Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now
UPDATE 2025
This is a very old review from from way back in 2011 which we think is wildly off the mark.
I can’t remember when was the last time we played an Mercury Orange Label pressing that had sound competitive with the best earlier pressings.
Back in 2011 we liked reissue pressings of Golden Age recordings a lot more than we do now, so take the review below with a huge grain of salt. Only the advent of top quality cleaning equipment and much improved playback made it possible for us to hear the earlier pressings in all their glory.
A lot of records that I used to like because they were cleaner and brighter — later Red Seal Living Stereos, some OJC jazz, some reissues of rock — sounded much better when my system was darker and less revealing.
There are plenty of live and learn entries about these records. This one from 14+ years ago could (probably, the record is long gone and not around to be played) not be more wrong.
Our advice in 2025 would be to avoid any pressing on the Orange Mercury label.
We played an Orange label late reissue of this title a while back and had this to say about it:
DEMO QUALITY thanks to superb low distortion mastering. Another very exciting Mercury recording. Some of these Orange Label pressings, which are cut with much better cutting equipment than was available when the original album was released, can show you just how good the master tape really is.
This kind of sound is not easy to cut, and it appears that the amplifiers of the day just weren’t up to it. This copy gets rid of all the cutter-head distortion and coloration and allows you to hear what the Mercury engineers accomplished.
Dorati breathes fire into the famous Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet on side 2. Unfortunately, the mastering on this copy is not very good. The sound is bright and dry.
This work frequently is recorded with harsh sound; the orchestration must be difficult to capture on tape. But Mercury here seems to have managed a feat few others can claim. I’m guessing the earlier pressings have too much cutter distortion to get this one right; I don’t recall the other copies I’ve heard sounding this good.
This is a famous TAS list record with amazing string sound! It’s incredibly textured and dynamic.
Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS List of Super Discs.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.
We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.
This Colorback Maroon Label RFR pressing (SR 90272) has wonderful orchestral sound, with both sides having Hot Stampers. Side two earned the full Two Pluses for its relatively rich strings, a quality one rarely hears on Mercury recordings from this era. The string texture is superb here, so critical to the enjoyment of a large scale romantic symphony such as this.
Side one big, full and dynamic, with horns and winds that are never screechy. (Side two of this first LP is very screechy and not at all to our liking.)
Side two of the second record has the sound of live music. Huge space, clear yet rich, this is the sound we were looking for! (more…)
