Robert Fine, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

A Scheherazade that Lacks Power in the Brass and Richness in the Lower Strings? No Thanks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

One of the most dynamic Scheherazade‘s on record. The brass really blasts through in this recording. 

Of course the question is how does this recording stack up to the famous Reiner. Well, I’ll tell you.

The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra is not in the same league with the CSO, that’s well known. Dorati may be every bit as talented as Reiner, but he doesn’t have the players at his disposal capable of pulling off demanding material such as this.

But the orchestra acquits itself well here. The first violinist is quite good. That’s not the problem.

What lets the side down is the Mercury recording team, who fail to adequately present the weight of the orchestra in the lower midrange and below. One thing I noticed recently when playing an original LSC 2446 was how rich and powerful the sound was in the lower strings and in the brass relative to later pressings of the same title and other recordings of the work.

That opening movement of Scheherazade needs power down there and the Mercury simply doesn’t have enough of that power to qualify it as one of the top sounding Mercs.

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The Thrill of Discovering Great Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

Robert Fine was one of the greatest audio engineers who ever lived. He is the man responsible for recording this audiophile gem for Command, as well as much of the Mercury catalog.

Unfortunately, we rarely have any Command records in stock, but we do make an effort to have a good selection of the most amazing sounding Mercury titles available in the form of Hot Stamper pressings.

If you have the system for it, it’s very possible you have never heard most of these instruments sound this real on any other recording. It’s as if you were standing right in the studio with them. Yes, it’s that crazy good.

Let Me Ask You This

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking:

Who is finding incredible Demo Discs like this Command from 1961 nowadays?

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Hungarian Rhapsodies – Wait a Minute

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year in our experience. Just the opposite in fact.

The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.

It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.

But wait a minute.

Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.

How did they get this one so wrong?

We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.

Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.

One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.

We actually like testing records, and we’ve refined* a method for testing that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.

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Mercury Produced a Truly Awful Collection of Verdi Overtures in 1959

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The sound of this 1959 Mercury release, SR 90156, is terrible. It’s crude and hot like an “old record,” a sound we find on far too many vintage pressings. The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that have been stamped out over the last seven decades.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless the average record will show itself to be.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

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The Enigma Variations on Mercury Was Not to Our Liking (Although We Sure Love the Cover)

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1959 Mercury (SR 90125) impressed us when we did a shootout for the work years ago.

The performance of the Enigma Variations here seems rushed, and the two other recordings of the work that we like, one on Philips, the other on RCA, are better.

The Philips with Haitink is probably the better of the time and our favorite at this time. Of the three recordings that we felt had the best combination of music and sound, the Merc with Barbarolli was our least favorite, so we decided to concentrate on the best two recordings in our shootout and get rid of the Mercury pressings we had on hand.

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This Mercury Copland Record Had Screechy, Shrill Strings

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Our notes for SR 90246 read:

Lively and clear but screechy strings. Dry and bright sound.

To help you avoid records with these sonic faults, we’ve linked below to others with similar problems.

Here are some titles we’ve found that tend to have dry sound, and here are some that tend to have bright sound.

And of course shrill strings are the kiss of death on any orchestral record. (Classic Records, I’m talking to you!)

None?

None of the copies of SR 90246 we played were any good, but the RFR3 / RFR6 was the worst of the bunch.

Are there good sounding pressings of the recording?

There may well be. We didn’t hear any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

However, we have no intention of spending more money trying to find them. If you know of some killer stampers for the album, please shoot us an email.

We tend to like Dorati’s work with the London Symphony Orchestra, but in this case the better Dorati/Copland record was recorded in Minneapolis in 1959, SR 90172.

If You’re a Fan

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.

But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

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Unfortunately Mercury Did Not Produce a Good Record of Rossini Overtures

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

1960 just happens to be one of the truly great years for quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.

However, the sound of this Mercury recording, SR 90139, released that very year, was far from acceptable.

The loud passages are simply full of compressor distortion.

To be fair, we haven’t played this album by the dozens the way we have many of the records we review (more than a hundred in the case of most Beatles album).

Let’s just say I remember being disappointed by a copy or two back in the day — whenever that was — and the latest copy we auditioned was no better, so, as a practical matter, this is not a vein rich enough for us to be mining, not when there are literally hundreds of other recordings we are still pursuing. As always, if you believe you have a killer pressing, please let us know what it is so we can get one in ourselves.

It seems that many early Mercury recordings suffer from this shortcoming, and when they do, we put them in the trade-in pile and move on.

By the way, for those who are interested in these works, our favorite performance of Rossini’s Overtures on record is the one with Maag conducting the Paris Conservatoire.

This Mercury might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

Have You Noticed…

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.

But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

There is plenty of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and most of them are downright awful.

It seems as if the audiophile public has bought completely into the hype for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings. Audiophiles have too often made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.

I would say Mercury’s track record during the ’50s and ’60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.

But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one of them.

To see the 50+ Living Presence classical titles we’ve reviewed to date, click here.

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Classic Records 45 RPM Recut – This Is Your Idea of a Great Firebird?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

Many years ago, a customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him:

Steve, after starting to read Wayne’s take on the platters, I came across this:

That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn’t quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the “Infernal Dance” episode of Stravinsky’s Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording).

That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times.

This is why I have so little faith in reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago (04/2010) against a good original and the recut was at best passable in comparison. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say?

The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably mediocre and even just plain awful records. It’s the only real evidence we have for their credibility, and the evidence is almost always damning.

I want a reviewer who knows better than to play such an underwhelming pressing and then waste my time telling me about it. He should tell us what a good record sounds like with this equipment mod. Then I might give more credence to what he has to say.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

P.S.

This is one of the Classic Records titles on Harry Pearson’s TAS List of Super Discs(!)

P.P.S.

Allow me to quote a writer with his own website devoted to explaining and judging classical recordings of all kinds. His initials are A.S. for those of you who have been to his site.

Classic Records Reissues (both 33 and 45 RPM) – These are, by far, the best sounding Mercury pressings. Unfortunately, only six records were ever released by Classic. Three of them (Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) are among the very finest sounding records ever made by anyone. Every audiophile (with a turntable) should have these “big three”.

Obviously we could not disagree more. I’ve played all six of the Classic Mercury’s. The Chabrier, Ravel and Prokofiev titles are actually even worse than the Stravinsky we reviewed.

This same reviewer raved about a record we thought had godawful sound, Romantic Russia on MoFi, a label that never met an orchestral string section it didn’t think needed brightening.

Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

What is it with audiophile record reviewers? They seem to be taken in by the most unnatural sounding pressings. The world is full of wonderful vintage pressings that have no such problems. If you are an audiophile who feels himself qualified to write about records, shouldn’t you at least be able to hear the difference between a phony audiophile pressing and the vintage pressings it supposedly improved?

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Don’t Waste Your Money on these Mozart Symphonies

More of the Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1958 Mercury are impressive.

1959 just happens to be one of the all time great years for recording in analog.

If you have any doubt, check out this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.

This Mercury might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

Have You Noticed…

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.

But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

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Blary Brass Ruins Another Mercury – This Time It’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

The sound of the pressings we’ve played over the years has always been awful.

On SR 90217, the brass is just too sour and blary. To our knowledge, no copies of the album do not suffer from these problems.  They may exist — who can say they don’t? — but we’ve yet to play one and have no intention of seeking them out, not when there are other superior performances with top quality sound.

The performance is awful, too.

When the horns have clarity, correct tonality, plenty of space around them and a solid, full-bodied sound, probably every other instrument in the soundscape will too.

One minute into side one we knew that this Mercury had failed the brass test.

It was simply much too unpleasant to be played on modern high quality equipment.

The less revealing systems some audiophiles seem to favor can make the shortcomings of a recording such as this more tolerable, but we’ve worked very hard for many decades to make sure our system is as truthful and unforgiving as possible.

We knew right from the get-go this Mercury was not going to make the grade. Here are some others that we’ve found seriously wanting. We’ve also compiled a list of more than 40 of the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings of orchestral and classical music, and it can be found here.

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