Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jacques Offenbach Available Now
Reviewed back in 2009 in our pre-shootout days.
This Minty London Blueback LP has a WONDERFUL Tubey Magical Super Hot Stamper side one.
I have never heard this music sound better. Of course Ansermet is exactly the right conductor for these light and colorful orchestral pieces; the performances are uniformly superb.
But as audiophiles we want to make sure the sound is what it should be, and here side one does not disappoint. The string tone is perfection. I defy anyone to find a Heavy Vinyl reissue with string tone even remotely as good. In my experience there is simply no such record.
With vintage classical records there are always trade-offs of course. Here the loudest passages suffer from some mild compressor distortion, so common on these early pressings. A small price to pay for sound this lovely I say.
The Zampa overture by Herold is probably the best sound on the album — it’s gorgeous!
Side two is not quite as good. We rated it A Plus, with real weight and energy but a bit too much compression and distorton in the loud passages to be completely satisfying.
UPDATE 2025
Nowadays we would never list a record for sale as a Hot Stamper pressing with a grade of 1+ on either side.
And, more importantly, the grades we awarded these two sides were just estimates.
We did not put this copy in a shootout with a batch of similar pressings.
We played the record, liked what we heard on side one, liked what we heard on side two a bit less, and offered it to our customers with the description of the strengths and weaknesses you read about.
We could not have begun to conduct a shootout for this early London. Back in those days we simply could not find enough copies of such a rare title to make such a thing happen.
As for the compressor distortion on side one that we heard, it’s entirely possible that with better cleaning and better playback that the distortion we thought we heard would disappear. Blaming the record is rarely the ideal approach for making progress in audio.
This is an older classical/orchestral review.
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.
There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
100% of the records we offer on our site have been cleaned, then auditioned head to head against a number of other pressings under rigorously controlled conditions. We award the copies in the shootout sonic grades for each of their sides, and then condition check the best sounding ones for surface noise before listing them on the site.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which requires a highly trained staff. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever do the work we do, not at scale anyway.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of audiophile quality.
The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard, or you get your money back.
Side One
Le Roi D’ys
The Black Domino
Zampa
Side Two
La Belle Helene
Fra Diavolo
Orpheus In The Underworld