Mercury (Orchestral) – Reviews, Commentaries, Letters, etc.

Remind Me, What Is the Point of Listening to a Quiet Record with Mediocre Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

A lackluster reissue from Philips, bad enough to qualify for our hall of shame.

This is some truly dead as a doornail sound, sound which is not remotely competitive with the real Mercury pressings we’ve played. The FR pressings of the recording can be phenomenally good.  Even the later M2 pressings from Philips can be excellent. 

Back in the 80s and 90s, I actually used to like some of the Golden Import pressings.  That was a long time go, and thankfully our playback system is quite a bit more revealing than the one I had back in those days.

After playing literally tens of thousands of records since then, my critical listening skills are better too.

Now when I play these imports, they sound veiled, overly smooth, smeary and compressed, not too different from the average Philips pressing, which of course is exactly what they are. They’re all remastered by Philips, to give the Mercury tapes the sound that Philips thinks they should have. Sadly, not much of the Mercury Living Presence sound has survived.

We complain about mixing and mastering engineers who felt compelled to bring a new sound to old favorites.

The Philips label that produced the Golden Import series are serial offenders in this regard.

The Golden Import pressings might be good for audiophiles who care more about quiet surfaces than good sound.  We are firmly staked at the opposite side of that trade-off.

Quiet vinyl means nothing if the sound is poor, or, at the very least, wrong for the recording.

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Bose Salutes the Sound Of Mercury Records (and Some Audio Lessons Learned Long Ago)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

This Bose / Mercury Demonstration LP is autographed by none other than Amar G. Bose. The autograph reads “To EMI, with regards and best wishes, Amar G. Bose.”

Bose may not have ever made very good speakers, but they sure knew good recordings when they heard them. This LP has excerpts from some of the top Mercury titles, including music by Copland (El Salon Mexico), Kodaly (Hary Janos Suite), Mussorgsky/ Ravel (Pictures At An Exhibition), and Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian Easter Overture).

I played one of these Bose records years ago and was surprised at how good it sounded. The transfers of the Mercury tapes were excellent. I guess that makes sense — if you want to show off your speakers you had better use a well-mastered record for the demonstration.

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording.

To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

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We Were Way Off the Mark with this Rodrigo Recording in 2010

More of the music of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

In 2010 we did a shootout for this title and thought we had found a good one. We wrote:

A good side one backed with a lovely side two! We shot out a stack of these recently and side two of this copy was one of the few sides that really impressed us. The sound is transparent and full of energy. Side one is pretty good but a bit crude in the louder passages.

This is a wonderful record. The performance here by the first family of guitar is legendary. More importantly, the music is delightful and belongs in any serious classical collection.

RFR-1 stampers. What the best originals like this one give you is immediacy. The attack of the guitar is more real.

Comparing this with the Golden Import shows you that some of the transients are smoothed over on that pressing.

If you’ve got the front end that can deal with the Mercury upper midrange and transient attack, the strings will sound textured and clear, not harsh or shrill. (A badly mastered version of this record would make your ears bleed.)

More importantly, this copy captures the sounds of the guitars perfectly. I doubt if anybody could do it as well as Mercury.

Recently we did the shootout again and came up with very different findings:

Now those same stampers are tubey and weighty, but the strings are too hot (bright and shrill) and flat (lacking richness).

We can sum up the sound of these stampers — on a different copy of course, something to keep in mind — in one word:

Ouch.

Please allow us to help you avoid making the same mistakes we did:

  • More records with bright sound can be found here
  • More records with flat sound can be found here

What’s So Golden About These Imports Anyway?

And by the way, we would never even bother to reserve the studio time to play a Golden Import pressing these days. I can count on one hand the titles that actually sound good to me and it’s just not worth the labor to find the one out of fifty that has hi-fidelity sound as we currently define it.

This commentary gets at our disappointed feelings about the label.

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Robert Fine Does It Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

The notes you see below are for our Shootout Winner, which earned our top grade of at least 3+ on side one with its Hard to Fault (HTF) sound.

If you are interested in a record with the kind of sound described below, please contact us and we will be happy to put you on the waiting list for the next killer copy that comes along and blows our minds.

As you may well imagine, shootouts for this album are exceedingly rare. For a sought-after TAS List title such as this, we’re lucky to be able to do one every five years or so. Until the next one comes around, please consider trying some of our other classical and orchestral Hot Stamper pressings.

Robert Fine’s recordings for Mercury are some of the most amazing sounding we have ever played. To see what might be available, please click here.

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This Mercury Is Not a Good Way to Enjoy Tchaikovsky’s 4th

More of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

The pressings we’ve played of SR 90279 over the years tended to have crude and shrill sound. The string tone was bright and steely.

In our most recent shootout for the work, since we happened to have one in stock, we figured we would give the Mercury one more chance, just in case we had finally stumbled on some good stampers or that other improvements to our playback would allow the hidden virtues of the recording to be revealed. (Yes, thankfully that is still happening. So is the reverse; some records don’t do as well in shootouts as they used to, a reality every audiophile has to be on the alert for, a subject we discuss here.)

It probably lasted less than five minutes on the table.

It was simply too unpleasant to be played on the revealing modern equipment we use.

It seems that many early Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings. My guess would be at least half, maybe even closer to two out of three.

Waking Up

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way some audiophile systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up, bright and aggressive sound to bring it to life in no time. (If you’re a fan of MoFi pressings from the 70s and 80s, you definitely have a much smoother top end than we do. Most of the records they made in those years are way too bright and full of the kind of phony detail that some systems need to wake them up. I should know; I had one of those systems myself, but of course I didn’t know it at the time and would have gone to the mat to deny the accusation.)

There are scores of commentaries on the site detailing the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is now good enough to show you the difference.

With a too-forgiving system, you will most likely continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you clearly don’t know you’re missing.

My advice is to get better equipment and spend as much time as you can learning to tweak and tune it. That will allow you to be better at recognizing bad records when you play them.

The Heavy Vinyl Route

If more vintage Mercurys had sound as bad as this one, we would happily admit that going the Heavy Vinyl route might make sense.

And there certainly are a lot of bad vintage pressings — we should know, we’ve played them by the hundreds — but the number of bad modern Heavy Vinyl pressings would give them a run for their money and then some.

Beyond this Tchaicovsky title, there are plenty of others we’ve run into over the years with too many sonic shortcomings. As a public service, here are about 60 of them, broken down by label.

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The Reissues Consistently Beat the Originals on this Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Records Available Now

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

In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.

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

The notes for the FR original pressings we played read:

  • Less spacious, more bright and flat.

They’re not bad sounding, they’re just not as good sounding as the RFR reissues, which, incidentally, won the shootout.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but we make it a point to never give out the stamper information for our shootout winners, as finding those very special pressings has been the work of a lifetime and is certainly not something that should be given away for free.

Rules of Thumb

It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.

Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.

Who Knew?

Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?

Certainly not us, not until we had done the shootout.

The difference between the way we do things and the way others do them boils down to this: We assumed that the original could be the best, and then we tested that assumption and found out we were wrong.

But the right reissues of this Mercury — again not the ones you see pictured — is indeed an exceptionally good sounding record.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, assuming that owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

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Skip the Later Labels of this Rodrigo Title on the TAS List

More of the music of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

This is a TAS list title that deserves its place on a list of Super Discs, as long as you are talking about one that sounds the way the best copies do.

The best sides are exceptionally transparent and full of energy, with the lush strings of the guitars sounding much more textured and real. The orchestra is rich and sweet, especially for a Mercury, yet the guitars are clear, present and appropriately placed relative to the surrounding ensemble.

But all the later label pressings we’ve bought over the years, mostly because we could afford to buy them, hoping for a miracle, have fallen well short of the mark. The notes below tell the story of their typical and obvious shortcomings.

Side One of the most recent late label pressing we played was crude, smeary and hot (bright).

Side Two was even worse, it was very hot (bright).

If you want to avoid records with these problems, click on any of the links below to see the titles we’ve found over the years with the same issues.

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This Is Why We Love Records from the 50s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

From time to time a record comes our way that sounds absolutely amazing, “I can’t believe it’s a record” amazing.

If it’s the kind of record that sounds like the best copy of Fiesta in Hi-fi from our most recent shootout, we might even let our enthusiasm for its superb fidelity get the better of us. That’s the effect a record as good as the copy we played can have. You just can’t stop yourself from saying one great thing after another about it.

Our over-the-top notes, like those you see below, attempt to convey what it’s like to experience the absolutely breathtaking sound we were hearing.

But where is the harm in that? These are notes that no one outside of the staff are ever expected to see. They are helpful to us in writing our commentary and pricing the specific copy we auditioned, but they are practically never quoted in the listings.

Fiesta in Hi-Fi is an example of one of those recordings that doubles as a thrill ride. They come along from time to time in order to show us the kind of sound that we’d almost forgotten was possible on a record.

Oh yes, with the rare properly-cleaned, properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage vinyl LP, played back on top quality equipment in a heavily treated, dedicated soundroom, we can assure you it is very possible indeed. Allow us to make the case with the Shootout Winning original pressing you see below.

The notes read: 

So rich and big / Great space and detail / Everything sweet + clear + breathy / 3D too / Great dynamics / A touch hot but so fun / Deep bass.

You know what’s unusual about these notes?

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The Original Mercury Pressings Don’t Sound Good on this Title, But Why?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings) on the plum label are the way to go, right? 

In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.

And the FR pressing of the Rachmaninoff record you see pictured above may indeed have the best sound.

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

(We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping this title closer to the vest.)

Note that we had FR1, FR2 and FR3, all originals, yet none of them could be considered good enough to offer our customers.

It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.

Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.

Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?

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And to Think I Used to Like this Strauss Record

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

I used to like this Strauss Family Album back in the old days. Picked them up whenever I saw them, usually for ten bucks or less. They’re fairly common. It’s not exactly HiFi a la Espanola.

Now when we play this Mercury, it doesn’t sound so good. We traded what we had in stock back to stores or gave them away as freebies to our good customers.

A lot of records that I used to like because they were cleaner and brighter — later Red Seal Living Stereos, some OJC jazz, some reissues of rock — sounded much better when my system was darker and less revealing.

Side one of this copy has steely strings, the kiss of death on this kind of music.

Side two is passable, a low grade Hot Stamper. If you see this album for five bucks, pick it up and give it a listen. More than that and you should probably pass.

Many Mercury records simply do not sound good, and this appears to be one of them. The sound is  shrill, and that is just not acceptable on today’s highly-tweaked stereos.

Some of the early Mercs seem better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today.

Some of these records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know. I had an Old School stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

For a more complete list of those records, click here.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.

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