More of the music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
More of the music of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
A good sounding audiophile record? Yes, it is possible, we would never deny it.
In fact, we actually sell some of the best ones ourselves.
The sound on the record is excellent. It was engineered by Mark Levinson, on special equipment designed to create virtually noiseless ultra-low-distortion master tapes, without noise-reduction systems. It’s mastered by Robert Ludwig.
The reproduction of the violin here is superb — harmonically rich, natural, clean, clear, resolving. What sets the truly killer pressings apart is the depth, width and three-dimensional quality of the sound, as well as the fact that they become less congested in the louder passages and don’t get shrill or blary. The best copies display a Tubey Magical richness — especially evident in the basses and celli — that is to die for.
Big space, a solid bottom, and plenty of dynamic energy are strongly in evidence throughout. Exceptional resolution, transparency, tremendous dynamics, a violin that is present and solid — this copy takes the sound of the recording right to the limits of what we thought possible from Philips.
As we listened, we became completely immersed in the music, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity he brings to such a difficult and demanding work.
What to Listen For
This copy had very little smear on either the violin or the orchestra. Try to find a violin concerto record with no smear.
Let’s face it: records from every era more often than not have some smear and we can never really know what accounts for it. The key thing is to be able to recognize it for what it is. (We find modern records, especially those pressed at RTI, to be quite smeary as a rule. They also tend to be congested, blurry, thick, veiled, and ambience-challenged. For some reason most audiophiles — and the reviewers who write for them — rarely seem to notice these shortcomings.)
Of course, if your system itself has smear — practically every tube system I have ever heard has some smear, including the one I used to own — it becomes harder to hear smear on your records.
Our all transistor rig has no trouble showing it to us.
Keep in mind that one thing live music never has is smear of any kind. Live music is scompletely mear-free. It can be harmonically distorted, hard, edgy, thin, fat, dark, and all the rest, but one thing it never is, is smeary.
That is a shortcoming unique to the imperfect reproduction of music, and one for which many of the pressings we sell are downgraded.
This is an old review, pre-2010 I would guess, and we may no longer agree with the assertion that the White Dog pressings are better sounding than the Shaded Dogs.
This White Dog pressing is the best sounding copy I’ve ever heard, much better than the earlier pressings. The piano doesn’t break up like it does on those, especially in the second movement.
Finally the piano sounds right – solid and with the correct overtones. It goes without saying that this is an exceptionally good performance as well.
One of the best of the Cliburn recordings which, as you may know, are rarely any good, the worst of them being LSC 2252 and the best of them being, probably LSC 2507.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.
The original, favorable review for this album you see further down is from at least ten years ago and probably more like fifteen.
When we revisited the copies we had of this title more recently, we felt the sound was badly lacking in many respects, with no real extension up top nor much weight to the bottom, the very definition of boxy sound.
Many of the vintage classical records we audition have sound that we liked well enough in the past but now no longer meet our standards. Those pressings might sound fine on an Old School Stereo (or its modern equivalent), but we have something very different to play our records on, courtesy of the many Revolutionary Changes in Audio that have dramatically altered the quality of analog playback over the last twenty five years.
We much prefer Boskovsky’s performances for Decca for waltzes and the like, by Strauss or anyone else.
TAS List Thoughts
We wanted to like the record, it’s on the TAS List for cryin’ out loud, shouldn’t it at least be pretty good?
It very well may be amazingly good, we can’t say it is or it isn’t. In order to be more sure of our opinion, we would need a great deal more data to back it up. We would need to have a large number of copies on hand, clean them all and play them in order to make it possible to find the killer stamper that may be hiding in the pile, assuming one might be.
But why spend all that money and all that time chasing after a record that may turn out to be just another mistake Harry Pearson made when he included Strauss Waltzes on his famous list?
He regularly updated his list of Super Discs from year to year. Some records were added, some removed, so perhaps we might give him the benefit of the doubt and posit that, were he living today, LSC 2500 would have long ago been given the boot.
Our review for the album from years ago:
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS List of Super Disc LPs, but it’s the rare copy that deserves such an exclusive ranking.
This copy delivers the sonic goods on side one with Super Hot Stamper sound.
Side two is not quite up to the standards set by side one. It’s darker, not as open and lacks some of the richness of the first side. That said, it’s still better than the average copy we’ve played and worlds better than any reissue.
Both sides have some deep powerful bass and are fairly dynamic.
Three things we always keep in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should:
All things considered, the consensus would now be that LSC 2500 is very unlikely to be as good a record as we used to think it was.
As for other records we think we got wrong — we may change our minds again, you never can tell, all it takes is one good pressing to change our minds — you can find more examples under the heading of Live and Learn.
EXCELLENT SOUND for this TAS List Shaded Dog, with each side earning an A++ grade and playing relatively quietly.
This is a BIG one folks, as most of you probably know already. It is not easy to find copies of this album with excellent sound and fairly quiet surfaces on both sides, and if you don’t believe me, I encourage you to try.
The violin is sweet and full of rosiny texture here. The whole string section is full of Living Stereo magic. The soundstage is wide and deep, the overall sound rich and warm. The midrange is nothing short of magical.
This is the kind of Golden Age recording that makes us audiophiles lose it. It’s one of the few legitimate reasons to take the TAS Super Disc List seriously in the first place. HP put records like this on the audiophile map and we owe him a debt of gratitude for having done so. Our musical lives are remarkably richer for it.
Our current favorite recordings for sound and performance of The Comedians is this one.
These are the comments about a previous copy we had on the website (2001), many of which apply to this copy as well.
DEMO QUALITY. ONE OF THE BEST CLASSICAL RECORDINGS I HAVE EVER HEARD.
This recording is so natural it’s FREAKISH. You get swept up in the music completely because the sound allows you to forget it’s even a recording at all. All the normal adjectives apply; I won’t bother to repeat them here. If I ever make a list of the greatest recordings of all time, as Harry does with his “Best of the Bunch” dozen, you can bet that this record will be on it.
[I can’t say that I would be nearly as enthusiastic about this title nowadays as I was back then. Our playback system has gone through a lot of changes since 2001. The stereo I had back then (all tube, richer, darker and less revealing) no doubt was a better match for the best pressings of this recording than the one I have now
Note also that we gave the record a Double Plus sonic grade, not the full Three Pluses a top copy would earn if it were as “freakishly good” as I used to think.]
I used to think Ansermet’s reading was ponderous, but this copy from 2013 is making me want to change my mind.
Is it more lively than others? Is the stereo that much improved since I last heard one of these Londons?
We have no way of knowing. All we do know is that we were enjoying Ansermet’s performance more than we ever had before.
The darker brass instruments like tubas, trombones and french horns are superb here. Other Golden Age recordings of the work, as enjoyable as they may be in other respects, do not fully reproduce the weighty quality of the brass, probably because of compression, limiting, tube smear, or some combination of the three.
The brass on this record has a power like practically no other recording of the work we know.
It’s also tonally correct. It’s not aggressive. It’s not irritating. It’s just immediate and powerful the way the real thing is when you hear it live. That’s what really caught my ear when I first played the recording.
There is a blast of brass at the end of Catacombs that is so big and real, it makes you forget you’re listening to a recording. You hear every brass instrument, full size, full weight. I still remember the night I was playing the album, good and loud of course, when that part of the work played through. It was truly startling in its power.
Some of Ansermet’s recordings with the Suisse Romande are absolutely the best I’ve ever heard. It was a magical combination of the right hall, the right engineers, the right orchestra and the right technology — the pure tube ANALOG technology of the ’50s and ’60s!
Three Minty looking Philips Import LPs with EXCELLENT SOUND!
The sound is dark and rich. You may prefer it as I do to the famous Previn performances on EMI, which have that mid-hall, vague ’70s EMI sound. That sound never appealed to me.
The performances are excellent as well. The second symphony belongs in any serious collection and you get a very good one in this box set. This set includes Rachmaninoff’s Symphonies 1-3 and ‘The Rock,’ Op. 7.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.
This London UK pressing from 1967 has excellent sound on both sides. Some of what we’ve always liked about Decca/London from the period (mid- to late-’60s, in this case 1967) can be heard on this pressing: transparency; the texture on the strings; the natural timbre of the instruments.
These London pressings are quite hard to find in our experience. The music is wonderful throughout, perhaps the reason that so few of these have found their way to the record bins here in L.A.
Here Mehta is conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, not to be confused with the recordings he made in Los Angeles with the L.A. Philharmonic in Royce Hall.
A Word about Mehta and the L.A. Phil
Unlike many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them, we have never been impressed by the recordings Zubin Mehta made with the L.A. Philharmonic.
In a review of another Mehta recording, we noted:
They almost always suffer from exactly the same problems that we heard on this album. We had about five copies on hand in preparation for a shootout, some of which I had noted seemed to sound fine, but once we listened more critically we started to hear the problems that eventually caused us to abandon the shootout and give away the stock to our good customers for free.
The exceptionally rare copy of Mehta’s Planets can sound good, but 90% of them do not — just don’t make the mistake of telling that to the average audiophile who owns one. Harry told him it was the best, he paid good money for it, and until someone tells him different it had better be “the one Planets to own.”
We see one of our roles here at Better Records as being the guys who actually will “tell you different,” and, more importantly, can back up our opinions with the records that support our case.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
And this one comes complete with the bonus 7″ entitled “Berlioz Takes a Trip,” in which Bernstein explores the work “with musical illustrations by the New York Philharmonic.”
This work is difficult to fit onto a single LP, clocking in at around 45 minutes, which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record:
On this side two it seems that none of those approaches were taken by the engineer who cut this record in the early ’80s — there’s plenty of bass, as well as powerful dynamics, and the levels seem fine.
How he do it? Beats me. Glad he did though.
What’s Your Theory Then?
Side one is bass shy, however. Did the engineer filter out the lower frequencies, or is it just a case of pressing variation being the culprit. Who can say?
If we had many more copies with these same stampers for side one, all with less bass, we might be able to draw a conclusion about that, one that might be highly probable but of course not provable.
The very next copy we might find with those stampers could have plenty of bass.
Then we would be forced to say that our highly probable theory had been falsified conclusively.
So much for theories.
Which is one of the main reasons we avoid them. We play the records to find out how they sound. We don’t feel the inclination to theorize about them much.
We are more inclined to the No Theory approach to finding good records, which you can read about here.
We think the audiophile community would be better served by more critical listening and less theorizing, speculating and opining.
Skeptical thinking has been key to our success from the very start, and it can be key to your success too. To understand records, you need to think about them critically in order to get very far in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves.
“Song of the Nightingale” is far more enjoyable in Ansermet’s hands than in Reiner’s or Dorati’s. The sound is significantly better on this pressing than on the Stereo Treasury, the RCA, and the Mercury versions.
Once past the obvious saturation that opens this recording, the sound is perfection. The percussion leaps off of this LP like it does with a good Direct To Disc recording.
The strength of this LP is “Song of the Nightingale.” The “Pulcinella Suite” never sounds as good. But what does?