Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Imports on Decca & London
We’re big fans of Decca/London Records in general, but in this case the sound and the performances of this album are simply not good enough.
We had three original UK pressed copies of CS 6554 and none of them sounded right to us.
What’s worse, Mehta and the Los Angeles Phil. play the work poorly. How this album got released I have no idea. Maybe it was a case of a contract is a contract. Or maybe others like it and we are simply wrong about the sound and the performance. Who can say?
This London might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we (and we hope our customers) use.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable, but the music is weak. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.