_Composers – Bizet

What We Listen For – Timbre, Richness, Tubey Magic and Freedom from Artificiality

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Barney Kessel Available Now

Man, when you play a Hot Stamper copy of an amazing recording such as this, the timbre of the instruments is so spot-on it makes all the hard work and money you’ve put into your stereo more than pay off. To paraphrase The Hollies, you get paid back with interest.

If you hear anything funny in the mids and highs of this record, don’t blame the record. This is the kind of record that shows up audiophile BS equipment for what it is: Audiophile BS. If you are checking for richness, Tubey Magic and freedom from artificiality, I can’t think of a better test disc. It has loads of the first two and none of the last.

A Great Test Disc

We highly recommend you make every effort to find yourself a copy of this album and use it to test your own equipment. The right pressing can be both a great Demo Disc and a great Test Disc.

Two of the best sounding jazz guitar records in the history of the world were made by Barney Kessel for Contemporary: this one, and Music To Listen To Barney Kessel By. I used to have them both in my personal collection.

UPDATE 2015

This was written many years ago when I actually had a personal collection. With 40,000 records in stock I don’t need a collection of my own anymore. Any record I might want to play is in stock, waiting to be shot out.

UPDATE 2025

I’ve retired to Georgia. All the records are back in California where we are working diligently at finding them good homes.

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Bizet – Carmen and L’Arlesienne Suites / Gibson / Morel

More of the music of Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • A superb UK Decca pressing of these lively orchestral showpieces with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • 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
  • Vibrant orchestrations, top quality sound and reasonably quiet surfaces combine for an astounding listening experience
  • This is a spectacular recording – it’s guaranteed to put to shame any Heavy Vinyl pressing of orchestral music you own
  • Speaking of Heavy Vinyl, Alexander Gibson conducts two of the most sought-after and valuable RCA Living Stereo titles of them all, LSC 2225 and LSC 2449. We have not been able to find either for about ten years at anything under $1000, and that is too pricey for records that may not sound the way we want them to

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Bizet / Carmen Fantaisie – A No-Better-than-Decent Decca Reissue

More of the music of Georges Bizet

This Ace of Diamonds UK pressing (SDD 420) of the famous Ricci recording has fairly good sound, but it is a far cry from the real thing on either Decca or London disc.

The right originals are just too good. There is nothing like them. They are simply amazing recordings, unequaled in fifty or more years. If you want that sound, you’d better plan on going back to 1960 or thereabouts to find it.

The Speakers Corner Reissue was my first exposure to this music and I fell in love with it. I recommended it highly back in the days when I was selling Heavy Vinyl.

I admit I haven’t heard one in years, but my guess is that you are probably better off with this Decca Ace of Diamonds pressing that anything Speakers Corner might have put out.

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Gounod / Faust – Does Your Copy Have Clipped Bass?

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Classical and Orchestral Titles Available Now

This RCA Plum Label Victrola LP, the budget reissue of the incredibly rare LSC 2449, has some of the best and worst Golden Age sound I’ve ever heard. It has most of the magic of the better VICS copy I rave about.

When a cutting amplifier runs out of juice, the bass simply “clips.” The beginning of the bass note is heard, and then it just stops.

A fair number of RCA Shaded Dog originals have this problem. The cutting amplifiers of the day were often not up to the job. They ran out of power.

It’s amazing to me that so few collectors of these records even know what I’m talking about when I mention this shortcoming. They just assume it’s something in the recording perhaps. But it’s not. Oftentimes it is simply stamper variations that separate the clipped records from the unclipped records.

The more compression that is used, the less likely it is that the amplifiers will clip at all. But that’s obviously not the solution. And of course if you play records like this back on say, Quads, a notoriously compressed and bass-shy speaker to begin with, you’ll never notice any of this.

You also won’t hear it on this system.

Ah, but here is a wonderful recording that, on the better pressings at least, has deep, powerful, unclipped bass that can rattle the walls and sound like your flooring is in danger of being warped. But you need big woofers to get that effect, and lots of them.

But side two actually sounds quite good. Not as good as the best Shaded Dog copies possibly, but since those are $1000 and up, this has to be considered a good alternative at a fair price.

Lots of Living Stereo magic and a wonderful performance by Gibson make this record easy to recommend.

Carmen Fantaisie / Introduction And Rondo Capriccioso on Ebay for $787

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

UPDATE 2021

We sold this copy last night (10/2010), immediately after one had sold in an auction on ebay for $787, a price almost two hundred dollars more than what we were asking.

Note that our copy was cleaned and auditioned and found to be both phenomenally good sounding and reasonably quiet. None of these things could be said of the record on ebay of course, but apparently the word is out that this is an amazing recording and the bidding reflected that fact. I have never seen one go for anything like this kind of dough. Now that they do — there were four bidders about $550 — you should not expect to see a Hot Stamper pressing of the album show up on our site again unless we get very lucky locally, and that is highly unlikely.

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Gounod / Ballet Music from Faust – Classic Records Reviewed

More of the music of Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Reviews and Commentaries for Guonod / Faust Ballet Music

Sonic Grade: C

Classic Records did a passable job with LSC 2449, one of their better efforts, but of course it has almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have, and they have them more often than not in abundance.

Their version is not awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and considering that the original goes for many, many hundreds of dollars, might be worth picking up at a reasonable price.

Most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of the quality of a good original. If they had Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us way back in 1994, as soon as we had a chance to play them.

I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled (HP, how could you?), but I can say that we weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. (We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the We Was Wrong entries to prove it.)

And the fact that so many of them are currently on the TAS List is a sad comment on how far the mighty have fallen.

Classical Living Stereo Titles Available Now

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Bizet / Carmen for Orchestra / Gould – A Demo Disc for Size and Space

DEMO QUALITY SOUND, if what you’re demonstrating is the three dimensional quality of Living Stereo recordings. Amazing depth and width can be heard on this record. And the music is sublime.

I confess I somewhat misjudged this title. Yes, the opening is compressed, which led me to think that the entire record was compressed, but that’s not true. In some ways it’s quite dynamic. The quiet portions are very quiet; in a couple of places there are just horns playing off in the deep distance, followed by some flutes, and they sound very natural, just as you would hear them in a concert hall.

This record has one quality that sets it apart, and that is a tremendous sense of depth and a wide soundstage. Because so much of the music is quiet, and seems to be coming from so far back in the hall, you really get drawn into it, and lose the sense of being in your own living room. There are a couple of exciting climaxes, but for the most part this is fairly quiet music the way Gould has orchestrated it. I find it enchanting.

This is not the Power of the Orchestra. These are the Colors of the Orchestra.

This 1S copy is the best I’ve heard. This record looks brand new and plays about as good as one would expect from the RCA vinyl of the day, which is slightly ticky. I’ve never heard a quieter copy.

This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review

Most of these older reviews are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding the best sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s. We found the records you see in these listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described in the listing and priced according to how good the sound and surfaces seemed to us at the time.

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 then.

Nowadays, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions along with a number of other pressings, awarded sonic grades, then carefully condition checked 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 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, would ever be able to do the kind of work we do.

Every record we offer is unique, and 100% guaranteed to satisfy or your money back.

Bizet / Symphony in C Major / Ansermet – Notes from 2011

This Decca Ace of Diamonds pressing from 1970 of Ansermet’s 1961 recording has SUPERB Super Hot Stamper sound on BOTH sides. The Symphony in C, which takes up the whole of side one, is BIG and LIVELY, which is just the kind of sound that makes us swoon here at Better Records.

Live music IS big and lively, so why shouldn’t the best records be?

The second movement has a sublimely gorgeous oboe part you must hear. The whole side is wonderfully spacious, with real depth.

The sound of the 1961 tape must be truly magical. If you don’t know why we revere the Golden Age of Classical Recordings — 1954 to 1969 or so — buy this record.

We like our recordings to have as many live qualities as possible, and those qualities really come through on a record like this when reproduced on the full-range speaker system we use. It’s precisely this kind of big, rich sound that makes audiophiles prize Decca-London recordings above virtually any other label, and here, unlike in so many areas of audio, we are fully in agreement.

This is a Top Title in every way and comes highly recommended. Bizet wrote music that belongs in any serious music collection; there’s certainly a great deal more to his canon than Carmen. (more…)

Ibert / Divertissement / Martinon – Reviewed in 2011

More of the music of Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)

This London LP has a very good side two.

Lively and not too bright with nice space and clarity, the Jeux D’Enfants is very enjoyable.

Le Rouet D’Omphale (the Spinning Wheel) which follows is even better! Natural and dynamic with rich strings, the tonality is wonderfully balanced. 

Performed with the Paris Conservatory Orchestra under Jean Martinon, this record also features Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre.

Side one, unfortunately, is not up to the same standard. Both sides, of course, have been through our extensive cleaning process and should sound substantially better than average.

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.)

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