_Conductors – Reiner

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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These Are the Shaded Dog Stampers to Avoid on LSC 2581

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Even though they had the Shaded Dog label, some of the later stampers for this record were not very good sounding compared to the ones that won our shootouts.

15s on side one earned a grade that would prevent it from being sold as a Hot Stamper pressing. There was no reason to play side two (13s) since side one eliminated this copy from the competition.

The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, Shaded Dog label or no Shaded Dog label.

Pressings with these 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.

In this case, the conventional wisdom that the original pressings will most likely have superior sound to the later-numbered copies turns out to be right.

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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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The Violin is a Wonderful Instrument for Tweaking and Tuning

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Our review for LSC 2314, with both the Mendelssohn and Prokofiev Violin Concertos, described the wonderful sound we heard on some of the better copies as follows:

As usual for a Living Stereo Heifetz violin concerto recording, he is front and center, with his fingering and every movement of his bow clearly audible, without being hyped-up in the least. (Well, maybe just a bit.)

No violin concerto recording can be considered to have proper Living Stereo sound if the violin isn’t right, and fortunately we found the violin on this copy to be very, very right, with the kind of rosiny texture and immediacy that brings the music to life right in your very own listening room.

Audiophiles who cannot hear what is wrong with the Classic Records repressings of Heifetz’s RCA recordings by composers including:

may want to seek out a nice — maybe even one that’s not so nice — vintage RCA Shaded Dog of any of his albums, if only to see just how poorly the Classics stack up (with the exception of the LSC 2734, which we have to say, against all odds, is very good).

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Brahms & Dvorak / Hungarian & Slavonic Dances / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Brahms Available Now

UPDATED in 2022 for CS 6198

The last time we played copies of this London title, CS 6198, we were quite a bit less impressed than the review below might lead you to believe.

We found the sound to be plenty Tubey Magical, but the louder peaks were sour. Overall we judged the sound to be OK at best.

Having played a number of different pressings over the years, our favorite recording of the Slavonic Dances these days is the one with Kertesz on the Decca World of Great Classics budget reissue label.

It may come as a shock to some record collecting audiophiles, but there are actually budget reissues of some titles that can beat any and all comers.

Here are some that we’ve come across, discoveries which we are happy to share with you.

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Debussy / La Mer / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old review, one which we ourselves may no longer agree with. If you see this record in the bins for cheap, give it a try, but don’t pay a high price for it on our say-so.

The record that contains our current favorite performance with top quality sound for La Mer was conducted by Ansermet for Decca in 1955. We rarely have it in stock

For Don Juan we like Haitink’s recording for Philips from 1975. Again, not one likely to be in stock.

Note that records made from 1955 to 1975 make up practically all of our offerings of classical and orchestral music.

In the 70s things went downhill, and quickly. Let me give you just one example:

A mediocre Decca recording from 1972 was remastered in 1981 by an audiophile label trying to “improve” it. Sure enough, with their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system, they made it even worse.

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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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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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clone me Shaded Dog Stampers to Avoid on XXX passable sheet 1+

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Even though they had the Shaded Dog label, some of the later stampers for this record were not very good sounding compared to the ones that won our shootouts.

15s on side one earned a grade that would prevent it from being sold as a Hot Stamper pressing. There was no reason to play side two (13s) since side one eliminated this copy from the competition.

The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, Shaded Dog label or no Shaded Dog label.

Pressings with these 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.

In this case, the conventional wisdom that the original pressings will most likely have superior sound to the later-numbered copies turns out to be right.

The average Shaded Dog may be better than the average classical record, but that certainly doesn’t mean it has any claim to audiophile sound. We’ve played bad early RCA pressings by the hundreds. Now, finally, with this blog we can point some of them out to those record lovers who are more interested in top quality sound than an original label.

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

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