UPDATE 2026
This review was written many, many years ago, so many years ago that I don’t think I knew that the Victrola reissue had consistently better sound than any Shaded Dog we had ever played.
But one thing I did know was that the sound had obvious and rather serious shortcomings, shortcomings that the fans of vintage vinyl never seemed to notice. The conventional wisdom according to which so many record collectors and record reviewers operate, including the vast majority of those who identify as audiophiles, may have blinded them to the reality of its defects.
It’s also rare and sells on the collector market for a lot of money. Those facts often blind record lovers too.
Someone with the original in his collection might pull it off the shelf where it has been sitting for years and show such a rare and valuable and therefore impressive record to you. I suspect that such a collector would be much less likely to play it for you.
Having to sit down and actually play the records we sell means that biases and prejudices of these kinds can have no effect on our judgments. The records get played against other pressings and we simply call them as we hear them.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the original is not that good of a record.
And the best news is that the reissue is a true Demo Disc of the highest order.
Our Old Review
This copy of LSC 2400 has vintage RCA Golden Age sound, for better and for worse. Even though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s got a healthy dose of Living Stereo Tubey Magic.
There will never be a reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found here.
And the hall is HUGE — so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA.
Our More Recent Correction
We much prefer the sound of the Victrola reissue, VICS 1206, which came out in 1966.
As for the Victrola pressing, we’re guessing — how could we possibly know for sure? — that less tube compression was used in the mastering.
It’s still plenty tubey, but more to our taste for not being overly tubey.
Price Versus Quality
Speaking of cheap reissues, we are on record as being fans of a great many budget reissue classical LPs for decades. My catalogs from the ’90s were full of reissues with exceptionally good sound.
Now that we do things differently, we’ve discovered some budget pressings that are so well-mastered they have the potential — accent on the word potential — to win shootouts.
Vintage Vinyl
Plenty of the records we audition suffer from bad tube mastering, a quality we have no trouble recognizing and criticize at great length given the chance.
In that respect we have little in common with the True Believers who seem to want to defend analog regardless of its shortcomings.
We don’t hesitate to criticize new records that have bad sound and old records that have bad sound. Bad sound is bad sound no matter when the record was pressed.
Vintage classical records with weak sound can be found here.
Modern records of all kinds with weak sound can be found here.
Verdi / Aida
1. Act II – March & Ballet
Saint-Saens / Samson & Delilah
2. Act III Bachanale
Rossini / William Tell
3. Act I Passo a sei
4. Act II Soldiers Dance
Mussorgsky / Kovantchina
5. Act IV – Dances of the Persian Slaves