Conductors

Ravel / Daphnis et Chloé / Monteux

More of the Music of Maurice Ravel

  • Boasting INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout, this original London pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Ravel’s complete Masterpiece
  • 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
  • The sound is big and rich, lively and open, with an abundance of depth and huge climaxes that hold together
  • The voices in the chorus are clear, natural, separate and full-bodied — this is the hallmark of a vintage Golden Age recording: naturalness
  • We know of no other recording of the work that does as good a job of capturing such a large orchestra and chorus
  • Of course, Monteux is a master of the French idiom – his performance of the complete ballet is definitive in our opinion
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performances with the highest quality sound. This record is certainly deserving of a place on that list.

Both sides here are big, with the space and depth of the wonderful Kingsway Hall that the LSO perform in. John Culshaw produced the album, which surely accounts for the huge size and space, not to mention quality, of the recording. The sound is dynamic and tonally correct throughout.

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Allow Us to Make the Case that Even CDs Have Better Sound than Classic’s Vinyl

brahmvioli_1903_debunk

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 1903 is a disaster: shrill, smeary and profoundly unmusical.

In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records Living Stereo pressing.

The best Heifetz records on Classic were, if memory serves, LSC 2734 (Glazunov), LSC 2603 (Bruch) and LSC 2769 (Rozsa).

They aren’t nearly as offensive as the others, and one is actually quite good. If you can pick one up for ten or twenty bucks, you might get your money’s worth depending, I suppose, on how critically you listen to your classical records.

The CDs are better for all I know. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s generally poor track record.

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Violin Recordings and the Problem of Smear

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

This Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2129 had practically no smear on either the violin or the orchestra.

Try to find a violin concerto record with no smear.

We often say that Shaded Dogs, being vintage All Tube recordings, tend to have tube smear.

But what about the 70s transistor mastered Red Label pressings – where does their smear come from?

Let’s face it: records from every era more often than not have some amount of smear.

And we can never really know what accounts for it.

The key thing is to be able to recognize it for what it is.

(We find modern records, especially those pressed at RTI, to be quite smeary as a rule. They also tend to be congested, blurry, thick, veiled, and ambience-challenged. For some reason most audiophiles — and the reviewers who write for them — rarely seem to notice these shortcomings.)

Of course, if your system itself has smear it becomes that much harder to hear the smear on your records.  Practically every tube system I have ever heard had more smear than I could tolerate – it comes with the territory. And high-powered transistor amps are notoriously smeary, opaque and ambience-challenged. Our low-powered, all-transistor rig has no trouble showing us the amount of smear on records, including those that have virtually none.

Keep in mind that one thing live music never has is smear of any kind. Live music is smear-free. It can be harmonically distorted, hard, edgy, thin, fat, dark, and all the rest, but one thing it can never be is smeary.

That is a shortcoming unique to the reproduction of music, and one which causes many of the pressings we sell to have their sonic grades lowered.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for the Scythian Suite Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

When it comes to the Scythian Suite, we’ve decided that there is no good reason to put the Ansermet recordings in our shootouts anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. They are perfectly good records, but the Abbado is a step up both in performance and sound. Our main listening guy summed up the differences of the two recordings this way.

  • I prefer the DG version (2530 967) for sound and performance.
  • The London is very rich and lively but the big drums on the DG are killer, hard to beat!

So, out of the goodness of our hearts, we can now reveal the Shootout Winning stampers: 1W/1W.

However, in the case of CS-6538, knowing the right stampers is not going to get you very far.

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least six copies the way we did.

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Brahms and Dvorak / Serenades / Kertesz

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

This London Whiteback LP (CS 6594) has Super Hot Stamper sound on side two, which is where the Dvorak Serenade for 10 wind instruments, cello and bass can be found. It has lovely space and depth, with dead on tonality and lots of Tubey Magic.

If you love the sound of wind instruments (and who doesn’t? British Band Classics springs immediately to mind as one of the most enjoyable classical recordings I own), then this just may be the classical chamber recording for you.

We reviewed this recording using a single pressing back in 2011. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then. Everybody else did them that way too, and we see no evidence that they have adopted any of our methods

Until about twenty years ago we had no idea how incomplete and inadequate our understanding of any title could be with only a single copy on hand.  When we began doing shootouts in 2004, immediately it became obvious that only a stack of cleaned pressings allowed us to recognize what a recording’s strengths and weaknesses might be.

More to the point, it offered us the opportunity to clearly identify the best record in the group — the pressing whose superior sound quality stands out above all the others. (We call such records White Hot Stampers and put them in this section if at least one side earns a 3+ grade.)

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons. The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and detailing the specific differences we heard forced us to become better listeners.

Through this work, carried out over the course of many years, we learned that there is only one way to find better sounding records. Everything else is a guess, just like our review of this London was.

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Beethoven / Symphony No. 5 – Solti

More Classical and Orchestral Masterpieces

  • This big and lively vintage London pressing of Beethoven’s Masterpiece boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from top to bottom
  • 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
  • Good weight to the brass, huge hall space, wonderfully textured string tone – it’s all here and more
  • A top performance from Solti and the Vienna Phil – it’s classic Solti: fast-paced, exciting and powerful
  • This is Beethoven played with gusto – Solti brings this music to life like no other conductor we know of (with the exception of Dorati, perhaps)
  • Watch out for Solti’s later releases for Decca – they usually have an obvious shortcoming which we cannot abide in our classical recordings

We like our recordings to have as many of the qualities of Live Music as possible, and those qualities really come through on a record such as this, especially when reproduced on the full-range speaker system we use. It’s precisely this kind of big, clear, yet rich sound that makes audiophiles prize Decca/London recordings above those of virtually all other labels, and here, unlike in so many areas of audio, we are fully in agreement with our fellow record loving audiophile friends.

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50 Years Later and What, If Anything, Has Changed?

Audiophile Quality Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

In 1975 Klavier licensed and reissued some well-regarded EMI recordings with mastereing by one of our favorite mastering engineers, Doug Sax. They were to be produced here in the states for the domestic audiophile market.

I wrote a long piece many years ago about how ridiculously bad these records sounded. You can find it here.

I just happened to look up the album today to find out what year it had come out (1975) and discovered that back in 2015, when I first wrote about the record, I had somehow ignored the fact that not all the pressings were produced the same way. There was a special version made for a company called Eastern Pacific Sounds, no doubt serving the Asian audiophile market. It differed in ways that will be familiar to the audiophiles of today, even though it came out 50 years ago.

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 1,000 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality. Klavier records are used by many manufacturers and audio specialty shops for demonstrating their equipment.

For the Klavier release of Offenbach Overtures with Fremaux, our current favorite, they managed to produce even fewer pressings per stamper:

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 500 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality.

The problem with this way of thinking about records has always been a lack of evidence to support any of the supposed gains in sound or pressing quality. As with so much of audio and records, no doubt confirmation bias is at the heart of the problem

We did some testing ourselves years ago for the 45 RPM “Very Limited Edition” of Rumours, in which we demonstrated fairly conclusively that no two records sound the same, no matter how few you press from a stamper. (You can read all about it here.)

We discussed the conventional wisdom of buying promos so that you can get “test pressing” quality or something close to it. This also has proven to be of little value.

And now we have “one-step” pressings, some of which have been reviewed on this blog, either by me, Robert Brook or my customers. (This might be a good place to start to learn more about their sound quality, which, as far as we can tell, is consistently dismal.)

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Another Fine Entry for Our Heavy Vinyl Hall of Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It just so happens that I had the time to listen to this work from start to finish twice just last night, 2/11/2026. Saw it performed live just a few months back at Atlanta Symphony Hall.

This wonderful work never gets old.  Next time we do a shootout for the performance we like with Muti on EMI I hope you will see your way to picking up a copy. You won’t regret it.

The Classic Records repressings of Pictures at an Exhibition — whether at 33, 45, or any other speed, on one disc or four –are all godawful sounding.

(Yes, we have auditioned both versions, for as long as we could stand them, which wasn’t long as the sound was painfully bad. The details can be found below.)

Everything that was bad about the worst original Shaded Dog pressings not only hasn’t been fixed, it’s been made even worse!

Yes, we admit to having played a good pressing of LSC 2201 in 2024, but there are just too many bad pressings of the album to bother doing a shootout for it. It’s hard to justify the cost when so few have the sound we are looking for.

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my head hurt and my skin crawl. After a minute or two of listening to sound this bad I’ve had it.

And can you believe that HP put this miserable remastered pressing on his TAS Super Disc List? Sad but true.

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Beethoven – Symphony No. 7 / Solti

More of the Music of Beethoven

  • Solti and the Vienna Phil’s commanding performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (CS-6777) debuts on the site with big, spacious, and lively Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this vintage London pressing
  • 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
  • These sides are doing practically everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, and has depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard
  • The texture on the strings is captured perfectly – this is an area in which modern pressings fail utterly, and without good string reproduction, especially in the lower registers, a Beethoven symphony is simply not a pleasurable experience on highly resolving equipment

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Overtures in Hi-Fi / Wolff

More Imported Pressings on Decca and London

  • This vintage London Stereo pressing was doing practically everything right, with both sides earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
  • 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
  • Both of these sides are big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic, and will surely put to shame any pressing of the album you own
  • Although not long, every second is packed with color and energy, exactly what a good overture needs (And it even has a glockenspiel! How can you go wrong?)
  • Also notable is the choice of material, with a few of the more obscure overtures really brought to life here, such as the opening piece by Adam on side one: “Si j’etais roi”

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