1960-all

Grieg / Piano Concerto – Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

We used to think this was one of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

One of the best Deccas — superb sound and music that belongs in your life!

This performance also includes Franck’s “Variations Symphoniques” and Litolff”s “Scherzo from Concerto Symphonique, Op. 102”.

Our two favorite recordings of the Grieg Piano Concerto are the Decca with Lupu and Previn from 1973 and Rubinstein’s for RCA in 1962.

This Speakers Corner title may be good, but our Hot Stamper classical and orchestral pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short in our experience.  For more on that subject, see here and here.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Famous and Pricey RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The most recent copy we’ve played of LSC 2405 left us feeling underwhelmed. We expected more from such a famous (and pricey!) TAS-Listed Living Stereo record.

In the past we’ve auditioned the Victrola and the Decca SPA reissue, and both seemed to be reasonably good but not quite good enough to offer our customers. We were still looking for a better Fifth Symphony, and paid top dollar for this copy hoping it would be the one to make a shootout possible.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The sound of this copy was rich but opaque. We would call it no better than passable. It might be a good sounding record on a different pressing, but we doubt it could be a great one, and we really don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to prove ourselves wrong on that account.

As the best of the RCA pressings demonstrate beyond all doubt, 1960 was a great year for classical and orchestral recordings.

What the modern mastering engineers of today do to such wonderful recordings is another thing altogether. Bernie Grundman remastered this one in the 90s for Classic Records, and we can describe the work he did for them in just four words.

To sum it all up, LSC 2405 is unlikely to sound very good on high quality modern equipment. If your system leans more towards the old school approach — vintage tubes, vintage tables, horn speakers, that sort of thing — then the lack of transparency won’t be nearly as bothersome as it is to us.

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Now, There Was A Song! Sounds Bad to Us Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Johnny Cash Available Now

UPDATE 2024

We got a couple of nice copies of this record in recently and they sounded terrible.

We suspect we were being too generous with our previous review. Buy this one for the music of you like, but don’t expect it to have audiophile quality sound.

This very nice looking original Columbia Stereo 360 Label LP has that authentic early Johnny Cash sound. We put this through our cleaning process and took a listen. The EQ on his vocals is a little bit brighter than we like but overall the album has LOTS OF TUBEY MAGIC!

“This is an outstanding album of covers of old country songs, from the familiar (Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, George Jones) to lesser-known gems. ” AMG

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How Do the Original Mono Pressings of Mingus Dynasty Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

Although this album is fairly common in mono, we found the sound of the mono pressing we played seriously wanting. It’s dramatically smaller and more compressed than even the worst of the other pressings we played in our shootout.

We will never buy another, and of course we would never sell a record that sounds as bad as this mono pressing does.

For those looking for the best sound, the mono pressing is hard to take seriously, and for that reason, we say skip it.

For records reviewed on the blog that sound their worst in mono, click here.

Are You a Jazz Collector or an Audiophile?

If you’re a jazz collector, of course you want the mono. If you’re an audiophile who likes jazz, you should want the stereo.

And if you are a very serious audiophile who has a great deal of time and money tied up in his equipment and room, someone whose motto might best be summarized as “nothing but the best,” then you need one of our killer Hot Stamper pressings of the album.

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Verve Released this Awful Sounding Mel Torme Album in 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings Available Now

Smeary and dry. As far as we can tell, based on the sound of this copy, Swingin’ on the Moon is not an album worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout. If we hear a better one down the road, we would certainly be open to the possibility.

If you want a better sounding moon-themed album, Sinatra made a very good one.

This particular Mel Torme album came out in 1960, along with a great many wonderful titles from the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording. Although we love the cover, this unfortunately doesn’t happen to be one of the better releases from that year.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of the records on the list may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.

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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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We Was Wrong about Sketches Of Spain on Six Eye

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

Many, many years ago (15?) we had this to say about a killer Red Label pressing we had played at the time.

When you get a Hot Stamper like this one the sound is truly MAGICAL. (AMG has that dead right in their review.)

Tons of ambience, Tubey Magic all over the place; let’s face it, this is one of those famous Columbia recordings that shows just how good the Columbia engineers were back then. The sound is lively but never strained. Davis’s horn has breath and bite just like the real thing. What more can you ask for?

We Was Wrong in the Past About HP and Six-Eye Labels

In previous commentary we had written:

Harry Pearson added this record to his TAS List of Super Discs a few years back, not exactly a tough call it seems to us. Who can’t hear that this is an amazing sounding recording?

Of course you can be quite sure that he would have been listening exclusively to the earliest pressings on the Six Eye label. Which simply means that he probably never heard a copy with the clarity, transparency and freedom from distortion that these later label pressings offer.

The Six Eyes are full of Tubey Magic, don’t get me wrong; Davis’s trumpet can be and usually is wonderful sounding. It’s everything else that tends to suffer, especially the strings, which are shrill and smeary on most copies, Six Eyes, 360s and Red Labels included.

UPDATE

Over the course of the last fifteen or more years we’ve come to appreciate just how good the right Six Eye stereo pressing can sound.

Nowadays, all the copies earning the highest grades will be original stereo pressings. Other pressings can do well, earning grades of 2+ or so, but none will do as well as the originals.

This has never been our experience with Kind of Blue by the way. The later pressings have always done the best job of communicating the music on that album.

UPDATE #2

Our comments for Kind Of Blue are no longer true either. The Six-Eye pressings of the album win all the shootouts now.

The above shows just how wrong we were about the sound of some later label Columbia pressings we used to like.  The commentary below concerning early versus later RCA pressings is part and parcel of the same dynamic.

Back in 2010 we liked reissue pressings of Living Stereo recordings a lot more than we do now. Only the advent of top quality cleaning equipment and fluids and much improved playback made it possible for us to reproduce the early Shaded Dogs in all their glory.

When my system was darker and less revealing, a lot of records that were mastered to be cleaner and brighter sounded great to me. Records like RCA Red Seal pressings, some OJC jazz titles, and lots of other bad records that I used to like were a good complement to my system back in those days. Now, not so much.

When we encourage our readers to get good sound so they can recognize and acquire good records, it’s because we learned that lesson the hard way, by getting lots of great recordings wrong.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are happy to help you do that. The more progress in audio you make, the more you will  regret having wasted your money on them, and we hate the thought of seeing your hard-earned money go down the drain.

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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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