Hot Stamper Pressings of Phase 4 Recordings Available Now
The best Hot Stamper pressings of this TAS List album, one of the greatest and most famous orchestral blockbuster soundtracks ever recorded, more than live up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done right.
As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious analog.
The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.
The layering of depth is really something to hear on the best copies, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep.
Transparency is what allows this all to sound real.
Opacity Vs. Transparency
Note that we have been especially anti-Heavy Vinyl in our recent commentaries for their consistently opaque character, the opposite of what makes it possible to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear all the instruments, even the ones placed far back.
Try that with any Classic Records or Speakers Corner pressing. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those two labels and the others like them.
Tubey Magic with Clarity
Yes, Decca in 1977 managed to keep its lovely Tubey Magical analog sound without getting mired in the muck of tube smear and thickness, the kind that bedevils so many pressings from the 50s.
Couple that with real bite to the brass and texture to the strings and you have the best of both worlds on one record.
Wikipedia’s Entry
Miklós Rózsa (18 April 1907 – 27 July 1995) was a Hungarian-born composer and conductor, best known for his numerous film scores. Along with such composers as Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Max Steiner and Franz Waxman, Rózsa is considered to be one of the “founding fathers of film music.”
Rózsa was one of the most respected and popular composers working in Hollywood. He is also regarded today as one of the greatest film score composers of all time. In a career that spanned over fifty years, he composed music for nearly 100 films, including Spellbound (1945), Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961).
Rózsa is one of the most nominated composers in Oscar history: he had 16 nominations and three Oscars. He also had three Golden Globe nominations, and a Grammy Award nomination for the MGM Records album of Ben-Hur..