coplabilly

Copland / Billy The Kid / Rodeo – Johanos

More Classical Masterpieces

This vintage copy of this Copland Masterpiece boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last, with no audible marks and no Inner Groove Distortion (IGD)
The vinyl is somewhat noisy, alas, as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
A spectacular Demo Disc recording that is clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the big, bold sound we love
“To the ultimate delight of audiences Copland managed to weave musical complexity with popular style.”
If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this recording from 1967 belongs in your collection.

This vintage Turnabout pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for —this sound. (more…)

This Mercury Copland Record Had Screechy, Shrill Strings

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Our notes for SR 90246 read:

Lively and clear but screechy strings. Dry and bright sound.

To help you avoid records with these sonic faults, we’ve linked below to others with similar problems.

Here are some titles we’ve found that tend to have dry sound, and here are some that tend to have bright sound.

And of course shrill strings are the kiss of death on any orchestral record. (Classic Records, I’m talking to you!)

None?

None of the copies of SR 90246 we played were any good, but the RFR3 / RFR6 was the worst of the bunch.

Are there good sounding pressings of the recording?

There may well be. We didn’t hear any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

However, we have no intention of spending more money trying to find them. If you know of some killer stampers for the album, please shoot us an email.

We tend to like Dorati’s work with the London Symphony Orchestra, but in this case the better Dorati/Copland record was recorded in Minneapolis in 1959, SR 90172.

If You’re a Fan

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.

But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

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Billy The Kid / Rodeo – How Do the Record Club Copies Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

Without anyone knowing, a Record Club pressing found its way into one of our shootouts a few years back. Because the person doing the listening has no idea what pressing is on the table, biases and prejudices cannot affect the grading or the outcome of the shootout.

It earned Two Pluses, not enough to win a shootout, but enough to put practically any orchestral record made in the last thirty years to shame. We noted at the time:

This spectacular Demo Disc recording is clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the BIG, BOLD sound we love. There is a note on the inner sleeve that says this was a Record Club of America purchase in 1973.

Can you imagine that a Record Club was offering records in 1973 that were better sounding than anything being made today? Astonishing.

There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performance coupled with the highest quality sound. This record has earned a place on that list.

If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this recording from 1967 belongs in your collection.

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Not as Good a TAS List Title as We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

We had a handful of copies of this famous TAS List title in the backroom, so we decided it was high time to get a shootout going. We pulled all the pressings of the music (both Billy the Kid and Rodeo) we had on hand on every label and proceeded to needle-drop them in preparation for a big Copland shootout.

Much to our chagrin, most of the copies of LSC 2195 we played were unacceptable. The sound, for the most part, was very much not to our liking. Our notes read:

Smeary — (more records with smeary sound can be found here),
Dry — (more records with dry sound can be found here),
Bright — (more records with bright sound can be found here),
Flat — (more records with flat sound can be found here),
Hi-Fi-ish — (more records with hi-fi-ish sound can be found here),

Those records weren’t cheap. That was a lot of money down the drain. Not only can’t we sell records that sound as bad as this Living Stereo — our customers simply would not buy them — but we would never even try. Unlike other record dealers, we actually know what our records sound like. We don’t care about the reputations of the records we sell. We only care about their sound.

Some of the records on the TAS List seem better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s, 70s and 80s than the modern systems of today.

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We Was Wrong about Billy the Kid in 2011

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The rave review you see below was written in 2011. Recently we played a stack of copies of the album and realized that we was wrong about it.

As you may have noticed, this is a regular feature of The Skeptical Audiophile.

Live and Learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

(“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in practically any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we will gladly help you do that.)

Our Review from 2011

Super Hot Stamper sound on BOTH sides, with side one so energetic and exciting it would easily qualify as a Demo Disc. This title is almost impossible to find in anything but beat up condition. Records like these got played over and over and few survived the ten grams of stylus pressure and mis-aligned cartridges of the day.

The Big Sound

Side one is a bit recessed sounding at the beginning but it soon comes to life.

The drums and snares are HUGE in this recording, way at the back of the hall where they belong.

The sound just jumps out of the speakers — believe me, not many Living Stereo pressings from 1958 can do that.

If you like your exciting music to have exciting sound, this pressing will do the trick.

A++ is our grade. The loudest massed string passages can be a bit much, but they are tolerable. Many pressings of this album that we’ve played in the past have pretty much been unlistenable.

Rodeo

So dynamic! — you better have your stereo working at the top of its game or this side is going to be hard to sit through. The close-miked xylophone will give your arm and cart a real workout. If you have precise control over your setup, this may be a good record to fine tune it with. VTA is of course ultra-critical on vintage classical albums such as this.

The quieter passages fare best, showing off the Living Stereo Tubey Magic to full advantage.

Hoe-Down sounds like it may be slightly worn; either that or its got some compressor distortion problems.

With Big Bold sound such as this, the engineers had to walk a very fine line in order to balance the dynamic power of the music without letting the quietest passages disappear. (Nowadays loud orchestral music is either dynamic and shrill or compressed to death.)

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