1963-rev

Presenting a select group of reviews and commentaries for albums recorded or released in 1963, a great year for analog.

Why Did Suite No. 2 Sound Better than Suite No. 5?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:

An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.

The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.

I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)

Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

  • Present
  • Rich and sweet
  • Great texture and space all around
  • So lively too

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

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John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman – Nothing Special on Speakers Corner

More of the Music of John Coltrane

UPDATE 2026

This review was probably written in 2004 when the record was released. I had heard good copies of it — not the originals as it turns out! —  and new that the recording was outstanding.

This Heavy Vinyl is not awful, but it is a long way from outstanding. My guess is that the CD would be better.

We were only slightly impressed with both the Speakers Corner pressing of this album and the earlier Impulse Heavy Vinyl edition from the ’90s. In our opinion neither one is worth pursuing.

This could very well be the greatest collaboration between a horn player and a singer in the history of music. I honestly cannot think of another to rank with it. Ella and Louis has the same feel — too giants who work together so sympathetically it’s close to magic, producing definitive performances of enduring standards that have not been equaled in the fifty plus years since they were recorded. And, on the better copies, or should we say the better sides of the better copies, RVG’s sound is stunning.

They Say It’s Wonderful: Hartman and Coltrane, an Appreciation (more…)

The Glorious Sound of Tubes in 1963

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Thelonious Monk Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2018 we put up a killer Hot Stamper pressing of Big Band and Quartet and had a few thoughts about the sound of the best copies we played.

On this record, more than most, the tubes potentially make all the difference. 

Keep in mind that we are referring specifically to 1963 tubes, not the stuff that engineers are using today to make so-called “tube-mastered” records.

Today’s modern records barely hint at the Tubey Magical sound of a record like this, if our experience with hundreds of them is any guide. We, unlike so many of the audiophile reviewers of today, have a very hard time taking any of the new pressings seriously. We think our position is pretty clear, and we have yet to hear more than a stray record or two that would make us want to change our minds.

If you’ve ever heard a pressing that sounds as good as this one, you know there hasn’t been a record manufactured in the last forty years that has this kind of sound.

Right, wrong or otherwise, this sound is simply not part of the modern world we live in.

[Well, not quite, but close.]

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Making More Progress in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The story of our recent shootout is what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.

Courtesy of countless revolutions in audio. (In other words, this list is far from complete.)

In our previous listings we noted:

This is one of those odd records in which the variation in sound quality from track to track is dramatic. Take the first two tracks on side one — they suck. They sound like your average LSP Mancini album, the kind I have suffered through far too many times. And that means bad bad bad. 

But track three boasts DEMO DISC QUALITY SOUND and the next one is nearly as good. Listen to that wonderful glockenspiel. It sound every bit as magical as anything on Bang, Baa-room and Harp, and that’s some pretty magical sound in my book!

Same thing happens on side two. Bad sound for the first tracks, then track four sounds great, followed by a pretty good five and a lovely six with a chorus of voices to die for. Go figure.

Is there a copy that sounds good from start to finish? Doubtful.

We’ve made a dozen or more improvements to the system since we last did this shootout, and I’m happy to report that most of the tracks we had trouble with in the past are now sounding very good indeed. Of course the better tracks we noted from years ago are even better, making this a consistently good sounding Mancini record.

One obvious change from the old days is that we now spend a fair amount of time honing in the VTA for every title. That may account for the fact that the first track on side one, which used to be problematical, now sounds wonderful. The value of getting the correct VTA setting — by ear, for every record — cannot be overestimated in our opinion.

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Thoughts on One of the Most Dynamic Contemporary Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

This commentary was written in 2008.

Intensity is right — this is some SERIOUSLY GOOD SOUNDING alto saxophone led quartet jazz. AMG was right to give this one 4 1/2 stars — the musicianship is top notch and Pepper’s playing is INSPIRED throughout. 

The real surprise was how well recorded this album from 1963 is. I can’t recall a more DYNAMIC Contemporary. Pepper’s sax gets seriously LOUD in some passages. This is very much a good thing. Not only is he totally committed to the music, but the engineers are getting that energy onto the record so that we at home can feel the moment to moment raw power of his playing.

(Pepper was famous for saying that his playing is best when he just plays whatever he feels in the moment, and this record is the best kind of evidence for the truth of that claim.)

Of course, since this is a Roy Dunann recording, all the tubey magical richness and sweetness are here as well, but what is surprising is how transparent, spacious and clear the sound is. Some of Roy’s recordings can sound a bit dead (recording in your stockroom is not always the best for spaciousness) and sometimes are a bit thick as well. Not so here. But it should be pointed out that we liked what we heard from a previous shootout too.

Last time around we wrote:

This record has superb sound: you can actually hear the keys clacking on the man’s alto. And that sort of detail does not come at the expense of phony brightness as it would with your typical audiophile recording. The tonality of the sax, drums, and bass are right on the money, exactly the way we expect Roy DuNann’s recording to be.

This time around we got more extension out of the cymbals. Either these copies are better, were cleaned better, or were helped quite a bit by our new Townshend SuperTweeters. (Probably the last two more than the first one.) (more…)

These Beethoven Quartets (LSC 2632) Are Just Okay Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

The Shaded Dog pressings we played were a bit boxy and dry. This is the kind of sound we’ve run into on a number of RCA chamber recordings before.

Which makes it a passable sounding title, not much more than that, and not really not worth doing a shootout for. It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to hear 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 all over this blog.

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

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Vienna 1908-1914 on Mercury Is No Better than Passable (SR-90316)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

The various pressings we played of Mercury SR 90316 were not awful sounding by any means, but they were not especially good sounding either.

The strings tended to be shrill on the copies we had on hand.

We felt it best to abandon our plans to do a shootout for it. We will probably end up selling our stock on Discogs.

The sound of some pressings of this album might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they are not worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

Many Mercury recordings suffer from shrill strings, and to be honest we have certainly heard much worse, but for the money we charge even the copies that might win a shootout would not represent a good value for our customers, not once we factor in the high cost of the records and the time it would take to clean and play them all.

If you see a copy for cheap and aren’t that particular about sound quality, by all means pick it up, assuming the music appeals to you.

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Letter of the Week – “They break so many conventions, and it all works. What planet did John and Paul come from?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

One of our customers had this to say about some Hot Stamper pressings he purchased recently:

Hi Tom,

I just got The Beatles first album in the mail and put it on and it blew me away. I was thinking I didn’t need the first couple albums but this book I read, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie, published in 2025. made me rethink all that.

I did not foresee reading ANOTHER Beatles book. It is getting over the top reviews but I looked at it because my friend from my college days recommended it. It covers many of the same events and anecdotes any real Beatles fan would know but that are given new context by viewing their history – fundamentally – through the prism of the relationship of these two friends.

You realize by the time they released their first album in 1963, they’d been preparing for it since 1958, egging each other on as performers and songwriters.

Paul had written songs actually predating 1958, but they made their union as songwriters soon after they met. They had learned so many great pop songs such that every song on those early albums is either an amazing cover they make their own (e.g. “Twist and Shout” “Boys” etc.) or one of their original compositions that demonstrates the depth of their skills.

They break so many conventions, and it all works. What planet did John and Paul come from?

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3s Can Have Amazingly Good Sound, or 3s Can Have Mediocre Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?

Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.

A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.

As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

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VICS-1030 Can Have Passable Sound for Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.

This Victrola pressing, VICS-1030, with Graffman performing, had good, not great sound. We’ve played them before and none of them was ever better than middling.

Some specifics we noted in the sound:

  • The piano was loud and clear, close-miked.
  • Boxy sound, could be richer
  • Orchestration not too compressed but veiled and small.
  • Not a standout performance.

A decent-enough record I suppose, but lacking in too many of the qualities our customers are looking for, especially at the prices we charge.

This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner for LSC 2575:

We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.

For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.

Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?

Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly, a public service from your friends here at Better Records.)

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