bach_suite

Did You Get Your $1.87’s Worth on the Reissue of Suites For Solo Cello?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

Many of the Oval Label pressings we’ve played recently have fared poorly in our shootouts.

As you can see from the notes below for this particular Starker record, one side was passable, earning our 1.5+ grade. It’s a decent sounding record I suppose, but a long, long, long way from the best.

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 SR 90370 can be on the best vintage 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.

We often tell audiophiles that it’s never a good idea to judge records by their labels, so when it came time to do a shootout for this famous Bach recording from Mercury, it was only fitting that we play every pressing we had on the shelf, including the later Ovals, which are by far the easiest to find for any of the Starker Mercury titles.

Well, now we know. This is some weak tea, probably not too different from the Philips-pressed Golden Imports we gave up on long ago.

(more…)

Bach / Suites For Solo Cello No. 2 & No. 5 / Starker

More of the music of J.S. Bach

  • An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from top to bottom
  • Suite No. 5 takes up all of this superb Double Plus side two, and we guarantee you’ve never heard it sound this good
  • True, side one earned a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, but we are very confidant that it will beat the pants off any Heavy Vinyl reissue because every one of those that we played was opaque, muddy and thick enough to have us crying “uncle” after five minutes
  • Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them

(more…)

Bach / Suites for Solo Cello on the Later Label – Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

The discussion here is for a later label copy we reviewed in 2010. These days the later Oval labels for records like this do not sound good to us and we no longer put them in shootouts. This record would likely not qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing these days.

Excellent cello reproduction on side one, where you get Bach’s entire Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello.  Hear how wonderful a cello can sound when recorded and mastered for maximum effect, live in your listening room.

The cutting is super low distortion on this later label copy as well. This copy will show you why these Starker Mercury records are so highly prized.

The sound of Starker’s cello here is humongous — it’ll fill up your room, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. 

It’s also tonally correct from top to bottom, a quality we heard on none of the Mercury Heavy Vinyl reissues we played. They have some of the worst sound we had heard from Speakers Corner up to that time.

This is very much in keeping with the overly rich, overly smooth sound of the Heavy Vinyl records being made today. We despise that sound and want nothing to do with it.

Speakers Corner and the TAS List

Three Mercury recordings of Starker’s on Speakers Corner vinyl are currently on the TAS List, SR 90303, SR 90392 and SR 3-9016. I suppose we could order the first two up, audition them and list their many sonic shortcomings, since we do have nice copies of both albums in the backroom, just not enough to do a shootout. [We have since done shootouts for both.]

NOTE: The 3 LP Box Set is probably never going to go through a shootout. At $1000 and up for an original set, the price we would have to charge for the best of them would be outrageously high.

But there are so many other good pressings to play, why go out of way to play another second- or third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing?

Another Link

By the way, we have a new link for audiophile pressings that are tonally correct but are wrong in other ways, as they usually are. You can assume that our Hot Stamper pressings are tonally correct for the most part, as correct tonality is fairly key to high quality sound. Not essential, but important nevertheless.

Starker’s records are legendary for their sound, not to mention Starker’s way with this music. If anybody can make Bach’s solo cello pieces capture your interest, Starker can.