Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
Probably more than ten years ago we had written the following about CS 6322:
The famous TAS list recording. The Decca 180 gram version is very good, but those of you who appreciate the qualities of the original mastering will want to have this one.
Now jump ahead five years to five years ago. We played three or four copies of the album and none of them really worked for us.
The sound was a bit opaque, a bit dry, and not nearly as tubey as we would have liked. (Many Decca recordings suffer from dry strings, a shortcoming that is apparently rarely noticed by audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them.)
A good record, not a great one, and for that reason really not worth cleaning up and doing a shootout for. The best copy would not pay for the labor to discover it.
Seems we got this one wrong. Live and learn is our motto, for precisely this reason.
There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.
- London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
- Mercury records with weak sound or performances
- RCA records with weak sound or performances
To this day, some of the records on the TAS list seem to me better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.
For a more complete list of those records, not just the ones on the TAS List, click here.
The following three things are best kept in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should: