More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
More of the Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.
I thought it was better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned, was unexpected to say the least.
Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the early reissues.
The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout.
(Some inside baseball: most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.)
Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.
Finding the time to do the serious investigation of LSC 2323 that would be necessary to get to the bottom of it was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years.
The title would have to wait until 2024 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records. Every record gets the chance to show us what it can do, to be evaluated fairly without the listener having any way to know which pressing is playing.
It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had probably never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings.
Side One, Second Movement (Tchaikovsky)
- Big, but bright and compressed
- Gets loud but opaque and hot
- Good weight
Side One, First Movement
- Bright and blurry bells
- Sort of tubey but a mess
- Grade: 1+ (passable, but no Hot Stamper)
Side Two (Rimsky-Korsakov)
- Big but boomy and smeary
- Brass is edgy and opaque
- No top end or space
- Peaks are hot and congested
- Grade: NFG
To recap: In 2005 I was impressed with Classic’s pressing of LSC 2323. That was only twenty years ago, yet I could not have been more wrong. I thought my stereo was great — I’d owned top quality equipment since 1975 by then — thirty sodding years — so my audiophile credentials would surely dwarf those of the vast majority of forum posters who write about audiophile pressings today. How reliable should we expect their reviews to be?
Subsequent to 2005 we made a great deal of progress, enough to make it clear that more and more the Modern Heavy Vinyl reissue was turning out to be a dead end.
I thought audio was easier than it was, and if anybody should have known better after working on his system for thirty years, it should have been me.
Of course, the kind of sound we describe above was always the problem with the Classic Records RCA remasterings. Their records had bass and weight, no one could deny it, but the strings were usually shrill and smeary, and the hall practically non-existent.
New Recuts!
We found out some years ago that there was a new series of recuts coming from Analogue Productions. Based on their dismal track record, I will be very surprised if they are much better than mediocre.
UPDATE 2024
We finally got hold of one of the new Living Stereo remasterings, in this case a copy of Scheherazade, and we immediately put it in a shootout.
The results: mediocre side one, bad side two. Not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on. Almost any White Dog or Shaded Dog will beat it (although it should be noted that there are plenty of vintage pressings of the album that don’t sound much better than mediocre. Still, on side two it should be no contest, If not, something is definitely wrong somewhere.)
Side One
Capriccio Italien – Tchaikovsky
Side Two
Capriccio Espagnol – Rimsky-Korsakoff
Further Reading