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.
As I’m writing this, I can picture myself in the store. I can still remember that the clerk who helped me find the record commented that I should have come in the week before when the record was on sale for $1 off. I certainly feel like I got my money’s worth that day. This album went on to become one of my personal treasures. I used to marvel at the way the wind instruments actually sounded like the pipes of an organ. (I wasn’t really sure at first that there wasn’t an organ playing somewhere on the record. I didn’t know much about classical music then. )