Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now
Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, resulting in an overall thinning of the sound and lower strings that get washed out.
On some sides of some copies of some titles the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.
If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.
Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.
Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.
If you have vintage tube equipment, or modern equipment that is trying to mimic the sound of vintage tubes, you never have to worry that the strings on your London orchestral recordings will sound too dry.
You haven’t solved the problem, obviously. You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.
Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is, from our point of view, a dead end.
If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.
Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.
A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the much more common second- and third-rate pressings that often look identical to them.
If you have this kind of audio firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get from the electronic overkill you see.
In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but create a barrier between you and the music you love.
It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life (and was perfectly happy with myself before the early 2000s.)
(more…)
There is a blast of brass at the end of Catacombs that is so big and real, it makes you forget you’re listening to a recording. You hear every brass instrument, full size, full weight. I still remember the night I was playing the album, good and loud of course, when that part of the work played through. The power of it was truly startling. 
