Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now
The sound of this 1959 Mercury recording (SR 90171) was not impressive.
The sound was decent enough, although somewhat dry and opaque on even the best copies of the record we played. Which makes it a passable sounding record, not much more than that, and not worth doing a shootout for.
It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.
The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to recognize its many shortcomings.
Vintage Vinyl
We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the hundreds on this blog.
We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than any other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years, especially the ridiculously bad pressings we’ve reviewed more recently.
It Was a Very Good Year
1959 just happens to be one of the truly great years for analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.