What Is There to Say about Mercury Sound This Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

In 2025 we did a shootout for the Mercury you see pictured, SR-90437, having collected a large number of copies with a wide range of stampers, which of course is always the best approach when doing a shootout for the first time. (Once you have a couple under your belt you naturally can start to focus on the pressings that do well and avoid the ones that do badly.)

In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner, we wrote:

Dorati and the LSO’s dynamic performance of these 16 Hungarian Dances debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early Mercury pressing.

These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs.

Some of the above may sound familiar. We say these sorts of things and use these stock phrases to describe many of the amazing sounding records that win our shootouts.

But aren’t these adjectives precisely the ones you should be using when a record is doing everything right? What else could you say about a record that sounds this good?

Our notes are simply the impressions a member of our listening panel wrote down as he critically listened to the record while it was playing.

In this case, his attention eas being drawn to the marvelous qualities a large scale orchestral recording can have when everything is working at the highest levels of fidelity.

With the right playback equipment and lots of practice, you could easily find yourself listening this way and taking the same kind of notes.

Sealed off in a quiet room by yourself, sitting in the sweet spot before a pair of full-range dynamic speakers, focussed entirely on the music and sound, you are able to give all your attention to the recording and the quality of its reproduction.

If, under those circumstances, you take notice and appreciate the record’s strengths, yet hear no weaknesses worth mentioning, you are very likely to produce notes that look like the ones below.

You find yourself in the presence — you might even say “the living presence,” since that’s the illusion the record has created — of a true Demo Disc from the lost world of vintage analog.

Great records like this Mercury do all the same things well. We consider ourselves fortunate to be able to hear sound like this practically every week. With anything other than the best vintage pressings, sound of this quality would simply be impossible.

The notes for side one read: 

Big and spacious and rich / Dynamic orchestra / Not hot / Great depth and room

Grade: 3+

For side two:

Big and tubey / Very 3-D midrange / Great size and energy when orchestra comes in

Grade 3+

3+/3+ records go in this section, which currently holds 6 titles as of 3/2026, meaning they are very hard to find the ones we do find sell quickly.  Records with at least one 3+ side go in this section, and there are 97 of those as of the same date.

Speaking of Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and like most of the things we do, we make no apologies for it.

16 Hungarian Dances, performed by the London Symphony under the baton of Antal Dorati, with credit of course going to the supremely talented recording engineers at Mercury, is an example of one of those records that doubles as a thrill ride.

They come along from time to time in order to show us the kind of sound that we’d almost forgotten was possible to capture on a record.

Oh yes, with the rare properly-cleaned, properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage vinyl LP, played back on top quality equipment in a heavily treated, dedicated soundroom, we can assure you it is very possible to hear that sound coming off of a pressing from 1965.

It’s still the same old story, and the fundamental things still apply: The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

It’s precisely the powerful sound found on this album that makes our job fun. It makes us want to play records all day, sifting through the crap to find the few pressings that can offer seriously good Hot Stamper sound.

There is, of course, no other way to find such records and such sound, and, of course, never will be. Learning how to find the best sounding vintage vinyl pressings took this hobby to levels I never imagined, and it can do the same for you.

You can learn to do it, or you can let us do it for you. Either way you will end up with one helluva great sounding record collection, with so few modern pressings that you could count them on your fingers.

Further Reading

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