The Shaded Dog pressings we played were a bit boxy and dry. This is the kind of sound we’ve run into on a number of RCA chamber recordings before.
Which makes it a passable sounding title, not much more than that, and not really not worth doing a shootout for. It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.
The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to hear its many faults.
Vintage Vinyl
We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the score all over this blog.
We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than every other kind of record, especially the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years.
We wrote about that subject in a commentary we called the big if. An excerpt:
The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right. That’s a big if.
In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.
We go on to discuss the wonderfully accurate timbre of the better vintage pressings, in contrast to the consistently inaccurate tonality of the Modern Heavy Vinyl pressing. It’s a long story but we think it is well worth your time if you are an audiophile looking for better sounding vinyl.
There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with a catalog of obvious shortcomings — obvious to us but not necessarily to others — and we’ve broken them down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances, including many on the coveted Shaded Dog label
Further Reading