1958-all

Skip the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 with Curzon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

We tried the pressings of CS 6019 mastered by Stan Goodall first, but they turned out to have sound that was disappointing.

Nothing surprising there. Happens all the time.

In the spirit of adventure, we thought we would take another crack at the album after learning that Tony Hawkins had also cut some pressings. Maybe he did a better job.

You never know, right?

No dice. Both were at best passable. In our world, the world of Hot Stamper pressings with exceptionally good sound, that’s a death sentence. We don’t sell passable sounding records, not at the prices we charge. Audiophiles can find those on their own.

If you like this Beethoven piano concerto, consider trying some copies of the recording Rubinstein made for RCA. (Stick with the Shaded Dog pressings for best results.)

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For Audiophile Quality Sound on “Jaws,” You Might Want to Look Elsewhere

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

For good music? We will leave that judgment to you. Music is personal. What moves me in music and what moves you in music may be related but they are surely not identical.

In 1959 Eddie Lockjaw Davis & Shirley Scott recorded an album for Prestige and they called it “Jaws.”

The sound of the vintage pressing we played was not very good, with hard panning to the left and right. It was also dry and had too much reverb.

We were playing an early stereo copy, mastered by Van Gelder, but I honestly cannot remember the label.

Maybe the mono is better? It would not surprise me. If we see a mono pressing for cheap we will probably pick it up and give it a spin.

If you’re a fan of either of these two fine players, you might want to do the same. I believe we played the OJC pressing years ago and were not impressed, so best to skip that one too.

What we can say is that any album with sound as weak as the pressing we played leads us to believe that finding top quality sound is too unlikely for us to pursue the album further. Maybe at a bargain price, but vintage jazz records are rarely found for cheap these days. Best to move on.

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Beethoven / Symphony No. 7 / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review of a White Dog pressing with decent sound.

We did a massive shootout for the work in 2025 and determined that the best combination of sound and performance could be found on the best pressings of Karajan’s 1959 recording for RCA.

However, although the Soria originals, LDS 2348, have the best sound, their vinyl on side two is consistently defective.

The later Shaded Dog pressing, LSC 2536, was good sounding, but not as good as we hoped, with a side two that was rich but bright. The best copy earned a grade of 2+/1.5+.

Of the seven copies we cleaned and played, only two made the cut for sound and vinyl, none earning even 2+/2+ grades.

This was an expensive shootout to get off the ground when you consider the seven we bought and the other pressings we auditioned in order to find the best of the best for performance and sound.

We proably lost more than a thousand dollars after all was said and done.

It may be unfortunate, but there are times when it will be unavoidable. These are the costs we must be willing to bear if we are to bring our customers top quality pressings of the most important works by the greatest composers who ever lived.

Finding good sounding records is a crap shoot. We get paid to dig deeper than other vintage record dealers — that’s the job we have chosen for ourselves, and not only do we not have any regrets, we much prefer doing things the way we do them, mostly because we actually enjoy testing records — but success is never assured.

You win some and you lose some, and if we’re not fine with results that don’t go our way, we should do what our competitors do and sell records based on, e.g., the established skills of the mastering engineers, supposedly superior production methods, original tape sources, higher quality vinyl, and who knows what else — in other words, everything but their actual sound quality.

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How Do You Make a Vintage Jazz Recording Sound Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now

How do you make a vintage jazz recording sound wrong?

Easy. Just take out all the Tubey Magic that was captured on the master tape all those years ago by Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.

You know the kind of Tubey Magic I’m talking about. It’s the trademark sound of every vintage Contemporary pressing ever made. It’s the defining sound of the best jazz recordings from the era. It’s the reason that jazz lovers and record collectors the world over pay big bucks for vintage pressings — because they have the sound of tubes.

When you take away that one quality — just the one, leaving everything else as it should be: the bass, the mids, the highs, the energy, the space, the size, you name it — what you are left with doesn’t sound right.

It no longer sounds the way a jazz record from 1958 would sound.

If you don’t know that sound, it’s possible that this cheap reissue pressing from 1984 might not be as bothersome for you as it was for us. But we’ve played vintage jazz records from the 50s by the hundreds. They never sound like this. The reissues might, but the best early pressings sure don’t.

Maybe This Is Your Sound?

However, if you happen to like the sound of CDs for some reason, something that is frankly hard to imagine but nevertheless seems to be true, this OJC might just be the ticket.

We’ve never liked that sound, and we sure don’t like this pressing.

Other records we’ve played that sounded like CDs to us can be found here.

We’ve only played three releases on the Music Matters label, but all three of them sounded like CDs to us — Green Street, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and Tina Brooks’ True Blue (review coming someday!).

Much of Kevin Gray‘s work has the kind of sound we associate with the compact disc. We don’t understand why everyone doesn’t hear how badly mastered his records are, but we have no trouble recognizing their many faults. They are, to one degree or another:

The OJC pressings of Harold in the Land of Jazz we played were thinner and brighter than even the worst of the 70s LPs we auditioned.

They did not make the cut for our shootout, a shootout we abandoned years ago because the early pressings we liked were just too rare, too noisy and too expensive to justify the cost and effort that would be required to make a shootout a reality.

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Duke Ellington / Newport Jazz Festival 1958

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Duke Ellington Available Now

If you are a fan, this record on the original 6-Eye label will be a thrill. If you’re unfamiliar with the Duke’s music, I can’t imagine a better introduction than this.

This LP also includes Gerry Mulligan’s only performance with the Ellington band.

Paul Gonsalves’s saxophone performance is superb and worth the price of the album alone.

The clarinet parts on Princess Blue are out of this world — Ellington at his best!

This is an older jazz 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 developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.

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 Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.

There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

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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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Don’t Waste Your Money on this RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

Never liked the performance. The sound can be quite good on the best pressings, but too many copies are congested in the loudest passages.

We recently found a pressing that was quite a bit better than the other Reiner pressings we had on hand, which simply means that good pressings exist, but they are very hard to find.

However, without a good cleaning, this record is very unlikely to sound right on high quality modern equipment.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

It may be on the TAS super disc list, but that doesn’t mean the sound is up to our standards.

We much prefer Muti’s performance from 1979 for EMI.

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This Living Stereo from 1958 Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Records Available Now

Our notes for this copy of LSC 2177 read “blary, bright, not nearly as good as Anserment’s recordings,” which are the ones we compared it to, both the complete ballet and the highlights.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record.

If you are looking for a top quality pressing with a performance to match, we recommend two:

  1. The complete ballet on three discs with Anserment conducting, and/or
  2. The highlights, on a single disc, again with Ansermet conducting.

This Shaded Dog might be passable on an old school audio system, but it was unpleasant when played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

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Every Label Made Bad Sounding Records – Capitol Made This One in 1958

Hot Stamper Pressings with Billy May’s Arrangements

Drowning in reverb and squawky as hell, a major misfire from Billy and the brass (ahem) at Capitol.

For 33 years we’ve been helping music loving audiophiles the world over avoid bad sounding records.

To see the records with bad sound or bad music we’ve reviewed, click here.

It’s yet another public service from Better Records, the home of the best sounding records ever pressed. Our records sound better than any others you’ve ever heard or you get your money back.

Strauss et al. / Vienna Holiday / Knappertsbusch

More of the Music of Johann Strauss

This is a super rare and quite early UK Decca LP (SXL 2016) with two very good sounding sides!

Side one is spacious and transparent but could use a bit more extension on the top and bottom, rating an A+.

Side two is similar sounding, but has some added fullness that nets it an A+ to A++ grade.

Both sides play about Mint Minus with no inner groove distortion and only very light surface noise.

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