Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This review is from way back in the olden days (2005) before we were doing regular shootouts for all the albums we sell, so take it for what it’s worth.
In 2005 we had been seriously into collecting the highest quality record pressings for more than thirty years, yet it was obvious that we still had a lot to learn. In 2004 we started selling vintage vinyl with Hot Stampers, and practically every shootout we did taught us something new and interesting about records.
Much of that information ended up here, on a blog dedicated to teaching audiophiles how they can find better sounding pressings using the methods we pioneered.
We wanted to share with other like-minded audiophiles what we’ve discovered about higher quality vinyl and, even more importantly, we wanted to stress that experimenting with records under rigorously controlled conditions is the best way to learn about their sound quality.
Our Old Review
This import pressing has some astonishing qualities, qualities we are not used to hearing on vintage Golden Age recordings such as this (or or any other recordings, truth be told).
This 1964 release — our pressing is the whiteback reissue, which we tend to prefer — has 3-D-like clarity and spaciousness that we could hardly believe.
The stage is DEEP and you can hear all the way to the back of it.
The width of the stage is dramatically wider than practically any record I can remember playing in the last year or two. I felt as though my listening room got bigger when playing this record.
And the dynamics are explosive. This pressing can really get LOUD when it wants to.
In some respects it’s hard to beat. But not, alas, hard to fault.
It lacks weight down low, whomp as we like to call it.
The details:
Side One
Amazing woodwinds right from the get go! So clear and airy. Quiet vinyl lets you hear into all the quiet parts of the music. A+ to A++ is the grade, due almost exclusively to the lack of bottom end. If you can add some bass this record would be killer.
Side Two
About the same. It can seem somewhat rich in places, but mostly it’s too thin, although big and wide as ever. A+
The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker was Tchaikovsky’s last ballet. Working with a trite story in which there is no real human drama, Tchaikovsky was freed from having to worry about content, which allowed him to indulge his gift for memorable melody and ignited his imagination as an orchestrator. While the feeling of the ballet can at times seem rather shallow – a child’s Christmastime vision of the Kingdom of Sweets – the skill with which Tchaikovsky dresses up individual numbers in the most evocative orchestral colors still delights the ear.
Even where his melody is not extraordinary, Tchaikovsky’s treatment is. The main motive of the Act II pas de deux is nothing but a simple descending scale, yet the way it is harmonized and phrased, and clothed in the warmest of string colors, endows it with powerful sentiment. Tchaikovsky’s orchestration transcends the material in the overture as well; scored without cellos and basses, and with violins and violas divided into six parts, it conjures up the sound of a Classical orchestra with just a triangle and a piccolo added. A silvery, child-like, “play” overture, small in scale but full of glittering tinsel, it is just the thing for Christmas Eve.
The Nutcracker is typical of Tchaikovsky’s later music in its delicate use of the strings, which provide shimmering backdrops to many of the scenes. But it shows a literalism unusual for the composer, especially in the children’s voices in the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” and the children’s instruments for several other numbers in Act. I. The writing for standard instruments is marvelously inventive, particularly in the Act II divertissement, where chocolate is represented by a Spanish Dance, coffee by an Arabian Dance and tea by a Chinese Dance. But the most wonderful touch of all is the solo celesta in the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” which so charmingly suggests the drops of water “spurting from fountains” called for in the scenario.
From liner notes
This is an older classical/orchestral review.
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.
There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
100% of the records we offer on our site have been cleaned, then auditioned head to head against a number of other pressings under rigorously controlled conditions. We award the copies in the shootout sonic grades for each of their sides, and then condition check the best sounding ones for surface noise before listing them on the site.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which requires a highly trained staff. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever do the work we do, not at scale anyway.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of audiophile quality.
The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard, or you get your money back.