Composers

Tchaikovsky / Rimsky-Korsakoff – Capriccio Italien / Capriccio Espagnol / Kondrashin

More of the Music of Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov

  • Kondrashin and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra’s performance of these sublime orchestral works makes its Hot Stamper debut with solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or BETTER throughout this vintage pressing of LSC 2323
  • Capriccio Espagnol takes up all of this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two and is practically as good as we have ever heard it, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Our Shootout Winner was a White Dog pressing as well, with these same stamper numbers – lucky us!
  • The Shaded Dog pressings can be excellent, but the one pressing that came in last in our shootout was — drum roll, please — a Shaded Dog with a 1s side one, if you can wrap your head around it
  • Both of these sides are full, rich and clear, with more space and more three-dimensional staging than practically all of the other copies we played
  • And of course it will completely destroy any pressing you may have on Heavy Vinyl, from any label, at any playback speed
  • If you like orchestral spectaculars, this is the record for you!

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On Ballet Music From The Opera, How Much Tubey Magic Is Too Much?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2023

We have stopped buying the original LSC 2400 for the simple reason that it is not competitive with the budget VICS 1206 reissue from 1960 that replaced it in the RCA catalog.

The review we wrote for the Shaded Dog is probably close to twenty years old. There was a time when the shortcomings of the original RCA were not nearly as easy for us to recognize, but that time has long since past.

If any copy of the original, or any remastered version from the modern era sounds good to you, we can almost guarantee that you are mistaken about the quality of the sound, and, even better, we can offer you the pressing that makes our case better than any review can.

Our Old Review

The hall is HUGE — so transparent, spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA. (Many of Solti’s recordings from the decade are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.)

EMI recordings may be super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out-of-phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And often so mid-hall and distant. Not our sound, sorry.

We strongly believe that there will never be a modern reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found on the best of these Living Stereo original pressings.

Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses we noted on a copy we played way back when.

Side One

Big and lively. The Tubey Magical colorations are a bit much for us, with too much tube smear on the strings and brass to earn more than a single plus. 

Side Two

Even bigger and more spacious, with some smear caused by the serious amounts of tube compression being used, of course, but the quiet passages are magical. [Which is precisely what heavy tube compression is designed to accomplish.]

The Victrola Reissue

We much prefer the sound of the Victrola reissue, VICS 1206, which came out in 1966.

As for the Victrola pressing, we’re guessing — how could we possibly know for sure? — that less tube compression was used in the mastering.

It’s still plenty tubey, but more to our taste for not being overly tubey.

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Tchaikovsky / Symphony No. 6 on Shaded Dog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We’ve played at least three Shaded Dogs of LSC 1901 since we started doing shootouts for this recording and all three were awful.

The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, one of the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.

Years ago we described a Hot Stamper pressing this way:

The size and scope of this recording is enormous, with the orchestral sections clearly staged wide and deep. Where is the old tube smear and compression and opacity? It must not be on the tape, because I hear no trace of it.

This copy is cut clean, its dynamics intact, which just goes to show how much better the master tape must be than we’ve been led to believe by the original Shady Dogs and the hacks at Classic Records (note: their Heavy Vinyl reissue is awful).

RCA managed to cut this record amazingly well decades after the tape was first recorded, not for audiophiles, but for music lovers. Maybe that’s the secret.

When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is. Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

UPDATE 2025

Some of our newer commentary for the Gold Seal pressing we like goes like this:

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Stravinsky – Les Noces / Symphony Of Psalms / Ansermet

More of the Music of Igor Stravinsky

  • Stravinsky’s Les Noces / Symphony of Psalms appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with bold, dynamic, and Tubey Magical Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound throughout this early London pressing – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • These sides are doing practically everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard
  • The sonics here have the power to transport you completely, with solid imaging and a real sense of space, qualities that allow us to forget we are in our listening rooms and not in a concert hall

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Better Front Ends Actually Reduce Surface Noise

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This record has no marks that play appreciably, but that RCA vinyl is up to its old tricks again.

Mint Minus Minus with constant light surface noise underneath the music in the quieter sections is the rule. The first half inch of side two is where you will notice it the most.

We are of the opinion that good sound and good music allow you to pretty much ignore surfaces such as these (scratches being another thing entirely of course). 

Better Front Ends

I would make the further point that the better your front end is, the less likely you are to have a problem with vinyl like this, which is the opposite of what many audiophiles perceive to be the case. In other words, some of the cheaper tables and carts seem to make the surface noise more objectionable, not less. (They also tend to collapse completely under the weight of a mighty recordings.)

On the other hand, some pricey cartridges — the Benz line comes to mind — are consistently noisier than those by Dynavector, Lyra and others, in our experience anyway.

Vintage Vinyl

As long as vintage vinyl is the only vinyl with sound worth pursuing, as is surely the case these days and will be the case for the forseeable future — we have ample evidence to support this statement for this who are interested in that lamentable reality — a quiet cartridge and a very high quality arm are essential to your being able to recognize good records and reproduce them properly.

Our Dynavector 17Dx gets down deep into the groove, where vintage used records have the least number of problems created by their previous owners.

And we run it nude for even better sound. I discovered this possibility more than a decade ago — so long ago that I cannot remember where I came by the information — but the sound was immediately so much better that all questions were answered moments after dropping the needle.

Not a lot of things are obvious, but that sure was.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Schubert Recording with Munch from 1962

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Some audiophiles buy albums based on their labels. For example, this Shaded Dog pressing from the Golden Age of RCA Living Stereo might appeal to a certain kind of audiophile who treasures original LSC pressings.

More than that, he might limit himself to the most sought-after 1S Indianapolis pressings. Hooray! What could be better?

However, many records from this era simply do not sound good, and this is one of them. We have never heard a good sounding copy of LSC 2522, and we’ve played plenty of them over the decades that we’ve been selling Golden Age Classical records.

Are You a Fan?

If you’re a fan of Living Stereo pressings, have you noticed that many of them – this one for example – don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have. But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare LSC pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

When vintage RCA Living Stereo records don’t sound good to us, we put them on this list and they go into our hall of shame. We don’t make excuses for them. We call a spade a spade. The same goes for records being made today.

Some audiophiles buy albums based on their labels. For example, this Shaded Dog pressing from the Golden Age of RCA Living Stereo might appeal to a certain kind of audiophile who treasures LSCs on the original label.

More than that, he might limit himself to the most sought-after 1S Indianapolis pressings. Hooray! What could be better?

However, many records from this era simply do not sound good, and this is one of them. We have never heard a good sounding copy of LSC 2522, and we’ve played plenty of them over the decades that we’ve been auditioning Golden Age classical records for sale.

This Shaded Dog might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances, including many on the coveted Shaded Dog label

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Dvorak / Violin Concerto – A Killer Philips Recording

More of the Music of Antonin Dvorak

  • Stunning sound throughout this Philips import pressing of Dvorak’s Classical Masterpieces, with a Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The orchestral passages are rich and sweet, the violin present, its harmonics gloriously intact
  • We audiophiles are fortunate indeed that a violinist of Accardo’s skill and taste recorded this piece for Philips at a time when their recording technology was still capable of capturing the sound of his violin in rich, warm, sweet, clear analog
  • A superb performance from Salvatore Accardo, not only competitive with the best we have heard, but superior – we know of none better
  • These links will take you to some of the orchestral “sleeper” recordings we’ve discovered with Demo Disc sound

Yes, it was still possible to record classical music properly in 1980, though not many labels managed to pull it off. (Londons from this era are especially opaque and airless. We find them as irritating and frustrating as most of the Heavy Vinyl releases being foisted on the audiophile public today.)

This is still analog, with the better copies displaying much of the Tubey Magic of 50s and 60s vinyl without as much compressor distortion (the Achilles’ heel of so many of the great recordings from the Golden Era).

Accardo is an accomplished performer of the works of Paganini, but those recordings are on DG and we would not expect them to be of acceptable audio quality for our customers. We will investigate further of course, as Paganini’s works for violin are some of the most sublime in the repertoire.

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Our Favorite Night on Bald Mountain

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mussorgsky Available Now

If you like Orchestral Spectaculars, have we got the record for you!

What you want this record for is the best performance of Night On Bald Mountain ever recorded.

Fiedler plays it with a kind of pull-out-all-the-stops abandonment that no other conductor has on a modern recording, not to my knowledge anyway. It’s supposed to be a wild witches’ frenzy, and this is the only performance I know of that allows you to experience the full measure of diabolic revelry playing in your mind’s eye.

This is one of those “sleeper” albums that, as record collectors, you might stumble across from time to time, especially if you’re the kind of person who does nothing but play records all day. You will simply be amazed at the performance and the sound on this copy.

The Sound

Lively, set in a huge hall, with big orchestral sound, and more energy than you will find on 99 out of 100 classical LPs. So present, with an extended top end and transparency that allows you to “see” to the back of the hall.

Huge low brass, the kind you hear on Ansermet’s recording from the Victoria Hall. What a sound!

It gets loud and it stays clean doing it. Not many records can make that claim.

This pressing clearly has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND — not in every way, but in some important ways. The ENERGY of both the sound and the performances of these barnburning showpieces is truly awesome. Fiedler brings this music to LIFE like no other conductor we have heard.

This pressing boasts relatively rich, sweet strings, especially for a Deutsche Grammophon LP. Both sides really get quiet in places, a sure sign that all the dynamics of the master tape were protected in the mastering of this copy, and the reason it is so hard to find a copy that plays better than Mint Minus Minus. (more…)

Mussorgsky & Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition

More of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky

  • With two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, this British EMI import pressing is doing just about everything right – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Our favorite performance by far, with big, bold and powerful sonics like no other recording we know
  • The brass clarity, the dynamics, the deep bass and the sheer power of the orchestra are almost hard to believe
  • No vintage recording of these works compares with Muti’s – and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite is an extra special added bonus on side two
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we’ve awarded the honor of offering the best performances with the highest quality sound, and this record certainly deserve a place on that list.
  • If you like orchestral spectaculars, have we got amazing sounding records for you

This EMI import pressing gives you the complete Pictures at an Exhibition with a top performance and superb sonics.

As this is my All Time Favorite performance of Pictures, this record naturally comes very highly recommended. Pictures is a piece of music that has been recorded countless times, and I’ve played scores of different recordings, but the only one that truly satisfies is this one, Muti’s 1979 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Much like Previn and the LSO’s performance of The Planets, he finds the music in the work that no one else seems to.

A Must Own Classical Record

This orchestral spectacular should be part of any serious Classical Collection. Other Must Own classical recordings can be found here.

For his 1979 review of the Mussorgsky, Robert Layton in the GRAMOPHONE writes of Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra :

…what orchestral playing they offer us. The lower strings in ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’ have an extraordinary richness, body and presence, and “Baba Yaga”, which opens the second side, has an unsurpassed virtuosity and attack as well as being of demonstration standard as a recording. The glorious body of tone, the richly glowing colours, the sheer homogeneity of the strings and perfection of the ensemble is a constant source of pleasure.

Of the performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird, Layton writes:

…Muti’s reading is second to none and the orchestral playing is altogether breathtaking. The recording is amazingly lifelike and truthful.

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VICS 1069 – In 2004 We Mistaked Finlandia on VICS for a Demo Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sibelius Available Now

UPDATE 2024

We played a 4S/1S copy of this record, VICS 1069, and thought it sounded terrible.

It was flat and bright with splashy cymbals and crude brass.

Even if we assume the copy we played many years ago could have been much better than this latest pressing — which is doubtful but certainly possible — there is no reason to pursue this version of the album when there are known top quality pressings of this very same performance on Decca.

Our Old Review

DEMO QUALITY SOUND and quiet surfaces too.

I don’t know when I’ve heard this album with better sound. This one may be better than the best Shaded Dog for all I know — it’s that good.

You’ll notice that there is a copy of this very same record on the website for $1.99. That one sounds dull. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a better sounding copy of this record than the pressing we are selling here, because it really is an exceptionally good sounding record. If it weren’t, it would be more like $1.99.

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