_Conductors – Munch

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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Beethoven / Violin Concerto / Heifetz / Munch

More of the Music of Beethoven

  • Our superb vintage pressing of this brilliant Living Stereo recording – from 1956! – boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
  • 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
  • The orchestra is wide, tall, spacious, rich and tubey, yet the dynamics and transparency are first rate
  • White Dogs and Shaded Dogs can both sound good on this title – just avoid the Red Seals and later pressings if you are looking for the best possible sound
  • 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.
  • If you’re a fan of Beethoven’s music, this superb All Tube Recording from 1956 belongs in your collection.
  • This Classic Records pressing, however, was a piece of garbage, and we made our position clear right from the start

The reproduction of the violin here is superb — harmonically rich, natural, clean, clear, resolving. What sets the truly killer pressings apart is the depth, width and three-dimensional quality of the sound, as well as the fact that they become less congested in the louder passages and don’t get shrill or blary.

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Debussy / Images For Orchestra / Munch

More of the Music of Debussy

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing
  • A spectacular Demo Disc quality orchestral recording – big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic
  • The rich, textured sheen on the strings that the Living Stereo recording process perfected starting in the 50s is clearly evident throughout these pieces, something that the Heavy Vinyl crowd will never experience – that sound just does not exist on modern records

Demo Disc quality sound! Iberia on side two sounds exceptionally good. It’s also a better performance than the famous Reiner. Munch understands this music perfectly.

This recording has an extremely open, extended top end. If you can add a few dB around 50 cycles, you will have the best of both worlds.

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Three Copies of Harold in Italy and Still No Luck

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

For a Living Stereo record from the Golden Age of All Tube recording, especially one from the late-50s, you might expect that the better Shaded Dog pressings would have exceptionally rich, natural sound.

After all, 1958 is clearly one of the great years for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.

Unfortunately, the pressings we played of the Berlioz album you see pictured were quite a letdown. We dropped the needle on three different early copies of LSC 2228 with three different sets of stampers and found that none of them were all that impressive, as can be seen from our notes:

  • First: tubey but pretty hot, just okay. (6s/3s)
  • Second: smeary and congested, not great. (4s/4s)
  • Third: tubey but smeary (3s/1s)

We guessed that their final grades after a shootout would probably fall into the range of 1+ or so, just below the cutoff for a minimal Hot Stamper grade (1.5+).

If we’d half a dozen or more to play, some copies would probably be a bit better, some would be a bit worse, but the bulk of them would end up having sound that was merely passable, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning some might not even earn that single plus.)

For now we’re throwing in the towel and moving on to Golden Age records with better prospects.

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Mendelssohn – Symphonies No. 4 (“Italian”) and 5 (“Reformation”) / Munch

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s dynamic and lively performance, here with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two of this vintage Living Stereo reissue pressing
  • It took us about a decade to finally realize that the Shaded Dog pressings, no matter what stampers they had, would simply never sound the way we wanted them to, and that the only way forward was to track down the right reissues, which I am happy to report we have now succeeded in doing
  • These sides are doing practically everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard
  • An abundance of energy, loads of rich detail and texture, and excellent clarity – the very definition of Demo Disc sound
  • There are some bad marks (as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs) on the third movement of Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”), but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and just be swept away by the music

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Ravel / Concerto in G – Munch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ravel Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We just played a clean, early Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2271, featuring Ravel’s Concerto in G.

Although it is a good sounding record, we do not believe it is very likely to be a great one.

If you own the record, play it and see if it still holds up. Our latest purchase didn’t.

There may be great sounding pressings of it, but at the price clean copies command these days, $100 and up, we have decided that pursuing this title is no longer in anyone’s interest.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

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Breathy, Sweet and Lush – What’s Not to Like?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

Our notes for LSC 2565 read:

Love the sound of this LP, especially the flutes and strings. Breathy, sweet and lush.

It’s very difficult to get the sound right, though. Most copies are smeary, veiled or lacking weight and the loud brass gets pinched. Best copy was a big step up!

We described the Top Copy from our 2023 shootout this way:

Wonderful Living Stereo sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing.

Our White Hot Shootout Winner was simply amazing sounding — some of the best orchestral sound we have heard lately, especially audible in exceptionally breathy flutes and sweet strings.

It was a quite a step up in sound quality over even the closest contender, which just goes to show how hard it is to come across these very special pressings no matter how many Shaded Dogs you play.

Our favorite performance of the Tchaikovsky — when you hear it played by the BSO, guided by the baton of the supremely talented Charles Munch, you know you are hearing the work performed with the greatest skill and interpreted as authentically as is humanly possible.

Spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence.

Another amazing recording from the 60s, brought to you by your vinyl-loving friends at Better Records.

  • The three-dimensional space and Tubey Magic are jaw-dropping on this copy.
  • An amazing Living Stereo all analog recording from 1962 – nothing else sounds like it.
  • When you’ve played as many Living Stereo titles as we have (250+ and counting), you’re bound to run into this kind of Demo Disc sound from time to time – it’s what makes record collecting fun.
  • It’s the kind of record we live for here at Better Records.

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La Creation du Monde Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Many years ago, perhaps around 2010, we played a nice copy of LDS 2625 and had this to say about it:

1s/ 2s. Side 2 has DEMO QUALITY sound. These rare Soria pressings have a tendency to be noisy so this is as quiet a copy as you are likely to find.

Unusually smooth. Just the opposite of the Mercury recordings. Perfect for this kind of music.

UPDATE 2025

The last couple of copies we picked up in preparation for a shootout we had been wanting to do were a little bright and would probably have earned grades of 1.5+, which are good, not great Hot Stamper grades.

Unless we can find some better sounding copies — not likely since this album on the original Soria pressing in stereo is rare and usually fairly expensive — we are very unlikely to be offering this title to our customers anytime soon.

Seems we got this one wrong. Live and learn is our motto, for precisely this reason.

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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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Destination Stereo, Gresham’s Law and the State of Reviewing As We See It

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Explosive dynamics, HUGE space and size, with unerringly correct tonality, this is a Demo Disc like no other.

When “in-the-know” audiophiles discuss three-dimensionality, soundstaging and depth, they should be talking about a record with sound such as this.

But are they? The so-called “glorious, life-changing” sound of one Heavy Vinyl reissue after another seems to be the only kind of record audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them want to talk about these days.

Even twenty years ago reviewers noted that tracks on compilations such as this often had better sound than the albums from which they were taken, proof that they were listening critically and comparing pressings.

What happened to reviewers of that caliber?

I can tell you what happened to them: they left audio, driven out according to the principle that underlies Gresham’s Law:

Bad reviewers drive out good ones.

Which leaves you with the type that can’t tell how mediocre-at-best most modern Heavy Vinyl reissues are. A sad state of affairs if you ask me, but one that no longer impacts our business as we simply don’t bother to buy, sell or play most of these records.

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