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.

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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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