*Live and Learn

Here we discuss the records we think we got, uh, wrong.

It’s not really a problem for us though. We feel no need to cover up our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting previous errors is how we’ve managed to learn so much about records that no one else seems to know.

Gaining knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is always slow, incremental and riddled with errors and bad judgments.

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

By playing the records grouped here, under rigorously controlled conditions, on top quality equipment, we found out just how much better or worse they are than are we thought.

The Bloated Cello Sound Some Find Appealing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We made a crack about the Starker Mercury recordings below which we gernerally no longer agree with, although I am sure there are some pressings which have bloated sound. Those are the ones that don’t win shootouts.

On this pressing we were a bit surprised at how natural the cello sounded — more like the real instrument and less like the typical recording of it. 

Normally when recording the cello, the microphones are placed fairly close to the instrument. This often results in what’s known as the “proximity effect,” which simply describes a boost in the lower frequencies relative to the more linear response of the microphone when placed at a distance.

The famous Starker cello recordings on Mercury — you know the ones, the originals and even the reissues sell for hundreds and hundreds of dollars — suffer from this effect, which audiophiles seem to prefer. (The Mercury heavy vinyl reissues, at least the ones I’ve played, were ridiculously fat and bloated in the bottom.)

Audiophiles did not seem to mind much, judging by the apparently strong sales and the rave reviews I read. Bass shy systems, and that means most of the systems owned by audiophiles, probably benefited from the bass boost.

Systems with lots of large woofers — at least in our case — would of course make the sound of these pressings positively unbearable. That indeed was our experience.

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Time Out Is a Classic Case of Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

When we did a shootout for this album way back in October of 2007, we took the opportunity to play the Classic Records 200 gram pressing. Maybe we got a bad one, who knows, but that record did not sound remotely as good as the real thing. (6 eye or 360, both can be quite good. Skip the Red Label ’70s reissues.)

The piano sounded thin and hard, which was quite unexpected given the fact that we used to consider the Classic LP one of their few winners and actually recommended it. Another example of we was wrong.

As we said in our shootout: “We dropped the needle on the Classic reissue to see how it stacked up against a serious pressing. Suffice it to say, the real Time Out magic isn’t going to be found on any heavy vinyl reissue!”

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, I would not have put this record on it.

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Are You a Soundphile? I Used to Be One

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

About 30 years ago I got hold of a Japanese pressing of Marriner conducting Haydn’s Toy Symphony and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and was blown away by the absolutely phenomenal quality of the Haydn. Listing the record for sale, I raved:

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is the best sounding Toy Symphony you will ever hear!

…all the little toys that play along with the music just JUMP out of the speakers. The recording is so transparent and the toys are so well miked it’s like hearing the work for the first time, or live.

Now we know definitively that this is clearly not true, assuming yoy have one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the EMI original. They are better in every way than the Japanese pressing, which is the one purporting to have audiophile sound.

If this sounds familiar to you, I’m guessing this is not your first visit to the blog or our site. There is almost always a vintage pressing with superior sound when compared to the audiophile pressings made from the same recording.

The problem is: You just don’t know which vintage pressing will have superior sound. Maybe they all will. Maybe none of the copies you own will. There is one, but how do you find it?

In order to get that answer, you have to know how to do carefully controlled shootouts, and not just once, but more often than not a number of them over a period of years. Whatever answer you may come up will most likely be provisional, not definitve, because that’s the only way the process of discovery can work when applying scientific methodologies to the solution of a problem like “which pressings sound best on record X?”.

We did the shootout in 2022 and found out that the best of the original EMI pressings are quite a bit better, a classic case of live and learn, as well as one of the hundreds of breakthrough discoveries we’ve made over the years. That’s what happens when you are in the business of playing records and then selling the best of them to audiophiles looking for superior sound.

I believe I had at least one or two UK EMI pressings to play against the Japanese ones, but all the details of how I came to this conclusion — a proto-shootout, carried out long before I knew how to do a real one — are lost to the mists of time.

Keep in mind that my stereo was dramatically less revealing back then. Also I had not learned how to clean records properly. Those two facts, combined with the underdeveloped listening skills that go with them, helped me to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

No, the Japanese pressing, specifically targeted to audiophiles, or “soundphiles” if you like, is not superior to a properly mastered and pressed UK LP.

If you have more than a handful of Japanese pressings in your collection, you can be sure that there is still plenty of room for improvement in your audio system.

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Are the Strauss Waltzes on the TAS List Any Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The original, favorable review for this album you see further down is from at least ten years ago and probably more like fifteen.

When we revisited the copies we had of this title more recently, we felt the sound was badly lacking in many ways, with no real extension up top nor much weight to the bottom, the very definition of boxy sound.

Many of the vintage classical records we audition these days have sound that we liked well enough in the past but now no longer meet our standards.

Those pressings might sound fine on an old school stereo (or its modern equivalent), but we have something very different to play our records on, courtesy of the many revolutionary changes in audio that have dramatically altered the quality of analog playback over the last twenty five years.

We much prefer Boskovsky’s performances for Decca for waltzes and the like, by Strauss or anyone else.

TAS List Thoughts

We wanted to like the record, it’s on the TAS List for cryin’ out loud, shouldn’t it at least be pretty good?

It very well may be amazingly good, we can’t say it is or it isn’t. In order to be more sure of our opinion, we would need a great deal more data to back it up. We would need to have a large number of copies on hand, clean them all and play them in order to make it possible to find the killer stamper that may be hiding in the pile, assuming one might be.

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What to Listen For on Queen’s The Game

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we wrote:

The best sounding side ones were rarely as good as the best sounding side twos.

Not sure if that’s still true but you can check your own copy and see how the two sides compare.

Here some other records that often display side to side differences.

Our Old Commentary

Even the good side ones tended to have a trace of harmonic distortion and compression that is simply nowhere to be found on the good side twos. How and why this is we have no idea. Since every copy had the same sonic issues, we discounted it in our grading.

Only the better copies bring the hits on side one to life and give them the size and power we know they can have.

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Five Major Problem Areas in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

There was a time, perhaps ten years ago, that many EMI pressings finally started to sound a lot better to us than they had in the early- to mid-2000s when this commentary was written.

(2007 was the year everything changed, but it wasn’t 2007 yet. After being deep into audio for close to thirty years, it wasn’t until a few years later that we learned we still had a long way to go.)

Nowadays we can say that we are proud to offer some truly outstanding recordings conducted by Previn, Fremaux and others for EMI.

What to listen for on this album?

That’s easy: The all-too-common 70s EMI harshness and shrillness.

We could never understand why audiophiles revered EMI the way they did back in the 70s. Harry Pearson loved many of their recordings, but I sure didn’t. 

The longer I stay in this hobby, the more clear it becomes that many of the records on the TAS list are better suited to the old school audio equipment of the 60s rather than the modern approach to audio that is possible today thanks to the many revolutionary changes to every aspect of music reproduction that have come along in the last thirty years or so.

(Obviously there are plenty of audio systems from every era that, for all appearances, seem unlikely to reproduce music well, which goes a long way in explaining most of the rampant enthusiasm for the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.)

These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s. Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.

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Clarity Has a Price

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Many years ago we were impressed with the sound of some of the later pressings of Sergio’s albums.

It turns out that we were wrong about those later pressings being better than the early ones, which are the ones we tend to like these days, mostly because our all tube system from the 90s was much darker and dramatically less resolving than the one we use now.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, there was still a long way to go and hundreds of more records to play before we could call our system reasonably accurate. Discovering this cartridge and learning how to tweak it — using the right records — took our playback to a level we had never imagined it could go.

That was about twenty years ago. Before then I was lost as lost could be, something I recognize in my fellow hobbyists, especially the ones who write about records as if it were 1982.

Here is what we liked about the reissues in the 80s and 90s.

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Falla / Three-Cornered Hat – We Changed Our Minds

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Falla Available Now

In our review from 2010, we wrote:

Falla’s Three Cornered Hat is positively WONDERFUL on this copy (A++), and the Sinfonia Sevillana by Turina on side two is every bit as good. The second suite on side one is particularly lovely — check out how rich and full the sound is.

Side two has a HUGE soundstage, as wide as they come. The sound is very rich and full of audiophile colors — this is the kind of record that you’re going to love playing for your audio pals!  

Argenta brings the authentic Spanish flavor out in these works. Like so many audiophile reviewers have over the years, you may find these performances definitive.

The strings on the first side are a bit dry to start, like the sound many of you will recognize from Mercury’s classical records. Still, there’s much to like about the sound and you’ll have a very hard time finding a copy that’s any better. Most pressings do not have such an extended top end, and that quality here really brings this music to life.

UPDATE 2025

We played a copy of CS 6050 not long ago and were not at all pleased with the sound. You can read more about it here.

An orchestral record with dry strings? Not our idea of good sound.

But who else reviewing records these days even notices these kinds of things?

The De Burgos performance for EMI in 1964 and the Ansermet for Decca from 1961 (CS 6224) are both better recordings and our two current favorites, with the Ansermet getting the nod due to its wonderful energy and exciting performance.

There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performances with the highest quality sound. Both are  deserving of a place on that list.

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Making More Progress in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The story of our recent shootout is what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.

Courtesy of countless revolutions in audio. (In other words, this list is far from complete.)

In our previous listings we noted:

This is one of those odd records in which the variation in sound quality from track to track is dramatic. Take the first two tracks on side one — they suck. They sound like your average LSP Mancini album, the kind I have suffered through far too many times. And that means bad bad bad. 

But track three boasts DEMO DISC QUALITY SOUND and the next one is nearly as good. Listen to that wonderful glockenspiel. It sound every bit as magical as anything on Bang, Baa-room and Harp, and that’s some pretty magical sound in my book!

Same thing happens on side two. Bad sound for the first tracks, then track four sounds great, followed by a pretty good five and a lovely six with a chorus of voices to die for. Go figure.

Is there a copy that sounds good from start to finish? Doubtful.

We’ve made a dozen or more improvements to the system since we last did this shootout, and I’m happy to report that most of the tracks we had trouble with in the past are now sounding very good indeed. Of course the better tracks we noted from years ago are even better, making this a consistently good sounding Mancini record.

One obvious change from the old days is that we now spend a fair amount of time honing in the VTA for every title. That may account for the fact that the first track on side one, which used to be problematical, now sounds wonderful. The value of getting the correct VTA setting — by ear, for every record — cannot be overestimated in our opinion.

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What to Listen For on Ancient Dances and Airs for Lute

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2024

In 2024 I would no longer agree with what I wrote below about Mercury being inferior to London and RCA. Many Mercury pressings are amazing, now that we can reproduce them with greater fidelity.

Here are some of the best we’ve heard, and we hope to be able to highlight the sonic strengths of many more in the future.

The complete list of amazing sounding orchestral pressings for which we have posted our shootout notes can be found here.

When we listed this Mercury back in 2010 or so we still had a lot to learn, and we don’t mind admitting it.

Both sides of this TAS List early Colorback RFR copy of Ancient Airs and Dances have Hot Stamper sound, so much richer and sweeter and less strident than the typical copy you might find.

I must admit the Mercury approach to sound has not worn as well as I might have hoped. When it comes to the Big Three from the Golden Age, these days we prefer London, followed by RCA, then Mercury.

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