Decca/London/Argo – Reviews, Commentaries, Letters, etc.

It’s Already So Good, How Could It Get Any Better?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not identify the title of the record that has the Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.

But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings for CS 6101 are the way to go.

It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.

It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.

Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound  tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.

No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.

No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.

When we first dropped the needle on a copy of this album, we heard the classic Decca Kenneth Wilkinson sound that we’ve come to know and love from the scores of other titles of his we’ve played.

At the time we would not have had any way to know how good the sound could get, or if it could get any better at all.

Knowing that only a  shootout could tell us that, we proceeded to round up as many clean copies of the album as we could find and get one going.

The Question of the Day

Now imagine you are a record collector of the audiophile persuasion. (Notice we rarely use the term “audiophile record collector” if we can avoid it — it leaves a bad taste in our mouths and has since 1987 when we started our little record business.) Any of the copies you see graded above could have been the one you might have auditioned in order to “test” the record’s bona fides for sound, music, vinyl quality, etc.

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Our Top Copy of Iberia Lacked a Measure of Weight and Tubey Magic on Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Subtitled:

The Thrill of Hearing Massive Sound on an Orchestral Blockbuster of the First Order.

We described our most recent shootout winning pressing this way:

This superb classical release (the first copy to hit the site in close to two and a half years) boasts big, bold, dynamic Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this early London pressing.

The notes rave about this copy: “huge and spacious, strong strings and brass, very rich, well-defined low end, sweet and rich and textured strings, gets massive and extends both up high and down low.”

Here you will find the huge hall, correct string tone, spacious, open sound that are hallmarks of all the best vintage orchestral pressings.

Listen to the plucked basses – clear, not smeary, with no sacrifice in richness. Take it from us, the guys that play classical recordings by the score, this is hard for a record to do.

Below you can find our actual shootout notes for that copy.

We discovered that side two was slightly lacking in some ways. We had a side two on another copy that was better than the 2.5+ side two you see here.

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side two of another copy showed us there was potentially even more weight and Tubey Magic to the recording than we had expected after hearing a number of copies by that point in the shootout.

As a consequence we felt it best to drop side two’s grade a half plus to 2.5+. Initially it was graded “at least 2+”, and the grade was then raised to 2.5+ after playing it head to head in the final round against the eventual shootout winner.

We marvelled at these specific qualities in the sound of side one.

Track Three

  • Huge and spacious
  • Strong strings and brass
  • Very rich
  • Well defined lows

Track Two

  • Sweet and rich and textured strings
  • Gets massive
  • Extends at both ends of the frequency spectrum

“Gets massive” is something we don’t say about too many records, but the best Hot Stamper pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars such as this one can certainly get massive if you have the speakers, the power to drive them, and the room big enough to unleash the kind of orchestral power found on these phenomenal sounding LPs.

In our experience, if you really want to hear this kind of “massive sound,” an early pressing of a Decca recording from 1960 is a good place to go looking for it.

You are very unlikely to hear it on any record made in the last fifty years, although we can’t say it isn’t possible.

Allow us to save you some trouble looking for love in all the wrong places. Take our word and skip the more than forty remastered classical and orchestral titles we’ve played over the years that badly missed the mark. (For other kinds of music there are hundreds more.)

Side two was nearly as good:

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Sometimes the Earliest Stampers Just Cannot Be Beat

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom, attempting to make the case that, although the most common record collecting approaches are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know what approach will produce the best results for any given title.

Rather than post one exception after another — easily done, since we know literally hundreds of them — we are happy to admit that the generally accepted record collecting rules of thumb* work well for most records, with the definition of “most” being “more than half the time.”

In the case of this Mystery London, the received wisdom turns out to be right on the money. (As per our policy, please note that the Mahler album you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this post.)

What conclusions can we draw from this information?

We would be very surprised if the earlierst pressings cut by Harry Fisher (1W/1W) can be beaten for sound. It’s possible, of course, and we will naturally continue to buy pressings with other stampers, if for no other reason than the fact that they are far more plentiful than the first pressings.

But if a 1W/1W gets offered to us at a high price, you can be sure we will jump at the opportunity to buy it and put it into a shootout.

The second one that comes to mind is that some vintage originals are not particularly well-mastered or pressed. (The 1W side twos should have sounded better than the 2+ grades they earned, but my guess is that the metal work by then was older and morn worn and just could not compete with the fresher, earlier copies, the ones with 1W side ones.)

All three of the early Deep Groove pressings with stampers other than 1W/1W did not earn Super Hot stamper grades (2+) on both sides. The only way to get top quality sound for this title is with the first pressing. And both of our 1W/1W pressings had Shootout Winning sides. (Here are some of the other albums we’ve discovered in which one set of stampers consistently win our shootouts.)

Now imagine that some company has come along and remastered the album on Heavy Vinyl for the benefit of audiophiles and music lovers alike.

If the vintage pressing you own just happens to have anything but 1W/1W stampers — you picked it up years ago because it’s an original on the Deep Groove early label and appears to be as vintage as vintage can be — you would be jumping for joy that finally the sound of the master tape has been transferred to vinyl properly after all these years.

Thank god for Kevin Gray / Bernie Grundman / Krieg Wunderlich / Chris Bellman or somebody else — pick any name you like — for the wonderful mastering work they do, bringing old records back to life.

What a service they do for the audiophile community!

Their critics must be idiots.

Sample Sizes and One Man Bands

Those of us who play a variety of pressings of the same album know where judgments of this kind come from.

They are mostly the result of sample sizes that are too small.

If you’re an audiophile reviewer operating as a one man band, which, as far as we know, is the only way any of them currently operate, your chances of getting it wrong are fairly high indeed. Here is one obvious example from a long time ago, but there are plenty more to be found under the heading of shootout malpractice here on the blog.

Just as an aside, please note that many of our customers do their own shootouts and seem to come to much more accurate assessments of the various pressings they play than any reviewers we’ve encountered. Perhaps we can take some small credit for showing them the way? I would like to think so.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

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This London from 1961 Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

1961 just happens to be one of the greatest years for high quality analog recordings. Just check out this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.

This London LP was released in 1961, right in the heart of the Golden Age, so we figured it had a good chance of displaying the kind of relaxed, immersive, smooth, rich, Tubey Magical Decca sound we absolutely cannot get enough of here at Better Records.

As we were preparing to do the shootout with the six copies of CS 6202 we had amassed over the years, we suddenly ran into a big problem.

(Cue sound effect of record being scratched here.)

We discovered that the sound was just not very good. There wasn’t much top end to speak of. The overall sound on even the best copies we auditioned was boxy, OK at best. It was crude and smeary.

You can be sure we will eventually be offloading these on Discogs when we find the time. Our advice in the meantime: Don’t waste your money.

And if you have one in your collection and think it sounds great, please drop us a line so we can find one like yours.

If you do have one in your collection, more than likely it is sitting on some shelf, not having been played in years. This is what happens to mediocre records — they just sit around, taking up space.

Yes, the classic Golden Age cover is lovely. But what good is a lovely cover when the record is as mediocre as this one?

The world is full of second- and third-rate records. As a matter of fact I am willing to bet they make up the bulk of most large record collections like the one seen here.

And if you just happen to be the proud owner of such a collection, how can you possibly find the time to play more than a small fraction of the records you own in any given year?

Or, for that matter, even over the course of a decade. The reality is that you can’t.

Which, on the upside, means that, as far as you know, all your records sound great! No need to buy another copy of [insert title here]. You haven’t played it in twenty years and chances are you won’t for twenty more to come.

Here’s hoping your kids like old records because they are going to inherit an awful lot of them.

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When Fisher Took Over from Goodall, He Really Let the Side Down

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Please keep in mind that, as per our usual, the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this posting.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

The quick takeaway: Stan Goodall (“E”) cut the Shootout Winning early pressings.

Then, for reasons known only to the folks at Decca, Harry Fisher (“W”) took the reins and managed to cut some side twos that were very good. Not as good, but still very good: 2+ most of the time, some slightly worse. They were not as weighty or rich, and we take a lot of points off for records that are not as weighty or rich as they should be.

By the time Decca had changed its label to the Decca in a Box design, Mr. Fisher was cutting all the pressings, and, in our experience, not doing an especially good job. We do not even offer records with grades that low.

The sound might be passable, and would probably still be better than whatever Heavy Vinyl pressings might have been made from the tapes in the last twenty years, but that’s not good enough for us here at Better Records, not at the prices we charge anyway.

We described Fisher’s sound as dry and hot on side one, and thin and very small on side two of the 5W-stamped pressing we played. We only had the one, and the reason we had even one after having heard other Boxed Decca pressings do poorly, is that it’s a good way to stay honest and to have a better baseline to work with.

If we played nothing but 3E/1E originals, most of those 1E side twos would have earned a 2+ grade, but they would have sounded much better than the 2W-graded copies, and that seriously screws up the grading scale, especially when clean originals cost us a hundred bucks or more these days.

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The Planets – Can You Imagine Sound this Bad from a TAS List Super Disc?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We can, we played it.

Or, to be more correct, we played them. Two pressings, each with one good side and one very bad side.

UPDATE 2025

Take all of this with a very large grain of salt. In the course of doing more shootouts for the Mehta Planets, we’ve played quite a number of different pressings and now believe — believe being the operative word — we know which are the best stampers.

It is very unlikely that any Dutch pressing would be competitive with the best UK-pressed copies cut by Harry Fisher.

For those of you who just want a good sounding copy of The Planets to play and enjoy, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

We know of no better performance, and we much prefer the dramatically more natural sound quality.

The Mehta recording, like much of what he recorded for Decca in those days, is a multi-miked mess, the kind we grew out of (for the most part) a long time ago. (More of the multi-miked records we’ve auditioned, of varying quality to be sure, can be found here.)

Our old commentary (please excuse the heavy-handed caps):

This 2-pack from many years ago (ten fifteen perhaps), described below, boasts White Hot Stamper sound on side two for the Mehta Planets. Yes, it IS possible. Side two shows you what this record is actually capable of — big WHOMP, no SMEAR, super SPACIOUS, DYNAMIC, with an EXTENDED top.

It beat every London pressing we threw at it, coming out on top for our shootout. Folks, we 100% guarantee that whatever pressing you have of this performance, this copy will trounce it.

But side one of this London original British pressing was awful.

We wrote it off as NFG after about a minute; that’s all we could take of the bright, hard-sounding brass of War.

If you collect Super Discs based on their catalog numbers and labels and preferred countries of manufacture, you are in big trouble when it comes time to play the damn things.

That approach doesn’t work for sound and never did.

If your stereo is any good, this is not news to you. The proof? The first disc in this 2-pack is Dutch. It earned a Super Hot grade in our blind test, beating every British copy we played against it save one. Side two however was recessed, dark and lifeless. Another NFG side, but the perfect complement to our White Hot British side two!

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London Records Takes You on A Journey Into (Potentially Very Good) Stereo Sound

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This was written a very long time ago!

INSANELY GOOD vintage Decca sound from 1958 — bigger, richer and more Tubey Magical than 9 out of 10 (or more!) records we’ve ever played from the pre-’60s early stereo Golden Age. How they got this one so right is beyond me.

We were sorely tempted to grade it White Hot, but chose instead to err on the side of modesty and call it A++ to A+++ or better (which is practically White Hot when you think about it).

Can it be that THIS was the first stereophonic sound music lovers of the world were exposed to on LP? (Stereo tapes may have existed in 1954, but they had to wait until 1958 to be transferred to vinyl.)

Could we possibly have fallen so far in only fifty years?

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For Arcana, Speed Is Key

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

This is a recording that allows your speakers to disappear completely like practically no other. A powerful Test Disc as well. Use this one to check your speed and staging, subtle changes in your equipment can have a big effect on recordings like this

Incredible sound for this CRAZY 20th Century music, featuring wild and wacky works which rely almost exclusively on percussion (not one, not two, but three bass drums!). My favorite piece here may be Ionisation, which uses real sirens (the Old School ones cranked by hand) as part of Varese’s uniquely specialized instrumental array.

But the main reason audiophiles will LOVE this album is not the music, but the SOUND. Ionisation has amazing depth, soundstaging, dynamics, three-dimensionality and absolutely dead-on tonality — it’s hard to imagine a recording that allows your speakers to disappear more completely than this one.

It also makes a superb test disc. Subtle changes in your equipment can have a big effect on recordings like this.

The instrumental palette is large and colorful, giving the critical listener plenty to work with.

And this copy is perfect for testing because is is nearly FLAWLESS in its sound. No other copy could touch it. Many copies are not especially transparent, spacious or three-dimensional, and lack extension on both ends of the frequency spectrum.

The SPEED of the percussion is also critical to its proper reproduction.

No two pieces of electronics will get this record to sound the same, and some will fail miserably.

If vintage tube gear is your idea of the ultimate in sound, this record may help you to better understand where its shortcomings lie.

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Frames of Reference, Carefully Conducted Shootouts and Critical Listening

Hot Stamper Pressings of Decca Recordings Available Now

The sound we were hearing on this pressing of the Beethoven Septet (CS 6132) during a recent shootout was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments heard in the work.

The legendary 1959 Decca tree microphone setup had worked its magic once again.

And, as good as it was, we were surprised to discover that side two was actually even better!

The sound was more spacious and more transparent. We asked ourselves, how is this even possible?

Hard to believe, but side two had the sound that was TRULY hard to fault.

This is precisely what careful shootouts and critical listening are all about.

Shootouts are the only way to answer the most important question in all of audio: “compared to what?”

Without shootouts, how can you begin to know what are the strengths and weaknesses of the copies you own?

The vast majority of our Shootout Winning pressings fall short in one way or another on one side, something we have lately been making more of an effort to highlight on the blog.

Now, if you are a fan in general of modern Heavy Vinyl pressings, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings of those same titles could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl might sound fine.

It’s only when you have something better to play that its faults come into clearer focus.

And if you have any of these titles and they sound fine to you, this is a situation that requires your immediate attention!

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Beethoven Symphony No. 7 – This London with Solti Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

In our survey for the work, we played a number of the better known recordings from the top conductors and orchestras around the world.

Here is what we heard when we dropped the needle on an early pressing of CS 6093, released in 1959.

Our notes read:

  • Awful,
  • so dry,
  • steely,
  • crude,
  • bad

In other words, it just sounded like an old record. The world is full of records that don’t sound very good. As a matter of fact they undoubtedly make up the bulk of large record collections.

And if you just happen to be the proud owner of a big record collection, how can you possibly find the time to play more than a small fraction of it in any given year. Or even over the course of a decade for that matter.

The fact is that you can’t. Which, on the upside, means that, as far as you know, all your records sound great!

No need to buy another copy of whatever title you care to name. What for? You haven’t played it in twenty years and probably won’t get around to pulling it off the shelf for a spin for at least another twenty.

Here’s hoping your kids like old records because they are going to end up with an awful lot of them.

Back to the Beethoven 7th. What a beautiful cover!

But what good is a beautiful cover when the record sounds as bad as this one does?

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