Hot Stamper Percussion Recordings Available Now
What to listen for you ask? Top end, plain and simple.
It’s the RARE copy that has the incredible extension of the side two we played recently. The space, the clarity, the harmonic complexity — perhaps one out of ten copies will show you a side two like that.
The highs are so good on this record you can use it as a setup tool. Adjust your VTA, tracking weight and the like for the most natural and clear top end, then check for all the other qualities you want to hear. You may just find yourself operating on a higher sonic plane than you ever thought possible.
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS List of Super Discs, and rightfully so. It certainly can be a Super Disc, but only when you have the right pressing. It’s a real treat to hear such a crazy assortment of percussion instruments with this kind of amazingly clear, high-resolution sound!
This is one of the Demo Discs on the TAS List which truly deserves its status when, and only when, you have a killer copy.
UPDATE 2025
The last three shootouts for this album were won by the same set of stampers. Here are about a hundred other albums with one set of stampers that consistently win shootouts.
There is only one other set of stampers that we buy apart from those of the shootout winners. We avoid the rest. As a rule this is not our approach, but in the case of this record, having done so many shootouts for it over the course of decades, we can’t be bothered to buy, clean and play the pressings that have little hope of earning good grades.
This album is hard enough to sell as it is, even when it sounds amazing. Like so many other records we offer, we think it should be more popular with audiophiles, especially for those more serious types who don’t mind working at improving their playback.
The best copies are amazingly spacious and three-dimensional. They would probably come in handy for setting up speakers using some of the principles outlined in this discussion of the “room coupling method.”
Polarity
Music for Bang, Baa-room and Harp is yet another one of the many pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some copies.
Are audiophile reviewers or audiophiles in general listening critically to records like this? I wonder; I could not find word one about any polarity issues with this title, and yet we’ve played many copies with reversed polarity on side two. Two different stampers have their polarity reversed. How come nobody is hearing it but us?
We leave you, dear reader, to answer that question for yourself.
This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following playback qualities.
Further Reading