We Review the Classic Records Pressing of SR 90212

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

The Classic Records pressing of the famous Mercury is a gritty, shrill piece of crap.

I used to have a less-than-revealing all-tube system back in the 90s, but even that system, limited as it was and not remotely as revealing as the one we have now would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful record.

I don’t know how dull and smeary a stereo would have to be in order to play a record this phony and modern sounding in order to make it listenable, but I know that it would have to be very dull and very smeary, with the kind of vintage sound that might work for Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings but not much else.

It’s a disgrace, and the fact that it’s on the TAS Super Disc list is even more disgraceful.

Which all adds up to an audiophile hall of shame pressing and a record perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

Argenta and Ansermet

I much prefer Ansermet’s performances on London to those of Paray on Mercury.

As of 2022 we actually prefer the famous Argenta recording for Decca that’s on the TAS List, CS 6006.

Both are excellent and clearly superior to the Paray, even on the original Mercury pressings we’ve played.

UPDATE 2024:

This recording is no longer on the TAS Super Disc list. Our favorite, the London with Argenta, is however.

We call that progress! Maybe there’s hope for the TAS List yet.

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Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years

More Paul Simon

More Rock and Pop

  • With two INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage pressing is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “rich and 3D vox”…”excellent space and detail”…”dynamic chorus”…”deep, note-like bass”
  • A tough album to find with the kind of big, spacious, Tubey Magical sound this pressing offers
  • Clean, clear and open are nice qualities to have, but the richer, smoother, more natural sounding copies are the only ones ever good enough to be called Hot Stampers
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…he was never more in tune with his audience: Still Crazy topped the charts, spawned four Top 40 hits, and won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Vocal Performance.”
  • If you’re a Paul Simon fan, this has to be considered a Must Own Title of his from 1975.
  • The complete list of titles from 1975 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The overall sound here is big and rich. You get texture to the instruments (check the strings in the title track) but a smooth quality to the vocals instead of the grit and strain you hear on most copies. There’s good extension up top and weight down low.

Four Critical Test Tracks

What separates the mediocre-to-bad-sounding average copy from a Hot Stamper on side one is how well mastered and pressed (yes, pressed, because we shouldn’t overlook what bad vinyl can do to the sound) two songs are: Still Crazy After All These Years and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

If you get those two tracks right — breathy vocals, sounding smooth and sweet, with the sibilance under control, supported by good solid bass — the whole side is going to be good, maybe even amazingly good.

On side two listen to Have a Good Time and You’re Kind. On the better Hot Stamper copies, both will sound wonderful.

You can find this album in any store any day of the week, but let me tell you — most copies out there are godawful. I couldn’t stand to sit through another grainy, dry pressing of this album with a gun to my head — it doesn’t matter how good the music is.

On the best copies, however, it’s a whole different story.

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Carly Simon – Anticipation

More Carly Simon

  • This early pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in nearly three years) boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “tubey bass and vox”…”huge when it kicks in” (side one)…”zero veil” (side one)…”huge and rich and 3D”…”big toms and chorus”
  • Produced by Mr. Paul Samwell-Smith and engineered by Mike Bobak, the same team that worked their magic on this classic, Anticipation blends Carly’s lilting vocals with lush, harmonically detailed acoustic guitars and big punchy drums
  • Brimming with favorites such as Anticipation, Legend In Your Own Time and I’ve Got To Have You, this is clearly one of her most consistent albums
  • “Carly Simon’s second album found her extending the gutsy persona she had established on her debut album… a frankly passionate person whose vulnerability was a source of strength, not weakness, a valuable feminist trait and one Simon would pursue in her later work.”

The acoustic guitars sound particularly good on this copy, with just the right balance of pluck and body. The vocals are breathy and full-bodied with extraordinary immediacy. The tonality from top to bottom is right on the money. I don’t think you could find a much better sounding copy of this album no matter how hard you tried. We went through plenty to find this one, I can tell you that.

The Big Sound We Love

Drop the needle on “Legend In Your Mind” for some of the best sound and music on here. The overall sound is open and transparent, with real depth to the soundfield and lots of separation between the instruments.

The one word that comes to mind is BIG — this record gives you the big sound that Carly was no doubt going for.

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How Do the Columbia Special Products Reissues Sound on Mingus Dynasty?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

In general it is best to avoid pressings with the round sticker you see to the left, the one attached to the Columbia Special Products bargain reissue series.

They are rarely much better than awful, although there are a few exceptions to that rule. (There are almost always exceptions to the kinds of rules collectors use to find the best sounding records.)

The 6 Eye label domestic stereo pressings of Mingus Dynasty win our shootouts, in this case without exception.

On this title, the 360 label pressings, Black Print or White Print, can sound very good, but they never win shootouts.

We’ve identified a select group of reissues with the potential to do well in shootouts, typically earning a grade of Super Hot (A++) when up against the best originals, which are the only ones that seem to have the potential to earn our top grade, White Hot (A+++).

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Neither of These Tchaikovsky 5ths Made the Grade

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.

Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.

London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.

The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.

The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!

DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.

Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.

We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.

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The Police – Zenyatta Mondatta

More Sting and The Police

More Records We Only Sell on Import Vinyl

  • A Zenyatta Mondatta like you’ve never heard, with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this original UK-pressed copy – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Forget the domestic pressings, forget the lightweight Nautilus Half-Speed, forget whatever lame reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper import pressing is the only way to go
  • This album is an absolute classic – it leads off with “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and never lets up
  • 5 stars: “Zenyatta contains perhaps the quintessential new wave anthem, the haunting ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’… Zenyatta Mondatta remains one of the finest rock albums of all time.”  [That’s a bit much.]

It is brutally difficult to find great copies of this album, which explains why only a handful have gone up since 2006.

This copy was doing practically everything we wanted. The vocals are present, the bass is well-defined, the guitars have harmonic texture, and the drums are punchy and lively.

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Ellington-Basie / First Time – The Count Meets the Duke

More Duke Ellington

More Count Basie

  • This original 6-Eye Stereo pressing was doing pretty much everything right, with both sides earning superb Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • Reasonably quiet vinyl too, considering its age – how many early ’60s Columbia Stereo pressings survived with audiophile-quality playing surfaces the way this one did?
  • Huge amounts of three-dimensional space and ambience, along with boatloads of Tubey Magic – here’s a 30th Street recording from 1961 that demonstrates just how good Columbia’s engineers were back then
  • If all you’ve heard are the Classic Records reissues of Ellington, you are in for a treat, because there is a world of difference between the real thing and the Classic wannabe
  • It’s yet another Tubey Magical demo disc from the golden age of vacuum tube recording
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… a very successful and surprisingly uncrowded encounter… Ellington and Basie both play piano (their interaction with each other is wonderful) and the arrangements allowed the stars from both bands to take turns soloing.”
  • It’s hard to imagine that any list of the best jazz albums of 1961 would not have The Count Meets the Duke on it. The sound is out of this world on the best copies.

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Burt Bacharach – Casino Royale

More Soundtrack Recordings of Interest

  • Casino Royale finally returns to the site after a two and a half year hiatus, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this original Stereo Colgems pressing
  • A record that has its share of problems, but if you’ve got the system for it (huge, heavily tweaked, fast, undistorted, highly resolving and free from obvious colorations), this pressing is guaranteed to handily beat anything else you’ve heard
  • A TAS list favorite – “The Look of Love” with warmth, richness and immediacy? Here is the sound you never thought you’d hear
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The more recognizable and certainly more straightforward side of Bacharach is here, too, on the Dusty Springfield smash ‘The Look of Love.’ This is one of Bacharach’s best soundtracks…”

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A Pink Label Island LP Left Us with Egg on Our Face

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

We used to think that The Best of Traffic had better sound than the early pressings of Mr. Fantasy, but in a head to head comparison with a killer copy we played not long ago, we were proved wrong, or, perhaps more accurately, we proved ourselves wrong, something we pride ourselves in being able to do by carrying out regular shootouts for records we’ve been listening to for more than twenty years.

Oddly enough, in our shootouts we often learn new things about records we thought we knew well.

Here is what we had to say about one of the tracks on Mr. Fantasy that we thought sounded dramatically better on The Best of Traffic back around 2005:

Best evidence: Heaven Is In Your Mind, the second track on side one. It is amazing sounding here and such a disappointment on every Pink Label Island original we’ve played.

Once you know how good that song can sound — by playing a Hot Stamper copy of Best of Traffic like this one — going back to the original version of the song found on the album is not just a letdown, it’s positively painful. Where’s the analog magic? The weight to the piano? The startling clarity and super-spaciousness of the soundfield? The life and energy of the performance?

They’re gone, brother. Not entirely gone, mind you, more a shadow of what they should be, but once you’ve heard the real thing it’s not a lot of fun listening to a shadow.

You can be sure that we did not know what we were talking about when we wrote all that.

What we had done is assumed that all the pink label pressings of Mr. Fantasy sounded like the one we played, something we’ve been telling audiophiles for twenty years not to do, because collecting records by label is a fool’s game.

In this case, clearly we are the fools.

It probably — probably, since all the evidence points in the same direction — had the stampers you see below, apparently known as an Orlake Pressing, something I knew nothing about until reading about it on Discogs just now.

  • Matrix / Runout (Side A, stamped): ILPS+9061+A
  • Matrix / Runout (Side B, stamped): ILPS+9061+B

These same stampers would be used to press the Pink Rim Label copy you see below. We put it into a recent shootout and described it as having “hollow, dubby” sound.

Yes, we heard the very same “dubby” sound on a copy we played about twenty years ago, and thought all the early pressings on Island, pink and pink rim alike, had these same mastering shortcomings.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right UK pressings on Island of Mr. Fantasy are dramatically better sounding.

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David Bowie / Aladdin Sane

More David Bowie

More Records with Exceptionally Tubey Magical Sound


  • Excellent sound throughout this vintage UK pressing of Bowie’s 1973 post-Ziggy classic, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from top to bottom – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Both of these sides are remarkably rich, smooth and warm, something that all the best Ken Scott tube recordings are renowned for
  • Plenty of Bowie Classics: “Watch That Man,” “Aladdin Sane,” “Panic in Detroit,” “Cracked Actor,” “The Jean Genie,” “Lady Grinning Soul,” and more
  • Bowie encyclopedist Nicholas Pegg describes it as “one of the most urgent, compelling and essential” of his releases
  • Fun fact: Bowie “ruled the (British) album chart, accumulating an unprecedented 182 weeks on the list in 1973 with six different titles.”
  • Here are more of our favorite Hot Stamper pressings of recordings with exceptionally Tubey Magical sound
  • And some reviews and commentaries for the most Tubey Magical recordings we have ever played
  • If you’re a fan of Bowie, or Glam in general, this title is clearly a Must Own from 1973

The big Bowie sound for this wonderful follow-up to Ziggy Stardust! We just finished shooting out a number of import pressings of the album, and this was one of the best copies we heard. It’s got the kind of Tubey Magical richness that takes these glam rockers to a whole new level.

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