Testing Harsh String Tone

Satie, Ravel, Debussy / The Impressionists – Phase 4, its Strengths and Shortcomings

More Bernard Herrmann

Presenting an exceptionally rare and very good sounding Decca Phase IV pressing (with the textured cover, ooh!), the first to ever hit the site. We have been on the lookout for this album for years and somehow cannot find any clean copies, other than this one of course.

Not to worry; this one will do nicely. Three of the six works here have SUPERB better than Super Hot Stamper sound. We went through them one by one and were rather surprised that the sound quality varied so much from track to track.

One might conclude from the variation in the sound that the album must be a compilation — so many of Herrmann’s albums are — but that is not the case, assuming the liner notes are to be believed.

Here’s what we heard, taken directly from our notes.

Side One

Satie / Gymnopedies I & II

A++ or better. Rich, smooth, sweet, big, natural, clear and very ANALOG. I don’t know when I’ve heard these famous works sounding better than they do here.

Debussy / Clair de Lune

A+, rich but a bit smeary, strings need more texture.

Debussy / Valse ‘la Plus Que Lente

No grade – Too murky.

Ravel / Five O’Clock Fox-Trot

A++ to A+++, with Demo Disc sound! So lively and clear, the sound will jump out of your speakers when you play this track!

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Another Fine Entry for Our Hall of Shame (Now Nearly 300 Strong)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pictures at an Exhibition Available Now

Classic Records Repress at 33, 45, or any other speed – they’re all terrible.

A Heavy Vinyl Disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty).

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my skin crawl. After a minute or two of listening to sound this bad, I have had it.

HP put this on his TAS List? Sad but true.

What do you get with Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue? Dramatically more warmth, sweetness, delicacy, transparency, space, energy, size, naturalness (no boost on the top end or the bottom, a common failing of anything on Classic); in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, in our experience anyway.

Now if you’re a Classic Records fan, and you like that brighter, more detailed, more aggressive sound, our Hot Stampers are probably not for you. We don’t like that sound and we don’t like most Classic Records. They may be clean and clear but where is the RCA LIVING STEREO Magic that made people swoon over these recordings in the first place? Bernie manages to clean that sound right off the record, and that’s just not our idea of hi-fidelity.

Our Hot Stamper Classical Pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding than practically any record Classic Records ever made, if only because these are all the areas in which heavy vinyl pressings tend to fall short in in our experience.

So Many Columbia Classical LPs Are Bad Sounding – Why Is That?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding.

The upper mids are usually nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst way.

If Columbia’s goal was to drive the audiophile classical music lover screaming from the room, most of the time they succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they fail.

When they do we call those pressings Hot Stampers.

Columbia Rock and Jazz

When I play Columbia recordings from the ’50s and ’60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles and other jazz giants, what strikes me most is how natural, warm and sweet the sound is. I was playing an old mono Ellington record recently and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-’50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing. Those guys (the engineers and the musicians) knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how many of the best sounding records in the world managed to be recorded without any of that stuff. RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos. Decca didn’t need it. Contemporary Records managed to record the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great sounding records get made with such bad equipment? I guess we’ll never know.

Columbia may not have always recorded the best “serious” jazz, but they were very serious about the sound of their jazz. Outside of Contemporary, Columbia has the consistently best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard.

Further Reading

Bread / On The Waters

More of the Music of Bread

Hot Stampers have finally been discovered for the most consistent and BEST SOUNDING of the Bread albums (not counting the Best of Bread compilation, one of our long time favorites here at Better Records, but a compilation nevertheless). This is the record that put their heavily Beatles-inflected Pure Pop on the map, and at the top of the charts with their Number One hit single Make It With You.

We used to think that only the Best of Bread album could get that song to sound as luscious and Tubey Magical as it does when we hear it in our heads, but it seems we were wrong — it sounds positively amazing on the best copies of On The Waters. To hear the vocal harmonies that these guys produced is to be reminded of singers of the caliber of the Everly Brothers or The Beatles. (more…)