Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
For a Living Stereo record from the Golden Age of All Tube recording, especially one from the late-50s, you might expect that the better Shaded Dog pressings would have exceptionally rich, natural sound.
After all, 1958 is clearly one of the great years for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.
Unfortunately, the pressings we played of the Berlioz album you see pictured were quite a letdown. We dropped the needle on three different early copies of LSC 2228 with three different sets of stampers and found that none of them were all that impressive, as can be seen from our notes:
- First: tubey but pretty hot, just okay. (6s/3s)
- Second: smeary and congested, not great. (4s/4s)
- Third: tubey but smeary (3s/1s)
We guessed that their final grades after a shootout would probably fall into the range of 1+ or so, just below the cutoff for a minimal Hot Stamper grade (1.5+).
If we’d half a dozen or more to play, some copies would probably be a bit better, some would be a bit worse, but the bulk of them would end up having sound that was merely passable, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning some might not even earn that single plus.)
Bottom Line
More money down the drain. Oh well — that’s the cost of doing business. Of course, our admittedly high prices for some of the other records on our site will more than compensate us for whatever losses we end up incurring with LSC 2228.
To be clear, we do not sell records with 1+ or lower grades — you can find those on your own. The world is full of them. It has been my experience that they make up the bulk of vintage record collections.
The average Shaded Dog may be better than the average randomly-chosen classical pressing, but that certainly doesn’t mean it has any automatic claim to audiophile quality sound. Maybe one out of three or four are good enough to offer our customers. The same would hold true for the Mercury and Decca/London pressings we sell.
Now, with the help of this blog, we can sort the wheat from the chaff for music lovers who are looking for top quality records to play, and who are much less interested in simply owning records with a white dog in a darkened area of the label, the ones so highly prized by a certain breed of audiophile record collector, unconcerned with whether they sound good or not.