Speakers Corner -All

Speakers Corner – All Titles

Petrushka on Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stravinsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in the 90s when we were still selling Heavy Vinyl records like this Decca reissue from Speakers Corner, which was one of the better releases.

Our current favorite recording of Petrushka for both performance and sound is the one Dorati recorded for Mercury in 1960.

Sonic Grade: B (I’m guessing)

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds.

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Porgy and Bess Gets the Speakers Corner Treatment, from Sterling No Less

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

Here is how we described a recent Shootout Winning copy of Porgy and Bess.

Spacious, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, with Ella and Louis front and center, this is the sound you want to hear on their brilliant collaboration from 1958.

Two vocal giants came together to perform Gershwin’s timeless opera, revered by both music lovers and audiophiles to this day. If you’ve never heard exceptionally well recorded male and female vocals from the 50s, this is a great opportunity to have your mind blown.

Speakers Corner contracted Ryan Smith at Sterling to remaster their Heavy Vinyl pressing in 2013, which might sound like a wise move — Sterling has a good reputation around these parts, even if RKS does not — but the results were disastrous.

Or maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Our notes tell the story of the sound, and it’s not pretty. Painful is actually the word that comes to mind.

Pity our poor listening panel that had to sit through a record that sounds as bad as this one does.

(This is a four sided set but we could not see the point in playing all of them when the first two sucked so badly.)

(Technically they don’t “have to” play these Heavy Vinyl pressings. We don’t force our talented staff to waste their time on modern records. They do it because they choose to, in order to have a better idea of what the competition is up to. Turns out the competition is up to no good.)

Our two sentence review should tell you everything you need to know. Let us hope it saves you from throwing your money away the way we did.

  • Loud, dry and pinched.
  • Hot vocals, no space, very sour and lacking bass.

When the voice is wrong, the sound is wrong. What more do you need to know?

And when the voice is wrong on a legendary recording such as this, you have a worthless piece of vinyl no matter how much you may have paid for it. (Current price on Discogs: about a hundred bucks.)

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Speakers Corner Has a “Winner” in Espana

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

One of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the 90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

This is a Speakers Corner Decca 180 gram LP reissue of the famous Argenta performance, a recording which can sound positively amazing on the right original London, but only about 2 out of 10 copies actually do sound amazing.

And where in the world are you going to find 10 clean copies of a record that’s almost 40 years old?

This pressing gets you most of the way there, on reasonably quiet vinyl, for a lot less money.

UPDATE 2025

This Speakers Corner title may be good, but our Hot Stamper classical and orchestral pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short in our experience.  For more on that subject, see here and here.

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Grieg / Piano Concerto – Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

We used to think this was one of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

One of the best Deccas — superb sound and music that belongs in your life!

This performance also includes Franck’s “Variations Symphoniques” and Litolff”s “Scherzo from Concerto Symphonique, Op. 102”.

Our two favorite recordings of the Grieg Piano Concerto are the Decca with Lupu and Previn from 1973 and Rubinstein’s for RCA in 1962.

This Speakers Corner title may be good, but our Hot Stamper classical and orchestral pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short in our experience.  For more on that subject, see here and here.

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Al Di Meola et al. on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Di Meola Available Now

Sonic Grade: D?

The Speakers Corner remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing of this famous jazz album had two big strikes against it right from the get go. The sound is both congested and hard.

With these guys hell-bent on one-upping each other right off of the stage, even our best Hot Stamper pressings struggle with clarity, transparency and harmonic sweetness

Do you really want to add all the problems of the modern remastered heavy vinyl pressing to a tape that already has plenty of problems to start with?

Congested and hard is the kind of sound Speakers Corner should be quite familiar with by now. You can hear it on plenty of their mostly mediocre-at-best pressings.

Sourced from a digital tape of the master? Maybe, but who cares what tape was used to make this dog?

It’s a loser and should be avoided at any price.

Our Hot Stamper pressings of this album will be dramatically more transparent, open, harmonically-correct, resolving of musical information, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are the most obvious areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short, if our experience with hundreds of them over the last few decades counts for anything.

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In the Land of Hi-Fi – A Very Good Speakers Corner Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cannonball Adderley Available Now

Soon after the album was released in 2000, we wrote the following short review (three words!) in our catalog:

“Outstanding! Top recommendation!”

Ten years or so later, we added this caveat:

A fairly good Speakers Corner jazz album. Hard to know what we would think of this pressing today, but for the thirty bucks you might pay for it, it’s probably worth a listen. 

Well, we recently got one in and gave it that listen. Shockingly, it has held up fairly well for a Heavy Vinyl pressing.

With the mono switch out (inactive) on the EAR 324P, we noted:

Big, loose bass.

Horns are rich and nice but veiled.

With the mono switch in (active), the sound is a bit less veiled but not too different.

It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with a grade of 1.5+, it might qualify for our good, not great sounding LPs section, depending on how side two sounds. We didn’t play side two because 1.5+ is not a grade that makes us want to put any more time into it. It’s our lowest Hot Stamper grade, and it barely qualified for it, meaning there is a good chance that the next one could be 1+ and not worth anybody’s trouble.

The right vintage pressings are a big step up in class sonically, but boy are they hard to find in clean condition. We’ve tried for years and don’t have much to show for our efforts yet.

At a cheap price it’s not a bad record, depending on how you feel about the midrange being veiled.

I can’t stand that sound myself, but since a very large percentage of Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve auditioned over the years have suffered from that problem to one degree or another, I guess other music lovers and audiophiles feel differently. (This link will take you to some of the other records we’ve reviewed with veiled sound.)

The average copy on Discogs sells for $29.10. That seems like a decent price for a decent-sounding record.

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You Say the Budget Stereo Treasury Has Better Sound than the Speakers Corner?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Borodin Available Now

The Borodin album you see pictured is a decent enough Speakers Corner Decca repress.

The Heavy Vinyl reissue of this title is not bad, but like a number of reissues, it lacks the bottom end weight found on the early London pressings.

(Classic Records pressings rarely had that problem. Just the opposite in fact. The bass was boosted most of the time, especially the deep bass, but for some reason the lower strings are never rich the way the best vintage pressings can be.)

I remember this Speakers Corner pressing being a little flat and bright.

Since I haven’t played it in years, there is some chance that I could be wrong. I have never had trouble admitting to the possibility, a fact that makes us practically unique in the world of audiophile reviewers.

The glorious sound I hear on the best London pressings is simply not the kind of thing I hear on 180 gram records by Speakers Corner, or anybody else for that matter.

They do a good job some of the time, but none of their records can compete with a vintage pressing when that vintage pressing is mastered and pressed properly. 

The best pressings of this UK London Stereo Treasury from the Seventies will beat the pants off of it. That ought to tell you something, right?

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Heavy Vinyl Super Discs – “Nobody should have to listen to sound like that.”

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

This entry links up a few of the commentaries I wrote as I went back through the Classic catalog, comparing their pressings to both originals and reissues.

We take to task Classic Records, The Absolute Sound, and Chesky, as you will see below.

This commentary was written in 2005, prompted at the time by a rave review in TAS for one of the new Speakers Corners Mercury reissues. I detested the sound of the first one I heard, and subsequent releases only confirmed that the mastering of the Mercury catalog for Speakers Corner was an abomination — an affront, in my none-too-humble opinion, to all right-thinking audiophiles.

As for my commentary, it should be obvious that these awful remastering labels have not gone out of business, but instead have prospered, making millions of dollars from audiophiles eager to lay down their hard earned money for one Heavy Vinyl pressing after another, often of the same title even.

When Harry Pearson — of all people! This is the guy who started the Living Stereo craze by putting those forgotten old records on the TAS list in the first place — gave a rave review to the Classic Records reissue of LSC 1806, I had to stand up (in print anyway) and say that the emperor clearly had removed all his clothing, if he ever had any to begin with. (And now he has a CD List? Ugh.)

This got me kicked out of TAS by the way, as Harry does not take criticism well. I make a lot of enemies in this business with my commentary and reviews, but I see no way to avoid the fallout for calling a spade a spade.

Is anybody insane enough to stand up for LSC 1806 today?

Considering that there is a die-hard contingent of people who still think Mobile Fidelity is the greatest label of all time, there may well be “audiophiles” with substandard audio equipment or weakened powers of observation and discrimination, or both (probably both, as the two go hand in hand), that still find the sound of that steely stringed Classic pressing somehow pleasing to the ear. Hey, anything is possible.

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This Pines Of Rome Is Yet Another Mediocre Speakers Corner Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Pines of Rome Available Now

We were only slightly impressed with this Speakers Corner pressing of Maazel conducting The Cleveland Orchestra, writing at the time:

The famous TAS List recording. Very good sound. You can do better but it’s not easy. This work is just too difficult to record.

Mostly true. Not sure about very good sound but difficult to record is spot on.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

The Speakers Corner pressing earned something like a “B’ grade from us, which makes it one of the better releases on that label. (I would guess that one or two out of ten would rate a “B.” I also don’t know of any record of theirs that rates a higher grade than “B.”)

It’s overly rich, a case of being too fat in the mid-bass, but otherwise it mostly sounds right.

As you may already know, we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl pressings of any kind in 2011.

By then, the quality of our playback and record cleaning had improved to the point that even the best Heavy Vinyl LPs were no longer competitive with the vintage vinyl we were then offering as Hot Stamper pressings.

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