1960-all

A Disappointing OJC of Swinging With The Mastersounds

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We did a shootout for this Mastersounds title many years ago. It didn’t sell very well so we decided to give it a rest for a decade or so.

Recently we got another couple of copies in, including their other album we used to like on OJC, A Date with the Mastersounds, and found none of them to be nearly as impressive as we thought they were back in the day. Some quick notes:

  • A Date with the Mastersounds

Vibes are dry and glassy. Not much Tubey Magic.

  • Swinging With The Mastersounds

Rich but veiled sound. Just OK, not great.

With that said, we still like the music, so if you see one of these pressings for cheap and you like vibes-based jazz from the 50s, pick it up and discover the music of The Mastersounds for yourself.

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Unfortunately Mercury Did Not Produce a Good Record of Rossini Overtures

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.

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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Blary Brass Ruins Another Mercury – This Time It’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

The sound of the pressings we’ve played over the years has always been awful.

On SR 90217, the brass is just too sour and blary. To our knowledge, no copies of the album do not suffer from these problems.  They may exist — who can say they don’t? — but we’ve yet to play one and have no intention of seeking them out, not when there are other superior performances with top quality sound.

The performance is awful, too.

When the horns have clarity, correct tonality, plenty of space around them and a solid, full-bodied sound, probably every other instrument in the soundscape will too.

One minute into side one we knew that this Mercury had failed the brass test.

It was simply much too unpleasant to be played on modern high quality equipment.

The less revealing systems some audiophiles seem to favor can make the shortcomings of a recording such as this more tolerable, but we’ve worked very hard for many decades to make sure our system is as truthful and unforgiving as possible.

We knew right from the get-go this Mercury was not going to make the grade. Here are some others that we’ve found seriously wanting. We’ve also compiled a list of more than 40 of the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings of orchestral and classical music, and it can be found here.

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Brahms & Dvorak / Hungarian & Slavonic Dances – Updated

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

UPDATE 2022

The last time we played a few copies of this London title, CS 6198, we were quite a bit less impressed than the review below might lead you to believe.

We found the sound to be plenty Tubey Magical, but the louder peaks were sour. Overall we judged the sound to be OK at best.

Having played a number of different pressings over the years, our favorite recording of the Slavonic Dances these days is the one with Kertesz on the Decca World of Great Classics budget reissue label.

It may come as a shock to some record collecting audiophiles, but there are actually budget reissues of some titles that can beat any and all comers. Here are some that we’ve come across, discoveries which we are happy to share with you.

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Paganini / Concerto No. 1 / Rabin – Reviewed in 2011

This is a rare and very nice looking Capitol LP. The violin sounds rich and sweet, although the sound of the orchestra is a bit “old school” with too much congestion and distortion during the louder sections to qualify as a Hot Stamper, assuming we were to put this record in a shootout.

Which makes it a “good, not great” vintage classical record, best played on an Old School Stereo system.

The much more revealing systems of today, like the one we employed to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to spot its many faults.

Vintage Vinyl

We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the score on this very blog.

We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than every other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles over the course of the last thirty years or so.

We wrote about that subject in a commentary we call The Big If. An excerpt:

The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right. That’s a big if. In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.

We go on to discuss the wonderfully accurate timbre of the better vintage pressings, in contrast to the consistently inaccurate tonality of the Modern Heavy Vinyl pressing. It’s a long story but we think it is well worth your time if you are an audiophile looking for better sounding vinyl.

AMG Biography

Michael Rabin managed to be one of the most talented and tragic violin virtuosi of his generation. Hailed as a child prodigy, his talent matured gracefully into an adult level, but he failed to follow in his emotional growth, resulting in a cutting short of his career. He never reached the age of 36, yet remains one of the most fondly remembered of virtuoso violinists for listeners and fellow musicians such as Pinchas Zukerman, with whom he shared a teacher.

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.)

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Helen Humes – ’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

This EXCEPTIONALLY QUIET Contemporary Recording has wonderful sound on both sides. It’s got SHOCKINGLY DYNAMIC VOCALS — just listen to Miss Humes really belting it out on a great reading of Stardust! The sound is really rich and full with a BIG punchy bottom end. The clarity and transparency are superb, and you can really hear the leading edge transients on the various horns (Carter on trumpet, Rosolino on trombone).

You Can Depend On Me, the opening track, has an exceptionally weighty piano; it’s as if Andre Previn himself were pounding on a baby grand right there in your living room.

We don’t imagine that you are ever going to find a copy that sounds as good as this one.

All the usual suspects are here from the Contemporary corral: Benny Carter, Andre Previn, Leroy Vinnegar, Shelly Manne — providing big band back up for the lovely Miss Humes. We’re even bigger fans of Songs I Like To Sing, but the best moments here are every bit as wonderful.  

This is yet another stellar piece of wax from the best sounding jazz label of all time, Contemporary Records. Dynamic, rich, tonally correct, full of ambience — this record has it all.

Side One

You Can Depend on Me 
Trouble in Mind 
Among My Souvenirs 
Ain’t Misbehavin’ 
Stardust 
Bill Bailey

Side Two

When I Grow Too Old to Dream 
A Good Man Is Hard to Find 
Bill 
‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do 
I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good) 
When the Saints Go Marching In

AMG Review

Humes, 45 at the time, was at the peak of her powers, although she never really made a bad record. Accompanied by Benny Carter (on trumpet), trombonist Frank Rosolino, tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards, pianist Andrew Previn, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and either Shelly Manne or Mel Lewis on drums, the singer is typically enthusiastic, exuberant, and highly appealing on such numbers as “You Can Depend on Me,” “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” and “”Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do.”

Looks familiar.

Chopin / The Chopin Scherzos / Rubinstein – Reviewed in 2008

This is an RCA Living Stereo reissue LP with EXCELLENT SOUND. The strengths of this particular LP are not hard to hear: super quiet vinyl, which no original would have, and super transparent mids and highs, again something that no original (in our experience) has ever had. 

Like most of Rubinstein’s records on RCA, there is no real weight to the piano, but at least on this pressing the smear and noise common to practically every original is GONE!

Lovely music too. 

Jesse Belvin – Mr. Easy

Zero distortion. zero smear, huge amounts of space and breathy rich vocals – what’s not to like? Marty Paich and Art Pepper lend a hand, and with Al Schmitt behind the board the sound is 1960 Living Stereo Tubey Magic at its finest.

If you know anything about this record you know that it is practically impossible to find in clean condition. The mono pressings are much more common but we did not care for their sound in the least.

We consider ourselves lucky to have found one with this kind of sound, because side one is getting everything so right we simply have no faults to make note of.

Notice especially how rich and textured the strings are on Marty Paich’s arrangements.

Side two was clearly not as good, hence the lower sonic grade. We could have called side two A++ but we felt that a more conservative approach might be a wiser choice in this case.

Al Schmitt

Al Schmitt recorded and mixed Mr. Easy for RCA back in 1960 and on side one of this very copy it should be clear to all that he knocked it out of the park.

We know his work well; he happens to have been at the controls for many albums with audiophile quality sound: Aja, Hatari, Breezin’, Late for the Sky, Toto IV, as well as some we can’t stand (the entire Diana Krall digital-echo-drenched catalog comes to mind).

The guy’s won 13 Grammy Awards, that ought to tell you something.