harry-fisher

When Fisher Took Over from Goodall, He Really Let the Side Down

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Please keep in mind that, as per our usual, the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this posting.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

The quick takeaway: Stan Goodall (“E”) cut the Shootout Winning early pressings.

Then, for reasons known only to the folks at Decca, Harry Fisher (“W”) took the reins and managed to cut some side twos that were very good. Not as good, but still very good: 2+ most of the time, some slightly worse. They were not as weighty or rich, and we take a lot of points off for records that are not as weighty or rich as they should be.

By the time Decca had changed its label to the Decca in a Box design, Mr. Fisher was cutting all the pressings, and, in our experience, not doing an especially good job. We do not even offer records with grades that low.

The sound might be passable, and would probably still be better than whatever Heavy Vinyl pressings might have been made from the tapes in the last twenty years, but that’s not good enough for us here at Better Records, not at the prices we charge anyway.

We described Fisher’s sound as dry and hot on side one, and thin and very small on side two of the 5W-stamped pressing we played. We only had the one, and the reason we had even one after having heard other Boxed Decca pressings do poorly, is that it’s a good way to stay honest and to have a better baseline to work with.

If we played nothing but 3E/1E originals, most of those 1E side twos would have earned a 2+ grade, but they would have sounded much better than the 2W-graded copies, and that seriously screws up the grading scale, especially when clean originals cost us a hundred bucks or more these days.

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The Planets – Can You Imagine Sound this Bad from a TAS List Super Disc?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We can, we played it.

Or, to be more correct, we played them. Two pressings, each with one good side and one very bad side.

UPDATE 2025

Take all of this with a very large grain of salt. In the course of doing more shootouts for the Mehta Planets, we’ve played quite a number of different pressings and now believe — believe being the operative word — we know which are the best stampers.

It is very unlikely that any Dutch pressing would be competitive with the best UK-pressed copies cut by Harry Fisher.

For those of you who just want a good sounding copy of The Planets to play and enjoy, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

We know of no better performance, and we much prefer the dramatically more natural sound quality.

The Mehta recording, like much of what he recorded for Decca in those days, is a multi-miked mess, the kind we grew out of (for the most part) a long time ago. (More of the multi-miked records we’ve auditioned, of varying quality to be sure, can be found here.)

Our old commentary (please excuse the heavy-handed caps):

This 2-pack from many years ago (ten fifteen perhaps), described below, boasts White Hot Stamper sound on side two for the Mehta Planets. Yes, it IS possible. Side two shows you what this record is actually capable of — big WHOMP, no SMEAR, super SPACIOUS, DYNAMIC, with an EXTENDED top.

It beat every London pressing we threw at it, coming out on top for our shootout. Folks, we 100% guarantee that whatever pressing you have of this performance, this copy will trounce it.

But side one of this London original British pressing was awful.

We wrote it off as NFG after about a minute; that’s all we could take of the bright, hard-sounding brass of War.

If you collect Super Discs based on their catalog numbers and labels and preferred countries of manufacture, you are in big trouble when it comes time to play the damn things.

That approach doesn’t work for sound and never did.

If your stereo is any good, this is not news to you. The proof? The first disc in this 2-pack is Dutch. It earned a Super Hot grade in our blind test, beating every British copy we played against it save one. Side two however was recessed, dark and lifeless. Another NFG side, but the perfect complement to our White Hot British side two!

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On this Mystery London, The Reissues Have Lately Been Letting Us Down

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

The record you see pictured is not the record we will be discussing in this post.

The stamper numbers and grades you see below belong to a different album.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, in some cases including the actual stamper sheets compiled from the shootout — winners, losers, and everything in between — but for now we are keeping this title close to the vest.

This pressing was not as bad as many of the golden age classical titles we play. (See links below.)

Although it has the potential to sound amazingly good on the early labels, the second label London pressings never seem to do much better than 1.5+, a barely passing Hot Stamper grade.

It’s small, stuck in the speakers, and had no real top end. We judge the best pressings on the second label with these stampers to have good, not great sound quality.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy.

That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording this London can be on the best early pressings.

To see more records that earned the 1.5+ grade, please click here. (Incidentally, some of them are even on Heavy Vinyl. The better modern pressings have sometimes, if rarely, been known to earn Hot Stamper grades, and one shocked the hell out of us by actually winning a shootout. Wouldn’t you like to know which one!)

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

Here are reviews for some of the titles we’ve auditioned, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.

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