Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Classical Records on Mercury

EXCELLENT CELLO REPRODUCTION and MOSTLY QUIET VINYL on side one, where you get Bach’s entire Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello.

Side two has excellent sound as well but the vinyl is noisy so take this one at a bargain price and hear how wonderful a cello can sound when recorded and mastered for maximum effect, live in your listening room.

The sound of Starker’s cello here is HUMONGOUS — it’ll fill up your room, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. 

It’s also tonally correct from top to bottom, a quality we heard on none of the Mercury Heavy Vinyl reissues we played. They have some of the worst sound we had heard from Speakers Corner up to that time.

This is very much in keeping with the overly rich, overly smooth sound of the Heavy Vinyl records being made today. We despise that sound and want nothing to do with it.

Two Mercury recordings of Starker’s are currently on the TAS List, SR 90303 and SR 90392. I suppose we could order them up, audition them and list their many sonic shortcomings, since we do have nice copies of both albums in the backroom, just not enough to do a shootout.

But there are so many other good pressings to play, why go out of way to play another second- or third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing?

By the way, we have a new link for audiophile pressings that are tonally correct but are wrong in other ways, as they usually are. You can assume that our Hot Stamper pressings are tonally correct for the most part, as correct tonality is fairly key to high quality sound. Not essential, but important nevertheless.

The cutting is super low distortion on this later label copy as well. This copy will show you why these Starker Mercury records are so highly prized.

Starker’s records are legendary for their sound, not to mention Starker’s way with this music. If anybody can make Bach’s solo cello pieces capture your interest, Starker can. (more…)