Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now
An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.
MoFi’s version of this The Pines of Rome (#1-507) is one of the worst sounding classical records they ever produced, and that’s saying something, because practically all of their classical catalog is just awful — thin and bright, with sloppy bass and completely unnatural string tone.
As hard as it may be to believe, the MoFi of the Pines of Rome makes the typical Classic Records pressing sound good, shrill strings and all.
The UHQR is somewhat better, especially in the lower octaves, but it’s maybe a D+ or C-, not an audiophile record if we are using the term to mean what it no longer means — a pressing with higher quality sound.
How dull and opaque does a stereo have to be to make this record listenable?
The answer is VERY dull and VERY opaque.
Stone Age audio systems, or their modern equivalent, are the only ones that can play junk like this and get away with it.
A Quick Pines Recap
When I first started paying attention to the TAS Super Disc list in the late-70s, I read about the famous Pines of Rome RCA pressing with 1S stampers that was supposedly so dynamic that it needed to be recut in order to play on the turntables of the day. I could never find one, and the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals that I did find never sounded all that good to me.
I know now that I did not have the stereo system back then (equipment, room, etc.) that could reproduce a recording of such difficulty.
In the 80s, the Mobile Fidelity pressing of the Pines of Rome came out, and it never sounded right to me either. This was true of all their classical releases, without exception. To me they epitomized the kind of bright, phony, “audiophile” sound commonly found in audio showrooms but rarely if ever heard in concert halls.
The Classic Records release from 1995 of the Reiner Pines was no better. That record was just too harsh sounding, with the shrill strings that Bernie Grundman was cutting on practically every title put out by that awful label.
I fell for some of them — I actually raved about Witches’ Brew on Classic back then, an endorsement that mortifies me to this day — but most of their classical records were junk that I was selling for cheap to the audiophiles who bought into the reviews written about them in the audio mags.
In the 90s, the Decca on Speakers Corner came along and sounded fine to me. Not great, but good enough to sell if you wanted a quiet Pines for $30. It might not be fair to blame Speakers Corner for the shortcomings of their pressing, since the vintage Deccas with Maazel we’ve played have pretty much the same problems as the modern Heavy Vinyl classical LP: smeary strings and an obvious lack of depth and transparency
In 2006 we played a red seal pressing of LSC 2436 that we liked at the time, but that was on my darker and less revealing system. It would be anoher year before we started using the amazing Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System, which changed everything for us.
Around 2010 we played what we thought was a fairly good sounding London with Ansermet conducting, but by 2016 we had come to the conclusion that that recording was no longer competitive. A nice old record, but the world is full of nice old records. We had set our sights on a top quality pressing of a truly great recording with a performance to match and would settle for nothing less.
It would take us another six years of wandering in the wilderness before we finally found what we were looking for.
Cut to 2016
In 2016 we we began a serious survey of the recordings we had on hand, close to a dozen different performances I think, and found them less than satisfactory save three: this Reiner (which is still on the TAS List), a Reader’s Digest pressing with Kempe (our second favorite), and a London with Kertesz.
Distortion
If a particular performance had any distortion or limitation problems in the higher frequencies, it was quickly rejected out of hand. Same with low end whomp and weight. On these works both are crucial.
No other pieces of music we know of has so much going on up high and down low.
This narrowed the field of potential Hot Stampers considerably. Great performances by top conductors could not get over these hurdles — high and low — time and time again.
These are the main reasons it took us years to find the right recordings. We knew the Reiner would be hard to beat, but we kept trying other recordings, hoping that we could find one to wrest the crown away from what is widely considered the greatest recording of the works ever made.
We never did find something better. Our best Shaded Dog ended up winning the shootout. The best of the early RCA pressings were doing everything right. There was plenty of top end, with virtually no harmonic distortion, and when I say plenty, I mean the right amount. Not many engineers managed to get all the highs correctly onto the tape, but Lewis Layton nailed it — in 1960!
The complete story can be found here.