Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now
We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:
An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.
The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.
I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)
Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score
Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.
- Present
- Rich and sweet
- Great texture and space all around
- So lively too
Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.
When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+. However, the side two of another pressing showed us there was even more presence to the sound than we’d noticed the first time around.
After calling side two a “contender,” which it obviously was, we had to add one additional line to our note about what area fell short:
- The very best is a little more present
With another copy earning a better grade for being more present, we felt the right grade for this side two was 2.5+. Close, but no cigar.
This is exactly why we do shootouts. If you really want to be able to recognize subtle (and not so subtle!) differences between pressings, you must learn to do them too.
And make sure to take notes about what you are hearing, good and bad.
To answer the question we asked in the title, we don’t know.
Triple Plus Grades
One side falling short of the full A+++ happens more often than not. One out of five records that has one shootout winning side will have a matching shootout winning other side.
The math works like this. 3+/3+ records go in this section, which currently holds 23 titles as of 5/2025. Records with at least on 3+ side go in this section, and there are 127 of those as of the same date, five times as many.
You know what’s unusual about these notes?
They’re the kind of notes we’ve never written for any Heavy Vinyl reissue, even for the one that won our shootout not long ago.
They are the kind of notes that make it clear to us what a sham the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing tends to be, even those that are done right.
