Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Maurice Ravel Available Now
UPDATE 2024
About ten years ago we were under the impression that the domestic Philips pressing you see pictured had exceptionally good sound, sound that would be difficult to beat.
Well, that just goes to show how little we knew about the sound of the various recordings of this music back then.
We needed to do a lot more homework, and the reason we started playing other recordings of these two string quartets is simply that the Philips record we liked so much was too hard to find on the domestic pressing.
The imports could be found, sure, but they sounded like a lot of Philips pressings — overly smooth, smeary, lifeless, recessed and veiled, like the Golden Imports Philips had made in the 70s. It was in those bad old days of the early 70s that Philips set about ruining the sound of phenomenally good Mercury master tapes. They should never be forgiven for it.
I bought one and fell in love with it, for both its music and its sound, a classic case of me not having any idea what I was missing.
How clueless was I? I was almost as clueless as the guy who thought the MoFi pressing of Star Wars and Close Encounters was a true audiophile Demo Disc. As foolish a MoFi fan as I was in the late-70s, even I knew was a piece of phony junk that record was.
Now there are dozens of outfits that make it their business to ruin phenomenally good master tapes by dint of their incompetent remastering, a story we never tire of telling.
Breaking Through
The key to our breakthrough was the rediscovery of a record we had played many years before, all the way back in 2005, and had simply lost track of in the ensuing years: LSC 2413. (It’s easy to lose track of rare Shaded Dogs. They’re not usually sitting in the bins of your local record store. Out of sight, out of mind.)
The best pressings of LSC 2413 are dramatically better sounding, and the performances are equal to or better than any we know.
Recently we finally got hold of another copy of the rare Philips pressing above and found to our dismay that the sound was not nearly as good as we remember it from our shootout years ago. The copy that came in was flat and badly lacked the presence and Tubey Magic of the Shaded Dog pressings we played of the RCA.
As the best of the RCA pressings demonstrate beyond all doubt, 1960 was a great year for classical and orchestral recordings. (What the shameful modern masterng engineers operating today do to such wonderful recordings is another thing altogether.)
