Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
Not that we know of.
If audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them are listening carefully to these famous recordings on the supposedly high quality (and often very high-dollar) equipment they use, why do they never talk about this problem?
Here is what we noticed when we played a big batch of Nutcracker recordings on London and Decca:
On some copies of this album the strings are dry, lacking in that wonderful quality we like to call Tubey Magic. Dry is decidedly not our sound, although it can often be heard on the hundreds of London pressings we’ve played over the years.
And we imagined that this might be the culprit:
If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange, the one that so many moving coils have these days, you may not notice this tonality issue nearly as often as we do.
Our Dynavector 17Dx Karat is ruler flat and quite tonally unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.
We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled Hi-fi beats my-fi if you are at all serious about audio.
