obviously be impossible.
But we have played enough bad sounding copies of this album to know when to move on, so we’re moving on and that will have to be that.
If we do run across a pressing that contradicts everything we’ve written above, we will be happy to admit our mistake and offer you the Hot Stamper pressing that proves just how wrong we were.
Do we admit our mistakes because it’s the right thing to do, something practically no one else in this business has ever done?
Sure, why not. In running any business, integrity has to be of prime importance.
But let’s not forget that we get paid to do it.
We’ve auditioned and reviewed more than a hundred titles to date, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.
This link will take you to the 25+ titles recorded or released in 1963 that we think belong in any music-loving audiophile’s record collection.
This Mercury might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances
Have You Noticed…
If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — 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 pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
There is plenty of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and most of them are downright awful.
It seems as if the audiophile public has bought completely into the hype for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings. Audiophiles have too often made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.
I would say Mercury’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.
To see the 50+ Living Presence classical titles with the potential for Hot Stamper sound that we’ve reviewed to date, click here.
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.
