Older Orchestral

Most of these older reviews are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding the best sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s. We found the records you see in these listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described in the listing and priced according to how good the sound and surfaces seemed to us at the time.

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 then.

Nowadays, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions along with a number of other pressings, awarded sonic grades, then carefully condition checked 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 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, would ever be able to do the kind of work we do.

Every record we offer is unique, and 100% guaranteed to satisfy or your money back.

Offenbach et al. / French Overtures / Ansermet

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

More music conduced by Ernest Ansermet

  • This original London pressing of these wonderful Romantic works boasts KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from first note to last
  • You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs
  • The sound of the orchestra is dramatically richer and sweeter than you will hear on practically all other pressings – what else would you expect from Decca‘s engineers and the Suisse Romande?
  • This shootout has been many years in the making – we’ve been trying to do these wonderful French overtures for about five years, which just goes to show how hard it is to find these kinds of records in audiophile playing condition nowadays
  • We also have a recording with Fremaux at the helm for EMI coming soon to the site that’s every bit as good
  • Which one is better is probably a matter of taste as they are both head and shoulders better than any other recordings we have come across in the last five or more years
  • If you’re a fan of delightful orchestral showpieces such as these, Decca’s wonderful recording from 1961 belongs in your collection

Production and Engineering

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from May 1960 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

The gorgeous hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, perhaps of all time. More amazing sounding recordings were made there than in any other hall we know of. There is a solidity and richness to the sound that goes beyond all the other recordings we have played, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

It’s as wide, deep and three-dimensional as any, which is of course all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the weight and power of the brass, combined with timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

(more…)

Bruch & Mozart / Violin Concertos / Heifetz

Hot Stamper Pressings with Jascha Heifetz Performing

Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings Featuring Jascha Heifetz

  • Heifetz’s lively performance of these wonderful violin concertos debuts on the site with excellent Living Stereo sound  throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing
  • This is right at the top of all the recordings Heifetz made for RCA in the glory days of Living Stereo — there may be titles that are comparable, but we have yet to hear a violin concerto recording that can surpass it
  • Both of these sides are exceptionally relaxed and spacious, with the rich, textured sheen of the violin that Living Stereo made possible in the 50s and early 60s clearly evident throughout these pieces
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more real than practically all of the other copies we played
  • LSC 2652 is one of the hardest Heifetz titles to find with the original Shaded Dog label, and quite a few of the copies we paid premium prices for turned out to have marks or other problems in the vinyl
  • Skip the Red Seal pressings from the 70s — the ones we played were bright, screechy, thin and missing just about everything that makes the early pressings so amazingly good

(more…)

Mendelssohn / Violin Concerto / Rybar

More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

More Classical “Sleeper” Records We’ve Discovered

This review is from ten or fifteen years ago. If you see the album for cheap in the bins, pick it up and tell us what you think of it. Our favorite recordings of the work by Ricci, Heifetz and Campoli can be found here.

This Whitehall budget reissue stereo pressing has SUPERB Hot Stamper sound on both sides and a performance by Peter Rybar that can hold its own against any you may have heard.   

This recording easily beats most of the vintage Shaded Dogs, Mercurys and London records that we’ve ever played here at Better Records, and it was released on vinyl by a relatively obscure budget label that most audiophiles have never even heard of and would probably not want to be caught dead with.

Which is a good reason to judge records by playing them, not reading about them, on the net or in magazines. The sound of this record is so wonderful that, had it been a rare Shaded Dog, Merc or London it would have sold for something approaching twice the money we are asking here. In my experience relatively few of those recordings are as good as this one.

Whitehall

The best Whitehall records can be superb, but finding them on quiet vinyl is next to impossible. This copy plays Mint Minus Minus which is about as quiet as any we have heard.

Side One

A++ Super Hot Stamper sound, rich and Tubey Magical, smooth and lovely in all respects, with a tonally correct violin that’s neither bright nor edgy. We love the sound here.

Side Two

A++, with an especially rich sounding orchestra. Love those lower strings.

The Hebrides Overture, the coupling work at the end of this side, is not quite as good. We called it A+ to A++. It gets a bit congested when loud.

(more…)

Beethoven / ‘Appassionata’ – Kamiya

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings

  • This rare and wonderful TAS-approved Japanese import LP boasts INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Demo Disc sound on both sides
  • You will have a hard time finding a better recording of the piano than this – it’s one of the all time great Direct-to-Discs
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than all of what we played
  • A famous resident of the TAS list, this album offers excellent music, performed with feeling, and recorded properly, the best of all possible worlds for us audiophiles
  • A friend of ours tells me that Kamiya plays this piece exactly the way Horowitz did, and that’s probably a good thing – good luck finding a Horowitz recording that sounds like this

(more…)

Ravel / Haydn / Acoustic Recording Series, Volume 2 – Reviewed in 2008

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. 

(more…)

Beethoven / Violin Concerto / Grumiaux

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

More Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

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.

(more…)

Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 2 / Van Cliburn – Reviewed in 2005

More of the music of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

This is a very old review. 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.

(more…)

Strauss Waltzes – As Good As Some Say? As Good As We Thought?

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Hundreds of Reviews of Living Stereo Records

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:

(more…)

Khachaturian / Masquerade Suite / Kondrashin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Hundreds of Living Stereo Records

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 thought at the time.]

(more…)

Mussorgsky / Pictures at an Exhibition / Ansermet

Hot Stamper LPs that Need to Be Played on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

Recordings that Sound Their Best on Big Speakers at Loud Levels 

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!

(more…)