The sound of this 1959 Mercury recording (SR 90171) was not impressive.
The sound was decent enough, although somewhat dry and opaque on even the best copies of the record we played. Which makes it a passable sounding record, not much more than that, and 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 recognize its many shortcomings.
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 hundreds on this blog.
We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than any other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years, especially the ridiculously bad pressings we’ve reviewed more recently.
It Was a Very Good Year
1959 just happens to be one of the truly great years for analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.
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 especially 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?
I would say Mercury’s track record during the 50s and 60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.
But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one that audiophiles looking for top quality sound would do well to avoid.
To see the 50+ Living Presence classical titles we’ve reviewed to date, click here.
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.
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.
Further Reading
- Limitations? Colorations? Moi?
- Well recorded classical albums from the core collection available now
- Robert Brook has lots of good advice for the dedicated analog audiophile
