RCA Vintage – Reviews, Commentaries, Letters, etc.

Rachmaninoff / Concerto No. 3 – Wrong Again?

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

In 2007 we raved about this title:

Outstanding! Sounds just like the already very good shaded dog, in many ways better. (I don’t have that one around to compare anymore but this LP has that same natural, smooth sound, while being cut a bit cleaner.) 

We have two copies of this Victrola, both with the same stamper numbers, and this is definitely the better of the two sonically. It has more presence, more transparency and better dynamics.

In preparation for our latest big shootout, we decided to give the Victrola another listen, and the one copy we had on hand was not impressive to say the least. It was dark, thin and flat.

Three strikes and it was out. Seems as though we were wrong.

Did we have better copies in 2007? Perhaps.

Our advice: skip it. If you do buy one, buy it for cheap.

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A Couple of Key Tracks to Play on Pictures at an Exhibition

LHot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old listing for Pictures at an Exhibition, so take it for what it’s worth.

This TAS List record with a Super Hot stamper side one has some of the best sound we have ever heard for the Shaded Dog Reiner/CSO Pictures, and side two, although it starts out a little weak, gets going soon enough and earns a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade as well.

Side one is open and natural in the best Living Stereo tradition, with rich lower strings that have virtually no Golden Age smear.

Turn it up and listen for the big cymbal crashes — that’s the sound we love. It’s so good it even allows me to enjoy Reiner’s performance, never one of my favorites.

Side One

A++, transparent and free from smear, not many copies are going to beat this one! A little more top would have been nice.

Listen to: Samuel Goldenburg und Schmuyle

Superb sound! The brass and strings on this part of the work are as good as it gets. No smearing of the brass — it’s clean and clear like it is in the concert hall. We’re so used to hearing it wrong that it takes a record like this to remind us how good a full brass choir can really sound. (more…)

The Best Sound Here Is Everything But the 1812

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We no longer do shootouts for this title.

A number of other records have top quality sound for these famous pieces, so we see no reason to continue to struggle to find clean copies of LSC 2241 the way we might have done ten or twenty years ago.

If you see this title at a good price, feel free to pick it up as long as you can return it. Many of these old Shaded Dogs are noisy or groove-damaged, especially those that have dynamic, exciting music like this one.

Our old review follows:

The real stars here are NOT the 1812, but the three coupling works, which demonstrate, on this copy at least, The Real Power of the Orchestra. The remarkably rich, Tubey Magical and oh-so-rosiny Living Stereo strings and powerful, dynamic brass make this a real demo quality orchestral heavyweight.

Lizst’s Mephisto Waltz, Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture, and the Tragic Overture by Brahms are the Must Own 36 minutes worth of music on the record.

A rare and wonderful early Living Stereo Shaded Dog pressing containing an outstanding performance from Reiner and the CSO on everything but the 1812.

Say what?

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Everybody Knows that 1s Should Beat 2s Should Beat 3s, Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

In the case of this mystery Living Stereo title, the conventional wisdom holding that the original first pressings (1s) will most likely have sound superior to the higher-numbered pressings (2s) turns out to be right.

Below you will see the complete stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently. Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

Sometimes we do though. To see the titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list we’ve compiled to date is short but more are coming.

The sound of 3s with the Red Label was lean and dry on both the copies we played. This was surprising as the stampers are quite low: 3s/3s.

Many RCA chamber recordings can be dry, and if one owned a nice early stamper pressing of the album with lean, dry sound, one might conclude that this RCA is just another chamber recording with those shortcomings.

But one would be wrong, because the 1s stamper Shootout Winner sounded amazing, not dry or lean in the least.

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The Not So Swingin’ Nutcracker in Living Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We wrote the commentary you see below about 15 years ago.

We liked the record back then just fine. However, we recently got another couple of copies in and they sounded OK, not great, but what really had aged badly was the music, which was corny and, worst of all, contra the album’s title, definitely did not swing. Don’t waste your money on this one the way we did.

There are many jazz pressings we’ve discovered with audiophile quality sound and enjoyable music, but we reluctantly had to admit that this title should no longer be considered one of them. Live and learn, right?

We hope we can be forgiven for our mistaken bias in favor of a Golden Age title with a cool vintage cover. (And it wouldn’t be the first time.)

Another source of mistaken thinking: The Swingin’ Nutcracker came out in 1960, a year known for a great many other exceptionally good sounding titles produced during the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording. After playing so many wonderful recordings on that label, from that era, we were primed to like it regardless of whatever shortcomings it might have had.

This is why we recommend audiophiles pull titles off their massive shelves and give them a spin from time to time. Some records have simply not stood the test of time as well as others. Some will be better than we remember, some worse.

A wall full of records, most of which have not been played in years, even decades, is not a record collection worthy of the name. It’s better understood as a pile of vinyl that has been doing nobody any good for a very long time and, according to Newton’s Laws of Motion, will continue doing nothing for nobody forever.

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A Deep, Deep Dive into LSC 2323 – A Shootout Like No Other

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records remastered pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

It seemed better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on the hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned up to then, was unexpected to say the least.

Unheard of is more like it. (That is no longer true — stay tuned for the story of the one Classic Records classical record that actually won a shootout not that long ago.)

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the right early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout. (Most are terrible.)[1][2]

Some Inside Baseball

Most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

The time to do a serious investigation of LSC 2323 necessary to get to the bottom of what was truly a head scratcher was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years. (Other such oddities have their own section here by the way.)

This title would have to wait until 2025 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records.

Why? Because every record with any hope of sounding good must be given the chance to show us what it can do. It deserves to be evaluated fairly, without the listener having any knowledge as to which pressing my be playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings, which is very bad indeed.

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Isn’t This Supposed to Be a Good Sounding Sonny Rollins Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

It is — or can be — but that’s only possible — as far as we know — on the early stereo pressings. On the mono pressings, the ones originally pressed in 1965 on the black dynagroove label, and never pressed again, not so much. They’re not awful, but they’re not very good either.

Which means that as a general rule, audiophiles should stick to the stereo pressings of this album, in the same way that they should almost always stick to stereo pressings of stereo recordings.

This is a Core Insight we only arrived at after playing hundreds of mono pressings made from tapes originally recorded in stereo. [1] Rarely do the mono pressings of such titles sound remotely as good as the stereo pressings.

Here is how we described a killer stereo copy of The Standard Sonny Rollins we encountered during the course of a shootout in 2025:

The Standard Sonny Rollins is back on the site for only the second time in over four years, here with outstanding sound throughout this original stereo pressing.

Once again the brilliant engineering of Ray Hall for RCA conveys the vitality of live music for these sessions (which were undoubtedly recorded live). Includes superstars like Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, and Bob Cranshaw, who’ve lent their talents to some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

Here is the stamper sheet showing how the mono pressing fared. In the past we’ve had similar luck with the mono pressings of Living Stereo recordings, but this one was cheap and we figured why not?

Collectors often say that the mono pressings of jazz albums are often the best sounding. Well, why not put that proposition to the test? That is after all the business we are in, testing whether something is true or not to the best of our ability.

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Living Stereo Vs. Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

We described a Hot Stamper pressing of Symphonie Fantastique (LSC 2362) we put up not long ago this way:

The size and power of a large orchestra in Living Stereo sound.  The hall is huge, the brass solid and powerful, the top and bottom extends properly, the stage is wide and clear — what more can you ask for? 

So open and spacious, with gorgeous, richly textured strings — this is the VIVID sound we love from the Golden Age!

Classic Records and Their Abysmal String Tone

Of course, this was always the most obvious shortcoming of the Classic Records RCA remasterings — just not obvious to the audiophile press or the audiophiles who bought the records. None of them seemed to notice how the strings of the new pressings never sounded remotely the way they had on the originals and early reissues (reissues which were, unsurprisingly, sometimes better).

Classic’s pressings had bass and dynamics, no one could deny it, but the strings were unusually shrill and smeary, and the hall practically non-existent. (We chalked it up to the bad transistor cutting equipment Bernie was using back then, but how could anyone know for sure what was really going on? All we knew was that most of the classical titles they released did not sound good, so there was simply no need to investigate further.)

We found out some years ago that there was a new series of recuts coming from Acoustic Sounds. Based on their dismal track record, I will be very surprised if they are much better than mediocre.

UPDATE 2024

We finally got one in and put it in a shootout. The results: a passable-at-best side one and a bad sounding side two.

In other words, really not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on. Almost any White Dog or Shaded Dog will beat it (although it should be noted that there are plenty of vintage pressings of the album that don’t sound much better than mediocre. Still, on side two it should be no contest.)

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For Scottish Fantasy, Forget the Red Seal Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

The 70s Red Seal pressings we’ve played recently have all left a lot to be desired, but, since we had one sitting on a shelf in the backroom with lower stampers, we figured what the hell, let’s clean it up, throw it into our next shootout and hope for the best.

As you can see, the best was not to come.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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The Reiner Sound Is A Demo Disc for Energy, Dynamics and Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

This review was written in 2010.

I don’t think we have found a Reiner Sound as nice as this one since then. 

UPDATE 2024

It may have taken us more than a decade and cost us a lot of money to get a shootout going for a rare and expensive title such as LSC 2183, but all it took was one killer copy to make it worth all the time and trouble it took track it down.

And when a record sounds as good as our best copy did, with a grade of at least 3+ on side one, who cares how much trouble we went through to find it?

We live for records like these.

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