Performers

Don’t Waste Your Money on this Living Stereo from 1962

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The sound of the copies we’ve played of LSC 2605, Highlights from Rubinstein at Carnegie Hall, released by RCA in 1962, have never impressed us sonically.

We didn’t listen to the music critically because our primary purpose here at Better Records is to evaluate recordings for their sound quality first (hence the name of our business), and if the sound isn’t good enough, we have to move on to titles with better sound that our customers might find more to their liking.

1962 was surely one of the truly glorious years for analog recordings, but the sound of the most recent copy of the album we played may have been rich, but unfortunately is was also opaque.

We would consider the sound no better than passable, and therefore it’s not a title we would consider offering to our customers.

Unless…

Unless you somehow managed to come across a copy noticeably better than the ones we’ve played over the last twenty or more years — a possibility that, although unlikely, cannot be ruled out — we would advise those interested in a top quality piano recital recording to look elsewhere.

Leave this RCA to the people who love collecting records. It’s perfect for record collectors — it’s from the right company, made in the right era, and it has the right original label — but it’s really not suitable for those of us who love playing good sounding records. It will of course sit happily on a shelf, to be pulled out and shown to other like-minded souls, but it is unlikely to spend much time spinning on a turntable platter with a needle tracing its grooves.

Some audiophiles are of the opinion that vintage Living Stereo recordings on the original Shaded Dog label can do no wrong, but we have never subscribed to that view. We’ve played too many that did plenty wrong. Maybe one out of three are good enough for the audiophile who wants to experience music reproduced at a highest levels of sound quality.

There are quite a number of records that we’ve run into over the years with more shortcomings than this one. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of the titles 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

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Music of Old Russia – We Give Up (on Noisy Angel Vinyl)

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

White Hot Stamper sound on side one – the Tubey Magic is off the scale. Milstein is brilliant on these shorter violin works, 7 in all.

This rare, hard to find original Blue Angel stereo pressing has exquisite sound. As we noted in our listing for Milstein’s Saint-Saens Third, it is the rare Heifetz album on Shaded Dog (or any other label) that could hope to compete with it.

We would rank this Angel pressing with the best of Rabin and Milstein on Capitol, as well as the wonderful Ricci and Campoli discs on London/Decca.

The transparency of both sides lets you “see” the orchestra clearly, without sacrificing richness or weight.

What a record! What a performance from the incomparable Nathan Milstein. 

UPDATE 2024

This is an album we can no longer find enough clean, early stereo pressings with which to do a proper shootout.

Consequently it has been tagged as a never again record. It’s possible we could do it again, but unlikely.

We love both the music and sound and encourage you to find a nice copy for yourself.

For best results, stick to the Blue Label stereo pressings. There are two, but only one of them sounds good.

See how hard all this record stuff is!

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Piano Concerto Testing and Inner Groove Distortion

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

The piano is huge and weighty, the strings rich and highly resolving, and the overall presentation is powerful, balanced, dynamic and exciting like few other piano concerto recordings we have ever had the pleasure to audition.

Not only is the sound amazing — yes, it’s on the TAS Super Disc list, and for good reason: a copy as good as this one really is a Super Disc — but this copy has another vitally important characteristic that most copies of the record do not: no inner groove distortion.

We can’t begin to count the times we have had to return (or toss) a copy of one of these expensive Byron Janis records because the piano breakup for the last inch or so of the record was just unbearable. That’s a sound no serious listener could possibly tolerate, yet I would venture to guess that many Mercury piano concerto recordings suffer from this kind of groove damage.

As a matter of grading policy, we check the inner grooves of every record we offer on the site,

The Sound

The sound is rich and natural, with lovely transparency and virtually no smear to the strings, horns or piano. What an amazing recording! What an amazing piece of music.

The recording is explosively dynamic — on the best copies the sound comes jumping out of the speakers. In addition, the brass and strings are full-bodied, with practically no stridency, an unusual feat the Mercury engineers seem to have accomplished while in Russia (and not as often in the states).

Big, rich sound can sometimes present problems for piano recordings. You want to hear the percussive qualities of the instrument, but few copies pull off that trick without sounding thin. This one showed us a piano that was both clear and full-bodied.

With huge amounts of hall space, orchestral weight and performance energy, this is Demo Disc quality sound by any standard. Once the needle has dropped you will quickly forget about the sound (and all the money you paid to get it!) and simply find yourself in the presence of some of the greatest musicians of their generation, captured on one of the greatest analog recordings of all time.

Fine and Cozart

The piano is huge and powerful, yet the percussive and lighter qualities on the instrument are clearly heard in proper relation to the orchestra as a whole.

I simply cannot criticize the work that Fine and Cozart have achieved with this recording, and believe me, there are very few records in this world about which I could not find something to criiticize. After all, it is our job, and we like to set very high standards for the work we do.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing all aspects of your system, room, tweaks, electricity and the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in most audiophile reviews.

Our twenty or so of our favorite piano concerto recordings with top quality sound can be found here.

To read the 50 reviews and commentaries we’ve written for some of the greatest piano concerto recordings ever pressed on vintage vinyl, please click here

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VICS-1030 Can Have Passable Sound for Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.

This Victrola pressing, VICS-1030, with Graffman performing, had good, not great sound. We’ve played them before and none of them was ever better than middling.

Some specifics we noted in the sound:

  • The piano was loud and clear, close-miked.
  • Boxy sound, could be richer
  • Orchestration not too compressed but veiled and small.
  • Not a standout performance.

A decent-enough record I suppose, but lacking in too many of the qualities our customers are looking for, especially at the prices we charge.

This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner for LSC 2575:

We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.

For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.

Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?

Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly, a public service from your friends here at Better Records.)

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Prokofiev – Violin Concerti Nos. 1 and 2 / Ricci / Ansermet

More of the Music of Sergei Prokofiev

  • With two outstanding Double Plus (A++) sides, this early London Stereo pressing of Ricci and Ansermet’s performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerti Nos. 1 and 2 will be very hard to beat
  • It’s also remarkably 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
  • Ricci is a fiery player – this pressing will allow you to appreciate his playing in a coherent, natural and realistic way
  • The sound of the orchestra is dramatically richer and sweeter than you will hear on nearly all other pressings – what else would you expect from Decca‘s engineers and the Suisse Romande?

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An Extraordinary Recording of the Carmen Fantasie – This Is Why You Must Do Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

UPDATE 2025

It has been years since a Whiteback pressing on the later label won a shootout. Some reissue copies of CS 6165 have earned Nearly White Hot Stamper grades, but we would be very surprised if one of the Blueback originals we play in the next shootout does not come out on top. They are just too good.

This London Whiteback LP has DEMO DISC sound like you will not believe, especially on side two, which earned our coveted A Triple Plus rating. The sound is warm, sweet and transparent; in short, absolutely GORGEOUS. We call it AGAIG — As Good As It Gets!

As this is one of the Greatest Violin Showpiece Albums of All Time, it is certainly a record that belongs in every right-thinking audiophle’s collection. (If you’re on our site and taking the time to read this, that probably means you.) Ruggiero Ricci is superb throughout.

And side one was just a step below the second side in terms of sound quality, with very solid A++ sound. To find two sides of this caliber, on quiet vinyl no less, is no mean feat. You could easily go through ten copies without finding one as consistently good sounding as this one.

A True Demo Disc, Or Was It?

Ricci’s playing of the Bizet-Sarasate Carmen Fantasie is OUT OF THIS WORLD. There is no greater perforrmance on record in my opinion, and few works that have as much Audiophile Appeal.

Which is why I’ve had a copy of this record in my own collection for about fifteen years marked “My Demo Disc.” But this copy KILLED it. How could that be?

It just goes to show: No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.

Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of records. That’s why you must do them.

Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us) you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances where you just got lucky. In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.

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Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No. 3 / Ashkenazy / Fistoulari (Decca)

More of the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff

  • Here is a vintage UK Boxed Decca stereo pressing of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • It’s also impossibly quiet at Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus, a grade that practically none of our vintage classical titles – even the most well-cared-for ones – ever play at
  • Spacious, rich and smooth (particularly on side one) – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence
  • If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1963 Tubey Analog sound can be, this superb copy may be just the record for you
  • If you love this well-known piano concerto as much as we do, this is surely a classic from 1963 that belongs in your collection.
  • To read the 60-odd reviews and commentaries we’ve written for piano concertos, please click here

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Violin Concertos Are Ideal for Testing Table Setup

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

This is one of the ALL TIME GREAT violin concerto records. In Ruggiero Ricci’s hands both works are nothing short of magical. If you want to know why people drool over Golden Age recordings, listen to the violin. Careful, when you hear it you may find yourself drooling too.

The staging of the orchestra and violin is exactly the way we want to hear it in our heads. Whether it would really sound this way in a concert hall is impossible to say — concert halls all sound different — but the skill and the emotion of the playing is communicated beautifully on this LP. This is a sweetheart of a record, full of the Tubey Magic for which London recordings are justly famous.

As we noted above, engineering took place in the legendary Kingsway Hall. There is a richness to the sound of the strings that is exceptional, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

VTA and the Violin

This is truly The Perfect Turntable setup disc. When your VTA, azimuth, tracking weight and anti-skate are correct, this is the record that will make it clear to you that your efforts have paid off.

What to listen for you ask? With the proper adjustment the harmonics of the strings will sound extended and correct, neither hyped up nor dull; the wood body of the instrument will be more audibly “woody”; the fingering at the neck will be noticeable but will not call attention to itself in an unnatural way. In other words, as you adjust your setup, the violin will sound more and more right.

And you can’t really know how right it can sound until you go through hours of experimentation with all the forces that affect the way the needle rides the groove. Without precise VTA adjustment there is almost no way this record will do everything it’s capable of doing. There will be hardness, smear, sourness, thinness — something will be off somewhere. With total control over your arm and cartridge setup, these problems will all but vanish. (Depending on the quality of the equipment of course.)

We harp on all aspects of reproduction for a reason. When you have done the work, records like this are nothing less than GLORIOUS.

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Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 2 / Moonlight Sonata / Backhaus

More of the Music of Beethoven

  • The Hot Stamper debut of Backhaus and the Vienna Phil’s masterful performance of these two sublime classical works, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout this vintage London pressing
  • It’s also remarkably 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
  • Piano Concerto No. 2 takes up all of this incredible 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
  • Both of these sides are big, full-bodied, clean and clear, with a wonderfully present and solid piano, and plenty of 3D space around it
  • Dynamic, huge, lively, transparent and natural – with a record this good, your ability to suspend disbelief will require practically no effort at all
  • After surveying various recordings of the work, it was clear to us that CS 6188 on the early London pressing offers the discerning audiophile the best performance of the piece with the highest quality sound available

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Putting Your System to the (Violin and Piano) Test

Hot Stamper Pressings with Jascha Heifetz Performing

Do you want a recording that is going to put your system to the test? Well this is that record! The violin is REAL. As you compare equipment or tweak your system, you will hear the sound of that violin change and it should be obvious when it gets better and when it gets worse. 

The piano is also very well recorded.

If you lose some body to the piano you’re probably going in the wrong direction.

But since that direction would make the violin almost unbearable sounding, I’m going to guess that would be easily recognized as a mistake.

The balance between those two instruments on this recording is perfection, so if you get this record right, you’re making progress of the most important kind: toward musical naturalness.

Otherwise this violin, at least on the Kreutzer Sonata, is going to tear your head off.

Our previous Hot Stamper review follows.

The Beethoven, which takes up side one, is recorded in a fairly dry acoustic. The sound of the violin is very immediate. It’s quite a showpiece for Heifetz.

I much prefer the Bach on side two, however, which is recorded within a more natural hall acoustic. Sir Malcom Sargent conducts and Eric Freidman plays the second violin in this concerto, which is also his debut for RCA, according to the liner notes.

This piece was recorded in England and to me it has the rich, sweet, glorious sound of Living Stereo at its best.

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