Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year. Far from it.
The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.
It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.
But wait a minute.
Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.
How did they get this one so wrong?
We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.
Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.
One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.
We actually like testing records, and we refined* a method for doing it that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.