Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paganini Available Now
Years ago we managed to get hold of the Heavy Vinyl pressing put out by Fenn Music in Germany, about which a well known record dealer on the web (you may recognize the style) had this to say:
“Stunning Reissue Of EMI ASD 440 Recorded In Stereo In 1961. This Recording Featuring The Royal Philharmonic Conducted By Alberto Erede Provides Convincing Proof, If Any Were Needed, That Menuhin Was One Of The Great Violinists Of The 20th Century.”
The “convincing proof” provided by this record is that those responsible for it are Rank Incompetents of the Worst Kind (see what I did there?).
Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound than this piece of Heavy Vinyl trash delivers.
Had I paid good money to buy this pressing from 2004 in the hopes of hearing the supremely talented Yehudi Menuhin of 1961 tear it up on Paganini’s legendary first two concertos, I can tell you one thing: I would be pissed.
Where is the outrage in the audiophile community over this kind of trash?
I have yet to see it. I suspect I will grow quite a bit older and quite a bit grayer before anyone from the audiophile commentariat notices just how bad this record sounds. I hope I’m proven wrong.
Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound from this piece of Heavy Vinyl garbage.
- No warmth
- No sweetness
- No richness
- No Tubey Magic
In other words, no trace of the original’s (or the early reissue’s) analog sound. At most I may own one or two classical CDs that sound this bad, and I own quite a few. When audiophiles of an analog bent tell you they don’t like the sound of CDs, this is why they don’t like them: they sound like this junky Heavy Vinyl record.
I have to wonder how records this awful get released.
Then again, the Heavy Vinyl buyer of today is not known for his discrimination. If he were, Sundazed, Mobile Fidelity, Analogue Productions, Music Matters and a host of others would have gone out of business many years ago.
This link will take you to some other exceptionally bad records that, like this one, were marketed to audiophiles for their supposedly superior sound. On today’s modern systems, it should be obvious that they have nothing of the kind and that, in fact, the opposite is true.
We were still selling Heavy Vinyl when this badly remastered record came out in 2004, but a scant three years later we had had enough of the sonically-challenged titles being foisted on the public by one Heavy Vinyl grifter after another.
It was right then and there that we decided to focus all our energies on finding good vintage vinyl for our audiophile customers.
In 2007 we took the question we had asked rhetorically above and turned it into a full-blown commentary.
Looking back, 2007 turned out to be a milestone year for us here as Better Records.
If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.
The best way out of your predicament is to hear how mediocre these modern records sound compared to the vintage Hot Stamper pressings we offer (or that you can find for yourself).
Once you hear the difference, your days of buying newly remastered releases will most likely be over.
Even if our pricey curated pressings are too dear, as the English say, you can avail yourself of the methods we use to find killer records on your own.
Further Reading