Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now
The various pressings we played of Mercury SR 90316 were not awful sounding by any means, but they were not especially good sounding either.
The strings tended to be shrill on the copies we had on hand.
We felt it best to abandon our plans to do a shootout for it. We will probably end up selling our stock on Discogs.
The sound of some pressings of this album might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they are not worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.
Many Mercury recordings suffer from shrill strings, and to be honest we have certainly heard much worse, but for the money we charge even the copies that might win a shootout would not represent a good value for our customers, not once we factor in the high cost of the records and the time it would take to clean and play them all.
If you see a copy for cheap and aren’t that particular about sound quality, by all means pick it up, assuming the music appeals to you.
1963 just happens to be one of the truly great years for quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.
Have You Noticed…
If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.
But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
There is plenty of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually sit down to play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are downright awful.
It seems as if the audiophile public has bought completely into the hype for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings. Audiophiles have too often made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.
Further Reading
- Perhaps you can explain these record mysteries – we sure can’t
- Trying our best to get at the truth with transistors and failing with tubes
- Testing using large orchestral works is the only way to get to the highest levels in audio
