More of the Music of Saint-Saens

More of the Music of Mussorgsky

• You will find superb sound throughout this vintage Victrola 60s reissue, one of the best in the entire series
• Both of these sides are big, lively, and dynamic, with the lovely bells and other percussive elements benefitting immensely from the wonderfully extended top
• The sonics here have the power to transport you completely, with solid imaging and a real sense of space, qualities that allow us to forget we are in our listening rooms and not in the concert hall

Pay attention to the brass — yes, it may have some tubey smear, but listen to how huge and powerful it is.

Drop the needle and watch (or listen) as the sound comes jumping out of your speakers.

Modern remastered records never do that.

These Decca-derived recordings are highly sought after, and with good reason. It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful audiophile disc, both in terms of the program and the quality of the sound.

This is the precisely the kind of big, bold, lifelike sound Decca engineers were able to capture on tape, and RCA mastering engineers were able to master from that analog tape, 60+ years ago.

The original RCA (LSC 2400) sells for many, many hundreds of dollars in clean condition and may not have especially good sound, if our experience is any guide. Some of the ones we’ve played have been quite shrill. In other words, you could easily spend a ton of money on one and end up with a bad sounding collector piece destined to sit on your shelf for years between playings.

Or you could buy the Classic 180g reissue and end up with one of the biggest disasters in the history of remastering. More about that later.

Even though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s a superb example of Living Stereo Tubey Magic at its best. It is our belief that there will never be a reissue of this recording that even remotely captures the energy, transparency, sweetness and richness of the sound of this copy.

And the hall is huge — so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA.

EMI’s recordings are often super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out of phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And so often mid-hall and distant. Not our sound, sorry.

Extraordinary Performances

Act III of the William Tell is played with breathtaking orchestral vigor and skill. What a showpiece for Fistoulari and The Paris Conservatory! I would not expect to hear a better performance, not in this lifetime anyway.

What The Best Sides Of Ballet Music from the Opera 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 1960
• 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.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we’ve heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Classic Records — Let’s Try and Forget The Sound. This Means You, HP

Classic Records, as expected, ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than this pressing, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance. In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. If you’re tempted to pick one up for a few bucks to hear how badly mastered their version is, go for it. If you actually want a record to play for enjoyment, don’t bother; you’ll be wasting your money.

Most audiophiles (including, apparently, audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of this quality. If they had, Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us upon their release in 1994.

I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled (HP, how could you?), but I can honestly say that we certainly weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. (We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the We Was Wrong entries to prove it.)

And the fact that so many of them are currently on the TAS list is a sad comment on how far the mighty have fallen. Can the TAS list still have any value when it contains so many mediocre pressings?

What We’re Listening For On Ballet Music from the Opera

• 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.

Verdi / Aida 
1. Act II – March & Ballet

Saint-Saens / Samson & Delilah
2. Act III Bachanale

Rossini / William Tell 
3. Act I Passo a sei
4. Act II Soldiers Dance

Mussorgsky / Kovantchina 
5. Act IV – Dances of the Persian Slaves