deccas-violin

Mozart – Sinfonia Concertante / Duo in G Major / Oistrakh

More of the Music of Mozart

  • These sublime works for violin and viola debut on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades throughout this vintage London pressing
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “sweet and transparent and dynamic violin”…”lively and lush and tubey”…”very roomy and 3D”…”great texture”
  • These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard
  • The texture and harmonic overtones of the strings are perfection – as we listened we became completely immersed in the music on the record, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity father and son bring to the piecesFor those of you who keep track of such things, we would like to point out that no Decca pressing did better than “good” in our shootout
  • The early London pressings are the only ones we played with the sonic goods befitting such an extraordinary recording, a reality that many audiophiles would do well to wrap their heads around

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Decca’s Violin Concerto Recordings on the Early Label Are Hard to Beat

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Lately we’ve been having exceptionally good luck with the early label pressings of many of the London violin concerto records we’ve done shootouts for.

The notes you see below are fairly typical. However, the notes you see below do not belong to the wonderful Sibelius record pictured here.

They belong to another London record. We give out lots of bad stampers on this blog, but almost never do we give out the good ones. (When we do give out the best stampers, we keep the title a mystery, as is the case of the record here.)

The amazingly good sounding pressing on the early label took the recording to another level. Our shootout notes read:

  • Amazing violin sound and performance.
  • Very dynamic and realistic.
  • So much subtlety.

Key Takeaways

  • The top four copies all had the same stampers, yet the sound varied noticeably from side to side, from Super Hot (A++) to White Hot (A+++), with one earning the grade between, Nearly White Hot (A++ to A+++).
  • We’ve done this shootout a few times before. Since we know that the best copies are going to be on the early label, those are mostly the copies we’ve been stocking up on whenever possible.
  • We also buy the second label copies if the price is right, and in this case we had a couple on hand to play, both of which earned a Super Hot stamper grade on one side and something slightly lower on the other.
  • They aren’t as big as the best, nor do they extend as much up high or down low.
  • Keep in mind that even worst of the second label copies are still very good sounding records, beating practicallly any orchestral recording that can be found on Heavy Vinyl (with only two exceptions we know of, one of which is this lovely title).
  • The second labels are fairly impressive, but it is unlikely you would find yourself calling them amazing.
  • Amazing is what you say when you play that one very special original pressing out of four and can hardly believe what your ears are telling you.
  • How many audiophiles will go to the trouble of finding, buying, cleaning and playing four original copies in order to find the one with sound that soars above the rest? Let’s just say we only know of one, and he writes a blog very much like this one.

What It Takes

If you have big speakers and you play them at loud levels in a large enough room, on the highest quality equipment, tweaked and tuned to within an inch of its life, you can get a lot closer to the sound of live music in the home than most audiophiles will ever be able to experience for themselves.

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