Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
When it comes to the Scythian Suite, we’ve decided that there is no good reason to put the Ansermet recordings in our shootouts anymore.
Don’t get me wrong. They are perfectly good records, but the Abbado is a step up both in performance and sound. Our main listening guy summed up the differences of the two recordings this way.
- I prefer the DG version (2530 967) for sound and performance.
- The London is very rich and lively but the big drums on the DG are killer, hard to beat!
So, out of the goodness of our hearts, we can now reveal the Shootout Winning stampers: 1W/1W.
However, in the case of CS-6538, knowing the right stampers is not going to get you very far.
You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.
Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least six copies the way we did.
Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering credits or country of origin.
As we have been saying for more than twenty years, about title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely do they sound the same.
Further Reading