lacks-transparency

These 20+ vintage records lack transparency. They are difficult to “hear into.”

The best properly-cleaned vintage pressings are usually quite transparent.

Which means that the records listed here are not particularly good pressings, or the recordings themselves lack this important quality.

Either way, they are best avoided by those looking for top quality sound.

Also Sprach Zarathustra by Way of Zubin Mehta – No Great Shakes

More of the music of Richard Strauss

A very good performance, with passable sonics.

But passable sonics are not going to cut it at the prices we charge.

Unlike many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them, we have never been taken with most of the recordings of Zubin Mehta and the LA Philharmonic.

They almost always suffer from exactly the same problems that we heard on this album. We had about five copies on hand in preparation for a shootout, some of which I had noted seemed to sound fine, but once we listened more critically we started to hear the problems that eventually caused us to abandon the shootout. We ended up giving away the stock to our good customers for free.

Here is what my notes say:

By the way, if you do have some of these and want to play them, the 4G side two was the best we played, much better than any 6G side two.

This link will take you to our current favorite recording of the work.

Opacity Vs. Transparency

Note that we have been especially anti-heavy vinyl in our recent commentaries for their consistently opaque character, the opposite of what is necessary in order to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear ALL the instruments, even the ones at the back.

Try that with any Classic Record or Speakers Corner pressing. Our Hot Stamper pressings can show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those labels and others like them.

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Khachaturian Conducts Spartacus – Not As Good As We Thought

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:

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London Orchestral Records from the 70s and the Problem of Opacity

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

The average copy of this 1976 recording has that dry, multi-miked modern sound that the 70s ushered in for many of the major labels, notably London and RCA.

How many Solti records are not ridiculously thick and opaque? One out of ten? If that. We’re extremely wary of records produced in the 70s; we’ve been burned too many times.

And to tell you the truth, we are not all that thrilled with most of what passes for good sound on Mehta‘s London output either, especially those recorded in Royce Hall. If you have a high-resolution system, these recordings, like those on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl that we constantly criticize, leave a lot to be desired.

Opacity is a real dealbreaker for us. Most of the classical records we play from later eras simply do not have the transparency essential to transporting us from our listening room into the concert hall.

One thing you can say about live classical music, it is never opaque. (It can be dry though. Some concert halls have that sound.)

No recording in our experience — our experience having been informed by playing thousands upon thousand of them — can ever be remotely as transparent as live music.

If you have any doubts, next time you come home from the concert hall, take a moment to put on a favorite recording of the same music. You may be in for quite a shock.

Other Deccas and Londons that we’d cleaned and played and found to be disappointing can be seen here.

For more on the subject of opacity on record, click here.

Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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Chicago – What We Heard Circa 2008

More of the Music of Chicago

In 2008, we had a lot of trouble finding good sound on the copies of the first album that we had on hand, more than a dozen I’m sure.

Over the next five to ten years we managed to do a much better job of cleaning and playing the band’s debut, to the delight of our listening panel as well as our Hot Stamper fans.

This is the kind of album that most audiophiles would be sorely tempted to give up on. Who can blame them?

So Many Faults, So Little Time

The average copy of this album is an unmitigated DISASTER. The smeary brass alone is enough to drive anyone from the room.

To a list of its faults you can confidently add some or all of the following:

1) blobby, blurry, out of control bass;
2) opaque, veiled mids;
3) rolled off highs, or no highs, whichever the case may be, common to virtually every pressing you find;
4) plain old distortion; and, last but not least,
5) the kind of compressed, lifeless sound that manages to make this groundbreaking album boring — and that’s not easy to do.

The music ROCKS! It’s the crappy records Columbia pressed that suck.

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Ravel, Saint-Saens et al. / Tzigane, Havanaise / Kyung-Wha Chung

Hot Stamper Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

This 1979 London original English pressing of violin showpieces (reviewed in 2012) has Super Hot Stamper sound on side two, which came as a bit of a shock to us after playing side one, which is as congested and opaque as one would expect from such a late London recording.

A great many Decca recordings from the Seventies are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.

Side two is fabulous — full-bodied, rich and sweet. Even though it may have been recorded in 1977, the engineer is Kenneth Wilkinson, and the hall is Kingsway — not many bad recordings can be attributed to either.    

But bad mastering or bad pressing quality are surely not the fault of either. When the record doesn’t come out of the oven right, the sound is going to suffer, and the sound on this side one is insufferable all right.

But side two is GLORIOUS, with wonderful music played with skill and feeling. (more…)

Boy, Was We Ever Wrong About Solti’s Rite of Spring

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

This is a VERY old and somewhat embarrassing commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Solti’s 1974 recording for Decca.

Here is what we had to say about the album in 2008:

This is an amazing recording, DEMO QUALITY SOUND, far better than the Decca heavy vinyl reissue that came out in the 2000s. [That part is no doubt true.]

This record is extremely dynamic; full of ambience; tonally correct; with tons of deep bass. Because it’s a more modern recording, it doesn’t have the Tubey Magic of some Golden Age originals, but it compensates for that shortcoming by being less distorted and “clean.” Some people may consider that more accurate. To be honest with you, I don’t know if that is in fact the case.

However, this record should not disappoint sonically and the performance is every bit as exciting and powerful as any you will find. The Chicago Symphony has the orchestral chops to make a work of this complexity sound effortless.

Skip forward to the present, roughly ten years later. We had three or four copies on hand to audition when we surveyed the work a couple of years ago in preparation for a big shootout.

The Solti did not make the cut. It was not even in the ballpark.

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Clair de Lune – Compare and Contrast Sides One and Two

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

This Shaded Dog LP has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND, if what you’re demonstrating is not a Hi-Fi spectacular, but rather a sublime presentation of an exceptionally sweet and natural string section in an orchestra, presented here on analog disc pressed more than sixty years ago.  

I can’t imagine a more beautiful record, both in terms of the program and the sound. This record is a wonderful example of what the Decca recording engineers were able to capture on tape, and the RCA mastering engineers were able to master from that tape.

Even though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s a superb example of Living Stereo Tubey Magic at its best. There will never be a reissue of this record that even remotely captures the space, transparency, sweetness and richness of the sound here.

Side Two

A++ to A+++ or better! Without more copies in hand it’s hard to know how good the sound can get, but we found it Hard To Fault (HTF).

This side has more extension up top and down low and more texture to the strings.

Side One

A++, although it starts out a bit weaker than that and only really gets good a few minutes into the side. (We hear this effect fairly often on the records we play. Noticing things like this is what we do for a living.)

There is some smear and it is slightly opaque as well.

You will hear what we mean when you flip it over and those two problems disappear.

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The Original A Hard Day’s Night on CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

The Old CD – You Know, the Original Mono One that the General Public Used to Say Was So Great…

(That is of course the stereo record you see pictured to the left.)

I have the early generation mono CD of this album. Although my car has a very good stereo system, you would never know there was any magic to the sound of these recordings by playing that CD. The whole thing is hopelessly flat and gray.

It starts to perk up by the song Things We Said Today, the 10th (!) track.

Before that it just sounds compressed, with all the voices and instruments mashed together. There’s no transparency to the sound. It reminds me of listening to this music on the radio. If that’s the effect George Martin was going for with the old mono mix, he succeeded brilliantly. I prefer the twin-track unapproved stereo mixes found on the LPs.

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This Tchaikovsky 4th Turned Out to Be Not as Good as We’d Hoped

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

About ten years ago we dropped the needle on this Mehta recording and thought it had potential, so we went about acquiring more copies for an eventual shootout.

A few years back we gave them another listen and found the sound not to our liking.

We have not done a shootout for any of the major Tchaikovsky symphonies (4, 5 and 6) in a very long time, but we hope to do them in the future, although that future could be many years from now. Nothing we have dropped the needle on has knocked us out, and that’s usually what it takes to get the ball rolling.

UPDATE 2024

Actually we quite like this RCA reissue with Monteux, and there are some other recordings we know to be good, but they are turning out to be very hard to find.

These Mehta Londons have revealed themselves to be much more artificial sounding than we thought they were, or, more accurately, could tell they were back in 2011.

Like every Royce Hall recording we’ve ever played, including the one everybody knows, there is too much multi-miking and spotlighting going on for us to suspend our disbelief and feel like we are in the living presence of the musicians, to borrow a phrase. The orchestra in this recording is not presented with anything resembling the experience one would have in the concert hall.

James Lock is a brilliant recording engineer, but his work here in the states leaves a lot to be desired.

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Bill Evans – Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. Many years ago we had played copies of the record and thought the sound was fine, shootout material in fact.

Flash forward to 2015 or 2016.  Now it sounds thin, flat and opaque.

Worse, it’s actually in mono.

On today’s modern stereos it leaves a lot to be desired, and for that reason we say skip it.

A stereo recording reissued in mono for no apparent reason?

What were they smoking over there at Milestone? 

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