Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now
The record you see pictured is not the record we will be discussing in this post.
The stamper numbers and grades you see below belong to a different album.
We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, in some cases including the actual stamper sheets compiled from the shootout — winners, losers, and everything in between — but for now we are keeping this title close to the vest.
This pressing was not as bad as many of the golden age classical titles we play. Although it has the potential to sound amazingly good on the early labels, the second label London pressings never seem to do much better than 1.5+, a barely passing Hot Stamper grade.
It’s small, stuck in the speakers, and had no real top end. We judge it to have middling sound quality.
1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording this London can be on the best early pressings.
To see more records that earned the 1.5+ grade, please click here. (Incidentally, some of them are even on Heavy Vinyl. The better modern pressings have sometimes, if rarely, been known to earn Hot Stamper grades, and one shocked the hell out of us by actually winning a shootout. Wouldn’t you like to know which one!)
For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.
Here are reviews for some of the titles we’ve auditioned, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances
We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.