Classical LPs to Improve Your Playback

This Carmen Ballet Is a Great Test Disc for Shrill, Gritty Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

I’ve added some tubes-versus-transistors commentary at the bottom of this posting.

This Angel Melodiya pressing of Bizet’s Carmen, rearranged by Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin for strings and 47 percussion instruments, has two incredible sides. Demo Quality Sound barely begins to do it justice. If you have the system to play it, this copy is a KNOCKOUT.

But boy is it a difficult record to reproduce. You better have everything working right when you play this one — it’s guaranteed to bring practically any audiophile system to its knees.

Speed, resolving power and freedom from distortion are what this record needs to sound its best.

Is your system up to it? There’s only one way to find out.

And if you have any peaky audiophile wire in your system, the kind that is full of detail but calls attention to itself, you are in big trouble with a record like this.

More than anything, this is a record that rewards your system’s neutrality.

Testing

This is a superb Demonstration Disc, but it is also an excellent Test Disc. The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce.

Musicians are banging on so many different percussion instruments (often at the far back of the stage, or, even better, far back and left or right) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge — and when you’ve met it, a thrill. If you’ve done your homework, this is the kind of record that can show you what you’ve accomplished.

On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly gritty as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem.

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Rich, Rosiny Lower Strings in Living Stereo Like These Are to Die For

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Franz Liszt Available Now

Find me a modern record with rich, rosiny lower strings and I will eat it.

And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. No one alive today can make a record that sounds as good as this one.

To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have fully grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: head to head they are simply not competitive.

After twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples, both the boutique and major labels of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful and lifelike as this RCA from the old days. 

Fortunately for record lovers and record collectors alike, we here at Better Records are not trying to make a record sound the way these sides do.

Our job is much easier than that. We’re just trying to find ones that do. When we find sides as good sounding as these, we call them Hot Stampers and charge a lot of money for them.

But you get what you pay for when you buy a record from us. And if you disagree, for any reason, you get your money back.

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Compression Works Its Magic on The Christmas Eve Suite

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Some notes about the compression effects we heard on side two of a Blueback pressing of The Christmas Eve Suite album back in 2012. We wrote:

Side two is even more transparent and high-rez than side one. The texture on the strings and the breathy quality of the woodwinds make this a very special pressing indeed.

The horns are somewhat smeary and do get a bit congested when loud.

There is more compression on this side two than there was on the best copy we played, and that means low level detail is superb, but louder parts, such as when the more powerful brass instruments come in, can present problems.

Note how good The Flight of the Bumble Bee sounds here.

Compression is helping bring out all the ambience and detail in the recording, and there’s no downside because the orchestra is playing softly, unlike the piece that precedes it.

A classic case of compression having sonic tradeoffs.

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Azimuth – A Little Can Make a Lot of Difference

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining what the aim of his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with higher fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting. He recently spent some time with our favorite recording of the Beethoven First Piano Concerto, and needless to say, he’s glad he did.

AZIMUTH: A LITTLE Can Make A LOT of Difference!

You may enjoy our piece on azimuth and other aspects of turntable setup in this posting from many years ago.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

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Borodin’s Symphonies – Phenomenal Richness in the Lower Registers

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Borodin Available Now

This commentary was written way back in 2005. Still holds up though.

The Borodin title you see pictured has demonstration quality orchestral sound of the highest order.

The performance by Ansermet is definitive, IMHO, and this recording ranks in the Top Ten Decca/ Londons we’ve ever played.

The powerful lower strings and brass are gorgeous. Ansermet and the Suisse Romande get that sound better than any performers I know. You will see my raves on record after record of theirs produced in this era.

No doubt the wonderful hall they record in is the key. One can assume Decca engineers use similar techniques for their recordings regardless of the artists involved. The only real variable should be the hall.

Ansermet’s recordings with the Suisse Romande have a richness in the lower registers that is almost unrivaled in my experience.

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The Planets – Testing with Mars and Saturn

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

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

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The Carmen Ballet – As Tough a Test Disc As Any We Know

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

If I had only one record to bring to someone’s house in order to evaluate their equipment, a killer copy of this Bizet-Shchedrin record would certainly be at the top of my list. (Here are some others.)

If you can make this record sound the way it should, your stereo is cookin’.

If you are having problems, this record will show them to you in short order.

Many copies are bright in the upper-midrange, sounding as nasally and artificial as a bad Mercury or London. Many lack weight down low. The lower strings and heavier percussion play a crucial role in balancing out the upper strings and lighter percussion, so without enough going on down low, the sound skews upwards in an artificial way.

If your copy has either of these problems don’t use it to set up or tweak anything in your system.

Use one of our Hot Stampers, the hotter the better.

The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce. Musicians are banging on so many different percussive devices (often at the back of the stage, exactly where they should be) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge. And when you’ve met it, a thrill.

If you’ve done your homework with VTA, Azimuth, Anti-Skate and Tracking Weight, this is the record that will make clear just how much you’ve accomplished.

The recording has tremendous transients and dynamics. Be prepared to have trouble tracking it. In that respect it’s a prime candidate for table, cartridge and system tweaking.

If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound.

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Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, resulting in an overall thinning of the sound and lower strings that get washed out.

On some sides of some copies of some titles the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage tube equipment, or modern equipment that is trying to mimic the sound of vintage tubes, you never have to worry that the strings on your London orchestral recordings will sound too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is, from our point of view, a dead end.

If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the much more common second- and third-rate pressings that often look identical to them.

If you have this kind of audio firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get from the electronic overkill you see.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but create a barrier between you and the music you love.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life (and was perfectly happy with myself before the early 2000s.)

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On This Recording of Concerto No. 1, Transparency and Piano Weight Are Key

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

Notes from a recent shootout.

This pressing has the real Living Stereo magic in spades, but unlike most of the RCA concerto recordings, Richter, the brilliant soloist featured here, is not overly spotlighted, hence the much more immersive “concert hall” sound.

The piano is part of the orchestra, and properly sized, allowing the contributions of the other musicians in the orchestra to be heard more clearly, laid out as they are elegantly across a huge and deep Boston Symphony Hall stage.

All of which adds up to a top quality piano concerto recording in every way.

When it comes to clarity in orchestral music, there is nothing that comes close to the sound of a live performance.

However, some records, this one especially, give you the sense that you are hearing it all.

Audio may be an illusion but it can be a very convincing one.

The spaciousness and three-dimensionality of the recording are also exceptional. Through the efforts and skill of the RCA engineers, that striking openness in the recording is somehow combined with an electrifying immediacy in the sound of the piano, no mean feat. One rarely hears both, except of course live (and not always even then).

There may be other performances of merit, but I know of no recording of this music with better sound. If you are demonstrating naturalistic sound, not bombastic Hi-Fi spectacularity, this pressing more than qualifies as a DEMO DISC.

What to Listen For

What typically separates the killer copies from the merely good ones are qualities that we often look for in the records we play: transparency. Transparency allows you to hear into the recording, reproducing the ambience and subtle musical cues and details that high-resolution analog is known for.

(Note that most Heavy Vinyl pressings being produced these days seem to be seriously Transparency Challenged. Lots of important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate standard-weight pressings — is simply not to be found.)

Solid weighty sound for a piano concerto recording is critically important as well. The piano has to be big, powerful, and solid, as massive as a boulder, just the way it can be in the concert hall. In this respect it helps to have Sviatoslav Richter pounding away on the instrument of course.

Side One

Amazing – big and rich without a touch of smear on the strings or the percussive piano. The piano is right sized and that is unusual indeed in our experience.

Dynamic as all get out, with lively horns and a piano that is clear and present. Tonally correct, in a big hall, the sound is Hard To Fault.

The piano is so clear, yet the orchestra is as rich and smooth as one could possibly ask for. No smear, no congestion, no bandwidth limitations – this is the sound of the master tape. No modern reissue — digital or analog — will ever be able to reproduce more than a fraction of the sound found on this pressing.

Side Two

Big, lively and less congested that most of the copies we played. Side one had no smear, this side has a touch, but the sound is wonderful nevertheless.

Listen to the woodwinds on this side; they are glorious. You will have a hard time finding better sound for that section of the orchestra on other recordings.

A Simple Listening Test Makes It Easy to Judge Pressings of Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 2446, as well as the Analogue Productions version from 2013 (the original 33 is the only one I have played, mastered by Ryan Smith at Sterling), are, for many reasons, both disasters, but they do have one specific failing that we had no trouble recognizing.

We feel both pressings are worth further discussion and analysis because they both provide an easy test that can show you, dear reader, how wrong they are in one easily identifiable respect.

When reading the commentary below, keep in mind that what is bad about the Classic Records reissue from 1995 is precisely what is bad about the Analogue Productions remaster put out many years later.

As I noted for some of the Classic Heifetz titles a while back, for all I know the CDs for his Living Stereo recordings may have better sound. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s rather poor track record regarding the remastering of his music.

Case in point: The Living Stereo CDs I own (both the CD and the SACD) of Scheherazade are dramatically better than the awful Classic Records pressing of it.

Audiophiles who don’t notice what is wrong with the Classic pressing need to get hold of a nice RCA White Dog pressing to see just how poorly the Classic stacks up. (They could even find one that’s not so nice and listen through the surface noise. The difference would still be obvious.)

UPDATE 2025

It has been many years since a White Dog pressing won a shootout. In our last listing for a Hot Stamper White Dog pressing in 2024, we noted:

Now that we know which stampers have the potential to win our shootouts, the right Shaded Dog originals have lately been coming out on top, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good, just not as good.

No White Dog earned a higher grade than 2+, and none of the three WD pressings we had on hand earned 2+ on both sides.

Our notes for the various sides of the WD pressings read: “a bit brash, sometimes squawky, dry and bright,” and the like.

Those of you looking for the best sound should stick to the Shaded Dog label originals. They are rich and lush in a way that the WD reissues in our experience never are. I used to swear by the WD reissues, but I see now how wrong I was. My judgments were colored by a darker, less revealing stereo than the one we use now, and that makes all the difference in the world.

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