Mercury Orchestral – Not the Best

Based on the specific pressings we played, we judged these vintage Mercury records to fall short of the best.

We can’t say that other pressings of these albums don’t sound better than the ones we played. If you have an exceptional sounding pressing of any of these titles in your collection, please let us know.

Grieg / Peer Gynt Suite / Barbirolli

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings 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 though.

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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Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 2 / Bachauer (SR-90301)

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Brahms Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this recording using a single early pressing back in 2012. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then.

We reviewed this recording using a single early pressing back in 2012. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then.

Until about twenty years ago we had no idea how incomplete and inadequate our understanding of any title would turn out to be with only a single copy on hand.  When we began doing shootouts in 2004, immediately it became obvious that only a stack of cleaned pressings allowed us to recognize what a recording’s strengths and weaknesses might be.

More to the point, it offered us the opportunity to clearly identify the best record in the group — the pressing whose superior sound quality stood above the others.

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons. The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and noting the differences we heard made us better listeners.

Through this work, carried out over the course of many years, we learned that there was only one way to find better sounding records. Everything else is a guess, just like our review of the record above was a guess.

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Vivaldi / Concertos for Harpsichord, Guitar, Harp and Violin (SR-90401)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Many years ago we wrote the following review. We’ve ordered a few copies of the album recently and hope to do a shootout for it soon, assuming it still sounds as good as we used to think it did, but who can say?

Near Demo quality and a true Mercury sleeper.*

These concertos have excellent sound and the music is very enjoyable.

Sleepers

*A “sleeper” is an exceptional record that is not well known to audiophiles and collectors.

By conducting thousands of auditions and shootouts, we’ve discovered hundreds of amazing titles like SR-90401, which has been one of the greatest sources of joy for those of us here at Better Records.

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Mercury Did Not Produce an Especially Good Brahms Symphony No. 2

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

The sound of this 1959 Mercury recording (SR 90171) was not impressive.

The sound was decent enough, although somewhat dry and opaque on even the best copies of the record we played. Which makes it a passable sounding record, not much more than that, and not worth doing a shootout for.

It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to recognize its many shortcomings.

Vintage Vinyl

We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the hundreds on this blog.

We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than any other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years, especially the ridiculously bad pressings we’ve reviewed more recently.

It Was a Very Good Year

1959 just happens to be one of the truly great years for analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.

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Vienna 1908-1914 on Mercury Is No Better than Passable (SR-90316)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

The various pressings we played of Mercury SR 90316 were not awful sounding by any means, but they were not especially good sounding either.

The strings tended to be shrill on the copies we had on hand.

We felt it best to abandon our plans to do a shootout for it. We will probably end up selling our stock on Discogs.

The sound of some pressings of this album might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they are not worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

Many Mercury recordings suffer from shrill strings, and to be honest we have certainly heard much worse, but for the money we charge even the copies that might win a shootout would not represent a good value for our customers, not once we factor in the high cost of the records and the time it would take to clean and play them all.

If you see a copy for cheap and aren’t that particular about sound quality, by all means pick it up, assuming the music appeals to you.

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The “Not-So-Golden-Age” of RCA, Mercury, London and Others

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

We ran into a number of copies of this title that had what we like to call “old record sound,” which is surprisingly common on even the most revered Golden Age labels, RCA included.

No top, no real bottom, congested climaxes and a general shrillness to the sound — we’ve played Living Stereos by the dozens that have these shortcomings and many more.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works.

Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start. It does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten, you’re probably setting the bar too low, if our experience is any guide.

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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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Hungarian Rhapsodies – Wait a Minute

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year in our experience. Just the opposite in fact.

The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.

It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.

But wait a minute.

Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.

How did they get this one so wrong?

We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.

Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.

One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.

We actually like testing records, and we’ve refined* a method for testing that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.

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Mercury Produced a Truly Awful Collection of Verdi Overtures in 1959

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The sound of this 1959 Mercury release, SR 90156, is terrible. It’s crude and hot like an “old record,” a sound we find on far too many vintage pressings. The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that have been stamped out over the last seven decades.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless the average record will show itself to be.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

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The Enigma Variations on Mercury Was Not to Our Liking (Although We Sure Love the Cover)

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1959 Mercury (SR 90125) impressed us when we did a shootout for the work years ago.

The performance of the Enigma Variations here seems rushed, and the two other recordings of the work that we like, one on Philips, the other on RCA, are better.

The Philips with Haitink is probably the better of the time and our favorite at this time. Of the three recordings that we felt had the best combination of music and sound, the Merc with Barbarolli was our least favorite, so we decided to concentrate on the best two recordings in our shootout and get rid of the Mercury pressings we had on hand.

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