Roy Wallace, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Listening for Dry Strings on Espana

 Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

On many copies the strings are dry, lacking some of the Tubey Magic heard on the better copies.

This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard.  

It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in even the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled Hi-Fi beats My-Fi (if you are at all serious about audio).

Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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The Tale of Tsar Saltan and Our Discontinued Four Plus Grade

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

Many years ago we played a copy with an AMAZING side one. It was so good we gave it our rare 4+ grade. We freaked out when we heard this side – it took the sound beyond anything we had ever experienced for the work.

It’s so rich and real, with huge WHOMP factor down low, as well as clear, uncolored brass and robust lower strings – wow!

We figure about one out of a hundred sides earn our Four Plus grade – you can’t get much more rare than that.

UPDATE 2026

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and what it takes to discover them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it changes our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question might have been “How high is up?”

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French Overtures with Ansermet Had One Awfully Good Sounding Side in 2009

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jacques Offenbach Available Now

Reviewed back in 2009 in our pre-shootout days.

This Minty London Blueback LP has a WONDERFUL Tubey Magical Super Hot Stamper side one.

I have never heard this music sound better. Of course Ansermet is exactly the right conductor for these light and colorful orchestral pieces; the performances are uniformly superb.

But as audiophiles we want to make sure the sound is what it should be, and here side one does not disappoint. The string tone is perfection. I defy anyone to find a Heavy Vinyl reissue with string tone even remotely as good. In my experience there is simply no such record.

With vintage classical records there are always trade-offs of course. Here the loudest passages suffer from some mild compressor distortion, so common on these early pressings. A small price to pay for sound this lovely I say.

The Zampa overture by Herold is probably the best sound on the album — it’s gorgeous!

Side two is not quite as good. We rated it A Plus, with real weight and energy but a bit too much compression and distorton in the loud passages to be completely satisfying.

UPDATE 2025

Nowadays we would never list a record for sale as a Hot Stamper pressing with a grade of 1+ on either side.

And, more importantly, the grades we awarded these two sides were just estimates.

We did not put this copy in a shootout with a batch of similar pressings.

We played the record, liked what we heard on side one, liked what we heard on side two a bit less, and offered it to our customers with the description of the strengths and weaknesses you read about.

We could not have begun to conduct a shootout for this early London. Back in those days we simply could not find enough copies of such a rare title to make such a thing happen.

As for the compressor distortion on side one that we heard, it’s entirely possible that with better cleaning and better playback that the distortion we thought we heard would disappear. Blaming the record is rarely the ideal approach for making progress in audio.

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Yes, Sometimes There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

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

Way back in 2015 we wrote:

There are certain stampers that seem to have a consistently brighter top end. They are tolerable most of the time, but the real magic can only be found on the copies that have a correct or even slightly duller top. Live classical music is never “bright” the way recordings of it so often are.

On the other hand, it’s rarely “rich” and “romantic” the way many vintage recordings are — even those we rave about — but that’s another story for another day.

We recently did the shootout again, and now with a much more resolving, clear, accurate upper midrange and an even more extended top end, the stampers that we used to find “brighter than ideal” are almost always just too damn bright, period.

We will never buy another copy with those stampers except by accident or misfortune.

We was wrong and we don’t mind admitting it. We must be learning something in our shootouts, right?. We ran an experiment, we discovered something new about this album, and that should be seen as a good thing.

If you have been making improvements to your system, room, electricity, etc., then you too own records which don’t sound as good as you remember them. You just don’t know which ones they are, assuming you haven’t played them in a while.

One Stamper to Rule Them All

Which leaves one and only one stamper that can win a shootout. There is another stamper we like well enough to offer to our discriminating customers, but after that it is all downhill, and steeply.

Here are some of the other albums we’ve discovered for which one set of stampers has been consistently winning shootouts for years now.

Wouldn’t you know it — the right stampers are the hardest ones to find.

Which of course pretty much explains why you will rarely see a copy of the album for sale on our site.

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Letter of the Week – “This is the best classical recording I have ever heard.”

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

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

One minute into The Tale of Tsar Saltan I knew this was a winner of the highest order. I was not prepared for the low end whomp factor as you call it.

The tonal balance of this wonderful recording is off the charts. the triangles just seem to float in the mix with a delicate presence that works so beautifully with the rest of the orchestra.

The strings and brass have this immediacy to them that feels like the orchestra is in the room with you.

This is the best classical recording I have ever heard both musically and sonically. So glad I fortunate to own this masterpiece!

Thanks
Rob

Dear Rob,

Fantastic news, we liked it too. Thanks for your letter.

BTW, don’t try to play your Heavy Vinyl classical pressings for a while, it might just be too big a shock to your (nervous, not stereo) system!

TP

Ha! I just never realized how much I have been missing or accepting, until I played this album : )
Rob

Rob,

Nobody does.

Nobody can know what they are missing until they hear it.

This explains every audiophile forum and every idiotic review by Michael Fremer and his uninformed/misinformed colleagues. These people simply don’t know any better because the approach they have taken to finding and auditioning records produces consistently inaccurate results.

We explain — for free! — how anyone can find better records here.

If you want to know what you’re missing, there is only one approach that works, and it involves two things that have made the modern world what it is today: empirical findings based on the use of the scientific method.

Any other approach is doomed, not to failure, but to mediocrity.

We are the only record dealers who use the scientific method, and that one fact, more than any other, explains why we can sell the best sounding pressings in the world. We alone are able to show you what you have been missing. Or, put another way, the second- and third-rate sound you have been living with because you didn’t know anything could be better.

We didn’t know much better either until about twenty-odd years ago.

Before that, we had raved about the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan. Its shortcomings are glaringly obvious to us now, but they weren’t back then. We didn’t have the stereo, we didn’t have the cleaning system, and we didn’t have the critical listening skills to be able to recognize its manifold faults.

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The Greatest Beethoven Ninth on Vinyl – Ansermet in 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

The legendary Ansermet recording from 1960 you see to the left is the best sounding Beethoven 9th we have ever had the pleasure to play here at Better Records.

Ansermet’s performance is clearly definitive to my ear as well. The gorgeous hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, possibly of all time. More amazing sounding recordings were made there than in any other hall we know of.

Both sides are big, rich and clear, and both were showing us pretty much everything that’s good about a vintage symphonic recording.

There is a solidity and richness to the sound beyond all others, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

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 weight and power of the brass, combined with unerring timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section of the orchestra.

The Chorus — Always a Tough Test

To get the chorus to play cleanly right to the very end is difficult for any pressing and this one is no exception. The chorus should play mostly without distortion or congestion even in the loudest parts, but we can’t say there won’t be a trace of one or both.

A good test of your turntable setup!

Production and Engineering

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from April of 1959 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall.

The album came out in 1960, along with a great many other exceptional titles from the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording.

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Who Can Explain Why This Cheap Reissue Sounds So Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

This Decca reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet.

Roy Wallace was the engineer for these sessions from 1955 to 1962 in Geneva’s glorious sounding Victoria Hall. His work here is superb in all respects.

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording, with the added benefit of mastering using more modern, but apparently still good, cutting equipment from the ’70s, 1972 to be exact.

We are of course here referring to the often amazing modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the mediocre-at-best modern mastering of today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that it excelled in so many areas of reproduction. The illusion of disappearing speakers is one of the more attractive aspects of the sound here, pulling the listener into the space of the concert hall in an especially engrossing way.

Thread It Up and Just Hit Play Already

What might be seen as odd — odd to some audiophiles but not to us — was how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the best copies.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the tape, and that all one has to do to get that vintage sound on to a record is simply to thread up the master on a good machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record these days makes clear that in fact I’m wrong to think that this approach would work. It seems to me that somebody should be able to figure out how to do it. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years.

Old Tapes, New Tapes

The master tapes were about fifteen years old when this record was mastered.

Compare that to a current cutting which would be made from approximately fifty year old tapes.

Perhaps that explains it.

Or maybe it doesn’t.

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This Tchaikovsky 4th with Argenta Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This vintage London Blueback pressing of CS 6048 was released in 1958.

(1958 just happens to be one of the best years for analog recording, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.)

CS 6048 seemed to have a lot going for it so we thought we would get one in and give it a spin.

For starters, just take a look at that cover!

Roy Wallace was the engineer and many of his recordings are superb. (As of this posting there are fifteen available on our site.)

Recorded in Geneva’s world-renowned Victoria Hall with L’Orchestre De La Suisse Romande performing, many of of the best sounding records we’ve ever played boast these three elements.

Unfortunately, this London has a case of the “old record” sound we find on far too many vintage pressings, even those with credentials as promising as this one.

All the right people worked on it. How did it all go so wrong?

Who the hell knows?

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands in the 38 years we’ve been in the business of selling premium vinyl to audiophiles.

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 — and sometimes just awful, as was the case here — LPs that were stamped out over the last seven decades or so.

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.

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Compression Works Its Magic on The Christmas Eve Suite

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

Some notes about the compression effects we heard on side two of a Blueback pressing of The Christmas Eve Suite album back in 2012. We wrote:

Side two is even more transparent and high-rez than side one. The texture on the strings and the breathy quality of the woodwinds make this a very special pressing indeed.

The horns are somewhat smeary and do get a bit congested when loud.

There is more compression on this side two than there was on the best copy we played, and that means low level detail is superb, but louder parts, such as when the more powerful brass instruments come in, can present problems.

Note how good The Flight of the Bumble Bee sounds here.

Compression is helping bring out all the ambience and detail in the recording, and there’s no downside because the orchestra is playing softly, unlike the piece that precedes it.

A classic case of compression having sonic tradeoffs.

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El Amor Brujo – Brilliant Decca Remastering from 1967

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2022

In 2012 we were knocked out by this Stereo Treasury Budget Reissue pressing.

We had the temerity to charge $175 for our Hot Stamper copy, a record we’d probably picked up locally for five or ten bucks. Nowadays of course it would go for even more than that, and still be worth every penny, assuming the buyer was looking for wonderful music with top quality sound regardless of the vinyl’s trade-in value, which in this case would probably be a dollar.

It is our strongly held belief that records are for playing and enjoying, not trading-in. Some records (like this one) are perfect for collectors, but their appeal is lost on us and has been since I soured on Mobile Fidelity records back in the 80s. It would take us another twenty years before we were done with other pressings that promised so much and delivered so little.

Decca released this title on their London label as a budget reissue, but that didn’t keep them from mastering it properly and pressing it on high quality vinyl.  The same cannot be said for RCA, which kept many of their golden age recordings in print on the RCA red label as well as others, but with sound that was most of the time clearly inferior to those earlier releases.

Our 2012 Review

Our current favorite El Amor Brujo for sound and performance is this Decca recording from 1967 with De Burgos conducting the New Philharmonia.

The best sound on this album is on side two, where El Retablo de Maese Pedro can be found.

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