Mercury (Orchestral) – 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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What Can You Learn from a Mercury Shootout Like This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

The short answer is that you can’t learn much from this shootout, because we’re not telling you which title the stampers you see below belong to.

Be that as it may, in the case of this mystery title the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — the earlier numbered pressings did better than the later numbered pressings, and the early labels did better than the later labels.

That happens a lot, and we are happy to admit that it does. Why? Because the experimental evidence — the data — say that is what happened.

As usual for posts in which the stamper sheet from a shootout is reproduced in its entirety, the stamper numbers shown below will belong to a different album than the one you see pictured.

These can be found under the heading of Mystery Stampers. Most of these posts will illustrate something to be learned from a Hot Stamper shootout, but because the information reveals the shootout winning stampers, the actual title of the record is rarely revealed.

Much more useful stamper information can be found using this link, which includes plenty of stamper numbers for specific titles that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound. In addition, we post the winning and losing stampers for some titles that are an unreliable guide to good sound. Unreliable stampers are also quite common.

The right stampers are only one of the many reasons some copies win our shootouts and others don’t, but in the case of this rare Mercury, a record that we only had four copies of, the RFR-2/2 stampers were clearly the best, with no other set of stampers coming close. The best of the others earned grades no better than 2+/2+.

One lesson that was clear was that the best stampers were, to quote our reviewer, “a step up!”

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So You Think You Know the Sound of the Best Stampers of Paris 1917-1938?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

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 five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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The Gayne Ballet on Mercury Can Be a Little Bright

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This review was probably written ten years ago.

Having just done another shootout for SR 90209 in 2025, I can now confirm that there are some stampers  are indeed too bright.

Side one of a recent copy had a sour midrange. Side two of the same copy was brash and metallic.

As for side two not sounding as good as side one in the older review before, seems we clearly got that wrong, the result, to some degree, of having an inadequate sample size.

More on the Gayne Ballet.

This side one is truly DEMONSTRATION QUALITY, thanks to its superb low-distortion mastering. It’s yet another exciting Mercury recording. The quiet passages have unusually sweet sound.

This kind of sound is not easy to cut. This copy gets rid of the cutter head distortion and coloration and allows you to hear what the Mercury engineers accomplished.

Side One

The balanced tonality is key, especially when you have such lively brass and strings. The top is correct, even sweet, and you can’t say that about very many Mercs. Exceptionally tight bass too.

I don’t know of a better performance or a better recording of the work.

Side Two

Dorati breathes fire into the famous Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet on side 2. Unfortunately, the sound is never as good in our experience as it is on side one.

Clear horns, a big hall — if it were a bit less bright it would probably have earned another plus.

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Piano Concerto Testing and Inner Groove Distortion

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

The piano is huge and weighty, the strings rich and highly resolving, and the overall presentation is powerful, balanced, dynamic and exciting like few other piano concerto recordings we have ever had the pleasure to audition.

Not only is the sound amazing — yes, it’s on the TAS Super Disc list, and for good reason: a copy as good as this one really is a Super Disc — but this copy has another vitally important characteristic that most copies of the record do not: no inner groove distortion.

We can’t begin to count the times we have had to return (or toss) a copy of one of these expensive Byron Janis records because the piano breakup for the last inch or so of the record was just unbearable. That’s a sound no serious listener could possibly tolerate, yet I would venture to guess that many Mercury piano concerto recordings suffer from this kind of groove damage.

As a matter of grading policy, we check the inner grooves of every record we offer on the site,

The Sound

The sound is rich and natural, with lovely transparency and virtually no smear to the strings, horns or piano. What an amazing recording! What an amazing piece of music.

The recording is explosively dynamic — on the best copies the sound comes jumping out of the speakers. In addition, the brass and strings are full-bodied, with practically no stridency, an unusual feat the Mercury engineers seem to have accomplished while in Russia (and not as often in the states).

Big, rich sound can sometimes present problems for piano recordings. You want to hear the percussive qualities of the instrument, but few copies pull off that trick without sounding thin. This one showed us a piano that was both clear and full-bodied.

With huge amounts of hall space, orchestral weight and performance energy, this is Demo Disc quality sound by any standard. Once the needle has dropped you will quickly forget about the sound (and all the money you paid to get it!) and simply find yourself in the presence of some of the greatest musicians of their generation, captured on one of the greatest analog recordings of all time.

Fine and Cozart

The piano is huge and powerful, yet the percussive and lighter qualities on the instrument are clearly heard in proper relation to the orchestra as a whole.

I simply cannot criticize the work that Fine and Cozart have achieved with this recording, and believe me, there are very few records in this world about which I could not find something to criiticize. After all, it is our job, and we like to set very high standards for the work we do.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing all aspects of your system, room, tweaks, electricity and the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in most audiophile reviews.

Our twenty or so of our favorite piano concerto recordings with top quality sound can be found here.

To read the 50 reviews and commentaries we’ve written for some of the greatest piano concerto recordings ever pressed on vintage vinyl, please click here

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Grieg / Peer Gynt Suite / Barbirolli

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review and one that may not be especially accurate as it was written before the advent of the modern record shootout. Pick this one up for cheap if you like.

Our current favorite pressing of the Peer Gynt Suite is the one Fjeldstad recorded for Decca.

1959 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2025 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and seventy titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.

We think there are close to 50 that belong in any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.

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The Firebird on Mercury – Hard to Beat for Table Setup

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stravinsky Available Now

Dorati’s performance of The Firebird for Mercury is an excellent recording for adjusting tracking weight, VTA, azimuth and the like.

Classical music is really the ultimate test for proper turntable/arm/cartridge setup and evaluation.

A huge and powerful recording such as The Firebird quickly separates the men from the boys when it comes to higher fidelity orchestral reproduction.

Recordings of this quality are the reason $10,000+ front ends exist in the first place. Just ask Robert Brook.

You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you do, this might just be the record that will show you what you got for your hard-earned dough.

Ideally you would want to work your setup magic at home with this record, then take it to a friend’s house and see if you can achieve the same results on his system. I did this sort of thing for years.

Sadly, not so much anymore; nobody I know can play records like these the way we can. Playing and critically evaluating records all day, every day, year after year, you get pretty good at it. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.

UPDATE 2025

The above was written about ten years ago. By then I had learned enough to know that all the systems my audio friends owned were woefully inadequate to the reproducton of sonic blockbusters such as The Firebird. They simply hadn’t spent the money on their equipment or done the work that it takes to play a magnificent recording such as this.

It was about this time that I stopped visiting them. In my experience, mediocre sound is not simply a matter of being less enjoyable than good sound. In fact, I found it to be the opposite of enjoyable. It was frustrating, irritating and unpleasant, and I wanted no part of it. My friends couldn’t hear what was wrong — they had nothing better to compare the sound to. I knew how much better it could sound because I had the killer pressings and the highly-tweaked system that were able to work magic on orchestral spectaculars like The Firebird. More on that subject here.

Properly set VTA is especially critical on this record, as it is on most classical recordings. The smallest change will dramatically affect the timbre, texture and harmonic information of the strings, as well as the rest of instruments of the orchestra of course.

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A Scheherazade that Lacks Power in the Brass and Richness in the Lower Strings? No Thanks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

One of the most dynamic Scheherazade‘s on record. The brass really blasts through in this recording. 

Of course the question is how does this recording stack up to the famous Reiner. Well, I’ll tell you.

The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra is not in the same league with the CSO, that’s well known. Dorati may be every bit as talented as Reiner, but he doesn’t have the players at his disposal capable of pulling off demanding material such as this.

But the orchestra acquits itself well here. The first violinist is quite good. That’s not the problem.

What lets the side down is the Mercury recording team, who fail to adequately present the weight of the orchestra in the lower midrange and below. One thing I noticed recently when playing an original LSC 2446 was how rich and powerful the sound was in the lower strings and in the brass relative to later pressings of the same title and other recordings of the work.

That opening movement of Scheherazade needs power down there and the Mercury simply doesn’t have enough of that power to qualify it as one of the top sounding Mercs.

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Is CTFR-1 Dark and Congested, or Flat and Bright?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Records Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original RFR-1 pressings on the plum label are the way to go, right? 

In some cases, yes. The first pressings of Mercury albums often win our shootouts.

And for both sides of a copy to win a shootout, like our gold promo seen in the stamper sheet below, everything about the pressing must be right. We call records that win their shootout, earning 3+ grades on both sides, Top Shelf pressings. They are rare and special enough to have a section of their own on the site (which, as of this writing, has all of 19 records in it.)

What we find to be interesting about this specific shootout, however, is that we had two later pressings, both with the same stampers, and they sounded markedly different from each other. (Note that the stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album than the one shown above.)

If a collector were to tell you that that the CTFR pressings tend to be dark and congested, and you owned one with the exact same stampers, CTFR-1, you might be inclined to agree with this person.

But if you were the owner of the copy we played that was flat and bright, again, with CTFR-1 in the dead wax of both sides, you would think this person was 1.) Out of his mind, or, 2.) Deaf as a post, or, 3.) The owner of some very inaccurate playback equipment.

He could be all three, but in this case, an unusual one to be sure, his copy of the album doesn’t tell you anything about the sound of your copy of the album. They could match, or they could be completely different. Some records are like that. Not all that many, but definitely some.

Sample Sizes and One Man Bands

Those of us who play a variety of pressings of the same album know how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about records. CTFR-1 on this title is the perfect example of a record whose stampers don’t tell you much about its sound. (Even RFR-1 on side one of one copy was no better than “good,” quite a long ways from the best.)

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Our Shootout Winner Needed to Solve Some Common Problems with Mercury Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

We described our shootout winning copy of Szeryng Plays the Music of Fritz Kreisler this way:

With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last, this Plum Label Mercury stereo pressing (the first copy to ever hit the site) is doing everything right.

The violin is so sweet and present, so rich, natural and real, you will forget you’re listening to a record at all.

This recording is not your typical dry, bright, nasaly, upper-midrangy Merc – the sound is rich and smooth like a good London, with a big stage and lovely transparency.

As is sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, there are marks that play, but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind.

Here are the notes that back up what we said above:

Notice that on side one, track four, we mention “not strident,” and the second track we note it’s “not too dry.”

Side has a note to the effect that it’s “kinda rich” and “not too bright.”

This tells you that practically all the other copies had these kinds of problems, something that anyone with a good selection of Mercury violin recordings is sure to know.

Our job is to find the pressings that not strident, not dry, not bright, and richer than others.

When you buy a top copy of an album from us, you don’t hear those problems because they are mostly not there.

What you hear is a side one that is:

  • Much fuller and 3-D, with a
  • Sweet and lively violin, one with
  • The most space

On side two you hear more of the same, and that’s a good thing:

  • 3-D and alive violin
  • Kinda rich
  • More dynamic and jumping out
  • Not too bright

Probably not the best solo violin recording we’ve ever sold, but certainly one of the best.

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