Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now
You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.
As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.
But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings of CS 6101, Music of Berlioz, are the way to go.
It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.
It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.
Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.
No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.
No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.
