EMI/Harvest – Reviews and Commentaries

Seventies EMI Classical LPs and Vintage Tube Playback

More of the Music of Sergei Prokofiev

What to listen for on this album?

That’s easy: The all-too-common 70s EMI harshness and shrillness.

We could never understand why audiophiles revered EMI the way they did back in the 70s. Harry Pearson loved many of their recordings, but I sure didn’t. 

The longer I stay in his hobby, the more clear it is to me that many of the records on the TAS list are better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems we have today.

These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s. Some of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

For a more complete list of those kinds of records, not just the ones on the TAS List, click here. Note that some I liked, and some I did not back in the day.

I chalk it up — as I do most of the mistaken judgments audiophiles make about the sound of the records they play, my own judgments included — to five basic problem areas that create havoc when attempting to reproduce recorded music in the home:

  1. Equipment shortcomings,
  2. Untweaked setups,
  3. Bad electricity,
  4. Badly treated or untreated rooms, and
  5. Improper record cleaning

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Dialing in the Anti-Skate with Massed Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

I once adjusted my anti-skate while playing this very album, at the time dialing it in to what I thought was a “T.” 

Over the years I’ve found that the best test for fine anti-skate adjustment is massed strings, and not just at the end of a side but right at the part of the record in which the anti-skate has been engaged. This will vary with different arms.

When you have all the rosiny texture, the high-end harmonic extension, the least shrillness and the widest and deepest staging, you are there, assuming that tracking weight, azimuth and VTA are correct as well.

Four variables to mess with is admittedly a bitch, but having the right record to test with is absolutely critical as well. Maybe we should call it five variables.

And if I only had one record to bring to someone’s house in order to evaluate their equipment, this would certainly be a top choice. If you can make this record sound the way it should, your stereo is cookin’. If you are having problems, this record will show them to you in short order.

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The Planets – Our Four Plus Shootout Winner from 2013

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

We award this copy’s side two our very special Four Plus A++++ grade, which is strictly limited to pressings (really, individual sides of pressings) that take a given recording to a level we’ve never experienced before and had no idea could even exist. We estimate that about one per cent of the Hot Stamper pressings we come across in our shootouts earn this grade. You can’t get much more rare than that.

We no longer use this grade for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. Suffice to say, if you buy a White Hot Stamper pressing from us, you are getting the best sounding pressing we know to exist.

This Beyond White Hot Stamper Planets has Out Of This World sound on side two, where it earned a Four Plus sonic grade for its MINDBLOWING orchestral power, especially from the brass section, a subject we discuss at length below. 

This is some of the best sound I have ever heard coming out of my two speakers, if not THE best. Side two of this very copy takes the recording to a level we had no idea was possible. Out of the fifty or so copies of The Planets we’ve played in the last decade or so, this is without a doubt the best side two of them all.

We can only hope to find a side one as good in the next ten years. It probably exists, but will it take us another fifty copies to run into it? Only time will tell! (more…)