Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now
- An early Plum Label copy of this famous TAS list LP with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout
- It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
- This pressing boasts incredible sound from start to finish – Mercury knows how to capture the bite of the brass
- Fennell is a master of this sort of sweet and lyrical Wind Music
- Both sides of this spectacular Demo Disc recording are big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the Mercury sound we love, and that is so hard to find
- Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS list of Super Discs many years ago, but, like so many amazingly good recordings from the golden age, it no longer appears to qualify for inclusion.
Regardless of its current status with the writers at The Absolute Sound, a group whose taste and acumen must be considered questionable at best, the credit must go to Fennel along with the brilliant engineering team at Mercury. I’ve been told that he was a stickler for making sure everyone was perfectly in tune and playing correctly within the ensemble. That’s exactly what you hear when you play a record like this — it’s practically sonic perfection.
Fennell made a number of band music recordings for Mercury. My favorite is British Band Classics Vol. 2, which was the first Mercury recording I ever heard. I went out and bought a copy of it immediately from my local Tower Records on Golden Import.
Years later when I heard the real thing, and original pressing, I realized the Golden Import was a pretty second rate reissue, fine for the $3.99 I might have paid but a big step down from the early pressings.
Also, if you ever see a clean copy of Vol. 1, only available in Mono, pick it up. If it’s cut right it, too, is out of this world.
What The Best Sides Of Winds In Hi-Fi Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1959
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For On Winds In Hi-Fi
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Powerful bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
Lincolnshire Posy – Grainger
“Lisbon Bay” (Sailor’s Song)
“Horkstow Grange” (The Miser And His Man – A Local Tragedy)
“Rufford Park Poachers” (Poaching Song)
“The Brisk Young Sailor” (Who Returned To Wed His True Love)
“Lord Melbourne” (War Song)
“The Lost Lady Found” (Dance Song)
Three Japanese Dances – Rogers
Dance With Pennons
Dance Of Mourning
Dance With Swords
Side Two
Suite Française – Milhaud
(a) Normandie
(b) Bretagne
(c) Île De France
(d) Alsace-Lorraine
(e) Provence
Serenade In E Flat – Strauss
Further Reading