Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue
This early Shaded Dog pressing of the 1958 recording has surprisingly good sound on side two. On the second side the sound opens up and is very sweet, with the violin becoming much more present and clear.
The whole of side two is transparent with an extended top. Usually the earliest Living Stereo titles suffer from a lack of top end extension, but not this one.
Maybe the 1s pressing is also that way. For some reason audiophiles tend to think that the earliest cuttings are the best, but that’s just more mistaken audiophile thinking if our experience can serve as any guide, easily refuted if you’ve played hundreds of these Living Stereo pressings and noted which stampers sound the best and which do not.
The 1s pressings do not consistently win our shootouts.
About half the time, maybe less would be my guess.
Of course, to avoid being biased, the person listening to the record doesn’t know the stamper numbers, and that may help explain why the 1s loses so often.
If you are interested in finding the best sounding pressings, you have to approach the problem scientifically, and that means running record experiments.
Practically everything you read on this blog we learned through experimentation.
When we experimented with the Classic Records pressing of LSC 1903, we were none too pleased with what we heard. Our review is reproduced below.