budg-re-class-comments

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

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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VICS 1069 – 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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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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Forget the STS Labels with Black Print on Images Pour Orchestra

More of the music of Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

None of the pressings on this later Stereo Treasury label that we played in our most recent shootouts were very good, unlike the Silver Print labels, which can sound quite respectable.

At this stage of the game, we’ve learned our lesson and will not be giving any more of the Black Label pressings a chance. This goes for practically all the records we’ve played on the later Stereo Treasury label. They rarely sound any good and just aren’t worth the trouble now that we know what the best pressings are.

Both the Ansermet on London and the Munch on RCA are better recordings, but both sell for quite a bit more money than the Stereo Treasury pressings we offer, so if you can’t see spending the kind of bread they command, there is a much more affordable alternative that is guaranteed to satisfy.

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El Amor Brujo – Brilliant Decca Remastering from 1967

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2022

In 2012 we were knocked out by this Stereo Treasury Budget Reissue pressing.

We had the temerity to charge $175 for our Hot Stamper copy, a record we’d probably picked up locally for five or ten bucks. Nowadays of course it would go for even more than that, and still be worth every penny, assuming the buyer was looking for wonderful music with top quality sound regardless of the vinyl’s trade-in value, which in this case would probably be a dollar.

It is our strongly held belief that records are for playing and enjoying, not trading-in. Some records (like this one) are perfect for collectors, but their appeal is lost on us and has been since I soured on Mobile Fidelity records back in the 80s. It would take us another twenty years before we were done with other pressings that promised so much and delivered so little.

Decca released this title on their London label as a budget reissue, but that didn’t keep them from mastering it properly and pressing it on high quality vinyl.  The same cannot be said for RCA, which kept many of their golden age recordings in print on the RCA red label as well as others, but with sound that was most of the time clearly inferior to those earlier releases.

Our 2012 Review

Our current favorite El Amor Brujo for sound and performance is this Decca recording from 1967 with De Burgos conducting the New Philharmonia.

The best sound on this album is on side two, where El Retablo de Maese Pedro can be found.

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It’s Records Like This that Give Decca Reissues a Bad Reputation

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Johannes Brahms Available Now

Apparently mastered with no regard to sound quality, this Decca SPA reissue is a mess.

How do we know that? We go out of our way to play every pressing we can get our hands on, even cheap reissues such as this. That’s our job.  We play everything to find the best sounding records so you don’t have to.

And some of these cheap reissues win shootouts!

But you can’t guess which ones will. You have to play them to find out.

And that’s how we know that some of them are good, some of them are mediocre, and some, like this one, are just awful.

Want to be assured of getting good sounding pressings of the greatest classical recordings of all time?

Step right up and order anything classical or orchestral you see here, Every one of them is guaranteed to please.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Schubert’s Ninth Revealed!

More of the Music of Franz Schubert

Looking to pick up a Hot Stamper on your own?

Easy — all the best Decca copies in our shootout were mastered by Ted Burkett and were incribed with the stampers 5G/7G.

I suppose it’s only fair to point out that all the worst copies had those same stampers.

There were a few others as well — it was quite a big shootout — but most of those ended up in the middle of the pack.

And here you thought I was actually being helpful.

But we are being helpful. We’re sharing with you an important truth.

Stamper numbers only tell part of the story, and they can be very misleading, in the same sense that a little knowledge is sometimes a dangerous thing.

To know what a record sounds like you have to play it.

This is a subject near and dear to us here at Better Records, and that has been the case for many decades.

We discuss it at length in a commentary you may have seen on the site called the book of Hot Stampers.

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