More of the Music of Gustav Holst
This is a fairly quiet, excellent sounding Decca in the Box Purple Label British import LP.
This is of course the same performance, the same recording that Mobile Fidelity remastered (510), but, thankfully, this copy sounds A WHOLE LOT BETTER!
This pressing is very dynamic and the brass has tremendous weight.
Our favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.
More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Great cover, awful sound. It’s blary and gritty.
The sound is much too unpleasant to be played on high quality modern equipment.
A stereo that looks like the console below — or one that sounds like an old console even though it has new components, there are plenty of those out there in audiophile land — is perfect for all your bad sounding Golden Age recordings.
Near Demo Quality. Solti is magnificent here. This record has even better sound than the famous Barbarolli. Another Wilkinson/ Kingsway winner.
It would be demo quality if it were recorded in ’67 instead of ’77; it doesn’t quite hang together in the climaxes the way an earlier recording would.
The sound is AMAZING on this minty Decca Black and Silver LP.
Guaranteed to trounce the Decca 180g pressing from 1996 (which is not a bad record by the way) or your money back.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.
The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.
The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?
Reviews and Commentaries for Other Recordings by Decca