Lewis Layton, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

A Deep, Deep Dive into LSC 2323 – A Shootout Like No Other

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records remastered pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

It seemed better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on the hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned up to then, was unexpected to say the least.

Unheard of is more like it. (That is no longer true — stay tuned for the story of the one Classic Records classical record that actually won a shootout not that long ago.)

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the right early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout. (Most are terrible.)[1][2]

Some Inside Baseball

Most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

The time to do a serious investigation of LSC 2323 necessary to get to the bottom of what was truly a head scratcher was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years. (Other such oddities have their own section here by the way.)

This title would have to wait until 2025 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records.

Why? Because every record with any hope of sounding good must be given the chance to show us what it can do. It deserves to be evaluated fairly, without the listener having any knowledge as to which pressing my be playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings, which is very bad indeed.

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The Reiner Sound Is A Demo Disc for Energy, Dynamics and Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

This review was written in 2010.

I don’t think we have found a Reiner Sound as nice as this one since then. 

UPDATE 2024

It may have taken us more than a decade and cost us a lot of money to get a shootout going for a rare and expensive title such as LSC 2183, but all it took was one killer copy to make it worth all the time and trouble it took track it down.

And when a record sounds as good as our best copy did, with a grade of at least 3+ on side one, who cares how much trouble we went through to find it?

We live for records like these.

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How Good Is the Sibelius Violin Concerto on Classic Records?

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Classic remastered this title in the 90s — of course they did, it’s clearly one of the better Heifetz recordings.

As expected, Classic’s remastered pressing of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (LSC 2435) was awful, as bad as LSC 1903, 1992, 2129 and others too numerous to list. 

(There is one Classic violin concerto record that is actually better than every RCA Living Stereo we have ever played — which amounts to scores of them since we have done shootouts for them all — and one of these days you will be able to read about it right here on this very blog!)

The Classic is both aggressive and lacking in texture at the same time, the worst of both worlds.

Bernie’s cutting system is what I would call Low Resolution — the harmonics and subtleties you would expect to hear are simply not there. He brightens the tonal balance, causing screechy strings whenever they get loud.

The world is full of these kinds of third-rate records. They make up the bulk record collectors’ collections as well as the ones audiophiles have sitting on their shelves.

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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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Debussy / La Mer / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old review, one which we ourselves may no longer agree with. If you see this record in the bins for cheap, give it a try, but don’t pay a high price for it on our say-so.

The record that contains our current favorite performance with top quality sound for La Mer was conducted by Ansermet for Decca in 1955. We rarely have it in stock

For Don Juan we like Haitink’s recording for Philips from 1975. Again, not one likely to be in stock.

Note that records made from 1955 to 1975 make up practically all of our offerings of classical and orchestral music.

In the 70s things went downhill, and quickly. Let me give you just one example:

A mediocre Decca recording from 1972 was remastered in 1981 by an audiophile label trying to “improve” it. Sure enough, with their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system, they made it even worse.

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Mahler / Symphony No. 4 – Another Disappointing Shaded Dog

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The Decca recording with Solti from 1961 on London (CS 6217) is still the king on this title, as far as we know.

The review below is for a White Dog pressing of the Reiner performance that we’d played way back in 2007.

We’ve played others over the years, but nothing has impressed us all that much, so we are still going through the process of acquiring more copies of the London and have yet to do a shootout for them.

Our 2025 notes for LSC 2364 on Shaded Dog is that it is rich, but the strings are somewhat shrill and it has an unfortunate tendency to become more congested than we would like in the louder passages.

The sound is passable I suppose, but it’s hardly the pressing you want to play when it comes time to hear the music properly performed, and with top quality sound. This is of course the service we offer — the actual pressing that has audiophile sound with a performance to match — so we hope to see Hot Stamper pressings of the London coming to the site in 2026.

Fun Fact

Note that this recording from 1961 was rereleased on London in 1971 with a different catalog number (CS 6781) and a different cover, as well as notably inferior sound. Audiophiles would do well to avoid it.

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Breathy, Sweet and Lush – What’s Not to Like?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

Our notes for LSC 2565 read:

Love the sound of this LP, especially the flutes and strings. Breathy, sweet and lush.

It’s very difficult to get the sound right, though. Most copies are smeary, veiled or lacking weight and the loud brass gets pinched. Best copy was a big step up!

We described the Top Copy from our 2023 shootout this way:

Wonderful Living Stereo sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing.

Our White Hot Shootout Winner was simply amazing sounding — some of the best orchestral sound we have heard lately, especially audible in exceptionally breathy flutes and sweet strings.

It was a quite a step up in sound quality over even the closest contender, which just goes to show how hard it is to come across these very special pressings no matter how many Shaded Dogs you play.

Our favorite performance of the Tchaikovsky — when you hear it played by the BSO, guided by the baton of the supremely talented Charles Munch, you know you are hearing the work performed with the greatest skill and interpreted as authentically as is humanly possible.

Spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence.

Another amazing recording from the 60s, brought to you by your vinyl-loving friends at Better Records.

  • The three-dimensional space and Tubey Magic are jaw-dropping on this copy.
  • An amazing Living Stereo all analog recording from 1962 – nothing else sounds like it.
  • When you’ve played as many Living Stereo titles as we have (250+ and counting), you’re bound to run into this kind of Demo Disc sound from time to time – it’s what makes record collecting fun.
  • It’s the kind of record we live for here at Better Records.

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Capriccio Italien on Classic Records and How Badly I Missed the Boat

More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

I thought it was better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned, was unexpected to say the least.

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout.

(Some inside baseball: most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.)

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

Finding the time to do the serious investigation of LSC 2323 that would be necessary to get to the bottom of it was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years.

The title would have to wait until 2025 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records. Every record gets the chance to show us what it can do, to be evaluated fairly without the listener having any way to know which pressing is playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had probably never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings.

Side One, Second Movement (Tchaikovsky)

  • Big, but bright and compressed
  • Gets loud but opaque and hot
  • Good weight

Side One, First Movement

  • Bright and blurry bells
  • Sort of tubey but a mess
  • Grade: 1+ (passable, but no Hot Stamper)

Side Two (Rimsky-Korsakov)

  • Big but boomy and smeary
  • Brass is edgy and opaque
  • No top end or space
  • Peaks are hot and congested
  • Grade: NFG

To recap: In 2005 I was impressed with Classic’s pressing of LSC 2323. That was only twenty years ago, yet I could not have been more wrong. I thought my stereo was great — I’d owned top quality equipment since 1975 by then — thirty sodding years — so my audiophile credentials would surely dwarf those of the vast majority of forum posters who write about audiophile pressings today. How reliable should we expect their reviews to be?

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La Creation du Monde Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Many years ago, perhaps around 2010, we played a nice copy of LDS 2625 and had this to say about it:

1s/ 2s. Side 2 has DEMO QUALITY sound. These rare Soria pressings have a tendency to be noisy so this is as quiet a copy as you are likely to find.

Unusually smooth. Just the opposite of the Mercury recordings. Perfect for this kind of music.

UPDATE 2025

The last couple of copies we picked up in preparation for a shootout we had been wanting to do were a little bright and would probably have earned grades of 1.5+, which are good, not great Hot Stamper grades.

Unless we can find some better sounding copies — not likely since this album on the original Soria pressing in stereo is rare and usually fairly expensive — we are very unlikely to be offering this title to our customers anytime soon.

Seems we got this one wrong. Live and learn is our motto, for precisely this reason.

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Liszt / The Music of Franz Liszt / Fiedler

More of the Music of Franz Liszt

  • This vintage Shaded Dog pressing of these wonderful orchestral showpieces boasts two outstanding Double Plus (A++) sides or close to them
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • Classic superb Living Stereo sound on this side one – big and open with an especially clean and extended top end (great fun on those huge cymbal crashes Liszt favored), and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • Powerful, rich, dynamic and life-like orchestral reproduction, set in a huge hall – no Heavy Vinyl pressing can hold a candle to sound as good as this (particularly on side one)
  • “The Hungarian-born composer and pianist Franz Liszt was strongly influenced by the music heard in his youth, particularly Hungarian folk music, with its unique gypsy scale, rhythmic spontaneity and direct, seductive expression.”
  • If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this Living Stereo from 1960 belongs in your collection.

This is, in our opinion, one of the most underrated Living Stereo treasures in the Golden Age canon — but not by this critic (here reviewing the CD):

In the early days of stereo, RCA released an all-Liszt LP by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops that has remained in my memory as one of the finest things the popular maestro ever committed to disc…

Two works, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and the high energy Rákoczy March, have been out for some time, coupled with “Hi-Fi Fiedler”. Now RCA has added to this current disc the two main pieces, Mazeppa and Les Preludes, from the original collection. They are as wonderful as ever – among the best, if not the best, performances of this music. Fiedler doesn’t dawdle or toy around with the melodies; he lets Liszt’s Romantic vision speak for itself, helping it along with brisk tempos and incisive phrasing. Seldom have the fanfares in Les Préludes had such bite and majesty.

ClassicsToday

The richly textured, rosin-on-the-bow lower strings on this record are to die for.

Find me a modern record with that sound and I will eat it. And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. NO ONE alive today can make a record that sound like this. To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have fully grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: compared head to head, they are simply not competitive.

After twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples, both the boutique and major labels of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful or as life-like as this RCA from the old days.

Fortunately for us record lovers and collectors, we at Better Records are not trying to make a record sound the way these sides do, we’re just trying to find ones that do, and folks, we found some very, very good sides here.

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