More Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Quality Sound
UPDATE
2007 was a long time ago, so please take that into condideration when reading this review.
This is a practically brand new UHQR JVC test record.
I’m SHOCKED at how good this record sounds.
It has AMAZING live jazz sound.
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 also doesn’t hurt that it’s been mastered by Robert Ludwig.
More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
This is what we had to say about the UHQR back in 2005 or so:
Having played this record all the way through, I have to comment on some of its sonic qualities. It’s about the most dynamic recording I’ve ever heard. This was the promise of digital, which was never really delivered. On this record, that promise has been fulfilled. The performance is also one of the best on record. It’s certainly the most energetic I can remember.
DATELINE 2015
Now that we’ve heard the best pressings of the Alwyn recording on Decca, I would have to say that Alwyn’s is certainly every bit as energetic if not more so and dramatically better sounding as well.
In other words, in 2005 we had a lot to learn.
Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Robert Ludwig Available Now
A lovely solo piano recording from Athena, which is certainly not a label we have ever associated with good sound. Just the opposite in fact.
But they did a great job on this album (or at least I thought so many years ago when I last played it. For purposes of this commentary, let’s assume the sound still holds up).
This is how to make a good audiophile record.
Yes, there is such a thing. They may be rare but they do exist. We have quite a few of them for sale as a matter of fact.
Take a good tape, hire someone who knows his way around a normal-speed cutting lathe (with 5800+ credits on Discogs, I would hope he knows what he’s doing) as well as classical music (he cut a huge number of records for Nonesuch back in the day), press it on good vinyl and let the audiophiles of the world enjoy it.
The Connoisseur Society original may in fact be better, but where are you going to find one?
Robert, Bernie and Doug – An Honest Comparison
In another listing for an audiophile record that Robert Ludwig cut, we noted:
I suspect that if Ludwig hadn’t stopped cutting records years ago, we would not be complaining nearly as much about the questionable sound of the modern Heavy Vinyl pressings currently inundating the market.
Bernie and Doug really started letting the record lovers of the world down, beginning as far back as the ’90s. See here and here.
The muddy messes Doug Sax cut for Analogue Productions and the awful Living Stereo records Bernie cut for Classic Records were sad chapters in both men’s body of work. Here are two of the All Time Greats. Their fall was precipitous and painful for those of us who care about sound quality and never gave up on analog.
In those dark days, they were mastering one bad record after another, all of them so unlike the amazing sounding records they had been making by the score in the 70s and well into the 80s.
We have nothing personal against either one of them, of course. We just haven’t liked the sound of very many of the records they’ve mastered for the last thirty years, and we don’t know of any reason why we shouldn’t say so.
This Reference LP, mastered by Stan Ricker might just be the best sounding record this sorry excuse for an audiophile label ever made.
Any label that would release Audiophile BS records such as this one and this one has a lot of explaining to do.
I hadn’t played this Kōtèkan title in probably twenty years, but I remembered it sure sounded good to me back in the day, so we decided to get some in and do a shootout for them. This copy was an impressive reminder of just how good the recording can be.
More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings of the 1812 Overture
Sonic Grade: D
If you want an amazingly dynamic 1812 with huge amounts of deep bass reproduced for the cannon, you can’t do much better than this (or its UHQR brother).
But if you want rich, sweet and tonally correct brass and strings, you had best look elsewhere. I’ve never liked the sound of this record and I’m guessing if I heard a copy today I would like it even less.
Who in his right mind thinks live classical music actually sounds like this?
Telarc makes clean, modern sounding records. To these ears they sound pretty much like CDs.
If that’s your sound you can save yourself a lot of money avoiding vintage Golden Age recordings, especially the ones we sell. They’re much more expensive and rarely as quiet, but — again, to these ears — the colors and textures of real instruments seems to come to life in their grooves, and in practically no others.
We include in this modern group analog labels such as Reference, Sheffield, Chesky, Athena and the like. Having heard hundreds of amazing vintage pressings, at this stage of the game I find it hard to take any of them seriously.
Twenty years ago, maybe. But twenty years is a long time, especially in the world of audio.
We started a list of records that suffer from a lack of Tubey Magic like this one, and it can be found here.
A poor man’s Bang-Baaroom with a stage full of percussionists playing a variety of instruments.
This LP presents a realistic, three-dimensional soundstage and an amazing array of percussion.
There’s also some incredibly deep bass drum work.
This is a Very Rare Ark LP. The piece by Mozart on side one has a 16 cycle note. Since it has virtually no overtones, the note is more often than not completely undetectable; few stereos in my experience have ever been able to reproduce it. If you have a full-range system, this record will allow you to hear deep bass you may have never heard before.
Let me warn you that these records require extremely transparent, full-bandwidth, neutral stereo systems to sound their best. Most records are “goosed up” in various ways to play on any stereo, regardless of quality. These Fulton records have the opposite of that sound.
From my admittedly prejudiced point of view, tubes are an absolute must for the magic of these live recordings to come through. (Or so I thought in 2006. Now, not so much.)
If your system leans more toward the budget side, these Ark records will leave you wondering what in the world that Tom Port character was talking about.
And of course organ records require good deep bass, the hardest part of the frequency range to reproduce in the typical living room. With this organ record at least you’ll know what the goal should be.
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…)
This is a Japanese 45 RPM Audiocheck Pressing with DEMO DISC quality sound! This is absolutely one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played here at Better Records!
For those of you who are not familiar with the Audiocheck 45 RPM series from Japan, these are albums remastered at 45 with some material left off by necessity, since the maximum for each side is closer to 12 minutes than the standard LP limit of 20 minutes.
These don’t come my way very often, so I hadn’t played one in quite awhile, but I have to tell you that this is one of the best sounding jazz records I’ve played in months. It sounds like a Direct to Disc recording! I knew the original albums that Jacques Loussier recorded for Philips had good sound but I never realized they had this kind of Demo Disc quality sound. (He also made a number of recordings for London previous to this one and most of those are mediocre in my estimation.)
The music is lots of fun: Bach played in a jazzy style by a band that really swings. For music and sonics this record is an audiophile dream come true.
This is an Older Jazz 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 developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.
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.
