_Composers – Holst

Holst – Testing with Mars and Saturn

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

Mars on the first side and Saturn on the second present serious challenges to any recordings of the work you may own, especially if you own the overrated Mehta recording on the TAS List.

Generally speaking, the White Hot copies stand apart from the pack with more top end extension, and/or more lower end weight. Our notes will typically say “extended highs and lows,” and those are hard to come by, on any record.

Let’s get to the specifics of the two movements we feel are the best test for The Planets as a whole.

The War Test — Side One

War, the first movement, has the string players “bouncing” their bows upside down to create the effect you hear. It’s not fingers plucking the strings; it’s the wood of the bows bouncing on the strings. The quality of that technique is so obvious and correct sounding on the good copies and so blurry and indistinct on the bad ones that you could almost judge the whole first side by that sound alone. When it’s right it’s really right. 

And of course the players are spread out wider and the soundfield is so much more transparent when these types of sonic qualities are brought out. This bouncing bow test makes it easy to separate the better copies from the also-rans when it comes to smear, resolution, transparency and the like.

The Saturn Test — Side Two

This was the real revelation in our recent shootout (2013). We had on hand performances by Steinberg on DG, Previn and Boult on EMI, as well as Mehta and Karajan on London — well known and highly regarded Golden Age recordings one and all. (I gave up on the Solti with the London Phil years ago; that opaque later London sound just won’t cut it on the more resolving stereo we have now.) None of the above could match either the performance or the sound of Saturn on the EMI by Previn and the LSO.

The brass is so BIG and POWERFUL on EMI’s recording that other orchestras and recordings frankly pale in comparison. Until I heard one of our top EMI pressings show me brass with this kind of weight and energy, I simply had no idea it was even possible to play the work this powerfully. The lower brass comes in, builds, gaining volume and weight, then calms down, but soon returns and builds relentlessly, ever and ever louder. Eventually the trumpets break out, blasting their way forward and above the melee the heavier brass has created below.

Quite honestly I have never heard anything like it, and I heard this work performed live in late 2012! In live performance the members of the brass section, being at the back of the stage, were at least 100 feet away from me, perhaps more. When playing the best EMI pressings, the brass were right there in front of me, eight to ten feet away. This is of course unnatural and unrealistic, but that should take nothing away from the subjective power of the experience.

Only the conductor can stand at the podium, but the EMI producers and engineers (the Two Christophers in this case, Bishop and Parker) have managed to put the listener, at least in this movement, right there with him.

The EMI Sound

EMI’s are usually recorded with the aim of of producing more of a mid-hall perspective, which is somewhat distant for our taste. That’s just not our sound. We prefer the Front Row Center seats (especially at the prices we charge).

That said, when an EMI from the 70s is recorded, mastered and pressed properly, it actually sounds more like the real thing actually does, more like a live performance of orchestral music in a concert hall.

It’s uncanny how real the best copies of this record sound. For a recording of The Planets it has no equal in our experience.

The Performances

For audiophiles who love the work but are disappointed by most performances (a group that includes us to be sure), the good sound found on this copy is coupled with a superb performance. The best pressings of this record truly deserve their place on the TAS List. This 1974 release is widely considered one of the great recordings of The Planets. Previn is simply outstanding throughout. He’s not going after effects, he’s making all the pieces fit.

Of course it trounces the Mehta recording that many audiophiles, HP included, are seemingly enamored with. We certainly never have been. EMI knows how to make an orchestra sound like a seamless whole, unlike the Decca recording engineers who appear to take perverse pride in awkwardly spotlighting every section. (Was it a Phase 4 experiment gone wrong? That’s my guess.)

And the average London or Decca pressing of The Planets is lackluster, so opaque and smeary it’s barely second-rate, a fact that most audiophile record collectors have failed to appreciate since it first appeared on Harry’s Super Disc list.

VTA

Accurate VTA adjustment for classical records is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may even be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound of your classical records once you have learned to precisely adjust the VTA for each and every one of them. We heard the improvement on this record, and do pretty much on all the classical LPs we play. (All records really.) VTA is not a corner you should be cutting. Its careful adjustment is critical. Of course, so are anti-skate, azimuth and tracking weight. Our making audio progress section has a fair amount on turntable setup which might be worth checking out.

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Holst – We Call This “Blockbuster Sound”

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

More Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

This is what we here at Better Records refer to as blockbuster sound.

Even on the best copies, the recording does not sound very much like a live orchestra, nor is it trying to.

It’s trying to be huge and powerful in your home.

Which is more in line with a rock Demo Disc such as Crime of the Century or Dark Side of the Moon.

Everything has been carefully and artificially placed in the soundfield. Each instrument or group of intstruments is given its own space and (sometimes ridiculous) location.

It’s clearly not the recreation of a live orchestral event. No live concert I have ever attended sounds anything like this record.

Instead it’s the actual creation of a unique orchestral sound, with unique staging of its own design.  Lots of microphones were used, which cause instruments and sometimes whole sections of the orchestra to appear in places and take up spaces they could not possibly occupy.

If your stereo images well, with three-dimensional staging and depth, you will have no trouble hearing what we are talking about with any pressing of the album.

This is the sound that Bernard Herrmann made such wonderful use of with his series of Phase IV recordings for Decca, rather different than the four mics and two stereo channels of the Fiedler Gaite Parisienne from RCA in 1954.

Which is ironic. HP talked about The Absolute Sound of live unamplified music as being the standard, yet somehow this recording ended up in his Top Twelve all time greats. Makes no sense to me, but neither do many of the records on the TAS super disc list.

That said, our current favorite Planets is the other Planets on the TAS List, Previn’s performance for EMI.

If I were in charge of the TAS super disc list, I certainly would not have put this record on it.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as super discs.

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Do Pressings Remastered at 45 RPM Have Better Sound?

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – 45 RPM Pressings

Understanding the Fundamentals of Record Collecting

No doubt some do, but based on our admittedly limited experience, we rather doubt any of the titles shown here, or from this series, are likely to be very good sounding.

I was going to write about the awful Holst The Planets with Previn from this series that I had played a few years back, but never got around to it.

Lots of punchy, powerful and deep bass — yes, 45 RPM mastering is known for that — but the dry, overly clean, clear, modern sound and the screechy strings made me take it off the turntable halfway through the first side. (We write more about EMI and Angel pressings here.)

If you want a good sounding pressing of The Planets, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

As usual, our advice is to accept no substitutes. There are a lot of bad sounding, poorly performed Planets out there.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable, but the music is weak.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.

We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.

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The Planets on Pro-Use Japanese Vinyl at 45 RPM Is Just Awful

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

This EMI 45 RPM Japanese Import 2 LP set is considered one of the great Planets by many audiophiles, but it’s not, based on our playing of a copy we had years ago, which means it belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

The best copies on British or Dutch EMI vinyl are clearly better than this “audiophile” pressing.

What could be less surprising?

This is precisely why we dislike Japanese pressings as a rule — they sound like this audiophile trash.

Our favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.

The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile

You may have seen the following text in another listing, but it bears repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.

There has been one big change from the days when I self-identified as a freshly minted audiophile in the 70s.

Yes, the records being marketed to audiophiles these days may have second- and third-rate sound, but at least now they have good music. That’s progress, right?

The title reviewed above is a good example of the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to put up with back in the old days, long before we had anything resembling a clue.

This one clearly belongs on our list of bad audiophile records.

You might be asking: What kind of audio fool was I? to buy a dumbass record like this.

It’s a fair question. Yes, I admit I was foolish enough to buy records like this and expect it to have good music, or at least good sound. Of course it had neither. Practically none of these kinds of records ever did. Sheffield and a few others made some good ones, but most Direct to Disc recordings were crap.

As clueless as I was, even back in the day I could tell that I had just thrown my money away on this lipsticked-pig in a poke.

But I was an audiophile, and like a certain Mr. Mulder, I wanted to believe. These special super-hi-fidelity records were being made for me, for special people like me, because I had expensive equipment and regular records are never going to be good enough to play on my special equipment, right?

To say I was wrong to think about audio that way is obviously an understatement. Over the course of the last forty years, I (and to be fair, my friends and my staff) have been wrong about a lots of things in the worlds of records and audio.

You can read more about many of the things we got wrong under the heading: live and learn.

The good news? Audio progress is real and anyone who goes about doing audio the right way can achieve the equivalent of miracles.

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Holst / The Planets / Mehta

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

More Orchestral Spectaculars

  • This early London pressing of Holst’s phenomenal Magnum Opus boasts stunning sound from first note to last
  • These sides are clear, full-bodied and present, with plenty of space around the players, the unmistakable sonic hallmark of the properly mastered, properly pressed vintage analog LP
  • Vibrant orchestrations, top quality sound and scratch-free surfaces combine for an astounding listening experience of this TAS-approved recording

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Holst – The Planets / Previn

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

  • This early British EMI pressing is guaranteed to be the best copy of Holst’s Magnum Opus you have ever heard, with both sides earning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sonic grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • The vinyl on these mid-70s EMI pressings is never as quiet as we would like – with such a dynamic recordings, one with so many quiet sections, lightly ticky vinyl is unavoidable
  • Previn’s and the LSO’s performances are without peer in our estimation
  • These sides are rich, clear and dynamic, with weighty brass, and the kind of dynamic power that lifts the energy level right into space
  • A TAS List Super Disc, with a performance that’s as spectacular as the recording (thanks to the work of the two Christophers)
  • More of our favorite orchestral performances with top quality sound

These sides have some of the best sound we have ever heard for the work, and that’s saying something considering the scores of recordings we have played of this famous and famously well-loved piece.

Fortunately for audiophiles who love The Planets but are disappointed by most performances, a group that includes us to be sure, the amazing sound found on this copy is coupled with a superb performance.

As you might imagine, on a big system this would make for a powerful listening experience, which is exactly the experience we ourselves had during our recent shootout. This copy actually deserves its place on the TAS List.

Both sides earned strong grades for their powerful energy and orchestral excitement, especially from the brass section, a subject we discuss at length below. (more…)

Holst and Previn – A Planets for the Ages

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

Fortunately for audiophiles who love The Planets but are disappointed by most performances, a group that includes us to be sure, the amazing sound found on this copy is coupled with a superb performance.

As you might imagine, on a big system this would make for a powerful listening experience, which is exactly the experience we ourselves had during our recent shootout. This copy actually deserves its place on the TAS List.

The brass is so BIG and POWERFUL on EMI’s recording that other orchestras and recordings frankly pale in comparison. Until I heard one of our top EMI pressings show me brass with this kind of weight and energy, I simply had no idea it was even possible to play the work this powerfully. The lower brass comes in, builds, gaining volume and weight, then calms down, but soon returns and builds relentlessly, ever and ever louder. Eventually the trumpets break out, blasting their way forward and above the melee the heavier brass has created below.

Quite honestly I have never heard anything like it, and I heard this work performed live in late 2012! In live performance the members of the brass section, being at the back of the stage, were at least 100 feet away from me, perhaps more. When playing the best EMI pressings the brass were right there in front of me, eight to ten feet away. In a way this is of course unnatural, but that fact takes nothing away from the subjective power of the experience.

Only the conductor can stand at the podium, but the EMI producers and engineers (the two Christophers in this case) have managed to put the listener, at least in this movement, right there with him.

The EMI Sound

EMI’s are usually recorded with a mid-hall perspective, which is somewhat distant for our taste. That’s not our sound. We prefer the Front Row Center seats (especially at these prices). That said, when an EMI from the ’70s is recorded, mastered and pressed properly, it actually sounds more like the real thing, more like the live performance of orchestral music in a concert hall.

It’s uncanny how real the best copies of this record sound. For a recording of The Planets it has no equal in our experience.

Previn Vs. Mehta

This 1974 release is widely considered one of the great recordings of The Planets. Previn is simply outstanding throughout. He’s not going after effects, he’s making all the pieces fit.

Of course it trounces the Mehta recording that many audiophiles, HP included, are seemingly enamored with. We certainly never have been. EMI knows how to make an orchestra sound like a seamless whole, unlike the Decca recording engineers who appear to take perverse pride in awkwardly spotlighting every section. (Was it a Phase 4 experiment gone wrong? That’s my guess.)

And the average London or Decca pressing of The Planets is lackluster — so opaque and smeary it’s barely second-rate, a fact that audiophile record collectors have mostly failed to appreciate since it first appeared on Harry’s Super Disc list all those years ago.

Holst – A Shootout Years in the Making, and We Got It Wrong Anyway

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

This is a VERY old commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Steinberg’s 1971 recording for DG.

We did the shootout in 2008 and picked a winner, the Steinberg.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of five years later we picked a new winner, the Previn on EMI, and we have never wavered from that choice. It’s still our favorite.

In fact, the Previn gets better with every improvement we make to our system. That’s one of the ways you can be sure that it’s good: the better your system gets, the better your good records get. The inverse of that effect occurs right alongside your good records. Now your not-so-good records start to show you how not-so-good they always were. (For you fans of Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speeds, this can be painful, but we all have to go through it, so, looking on the bright side, the sooner your system can show you what’s wrong with those audiophile records, the less money you will have wasted on them.)

In July of 2005 we noted on the site that Hot Stampers for this album were discovered, and interested parties should watch the site for killer copies in the coming months. Obviously we didn’t know at the time that the number of coming months would be THIRTY TWO. That’s how long it would be before we could offer our loyal customers truly Hot Stampers, but hey, good things come to those who wait, right?

We had to wait for two things: the revolutionary cleaning techniques that we developed during that time (the heart of which is our $7000 record cleaning machine) which allowed us to get these records to sound better and play quieter, and, secondly, better equipment. 

One Long Shootout

This was one long shootout, two and a half years in the making. And I spent at least ten years before that collecting enough copies to be able to find some pattern in the stampers that clued me in as to what to look for. It was a long time coming but we expect you will find it was all worth it in the end. This music is so important and moving; it belongs in every audiophile’s collection. To get Steinberg’s version into your collection has not been easy, until now. This is the one. 

The Story from 2005

Below you will find an example of a title that will show up on the site someday (I hope): Holst’s The Planets with Steinberg and the BSO on DG. My favorite performance of all time.

But the copies you see pictured above all sound different! If you could read my post-its on the covers you would see that each of them has strengths and weaknesses. Some are quite good, some are quite awful. Some are noisy, some are quiet. Some are grainy, some are sweet, some have powerful bass, some are bass shy. They all sound different, and they all sound different in their own way.

So what we need to do now is winnow this group down to the best 4 or 5 copies, and then shoot them out. First all the side ones, then all the side twos.

This is a big job. A job that will take more than one day. I could probably spend a week playing these records. You can only do so many until fatigue sets in.

I regret to say I just haven’t felt sufficiently inspired to take on a project of this size. What will probably get me going is the next copy I pick up that really sounds good. It will make me want to hear how good it sounds compared to the other copies I like. I have 3 or 4 pretty good sounding copies in my own collection . But which is the best?

Someday I hope to find out.

And when I do I’ll be sure to let you know. It will be my pleasure. Finding really good records is a thrill. Especially when they have music like this on them.

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Holst – Can You Imagine Sound this Bad from a TAS List Super Disc?

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

We can, we played it.

Or, to be more correct, we played them. Two pressings, each with one good side and one very bad side.

This 2-pack from many years ago (ten perhaps), described below, boasts White Hot Stamper sound on side two for the Mehta Planets. Yes, it IS possible. Side two shows you what this record is actually capable of — big WHOMP, no SMEAR, super SPACIOUS, DYNAMIC, with an EXTENDED top.

It beat every London pressing we threw at it, coming out on top for our shootout. Folks, we 100% guarantee that whatever pressing you have of this performance, this copy will trounce it.

But side one of this London original British pressing was awful. We wrote it off as NFG after about a minute; that’s all we could take of the bright, hard-sounding brass of War.

If you collect Super Discs based on their catalog numbers and labels and preferred countries of manufacture, you are in big trouble when it comes time to play the damn things.

That approach doesn’t work for sound and never did.

If your stereo is any good, this is not news to you. The proof? The first disc in this 2-pack is Dutch. It earned a Super Hot grade in our blind test, beating every British copy we played against it save one. Side two however was recessed, dark and lifeless. Another NFG side, but the perfect complement to our White Hot British side two!

Hot Stampers are the only way to get this problematical recording to come to life, to convey the real power of Holst’s music. The typical copy of this record is dull, two-dimensional, smeary, veiled, opaque and compressed. If you were never impressed with the sound of HP’s favorite — a member of the Top Twelve TAS Super Disc List — this might just be the copy that will change your mind.

Our best Hot Stampers (depending on how hot they are) can show you an entirely different recording: rich, spacious, sweet, dynamic, full of ambience and orchestral detail — in short, a world of sound (no pun intended) barely hinted at by the standard import pressing.

If you would like a better sounding pressing of the work, with an even more impressive performance, our favorite recording of The Planets can be found here.

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Holst / The Planets – Proper VTA Adjustment Is Critical

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

More VTA Advice

Accurate VTA adjustment for classical records is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may even be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound of your classical records once you have learned to precisely adjust the VTA for each and every one of them. We heard the improvement on this record, and do pretty much on all the classical LPs we play. All records really.

VTA is not a corner you should be cutting. Its careful adjustment is critical. Of course, so are anti-skate, azimuth and tracking weight. The links below have a fair amount of advice on turntable setup which might be worth checking out.

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