budg-re-class-comments

Commentaries and reviews of budget reissue classical recordings we’ve played.

The Vintage Vinyl Sound You Won’t Find on Modern LPs and CDs

Classical Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Here is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your heavy vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage. 

It’s also proof positive that Decca’s choice of Kingsway Hall as a recording venue was a good one. The full range of colors of the orchestra are here presented with remarkable clarity, dynamic contrast, spaciousness, sweetness, and timbral accuracy.

If you want to demonstrate to a novice listener why modern recordings are so consistently unsatisfactory, all you have to do is play this record for them. In our experience, no CD and no Heavy Vinyl pressing ever sounded like this.

The richness of the strings, a signature sound for Decca in the Fifties and Sixties, is on display here for fans of the classical Golden Age. It’s practically impossible to hear that kind of string sound on any recording made in the last thirty years (and this of course includes practically everything pressed on Heavy Vinyl).

It may be a lost art, but as long as we have these wonderful vintage pressings to play, it’s an art that is not lost on us. I don’t think the Decca engineers could have recorded this music much better than they dhave here — it has all the orchestral magic one could ask for, as well as the clarity and presence that are missing from so many other vintage Golden Age records.

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Rachmaninoff / Concerto No. 3 – Wrong Again?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2007 we raved about this title, writing:

Outstanding! Sounds just like the already very good shaded dog, in many ways better. (I don’t have that one around to compare anymore but this LP has that same natural, smooth sound, while being cut a bit cleaner.) 

We have two copies of this Victrola, both with the same stamper numbers, and this is definitely the better of the two sonically. It has more presence, more transparency and better dynamics.

In preparation for our latest big shootout, we decided to give the Victrola another listen, and the one copy we had on hand was not impressive to say the least. It was dark, thin and flat.

Three strikes and it was out. Seems as though we were wrong.

Did we have better copies in 2007? Perhaps, but not likely. We just didn’t know what we were doing when it came to this piece of music. Our advice in 2026: skip it. If you do buy one, buy it for cheap.

Our favorite for sound and performance is the Janis conducted by Dorati on Mercury.

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Suites for Solo Cello on the Later Label – Ouch!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2021

The discussion here is for a Oval label copy of Suites for Solo Cello (SR 90370) we reviewed in 2010. These days the Oval label pressings from the early 60s almost never sound very good to us. We no longer buy them and we certainly don’t bother to put them in shootouts.

This record on the Oval Label would be very unlikely to qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing anymore, although we liked it just fine in 2010, as you can see from our old review.

In 2024 we actually put an Oval Label pressing of SR 90370 in a shootout and it did about as poorly as we would have expected. What a waste of time and money. Never again.

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Rossini Overtures – Reissues Versus Originals

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

The London and Decca original pressings of Decca’s recordings are the best sounding, right?

Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

We were a bit surprised that some of the (expensive) originals didn’t sound very good to us in recent shootouts.

Bad vinyl, bad mastering, who knows why so many early copies suffer from thick, dull and veiled sound? 

The Stereo Treasury pressing of Maag’s 1958 recording you see here is shockingly good in many ways. It sure doesn’t sound like a budget reissue.

If anything it sounds more original than the originals we played against it!

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the benefit of mastering by means of the modern cutting equipment of the mid- to late- ’60s. (We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of many years ago, not the bad modern mastering of today.)

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title, as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these Super Hot or better sides.

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RCA Produced this Amazing Budget Reissue in 1976

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This review was written in 2011 shortly after our first Hot Stamper shootout for the work.

It still holds up though — I wouldn’t change a thing, other than to add a few links to help audiophiles and record collectors gain a better understanding of the shortcomings of received wisdom when it comes to finding that small subset of pressings capable of offering significantly higher sound quality.

Conventional record collector thinking generally works fine most of the time, but Monteux’s recording of the 6th Symphony in 1955 is a good example of the standard advice for finding better pressings turning out to be completely wrong.

For more on this subject, including the solution we came up with to fix the problem, click here.

Our Original Review

Presenting a first for Better Records: a White Hot Stamper copy of this CORRECTLY remastered version of LSC 1901, which just happens to be a recording from the earliest days of stereo, 1955! It’s guaranteed to KILL any and all original Shaded Dogs, as well as the more common reissues; White Dogs, Red Seals, Victrolas, Classic Heavy Vinyl, you name it, this pressing will beat the pants off of it and in the process show you precisely what is wrong with each and every one of them.

Over the past twenty years we’ve played hundreds of early RCAs and we have sure never heard one sound like this, with so much richness, Tubey Magic, LIFE and CLARITY.

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In 2004 We Mistaked Finlandia on VICS for a Demo Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sibelius Available Now

UPDATE 2024

We played a 4S/1S copy of this record, VICS 1069, and thought it sounded terrible.

It was flat and bright with splashy cymbals and crude brass.

Even if we assume the copy we played many years ago could have been much better than this latest pressing — which is doubtful but certainly possible — there is no reason to pursue this version of the album when there are known top quality pressings of this very same performance on Decca.

Our Old Review

DEMO QUALITY SOUND and quiet surfaces too.

I don’t know when I’ve heard this album with better sound. This one may be better than the best Shaded Dog for all I know — it’s that good.

You’ll notice that there is a copy of this very same record on the website for $1.99. That one sounds dull. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a better sounding copy of this record than the pressing we are selling here, because it really is an exceptionally good sounding record. If it weren’t, it would be more like $1.99.

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VICS-1030 Can Have Passable Sound for Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.

This Victrola pressing, VICS-1030, with Graffman performing, had good, not great sound. We’ve played them before and none of them was ever better than middling.

Some specifics we noted in the sound:

  • The piano was loud and clear, close-miked.
  • Boxy sound, could be richer
  • Orchestration not too compressed but veiled and small.
  • Not a standout performance.

A decent-enough record I suppose, but lacking in too many of the qualities our customers are looking for, especially at the prices we charge.

This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner for LSC 2575:

We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.

For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.

Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?

Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly, a public service from your friends here at Better Records.)

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What We’ve Learned About Peer Gynt Over the Last 20 Years

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

The commentary reproduced down below is from 2005. It is unlikely that the pressing we liked at the time, a Stereo Treasury LP of the famous Fjeldstad performance, would come anywhere close to winning a shootout these days. We simply don’t buy them anymore. We stick to the pressings that have done well for us over the last twenty years in shootout after shootout.

Peer Gynt is a Masterpiece that deserves a place at the heart of any classical collection of the greatest recordings of all time.

If you want to improve the quality of pressings in your collection, by far the best way to go about it is to start doing your own shootouts. A great deal of this blog is dedicated to helping you learn how to do that.

Oddly enough, there actually are budget reissues that win shootouts. They just happen to be Ace of Diamonds pressings and not Stereo Treasurys. (You can see a picture of the pressing we like at the bottom of this post.)

The Wonderful Peer Gynt

Our favorite recording of Peer Gynt is the one by Otto Gruner-hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic from 1959.

The only other reading of the work with top quality sonics is the one that won our proto-shootout twenty years ago, the one with Fjeldstad and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Speaking of budget reissues, we are on record as having been fans of a great many budget classical LPs stretching back decades. My catalogs from the 90s were full of reissues with exceptionally good sound.

Doing things as we do them now, by following rigorous testing protocols, has made it possible for us to discover some budget pressings that are so well-mastered they have the potential — accent on the word potential — to win shootouts.

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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.

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Ravel / Daphnis et Chloé – Good, Not Great on Decca Jubilee

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available now

The Decca budget reissue you see to the left had passable sonics. It would probably be competitive with the top five percent ot Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve played over the last 30 years. Some of those would earn grades of 1.5+, which turned out to be the case here.

We play every pressing we can get our hands on because you never know just how good one of these budget reissues can sound until you clean it up and give it a spin.

Most don’t pan out — maybe one out of five is any good — but that’s just the nature of the best when it comes to collecting top quality records.

Most OJC pressings of jazz albums aren’t very good, but the best ones clearly are because they win our blinded shootouts.

If you want the best sound, you had better have your mind open to the idea that the originals are not the only ones that were mastered correctly. There are currently 175 records we’ve identified as sounding better on a reissue pressing, and that number probably represents less than half of the ones we’ve encountered over the many years we’ve actively been doing shootouts.

The commentary for the amazing sounding Decca originals below describes just how wonderful they are, worlds better than anything you can find on Heavy Vinyl.

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