Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now
In 2025 we did a shootout for the Mercury you see pictured, SR-90437, having collected a large number of copies with a wide range of stampers, which of course is always the best approach when doing a shootout for the first time. (Once you have a couple under your belt you naturally can start to focus on the pressings that do well and avoid the ones that do badly.)
In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner, we wrote:
Dorati and the LSO’s dynamic performance of these 16 Hungarian Dances debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early Mercury pressing.
These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs.
Some of the above may sound familiar. We say these sorts of things and use these stock phrases to describe many of the amazing sounding records that win our shootouts.
But aren’t these adjectives precisely the ones you should be using when a record is doing everything right? What else could you say about a record that sounds this good?
Our notes are simply the impressions a member of our listening panel wrote down as he critically listened to the record while it was playing.
In this case, his attention eas being drawn to the marvelous qualities a large scale orchestral recording can have when everything is working at the highest levels of fidelity.
With the right playback equipment and lots of practice, you could easily find yourself listening this way and taking the same kind of notes.