Older Classical / 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 developed 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.

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a very long way since then.

As you may imagine, our current approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a staff of 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.

Delibes / Coppelia / Ansermet

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Many years ago we wrote:

Very good sound for the Coppelia Ballet Highlights from the Master Ballet Conductor, with only a few slightly bright passages marring an otherwise wonderful recording.

UPDATE 2020

I doubt we would have any trouble with the bright passages these days. Better cleaning and better playback would have solved that problem, probably. Of course, this copy is long gone, so no one can ever really know if it was bright or not. I’m guessing, not.

Ernst Ansermet conducted some of the best sounding records ever made — here are some of the ones we’ve reviewed.

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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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Brahms / Sonata in D Minor / Laredo

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND for this incredibly rare Living Stereo violin record.

This is the first Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2414 I’ve ever seen. Side one, the Brahms Sonata, has very good sound and is played beautifully. When I dropped the needle on side two I went “Wow!”

The Bach partita for solo violin is incredible sounding. The violin is close-miked and every nuance of the instrument is right there before you. The immediacy of the recording is nothing short of stunning.

To quote from the liner notes, “Jaime calls the Sonatas and Partitas THE most demanding works in the literature. The works lightness and high spirits — the spirit of 17th century dance music — belie its complexity and the enormous technical and interpretive demands it makes of the performer.”

Having this intimate a window onto the piece, I completely agree. It’s a spell-binding work.

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Living Strings / Morton Gould and his Orchestra

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I typed so badly back in the early 2000s that it was actually easier to just dictate the short reviews we put up for our records. Rereading this just now made me recall that fact, because it is either poorly written or dictated, and I am going to go with the latter since I hate to think I ever wrote this badly.

As a rule, Moton Gould’s recordings for RCA are not especially good. If you see this title for cheap, pick it up. Otherwise I would give it a pass.

RCA Shaded Dog LP with good sound.

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Symphonie Fantastique – Three Mastering Options

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we played a reissue of the title you see pictured which prompted us to make some observations and ask some questions about the approach the mastering engineer might have taken.

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.”

Clocking in at around 45 minutes, Symphonie Fantastique is a difficult work to fit onto a single LP,  which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record:

  1. Compress the dynamics,
  2. Lower the level, or
  3. Filter the deep bass.

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? Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.

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Paris 1917-1938 – Side One Versus Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This listing was written all the way back in 2012 for the first Hot Stamper pressing of SR 90435 we’d ever listed as a Hot Stamper.

Note that it only had one good side, and even that side had a serious problem.

Thirteen years later in 2025 we would do a real shootout for this wonderful recording and learn something very few audiophiles know to this day — that the best stampers and the worst stampers are sometimes the same stampers.

Our 2012 Review

Super Hot Stamper sound for Eric Satie’s wonderfully eccentric Parade (and the Auric piece as well) can be found on this rare original promo copy of Mercury SR 90435, a record that was previously on the TAS List if I’m not mistaken.

It certainly deserves to be. The sound is BIG and OPEN, and like so many Mercury recordings with the London Symphony, it’s rich and full-bodied, not thin and nasally as is so often the case with their domestically recorded releases. Above all the sound is transparent, lively and dynamic.

In many ways this album would certainly serve quite well as an audiophile Demo Disc: the timbre of the wide array of instruments used is (mostly) Right On The Money.

Check out the lengthy and humorous producer’s notes for the sessions below. And people think The Beatles discovered experimental sounds in the studio.

The Brass Lacked Weight

With one small exception: the brass doesn’t have all the weight of the real thing, and for that we have deducted one plus from our top grade of three.

Side one has classic bad Mercury sound.

So screechy, hard and thin. How many audiophiles own records like this and don’t know that the sound of one side is awful and the other brilliant?

Since so few have ever commented publicly about such matters — and even supposedly knowledgeable audiophile reviewers never bother to even bring up the subject of one side versus the other — one must conclude that this is a subject that has yet to pierce the consciousness of most of our audiophile brethren, especially the ones who haven’t yet discovered this site.

Now’s a good time to start. Dig in, you may be surprised by what you find.

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Tchaikovsky / Nutcracker Suite / Karajan

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review is from way back in the olden days (2005) before we were doing regular shootouts for all the albums we sell, so take it for what it’s worth.

In 2005 we had been seriously into collecting the highest quality record pressings for more than thirty years, yet it was obvious that we still had a lot to learn. In 2004 we started selling vintage vinyl with Hot Stampers, and practically every shootout we did taught us something new and interesting about records.

Much of that information ended up here, on a blog dedicated to teaching audiophiles how they can find better sounding pressings using the methods we pioneered.

We wanted to share with other like-minded audiophiles what we’ve discovered about higher quality vinyl and, even more importantly, we wanted to stress that experimenting with records under rigorously controlled conditions is the best way to learn about their sound quality.

Our Old Review

This import pressing has some astonishing qualities, qualities we are not used to hearing on vintage Golden Age recordings such as this (or or any other recordings, truth be told).

This 1964 release — our pressing is the whiteback reissue, which we tend to prefer — has 3-D-like clarity and spaciousness that we could hardly believe.

The stage is DEEP and you can hear all the way to the back of it.

The width of the stage is dramatically wider than practically any record I can remember playing in the last year or two. I felt as though my listening room got bigger when playing this record.

And the dynamics are explosive. This pressing can really get LOUD when it wants to.

In some respects it’s hard to beat. But not, alas, hard to fault.

It lacks weight down low, whomp as we like to call it.

The details: (more…)

Ravel / Concerto in G – Munch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ravel Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We just played a clean, early Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2271, featuring Ravel’s Concerto in G.

Although it is a good sounding record, we do not believe it is very likely to be a great one.

If you own the record, play it and see if it still holds up. Our latest purchase didn’t.

There may be great sounding pressings of it, but at the price clean copies command these days, $100 and up, we have decided that pursuing this title is no longer in anyone’s interest.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

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Carmina Burana on Telarc – A Very Old Review

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

This IMMACULATE Telarc Double LP with Virtually No Sign Of Play is one of the greatest audiophile records of all time and Telarc’s greatest recording! No recording gets more realism with this work … depth, dynamics, colors & performance!

Why don’t more of their recordings sound like this? Telarc is not a label I would normally associate with good sound but you have to give them credit here: they knocked this one out the park. They have made good records in the past — this one is proof enough, and some of the Fennel titles are quite good — but most of their catalog leaves much to be desired and is hard to recommend. (more…)

Prokofiev / Piano Concerto No. 3 / Graffman

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Not sure if we would still agree with anything we said in the 2008 review you see below.

Back then we only had the one copy to play, and we certainly hadn’t learned how to clean it the way we do now, so who can say what any random copy of the record would sound like?

If you see it for cheap in the bins, pick it up, give it a spin and see.

This Plum Label Original pressing is one of the TOP Victrola titles! The sound is excellent, with real weight to the orchestra, powerful dynamics, deep bass, and solid piano tone.

Add to that a wonderful performance by Gary Graffman and the San Francisco Symphony, and you have one truly OUTSTANDING record. (If you can add 1 or 2 db to the top end, it’s even better.) 

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