_Composers – Rachmaninoff

Speakers Corner Mucks Up a Classic Mercury, Part Two

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

For some background, in 2005 we were still selling Heavy Vinyl. We were fans of DCC and Cisco and carried many of the Speakers Corner remasters.

But things were starting to look grim. With every improvement to our playback system, these modern reissues seem to be falling further and further behind.

In the late-’90s, Classic had released some Mercury titles which we’d auditioned and disliked immensely. In 2005 it was Speakers Corner’s turn to have at the Mercury catalog, and they went a different way, finding a “new sound” for the legendary recordings, completely unlike any vintage pressing we’d ever heard.

This was very upsetting. I felt the need to say something.

By 2007 it was clear that Heavy Vinyl was a lost cause and had no business being sold by any audiophile record dealer who cared about sound quality, most especially me. And that was the end of it. This Mercury was one of the records that helped me see the error of my ways.

Part 1 of this discussion of Speakers Corner’s Mercury Series can be found here.

A blog entry on the site from 2005 about the new Mercury reissue series that was coming out noted that:

I am expecting the new Rach 3rd (90283) later this week, and will report my findings as soon as I have a had a chance to evaluate it.

[A few weeks later I followed up with this:]

The news on 90283 is here. It came today. Are you ready? In one sentence:

The most opaque, dull and lifeless 180 gram reissue in the history of the world.

My blog entry from 2005 continues below, transcribed practically word for word.

I hope it’s becoming clear to people now that this series is an enormous fraud perpetrated against all right thinking (right listening?) audiophiles. I can’t imagine a worse sounding record. It makes the most opaque ’70s Phillips or London LP sound positively transparent next to this thick piece of crap. I pulled out my late label copy, far from the best sounding pressing I’ve ever heard, and it killed the new version. The trumpets sound like they’re playing from under a pile of blankets on this 180 gram LP. The sound is so bad it defies understanding.

And the sad thing, in some ways the saddest aspect of this very sad affair, is that I can safely predict right now, with absolutely no fear of being proved wrong, that every major record dealer will rave about it. Mark my words. Every one. Except me of course. But I’m not one of the majors. Thank god I don’t have to sell crap like this to make a living.

And every audiophile who reads a rave review in a dealer’s catalog or on a website should take it for precisely what it is: a naked grab for his money, nothing more, nothing less. It’s all about the money. It’s not about the sound. It’s not about the music. It’s just about money.

Any record dealer who would stoop low enough to take money for a record this bad is telling you something very important about his business: he either can’t tell a good record from a bad one, or he doesn’t care. Either one would make me take my business elsewhere. How do these guys stay in business? (Maybe the fact that most of their catalogs are now given over to equipment explains it.)

And you should be outraged at this kind of fraud. If you give money to retailers who so obviously have nothing but contempt for you, you share in the blame. You’re keeping these guys in business. It makes me think of the scene in Network where Howard the veteran newscaster talks directly to his audience:

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

After playing this new Mercury, I was filled with questions.

What is to become of the record business?

Do we really need records that sound worse than the worse sounding CDs, at twice the price?

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On This Rachmaninoff Title, the Right Reissues Clearly Have the Best Sound

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

Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.

Well, now we know.

The earliest Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we offer.

We never offered the record in Hot Stamper form because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.

Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.

Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.

Did Harry have a good later pressing?

Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did?

Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.

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Rachmaninoff / Concerto No. 3 / Janis – Wrong Again?

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

In 2007 we raved about this title:

Outstanding! Sounds just like the already very good shaded dog, in many ways better. (I don’t have that one around to compare anymore but this LP has that same natural, smooth sound, while being cut a bit cleaner.) 

We have two copies of this Victrola, both with the same stamper numbers, and this is definitely the better of the two sonically. It has more presence, more transparency and better dynamics.

In preparation for our latest big shootout, we decided to give the Victrola another listen, and the one copy we had on hand was not impressive to say the least. It was dark, thin and flat.

Three strikes and it was out. Seems as though we were wrong.

Did we have better copies in 2007? Perhaps.

Our advice: skip it. If you do buy one, buy it for cheap.

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Rachmaninoff / The Complete Piano Concertos – Wild / Horenstein

More of the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff

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  • An excellent copy of this wonderful original 4 LP Box Set with roughly Double Plus (A++) orchestral sound across these 8 magical sides
  • The vinyl is as quiet as we can find it – like most Shaded Dogs and Mercs, Mint Minus Minus is about the best you can hope for
  • We have been readying this shootout for probably twenty years – we had 8 box sets to play, 32 discs in all, searching for the best sound we could find on these famous TAS List records
  • There is not much chance we will be able to do such a comprehensive shootout in the near future — we find at most one nice set per year, which means the next big shootout is a very long way off
  • Wild’s playing of the Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini here is one of our favorites on vinyl
  • Some old record collectors (like me) say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be – here’s all the proof anyone with two working ears and top quality audiophile equipment needs to make the case
  • “Rachmaninoff’s music . . . changes as the composer goes along, moving from Romantic to a tentative Modernism in such works as the fourth piano concerto and the Symphonic Dances. In this sense, he walks a path similar to Puccini’s, incorporating new approaches to extend that [which was] already essentially his. Certainly, the works here show these changes, as the composer picks up more experience, both in writing and in hearing music.”

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Rachmaninoff / Favorite Classics for Piano / Pennario

More of the music of Franz Liszt (1811-1880)

More Classical ‘Sleeper” Records We’ve Discovered

We found White Hot Stamper sound on side two of this solo piano recording.

It’s big, rich and above all REAL sounding, with natural studio space. The legendary soloist Leonard Pennario is presented here at the height of his powers.

Superb choice of material, from Clair De Lune to Liebestraum to the Hungarian Rhapsody No . 2.

On the rare Stereo pressing of course — we want to hear all that studio space reproduced, just as your two ears would have heard it (more or less).

Side One

Graded Super Hot for the huge, solid-sounding piano, played with such verve and skill. The musical power on this side is stupendous. 

Side Two

Even better! No smear, with incredible clarity, and no sacrifice in weight or richness.

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

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Rachmaninoff / Piano Concerto No. 3 – Years Ago We Liked a Mono Pressing

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

CBFR-1/CBFR-2. This Mono pressing sounds SUPERB, much smoother and more natural than I remember the Stereo pressings sounding. What’s interesting about these Monos is they’re not mastered by Robert Fine. They are mastered by someone with the initials J.J., who apparently does all the Mono mastering. The reason Mercury Monos can sound as good as they do is because they have their own separate microphone feed and their own separate Mono tape recorder dedicated all to themselves. (London did the same thing and that’s why so many London Monos are amazing sounding.)

I don’t think you can find a better sounding Rachmaninoff 3rd on Mercury than this one. 

[UPDATE: Of course we no longer agree with that.  The best stereo copies are in an entirely different league. The mono can be good, but it cannot be great in the way the stereo pressings can be.] (more…)

Rachmaninoff / Piano Concerto No. 2 on Domestic STS – Would It Still Hold Up?

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff

This is a twenty year old review of a pressing we have not played in many years, so please take what we say with a very large grain of salt.

Beating that in mind, if you see one for cheap in your local record store, give it a good look and, for the five bucks they will probably be asking, take a chance to see if the record actually does have the sound we heard all those years ago.

Folks, what we are offering here is THE SLEEPER Hot Stamper pressing of all time. Side one earned an amazingly good grade of A++ with side two every bit as good. The buyer of this album is going to be SHOCKED when he sees what pressing it is. 

For those of you who cherish pressings for their best sound and performances — as opposed to the typical audiophile collector who prefers the “right” original labels on his records, of course produced only in the “right” countries — this is the record for you.

Hold it up for your (right-thinking or otherwise) audiophile friends to witness before you put it on your table and BLOW THEIR MINDS.

How did this kind of sound get produced so cheaply, so late in the game? From what tape, by what engineer? It is a mystery to me, one that is very unlikely to be explained to anyone’s satisfaction.

Side One

A++ Super Hot Stamper sound — rich strings, clear horns, a piano that is full-bodied and natural, with a solid low end (the kind you rarely hear on record but is always so strikingly obvious in the presence of the real instrument).

A bit of compression holds it back from A+++. What a record!

Side Two

A++, not quite as rich as side one but lively, transparent, present, with zero smear (always a problem with piano recordings — you want to hear those hammers striking the strings clearly). 

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Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No. 2 / Ashkenazy / Kondrashin

More of the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff

  • An outstanding pressing of this superb Decca recording with Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • This copy is guaranteed to beat any and every pressing you have of the work or your money back
  • Big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – HERE is the sound that simply does not exist outside the world of the properly cleaned, properly pressed vintage LP
  • On both of these sides you’ll hear rich strings, clear horns, a piano that is full-bodied and natural, with a solid low end (the kind you rarely hear on record but is nonetheless strikingly obvious in the presence of the real instrument)

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Have You Ever Noticed that Sometimes the Highs Come Back on Some Pressings?

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

This side one is interesting., I would say that it starts out Super Hot (A++) and within a few minutes becomes White Hot (A+++). The piano is a bit veiled at the start, but within a relatively short period of time that subtle loss of transparency disappears and the piano is RIGHT THERE.

This is not unusual in our experience.

The first track on many records can sound dull, and by the second track the highs come back and the tonality is right from top to bottom. Who knows why?

We speculate that the vinyl did not have time to fully heat up the edge of the record, but that’s speculation, something that has almost no value in our (yours and mine) quest for better sounding records. 1A, 1B, first off the stamper, who gives a flying you-know-what. You have to play the record to know how it sounds.

The rest is BS, proffered by those who are simply too lazy to do the work of actually cleaning and playing multiple copies of an album to know what they are talking about.

Side Two

A++, with all the texture and transparency we heard on side one. The strings are PERFECTION — truly Demo Disc quality.

The piano however does not quite have the weight it does on side one, so we knocked a plus off, putting this one at A++.

Only the last quarter inch has the slightest amount of groove damage on the loudest piano peaks. We’ve never heard one that played cleaner all the way through, I can tell you that. [This was written about a decade ago. Now we have, many of them in fact. They are out there, but if you buy a copy, make sure you can return it for Inner Groove Distortion because most of them have a problem in that area.]

What an amazing recording! What an amazing piece of music!

Audiophile Reviewers Raved About This Doug Sax Tube-Mastered Mess

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

The reviews below will sound depressingly familiar to you if you have been in audio for as long as I have.

Sonic Grade: F

This Athena LP is now long out of print, but it received rave reviews when it was released. (We quote many of them below.) This album is a member of the TAS Super Disc list, but we found the sound awfully opaque, smeary, slow and compressed, the kind of bad “analog” sound that Doug Sax brought to the early AP releases. 

The sticker on the shrink wrap of a previous copy had these quotes:

“…for this is the definitive symphonic recording to date.” – J. Gordon Holt/ Stereophile

“Wins ‘Best Record of the Year’ award against tough competition.” – Joe Hart/High End Audio Press & Music Review

“HP heard the Athena remastering of the Rachmaninoff and found it stunning. He could recommend it without reservation.” – Harry Pearson/The Absolute Sound #57

I guess things never change.

And doubtlessly he continued to refer to himself in the third person until the end.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

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