griegpeerg-fjeldstad

Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl and the Loss of Transparency

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical and Orchestral Music Available Now

We review yet another mediocre Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl reissue.

We recently gave the Heavy Vinyl pressing from Speakers Corner, the same one that we had previously recommended back in the 90s, a sonic grade of C+. 

UPDATE 2024

Recently in this case means about twenty years ago.

To our ears now it has many more shortcomings than it did back then, which we discuss below.

So often when we revisit the remastered pressings we used to like on Heavy Vinyl we come away dumbfounded — what on earth were we thinking? These are not the droids sounds we are looking for. Perhaps our minds were clouded at the time.

Below are some thoughts from a recent classical listing that we hope will shed some light on our longstanding aversion to the sound of modern remasterings.

What is lost in these newly remastered recordings? Lots of things, but the most obvious and bothersome is TRANSPARENCY.

Modern records are just so damn opaque.

We can’s stand that sound. It drives us crazy.

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Speakers Corner Peer Gynt Reviewed, with Handy VTA Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Sonic Grade: C+

The Fjeldstad has long been one of our favorite performances of Peer Gynt here at Better Records. 

This record is handy for VTA set-up as well, a subject discussed below in our listing from 2010.

The sound is excellent for a modern reissue*, but in the loudest sections the orchestra can get to be a bit much, taking on a somewhat harsh quality. (The quieter passages are superb: sweet and spacious.)

So I adjusted the VTA a bit to see what would happen, and was surprised to find that even the slightest change in VTA caused the strings to lose practically all their rosiny texture and become unbearably smeared.

This is precisely why it’s a good heavy vinyl pressing for setting up your turntable.

If you can get the strings to play with reasonably good texture on this record you probably have your VTA set correctly.

VTA

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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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Grieg – Peer Gynt Suite / Fjeldstad / LSO

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Fjeldstad and the London Symphony’s performance of Peer Gynt Suite debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “very 3D and tubey and sweet and spacious”…”huge and weighty and jumping out [of the speakers]”…”so fun” (side one)…”powerful and so musical (side two)”
  • Although we’re on record as preferring the Gruner-Hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic performance, there is no denying the power of this superb recording, with huge, spacious, dynamic, Tubey Magical Decca/London sound
  • Cyril Windebank was the engineer – he’s the man responsible for some of Decca’s most wonderful recordings
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more real than practically any other pressing we played 
  • 1958 happens to be one of the truly great years for analog recordings as far as we are concerned, and the evidence is this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year

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