Advice-WTLF-Classical

Here you will find listings of classical and orchestral titles with our advice on what to listen for. This advice is offered to help you separate out the better pressings from the lower quality ones. It’s what we do all day, every day. Here are some of the things we’ve learned by playing lots of records.

The Pines of Rome with Maazel – Not the Pressing You Want

Classical and Orchestral Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

More Recordings that Are Multi-Miked Messes

I played a lot of different pressings of this music a while back, trying to find recordings worthy of a shootout.

My notes for this one read:

  • Very multi-miked.
  • No depth, but the stage is wide.
  • Not warm but dynamic.

There are a lot of DG recordings that have this kind of sound. We’ve played them by the score. Most went directly into the trade bin.

We simply do not sell classical records with this kind of second-rate sound regardless of how good the performances may be.

We learned from our first big shootout for these works something that we think will remain true for the foreseeable future: the 1960 Reiner recording with the Chicago Symphony on RCA just can’t be beat.

Our Job

Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.

That’s the reason we carry:

  • No Heavy Vinyl of any kind.
  • Exactly one Half-Speed mastered title (John Klemmer’s Touch).
  • Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
  • Almost nothing made in the 21st century.

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The Grieg Piano Concerto – With a Correctly Sized Piano for a Change

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Edvard Grieg

This Shaded Dog pressing has exceptionally lively and dynamic sound on side two, which earned an A++ grade and plays quietly to boot.

The sound is BIG and BOLD enough to fill up your listening room and then some.

The piano is clean and clear, the strings are rich and textured.

And his performance of this work is superb, as is his performance of the shorter coupling works on side two (which actually have the best sound here). 

This is wonderfully recorded music. It has a very natural orchestral perspective and superb string tone.

It also boasts a correctly-sized piano, which is quite unusual for Rubinstein’s recordings in our experience.

Some of the titles we’ve auditioned that had noticeably over-sized imaging can be found here.

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Finlandia – Striving for Orchestral Clarity with Decca and Failing with RCA

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

The original RCA Living Stereo pressings we played in our 2014 shootout were not competitive with the best Deccas and London reissues.

Is the original the best way to go? 

In our experience with Finlandia, not so much.

The budget Decca reissue you see here is yet another wonderful example of what the much-lauded Decca recording engineers were able to capture on analog tape all those years ago. The 1961 master tapes have been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer. [Not true, see Two Things below.)

When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts

Side One

Correct from top to bottom, and there are not many records we can say that about. So natural in every way.

The brass is HUGE and POWERFUL on this side. Not many recordings capture the brass this well. Ansermet on London comes to mind of course but many of his performances leave much to be desired. Here Mackerras is on top of his game with performances that are definitive.

The brass is big and clear and weighty, just the way it should be, as that is precisely the sound you hear in the concert hall, especially that part about being clear: live music is more than anything else completely clear. We should all strive for that sound in our reproduction of orchestral music.

The opening track on side one, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, is one of my favorite pieces of orchestral music. Mackerras and the London Proms make it magical.

Side Two

The richness on this side is awesome. So 3-D, with depth and transparency to rival any recording you may own.

Two Things

When you hear a record of this quality, you can be pretty sure of two things: one, the original is unlikely to sound as good, having been cut on cruder equipment.

[UPDATE: I no longer subscribe to this view. There are many original pressings mastered in the 50s that are as hi-rez and undistorted as anything made after them. Here’s one example. It would be easy to name a great many more.]

Live and learn, I say.

And two, no modern recutting of the tapes (by the likes of Speakers Corner for example, but you can substitute any company you care to choose) could begin to capture this kind of naturalistic orchestral sound. [Mostly still true.]

I have never heard a Heavy Vinyl pressing begin to do what this record is doing. The Decca we have here may be a budget reissue pressing, but it was mastered by real Decca engineers (a few different ones in fact), pressed in England on high quality vinyl, and from fairly fresh tapes (nine years old, not fifty years old!), then mastered about as well as a record can be mastered.

The sound is, above all, REAL and BELIEVABLE.

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Ritual Fire Dance – Side One Had Tubey Colorations Missing from Side Two

More Columbia Classical Recordings

More Classical ‘Sleeper” Recordings We’ve Discovered with Superb Sound

An undiscovered gem from 1967 on the 360 Columbia label.

Side two of this record blew our minds with its White Hot Stamper sound.

Musically and sonically this record is nothing short of wonderful.

Who knew? You could play fifty vintage piano recordings and not find one as good as this.

Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart — these shorter pieces and excerpts were composed by those with the greatest gift for melody, men who’ve produced works that have stood the test of time, enchanting audiences over the centuries with works of such beauty and charm.

Here at Better Records we have never been fans of Columbia classical LPs. Years ago we noted that:

Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding. The upper mids are often nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst way. If Columbia’s goal was to drive the audiophile classical music lover screaming from the room (or, more realistically, induce a strong desire to call it a day record-playing wise), most of the time one would have to grant they’ve succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they fail. When they do we call those pressings Hot Stampers.

To be clear, the fault more often than not has to be in the mastering, not the recording. We’ve raved about so many great copies of titles in the past, only to find that the next three or four LPs we pick up of the very same titles sound just godawful. There are some amazing Bernstein recordings out there, but the the amount of work it takes to find the one that sounds good is overwhelming — how can such great recordings be regularly mastered so poorly?

Side One

A++, with a huge, rich, sweet, natural sounding piano. The more you listen the more apparent it becomes that, as natural as it may seem at first blush, there are still some old school tubey colorations that make the sound not quite as “accurate” and real as one might wish.

And the confirmation of that finding comes as soon as you flip the record over.

Side Two

A+++, with a piano that really DOES sound real. Tubey colorations are gone. It’s clear and clean and solid the way a piano really sounds in recital. The transparency is simply amazing — you are there. There aren’t many solo piano recordings that sound this right. When you hear one, it’s shocking how good it can be.

A case of good tube mastering? On the best sides of the best pressings, absolutely.

More on the subject of tubes in audio here.

Testing with the Piano

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all 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 is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.

Other records that we have found to be good for testing in order to improve your playback, as well as your critical listening skills, can be found here.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Bruch in Living Stereo – Two Vastly Different Sides

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

What to Listen For – Side to Side Differences

This listing is at least ten years old, perhaps even fifteen.

WHITE HOT Stamper sound for the Bruch side of this original RCA Shaded Dog, one of the best Heifetz concerto titles of all time. (I’m trying to think of a Heifetz title that sounds better and coming up blank.)

[UPDATE: As of 2023 we know of a couple so stay tuned.]

This was our shootout winner on side two, beating all comers, earning our highest grade, the full Three Pluses (our blue ribbon, gold medal, and best in show all wrapped into one). The sound is nothing short of DEMO DISC QUALITY.

If you want to demonstrate the magic of Living Stereo recordings, jump right to the second movement of the Bruch. The sonority of the massed strings is to die for. When Heifetz enters, the immediacy of his violin further adds to the transcendental quality of the experience. Sonically and musically it doesn’t get much better than this, on Living Stereo or anywhere else.

The violin is captured beautifully on side two. More importantly there is a lovely lyricism in Heifetz’s playing which suits Bruch’s Romantic work perfectly. I know of no better performance.

The performance of the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 is also wonderful, but the sound is not. Want proof that two sides of the same record can have vastly different sound? Here it is. Note how oversized the violin on side one is, how smeary the orchestra, how little texture there is to anything in the soundfield. This side one is no Hot Stamper.

And yet somehow side two won our shootout with the best sound we have ever heard for the Bruch. Go figure.

Side Two – Bruch / Scottish Fantasy

A+++, White Hot Stamper sound!

Pay special attention to the richness of the lower strings, a sonic quality that is not nearly as pronounced on side one as it is here on side two. The violin is also more present on this side. There’s lots of space around it, and the orchestra manages to stay uncongested in the loud sections for the most part (some congestion is heard on even the best Living Stereo records).

[Not so much anymore — we’ve made a lot of audio progress in the last 15 years!]

The energy, transparency and overall sweetness of the sound could not be beat! It’s the clear winner.

Having played more than a dozen Shaded Dogs of this album over the years, we would note that the sound on this side two is a bit dry, as is almost always the case.

[I don’t think we agree with the sound being dry anymore, but it could be slightly dry I suppose, just not enough to call attention to the fact. To see records that definitely can be dry, click here.]

The Bruch brings to mind some of Tchaikovsky’s works. It’s so sweet and melodic, it completely draws you into its world of sound. This is a work of unsurpassed beauty, music that belongs in any serious music collection.

Side One – Vieuxtemps / Concerto No. 5

A or so. Lovely Romantic music that’s much better than I remember it from our last shootout.

Classical Music

I’ve commented often over the years of the benefits to be gained from listening to classical music regularly. Once a week is a good rule of thumb I would say. I love rock and roll, jazz and all the rest of it, but there is something about classical music that restores a certain balance in your musical life that can’t be accomplished by other means. It grounds your listening experience to something perhaps less immediately gratifying but deeper and more enriching over time. Once you become habituated to listening regularly to these great works of art, the effect on one’s mood is easy to recognize.

Of course it should be pointed out that the average classical record is a sonic disaster. There are many excellent pressings of rock and jazz, but when it comes to classical music, being so much more difficult to record (and reproduce!), the choices are substantially more narrow. Most of what passed for good classical sound when I was coming up in audio — the DGs, EMIs, Sheffields and other audiophile pressings — are hard to listen to on the modern equipment of today.

I would say we audition at least five records for every one we think might pass muster in a future shootout, and we’re pulling only from the labels we know to be good. I wouldn’t even take the time to play the average Angel, Columbia or DG, or EMI for that matter. The losers vastly outweigh the winners, and there are only so many hours in a day. Who has the time?

All that said, it should be clear that assembling a top quality classical collection requires much more in the way of resources — money and time — than it would for any other genre of music. We are happy to do the work for you — our best classical pressings are amazing in every way — potentially saving you a lifetime of work… at a price of course.

Further Reading

Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Making Audio Progress Is Key to Finding Better Records 

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, which thins out the sound and washes out the lower strings.

On some sides of some copies the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage equipment, you never have to worry about the strings on your London orchestral recordings sounding too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is a dead end,  If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the second- and third-rate ones.

If you have this kind of electronic firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed Mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get with this kind of electronic overkill.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but get between you and the music you are playing.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life.

The “in-groove” guy you see to the left is the poster child for mistaking a rack of expensive components for the kind that can tell him how bad some records are, the Mobile Fidelity Kind of Blue in this case, which is very bad indeed. (Review coming someday we promise.)

We assume our customers can hear it — our good customer Conrad had no problem appreciating its shortcomings — but we are pretty sure our customers can recognize a good record from a bad one, otherwise they would not see the value in Hot Stampers, right?

But the blue lights look awesome, the stuff costs a fortune, and for those with better eyes than ears, it’s impressive as hell.

Good equipment is necessary but far from sufficient to get good sound, a subject we discuss here and at some length throughout the blog in our commentaries about audio equipment.

Why Are Some Common Subjects Concerning the Sound of Recordings Rarely Discussed?

Can we really be hearing all these characteristics of recordings that nobody else seems to be hearing? A few examples:

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Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 1 – What to Listen For

More of the music of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Hot Stamper Classical Imports on Decca & London

Our general notes for the recording seen below explain why the typical copy in our shootout fell short.

This is an LP with lots of tube compression, and some added brightness.

Without the added brightness, the piano would probably be mud.

The added brightness and compression results in a piano that always sounds rich and natural in the quieter passages.

The average copy also has some veiling or smearing that make the solo piano parts sound like they are coming fom behind a curtain. On these copies, the big peaks can often get strident and very messy.

It’s difficult to find a copy that has all the top end extension and space required to reproduce both a realistic piano and the massive live sound the orchestra is capable of.

All of which adds up to a difficult shootout in which relatively few copies had the sound we were looking for.

Production and Enginneering

John Culshaw produced and Kenneth Wilkinson engineered this recording for Decca in 1962 in the wonderful Kingsway Hall that the LSO perform in. If you know much about Golden Age classical recordings, you recognize these names as giants who strode the earth many years ago.

Further Reading

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Violin and Piano Concerto Recordings that Fall Apart

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Piano Concerto Recordings

Many of the vintage orchestral recordings we’ve auditioned over the years did a good job of capturing the lead instrument in a concerto — for example, the piano or violin — but fell apart completely when the orchestra came in, with obvious and unacceptable levels of congestion and distortion.

Orchestras are hard to record. Pianos and violins, not so much.

Here are some titles that often have congestion problems when they get loud. If you play your orchestral recordings at moderate levels, you may not be as bothered by this problem as we are, because we do not have the luxury of listening at moderate levels.

We have to put the records through the ringer, and one of the ringers they must go through is they must sound right at loud levels, because live music gets loud, without getting distorted or congested.

Congestion and distortion are problems for practically all the titles you rarely see on our site, the vintage pressings of recordings by EMI, DG, Philips, Columbia and dozens of others.

We discussed the problem here in more detail.

Further Reading

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Borodin / Symphonies 2 & 3 – Not Quite Perfect

More of the music of Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

This shootout, conducted back in 2012, was our first for the album.

This White Hot Stamper pressing has DEMO QUALITY sound of the HIGHEST ORDER on fairly quiet vinyl no less. We’ve long considered the album one of the greatest of all the Decca / London recordings, but this pressing takes the sound beyond even our high expectations.

There is simply nothing in the sound to fault. Where is the slightly dry and midrangy quality in the upper strings that so many Londons from this era suffer from? It’s nowhere to be found on this side one. (If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.)

And it’s not as though our stereo was hiding that quality, because some of it creeps into the sound on this very side two (which is why it earned a slightly lower grade of A++).

Big, rich and dynamic, this is the sound of LIVE MUSIC, and it can be yours, to enjoy for years to come — if you’ve got the stereo to play it and the time to listen to it.

The powerful lower strings and brass are gorgeous. Ansermet and the Suisse Romande get that sound better than any performers I know. You will see my raves on record after record of theirs produced during this era. No doubt the world renowned Victoria Hall they recorded in is key. One can assume Decca engineers use similar techniques for their recordings regardless of the artists involved. The only real variable should be the hall.

Ansermet’s recordings with the Suisse Romande exhibit a richness in the lower registers that is unique in my experience. His Pictures At Exhibition has phenomenally powerful brass, the best I’ve ever heard. The same is true for his Night On Bald Mountain. Neither performance does much for me — they’re both too slow — but the sound is out of this world. Like it is here.

Side One

A+++, big, rich and lively, yet clear, transparent and spacious. The brass is shockingly dynamic and powerful. I defy you to find better brass on a record than can be found on this side one. I can’t recall hearing it, and we play the best sounding Golden Age classical recordings by the score week after week.

Side Two

A++, a bit wider, with lovely sheen to the strings, but tonally a bit thinner and drier than it should be. Still, awfully good in comparison to the better classical records we put up every week, just not competitive with this amazing side one.

If you’re looking for Demonstration Quality Sound, look no further. This side one has it in spades.

Heavy Vinyl

Speakers Corner did a heavy vinyl reissue of this title, which we auditioned and used to sell. It’s reasonably good, but like all reissues it lacks the weight found on this original. I remember it being a little flat and bright. I haven’t played it in years so I could easily be wrong.

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Dvorak – Big Brass Is Key to the Best Pressings

More of the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Recordings Available Now

What do the best pressings all have in common?

There the ones with brass that is both powerful and weighty. That’s the sound that has the drive and energy to move the listener. As a rule, the tympani too will sound right when the brass has the air-moving power it should. The same is true for the lower strings.

Without fullness, richness and clarity in the area below the midrange, neither the sound nor the music can succeed. Many of the pressings we auditioned early on in an elimination round could not reproduce the brass with much weight; consequently they did not make it to the shootout.

(Sibelius’ Finlandia is the same way; it needs real weight down low. The huge brass opening of the piece is breathtaking on the best copies.)

Some of Our Favorite Orchestral Recordings with Especially Weighty Brass

Our Previous Hot Stamper Commentary

Presenting yet another remarkable Demo Disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, in this case 1961, with the added benefit of mastering courtesy of the more modern equipment of the ’70s, in this case 1970. (We are of course here referring to the good modern equipment of 40 years ago, not the bad modern mastering equipment of today.)

The New York critic W. J. Henderson raved:

It is a great symphony and must take its place among the finest works in the form produced since the death of Beethoven.

An Overview

We got off to a rough start with this piece of music. The early pressings we played were often sonically uninspiring, and that’s being charitable.

  • The London Blueback pressings with Kubelik (CS 6020) that we had thought were competitive with some of the better recordings we had on hand turned out to be generally disappointing. The strings were often hard and shrill, the overall sound crude and full of tube smear. These Londons cost us a pretty penny owing to the very high quality condition we require them to be in for our shootouts. All that time, effort and money was in the end for naught. A big chunk of dough was headed down the drain.
  • The Stereo Treasury pressing of this same performance sounded better to us than any of the Bluebacks we played but far from competitive with the recordings we ended up preferring.
  • The Londons and Deccas from 1967 with Kertesz conducting the LSO also left much to be desired sonically. After hearing the 9th on both London and Decca, we did a quick needle drop on the other symphonies from the complete cycle that Kertesz conducted and concluded that none of them were worth our time. The trade-in pile was growing ever taller.
  • Then some good news came our way when we dropped the needle on the Decca/London recording with Mehta and the LA Phil. Our best London sounded shockingly good, much better than the one Decca pressing we had on hand.His 8th Symphony (CS 6979) is also quite good by the way. This is surprising because we rarely like anything by Mehta and the LA Phil. from this period — the recording in question is from 1975 — but of course we are happy to be surprised when they sound as good as the ones we played.

The one that seemed to have the best balance of sound quality and performance was conducted by Istvan Kertesz, but not with the LSO. His recording with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1961, his debut for Decca as a matter of fact, is the one that ended up winning our first shootout of a dozen pressings or so. Our review of it can be found here.

Further Reading