Testing Orchestral Depth, Size and Space

The First Classic Record We Ever Played – Thus Spake Zarathustra

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Way back in 1994, long before we had anything like the system we do now, we were finding fault with the “Classic Records Sound.”

With each passing year — 28 and counting — we like that sound less.  Some Classic Records pressings may be on Harry’s TAS list — disgraceful but true — but that certainly has no bearing on whether or not they are very good records. 

I had a chance to play LSC 1806 (pictured above) not long ago and I was dumbfounded at how bright, shrill and aggressive it was.

I still remember playing my first Classic Records title, their first release, which would probably have been in 1994. The deep bass of the organ at the start of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the horns and the tympani blasting out from a dead silent background, put a lump in my throat. Had they actually managed to remaster these old recordings so well that the vintage pressings I was selling for such high prices would soon be worthless? I really do remember having that thought race through my mind.

But then the strings came in, shrieking and as bright as the worst Angel or DG pressing I’d ever heard. It was as if somebody had turned the treble control up on my preamp two or three clicks, into ear-bleeding territory. All my equipment at the time was vintage and tube, and even though my system erred on the dark side tonally, the first Classic release was clearly off the charts too bright and transistory, with none of the lovely texture and sheen that RCA was famous for in the early days of Living Stereo.

I knew right then that my vintage record business was safe.

Here is our review from the ’90s, written shortly after the release of Classic’s first three titles. (With minor additions and changes for clarity and context.)

Hall of Shame Pressings, Every One

I’m reminded of the nonsense I read in TAS and elsewhere in the mid-’90s regarding the reputed superiority of the Classic Records Living Stereo reissues. After playing their first three titles: 1806, 1817 and 2222 (if memory serves), I could find no resemblance between the reviews I read and the actual sound of the records I played. The sound was, in a word, awful.

To this day I consider them to be the single worst reissue series in history.

UPDATE 2025

Analogue Productions now holds that crown, surely. Still going strong, producing one crap pressing for the mid-fi collector market after another, there is simply no recording they won’t see fit to ruin.

When Harry Pearson (of all people! — this is the guy who started the Living Stereo craze by putting these forgotten old records on the TAS list in the first place) gave a rave review to LSC 1806, I had to stand up (in print anyway) and say that the emperor clearly had removed all his clothes, if he ever had any to begin with.

This got me kicked out of TAS by the way, as Harry does not take criticism well. I make a lot of enemies in this business with my commentary and reviews, but I see no way to avoid the fallout for calling a spade a spade.

Is anybody insane enough to stand up for LSC 1806 today? Considering that there is a die-hard contingent of people who still think Mobile Fidelity is the greatest label of all time, there may well be “audiophiles” with crude audio equipment or poorly developed critical listening skills, or both (probably both, as the two go hand in hand), that still find the sound of the shrill, screechy strings of the Classic pressing somehow pleasing to the ear. Hey, anything is possible.

As I’ve said again and again, the better a stereo gets, the more obvious the differences between good vintage pressings and most current reissues become. Modest front ends and mediocre playback systems can disguise these differences and mislead the amateur audiophile.

And the “professional” too. We’ve all had the experience of going back to play a record from years ago that we remember as being amazing, only to find it amazingly bad.

The Japanese Led Zeppelin series from the 90s comes immediately to mind. How could my system have been so dull that those bright pressings actually fooled me into thinking they sounded good all those years ago? I’ve done a few Mea Culpas over the years, and that’s one of the bigger ones.

Remember when Chesky Records were all the rage? Does anybody in his right mind play that shit anymore?

A short anecdote: A good customer called me up one night many years ago. He had just finished playing the Chesky pressing of Spain, and had pulled out his Shaded Dog original to compare. The sound of his Shaded Dog pressing was so much better that he took his Chesky and, with great satisfaction, ceremoniously dropped it in the trash can, noting, “Of course I could have sold it or traded it away, but nobody should have to listen to sound like that.”

Another anecdote: when Chesky first got started in the remastering business, a friend picked up their pressing of LSC 2150, Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije with Reiner. He played it for me when I came over to hear his system, and he and I were both shocked that his ’70s Red Seal pressing was better in every way.

We wanted to know: What kind of audiophile label can’t even go head to head with a cheap reissue put out twenty years after the initial release just to keep the bins stocked and satisfy the needs of the low-budget classical record buyer?

The answer: Plenty of them, and definitely Chesky. Playing most Classic Records classical titles is a painful experience these days. I do not recommend it to anyone with good equipment. If you love the Living Stereo sound and cannot afford vintage pressings, consider playing the CDs RCA remastered. The one I know well is clearly better than Classic’s and AP’s LPs.

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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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Why Did Suite No. 2 Sound Better than Suite No. 5?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:

An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.

The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.

I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)

Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

  • Present
  • Rich and sweet
  • Great texture and space all around
  • So lively too

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

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A 45 RPM Audiophile Pressing to Put Them All to Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

This Japanese 45 RPM remastering of our favorite recording of Prokofiev’s wonderful Lt. Kije Suite has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND. For starters, there are very few records with dynamics comparable to these. Since this is my favorite performance of all time, I can’t recommend the record any more highly. 

Most of what’s “bad” about a DG recording from 1978 is ameliorated with this pressing. The bass drum (drums?) here must be heard to be believed. We know of no Golden Age recording with as believable a presentation of the instrument as this.

The drum is clearly and precisely located at the back of the stage; even better, it’s as huge and powerful and room-filling as it would have been had you attended the session yourself. That’s our idea of hi-fidelity here at Better Records.

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What Do You Mean by “These Swan Lake Highlights Sound Like Live Music”?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

Kenneth Wilkinson engineered this album of Swan Lake Highlights for Decca in 1961 (one of the truly great years for top quality analog recordings).

Judging by the best pressings we played in our shootout, he did a great job. Knowing his work the way we do, this was to be expected. There are about 50 of his recordings for which we have done Hot Stamper shootouts, probably more than for any other engineer, and there are sure to be more added in the years to come.

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 timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

Highlights of the recording include huge amounts of bass; a clear snare at the back of the hall (a good test for transparency, of both the record and of your system and room); full-bodied horns and strings, which never become blary or shrill; and of course huge amounts of space.

This is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your Heavy Vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage. They cannot begin to sound the way this record sounds. (Before you put them in storage or on Ebay please play them against this pressing so that you can be confident in your decision to rid yourself of their mediocrity.)

Quality record production is a lost art, and it’s been lost for a very long time.

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Port’s Rule and The Song of the Volga Boatman

More Records that Helped Me Make Progress in Audio

The track that started us down the road to our first Sauter-Finegan shootout is, to this very day, our Number One Test Track of All Time, a little ditty known as the Song of the Volga Boatman.

We first heard it back in the 90s on Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular, which is still the version we test with, but this album of forward-looking big band contains that track  as well as 10 others, all with truly amazing sound.

Why is the Song of the Volga Boatman our ultimate test track?

The simplest way to understand it is that all the instruments are being played live in the studio, and all of them in the huge soundfield are real and acoustic — string bass, drums, horns of every size and type, woodwinds, percussion, tubular bells, etc.

In addition, the arrangements given to this roomful of players is so complex and lively that if anything sounds “funny,” to use the precise audiophile nomenclature, it really calls attention to itself.

Port’s Rule states: If it isn’t easy for your Test Discs to sound wrong, they are not very good Test Discs.

Wrong is the natural order of things.

Getting it right is where the work comes in to play.

And it should seem more like play than work or you are unlikely to get very far with it. (That’s another one of Port’s Rules, sometimes referred to as music does the driving.)

When the stereo is right from top to bottom, this song is right from top to bottom, and every other record we know the sound of will have the sound it’s supposed to have.

It seems simple and in some ways it is.

We’ve been getting the Song of the Volga Boatman to sound bigger and better now for years, through scores and scores of changes. At our current stage of audio evolution, at the very loud levels we play it at, it’s shocking how big, powerful and real it seems. It has more of the “live music” qualities we prize than almost any other studio recording I can think of.

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Our Best Copy Lacked a Measure of Weight and Tubey Magic on Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Subtitled:

The Thrill of Hearing Massive Sound on an Orchestral Blockbuster of the First Order

We described our most recent shootout winning pressing this way:

This superb classical release (the first copy to hit the site in close to two and a half years) boasts big, bold, dynamic Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this early London pressing.

The notes rave about this copy: “huge and spacious, strong strings and brass, very rich, well-defined low end, sweet and rich and textured strings, gets massive and extends both up high and down low.”

Here you will find the huge hall, correct string tone, spacious, open sound that are hallmarks of all the best vintage orchestral pressings.

Listen to the plucked basses – clear, not smeary, with no sacrifice in richness. Take it from us, the guys that play classical recordings by the score, this is hard for a record to do.

Below you can find our actual shootout notes for that copy.

We discovered that side two was slightly lacking in some ways. We had a side two on another copy that was better than the 2.5+ side two you see here.

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side two of another copy showed us there was potentially even more weight and Tubey Magic to the recording than we had expected after hearing a number of copies by that point in the shootout.

As a consequence we felt it best to drop side two’s grade a half plus to 2.5+. Initially it was graded “at least 2+”, and the grade was then raised to 2.5+ after playing it head to head in the final round against the eventual shootout winner.

We marvelled at these specific qualities in the sound of side one.

Track Three

  • Huge and spacious
  • Strong strings and brass
  • Very rich
  • Well defined lows

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The Fox Touch Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

The review reproduced below was written in 2010. More recently (2015 or so) I have played copies of these Crystal Clear organ recordings and been much less impressed.

The ambience is a fraction of what it should be, and the reason I know that is that the vintage organ recordings we play these days have dramatically more size and space than these audiophile pressings do. (We wrote about it here.)

A classic case of live and learn.

As we like to say, all these audiophile records sound great sitting on the shelf. When you finally pull one out to play it, you may find that it doesn’t sound the nearly as good as you remember, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a sign you are making progress in this hobby.

Ten years from now, if during that time you’ve worked hard on your stereo system, room, electricity and all the rest, your Heavy Vinyl pressings will also have plenty of flaws you never knew were there.

Our customers know what I am talking about. Some have even written us letters about it.

Linked here are some other records that are good for testing orchestral depth, size and space.

Our old review — way off the mark it seems!

White Hot on both sides, a DEMO DISC quality organ Direct to Disc recording.

Full, rich, spacious, big and transparent, with no smear.

The size and power of a huge church organ captured in glorious direct to disc analog.

We’ve never been fans of Crystal Clear, but even we must admit this recording is Hard To Fault.

Are we changing our tune about Audiophile records? Not in the least; we love the ones that sound right.

The fact that so few of them do is not our fault. 

The methods used to make a given record are of no interest whatsoever to us. We clean and play the pressings that we have on hand and judge the sound and music according to a single standard that we set for all such recordings. Organ records, in this case, get judged against other organ records. If you’ve been an audiophile for forty years as I have, you’ve heard plenty of organ records.

Practically every audiophile label on the planet produced at least one, and most made more than one. Some of the major labels made them by the dozen in the ’50s and ’60s, and many of those can sound quite wonderful.

Who made this one, how they made it or why they made it the way they did is none of our concern, nor in our mind should it be of any concern to you. The music, the sound and the surfaces are what are important in a record, nothing else.

Richter was making recordings of this caliber for London in the ’50s. Clearly the direct to disc process is not revelatory when it comes to organ records (or any other records for that matter), but finding vintage Londons with quiet vinyl that sound as good as this disc does is neither easy nor cheap these days, so we are happy to offer our Bach loving customers a chance to hear these classic works sounding as good as they can outside of a church or concert hall.

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Phase IV and the TAS List – Three-Dimensional Depth, Transparency and Space

Hot Stamper Pressings of Phase 4 Recordings Available Now

The best Hot Stamper pressings of this TAS List album, one of the greatest and most famous orchestral blockbuster soundtracks ever recorded, more than live up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done right.

As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious analog.

The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.

The layering of depth is really something to hear on the best copies, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep.

Transparency is what allows this all to sound real.

Opacity Vs. Transparency

Note that we have been especially anti-Heavy Vinyl in our recent commentaries for their consistently opaque character, the opposite of what makes it possible to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear all the instruments, even the ones placed far back.

Try that with any Classic Records or Speakers Corner pressing. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those two labels and the others like them.

Tubey Magic with Clarity

Yes, Decca in 1977 managed to keep its lovely Tubey Magical analog sound without getting mired in the muck of tube smear and thickness, the kind that bedevils so many pressings from the 50s.

Couple that with real bite to the brass and texture to the strings and you have the best of both worlds on one record.

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1962 Tubes and The Sound That’s Been Lost for Fifty Years

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This review was written many years ago, circa 2010 I would guess, right about the time we first started doing shootouts for the album. (Here is what we have to say about I Left My Heart in San Francisco these days, suspiciously similar to what we had to say in 2010. As the song says, ‘”The fundamental things apply…”)

Everything that’s good about All Tube vocal recordings from the 50s and 60s is precisely what’s good about the sound of this record.

The huge studio the music was recorded in is captured faithfully on this pressing. The height, width and depth of the staging are extraordinary, a true Demo Disc in that regard.

We are not big soundstage guys here at Better Records, but we can’t deny the appeal of the space to be found on a record that sounds as good as this one does.

Transparency and Tubey Magic are key to the sound of the orchestra and you will find both in abundance on these two sides.

(Other records that are good for testing those two qualities can be found here and here.)

Albums such as this live and die by the quality of their vocal reproduction. On this record Mr. Tony Bennett himself will appear to be standing right in your listening room, along with the 38 other musicians from the session. (Actually, come to think of it, they’re probably sitting.)

On the best pressings, the space of your stereo room will seem to expand in all directions to accommodate them — an illusion of course, but nevertheless a remarkably convincing one.

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