Composers

Duke Ellington – The Nutcracker Suite

More of the Music of Duke Ellington

  • This original 6-Eye Stereo pressing is doing practically everything right, with killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from first note to last – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Both of these sides are open and spacious with real depth to the soundfield and lots of separation between the various instruments, a very important quality for a large ensemble recording like this one
  • Rich, solid bass; you-are-there immediacy; energy and drive; instruments that are positively jumping out of the speakers – add it all up and you can see that this copy had the sound we were looking for
  • “The melodies flow out of the jazz ensemble with an easy feel for the manner of Tchaikovsky yet in an unmistakable Ellington style. It’s the kind of traditional jazz arrangement that at once makes it appealing to jazz fans as well as to classical-music afficionados.” – Classical Candor.com

This is a wonderful album featuring Duke and his orchestra doing a jazzy interpretation of the famous Nutcracker Suite, and on a copy like this the sound is incredible!

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Gershwin / Rhapsody In Blue / An American In Paris – Bernstein

More of the Music of George Gershwin

  • This vintage 6-Eye Stereo pressing boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades from top to bottom
  • Here is sound that is both tubey and real, with much more space and a much bigger and more realistic presentation of the hall than any of the other copies we played
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Paired with his buoyant 1958 performance of An American in Paris with the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein’s rendition of Rhapsody is lively, flashy, bluesy, and intensely romantic in feeling, and these positive characteristics no doubt contributed to keeping this album in print for many years as one of Columbia’s great successes.”

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You Say Your Shaded Dog Just Sounds Like an Old Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

The better pressings of LSC 2328 have some of the best sound we have ever heard for The Nutcracker. We’ve played recordings of the work by the dozens, on the greatest Golden Age labels of all time, including the likes of Mercury, RCA and London. (Our current favorites of both the suites and the complete ballet are those conducted by Ansermet for Decca.)

The CSO, as one might expect, plays this work with more precision and control than most others. They also bring more excitement and dynamic contrasts to their performance, adding greatly to our enjoyment of the music.

Some may find the performances a bit rushed. That was our experience during our most recent shootout.

But skip 9s/6s. We had two copies and both of them sounded too much like an old record.

Pressings with those stampers might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they would not be worth bothering with 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 a catalog of obvious shortcomings — obvious to us but not necessarily to others — and we’ve broken them down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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Beethoven / Symphony No. 7 / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review of a White Dog pressing with decent sound.

We did a massive shootout for the work in 2025 and determined that the best combination of sound and performance could be found on the best pressings of Karajan’s 1959 recording for RCA.

However, although the Soria originals, LDS 2348, have the best sound, their vinyl on side two is consistently defective.

The later Shaded Dog pressing, LSC 2536, was good sounding, but not as good as we hoped, with a side two that was rich but bright. The best copy earned a grade of 2+/1.5+.

Of the seven copies we cleaned and played, only two made the cut for sound and vinyl, none earning even 2+/2+ grades.

This was an expensive shootout to get off the ground when you consider the seven we bought and the other pressings we auditioned in order to find the best of the best for performance and sound.

We proably lost more than a thousand dollars after all was said and done.

It may be unfortunate, but there are times when it will be unavoidable. These are the costs we must be willing to bear if we are to bring our customers top quality pressings of the most important works by the greatest composers who ever lived.

Finding good sounding records is a crap shoot. We get paid to dig deeper than other vintage record dealers — that’s the job we have chosen for ourselves, and not only do we not have any regrets, we much prefer doing things the way we do them, mostly because we actually enjoy testing records — but success is never assured.

You win some and you lose some, and if we’re not fine with results that don’t go our way, we should do what our competitors do and sell records based on, e.g., the established skills of the mastering engineers, supposedly superior production methods, original tape sources, higher quality vinyl, and who knows what else — in other words, everything but their actual sound quality.

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Beethoven / “Kreutzer” & Spring Sonatas / Rubinstein

More of the Music of Beethoven

  • This original Shaded Dog pressing of Rubinstein and Szeryng’s extraordinary performances of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano (LSC 2377) boasts solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound from first note to last
  • Both of these sides are Tubey Magical, lively and clear, with the kind of three-dimensionality that will fill your listening room from wall to wall that only the best vintage vinyl can offer
  • The immediacy of Szeryng’s violin is simply in a league of its own, with some of the sweetest, richest, most “rosiny” violin tone we’ve had the good fortune to hear
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music

RCA is famous for its chamber recordings, which tend to be quite rare for some reason. Let’s be honest: we did not conduct this shootout with a dozen copies of the album. It would take us years to find that many clean pressings.

However, that said, we’ve played dozens and dozens of good violin recordings, and we have no problem recognizing good violin sound when we hear it. Don’t be fooled by the lack of Hot Stamper classical listings on the site. The vast majority of killer classical records never make it to the site; they go directly to our best customers, customers who want classical recordings that actually sound good. Not just the kind of Golden Age Recordings that are supposed to.

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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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The Cisco Pressing of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings with Heifetz Performing

An audiophile hall of shame pressing from Cisco / Impex / Boxstar / whatever.

The Cisco pressing of LSC 2577 should not have sound that is acceptable to any person who considers himself an audiophile.

There is no violinist in front of you when you play their pressing.

There is someone back behind your speakers under a thick blanket, and his violin sure doesn’t sound very much like a real violin — no rosiny texture, no extended harmonics, no real body.

In short, the sound of this reissue is much too smeary, veiled, and lacking in presence to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately for those of us who love good music with good sound, Cisco’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject in more depth here.

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Beethoven, Bach, Schubert / Heifetz, Primrose, Piatigorsky

More of the Music of Beethoven

  • An original Shaded Dog pressing of this wonderful recording of string trios and sinfonias, here with two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides
  • It’s also fairly quiet at the high end of Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • Beethoven’s Trio in D, Op 9, No. 2 takes up all of this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side one, and is practically as good as we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Remarkably spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence
  • This copy showed us the balance of clarity and sweetness we were looking for in the violin, viola and cello – not many recordings from this era can do that as well as this one does
  • Heifetz is a fiery player – he is front and center, with every movement of his bow clearly audible without being hyped-up in the least

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Mahler / Symphony No. 4 – Another Disappointing Shaded Dog

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The Decca recording with Solti from 1961 on London (CS 6217) is still the king on this title, as far as we know.

The review below is for a White Dog pressing of the Reiner performance that we’d played way back in 2007.

We’ve played others over the years, but nothing has impressed us all that much, so we are still going through the process of acquiring more copies of the London and have yet to do a shootout for them.

Our 2025 notes for LSC 2364 on Shaded Dog is that it is rich, but the strings are somewhat shrill and it has an unfortunate tendency to become more congested than we would like in the louder passages.

The sound is passable I suppose, but it’s hardly the pressing you want to play when it comes time to hear the music properly performed, and with top quality sound. This is of course the service we offer — the actual pressing that has audiophile sound with a performance to match — so we hope to see Hot Stamper pressings of the London coming to the site in 2026.

Fun Fact

Note that this recording from 1961 was rereleased on London in 1971 with a different catalog number (CS 6781) and a different cover, as well as notably inferior sound. Audiophiles would do well to avoid it.

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Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 2 / Cliburn / Reiner

More of the Music of Johannes Brahms

  • Van Cliburn’s exceptional performance of Brahm’s Piano Concerto No. 2, here with solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or close to it throughout this early Shaded Dog pressing
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • This side one is big, full-bodied, clean and clear, with a wonderfully present and solid piano, and plenty of 3D space around it, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • One of the best of the Cliburn recordings – most are not very good, the worst of them being LSC 2252 and the best of them being, probably, LSC 2507 with this one right up there with it
  • We’ve liked LSC 2296 with Rubinstein and Krips in the past, but after doing this shootout we have to say that Cliburn and Reiner set a higher standard for a recording of the work
  • On the right shaded dog pressing, LSC 2581 is yet another Must Own orchestral recording from 1962

Our main listening guy made some notes about the sound of the best pressings he heard. Here is what he wrote:

This LP might be tough for some customers to reproduce. The big peak at the end of track one on side one can have some tube/compressor distortion. Only the fullest, richest copies can properly reproduce this section without the piano and low end getting lost.

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