multi-miked

Recordings that are multi-miked and sound like it.

Back to the Stone Age with The Pines of Rome on Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.

MoFi’s version of this The Pines of Rome (#1-507) is one of the worst sounding classical records they ever produced, and that’s saying something, because practically all of their classical catalog is just awful — thin and bright, with sloppy bass and completely unnatural string tone.

As hard as it may be to believe, the MoFi of the Pines of Rome makes the typical Classic Records pressing sound good, shrill strings and all.

The UHQR is somewhat better, especially in the lower octaves, but it’s maybe a D+ or C-, not an audiophile record if we are using the term to mean what it no longer means —  a pressing with higher quality sound. (more…)

Phase IV and the TAS List – Three-Dimensional Depth, Transparency and Space

Hot Stamper Pressings of Phase 4 Recordings Available Now

The best Hot Stamper pressings of this TAS List album, one of the greatest and most famous orchestral blockbuster soundtracks ever recorded, more than live up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done right.

As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious analog.

The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.

The layering of depth is really something to hear on the best copies, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep.

Transparency is what allows this all to sound real.

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 makes it possible to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear all the instruments, even the ones placed far back.

Try that with any Classic Records or Speakers Corner pressing. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those two labels and the others like them.

Tubey Magic with Clarity

Yes, Decca in 1977 managed to keep its lovely Tubey Magical analog sound without getting mired in the muck of tube smear and thickness, the kind that bedevils so many pressings from the 50s.

Couple that with real bite to the brass and texture to the strings and you have the best of both worlds on one record.

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This Beethoven Ninth Started Out with Two Strikes Against It

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

MoFi took the shortcomings of a mediocre-at-best Decca recording from 1972 and made them even worse by means of their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system.

They should not have chosen this performance of the Ninth Symphony in the first place, and they certainly should not have added the treble they chose to add, which they did to this title and to every classical recording they remastered without regard to whether or not the recording needed brightening. None that I know of did. Try telling that to the brain trust running MoFi.

(They hired this guy to do their one-step digitally remastered pressings and from the get-go he’s been giving audiophiles the most ridiculously phony sounding records that collectors with way too much money can buy.)

The Decca recording of the Ninth from 1972 is opaque, lacks size and space, and comes off as a bit flat and dry.

Like practically every later Decca pressing we play, it’s passable at best.

Londons and Deccas from this era (1972 in this case) rarely sound very good to us.

Here is what we specifically don’t like about their sound.

If you want to know what’s wrong with the Mobile Fidelity pressing, take the above faults and add some others to them.

Start with an overall brighter EQ, add a 10k boost for extra sparkly strings, the kind that MoFi has always been smitten with, and finish with the tubby bass caused by the half-speed mastering process itself.

Voila! You are now in the presence of the kind of mid-fi trash that may have fooled some audiophiles way back when but now sounds as wrong as the records this ridiculous label is still making today.

Here are some other pressings with bright string tone that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound.

1981 Was a Long Time Ago

Old school audio systems are notorious for being dark, dull and lacking in transparency. They might need bright records in order to sound good, but high quality modern systems do not.

If these two MoFi pressings sounds right to you, you are very likely living with one of those old school systems and it is long past time to get rid of it.

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Maazel’s Pines of Rome Is Another Title Not Fit for a Super Disc List

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Pines of Rome Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at best)

I found a bit of commentary in a listing for Scheherazade, and right away it was clear to me that the shootout we did for that title showed us a recording that had much in common with the one we had done more recently for The Pines of Rome.

Here it is, with the necessary changes having been made.

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2021, one we had been planning for more than twenty years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London; the Maazel on Decca and London (the Decca being on the TAS List), the Kempe on Readers Digest, and quite a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the last movement being a real Ball Breaker, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Kempe. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing about twenty or so other pressings.

We learned from that first big go around something that we think will remain true for the foreseeable future: the 1960 Reiner recording with the Chicago Symphony on RCA just can’t be beat.

Could other pressings be better sounding? Of course they could.

Would we ever buy another copy? Not a chance.

The notes for the Decca pressing I played, mastered by G, Ted Burkett, can be seen above.

Hey, here’s an idea.

Why don’t you buy a bunch of them and see if any of them do not have the problems described on my notes.

If you find a good one, please let me know the stampers so I can go out and find one myself.

The above is of course all in good fun. We both know that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that anyone reading this commentary is going to go out and buy some Decca pressings of The Pines of Rome, clean them up, play them one by one and then critique their strengths and weaknesses.

The most likely thing is that, if you have any Decca pressing of Maazel’s Pines, it’s sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Odds are it has not been played in a very long time.

Which should tell you something. Good records get played and bad ones sit on shelves.

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This Recording of The Planets Has “Blockbuster Sound,” for Better or Worse

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Gustav Holst Available Now

This recording has what we here at Better Records like to call blockbuster sound.

Even on the best copies, the recording does not sound very much like a live orchestra, nor is it actually even trying to sound like a live orchestra in concert.

It’s trying to be huge and powerful in your home.

Which is more in line with a rock Demo Disc such as Crime of the Century or Dark Side of the Moon.

Everything has been carefully and artificially placed in the soundfield. Each instrument or group of intstruments is given its own space and (sometimes ridiculous) location.

It’s clearly not the recreation of a live orchestral event.

No live concert I have ever attended sounds anything like this record.

Instead it’s the actual creation of a unique orchestral sound, with unique staging of its own design.  Lots of microphones were used, which cause instruments and sometimes whole sections of the orchestra to appear in places and take up spaces they could not possibly occupy in the real world.

If you have a good-sized listening room and your stereo images well, with realistic three-dimensional staging and depth, you will have no trouble hearing what we are talking about with any pressing of the album.

This is the sound that Bernard Herrmann made such wonderful use of with his series of Phase IV recordings for Decca, rather different than the four mics and two stereo channels of the Fiedler Gaite Parisienne from RCA in 1954.

Which is ironic. HP talked about The Absolute Sound of live unamplified music as being the standard, yet somehow this recording ended up in his Top Twelve all time greats. Makes no sense to me, but neither do many of the records on the TAS Super Disc list.

That said, our current favorite Planets is the other Planets on the TAS List, Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

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Saint-Saens / Symphony No. 3 – The Mehta Would Not Make the Grade Today

More of the music of Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)

Our favorite performance of this magnificent work is the Fremaux on EMI from 1973

This is an old review from 2011. I doubt we would have anything nice to say about this recording these days. Our system has come a long way since then, and 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.

Unlike many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them, we have never been enamored with the recordings Zubin Mehta made with 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 started listening more critically we heard the problems that eventually caused us to abandon the shootout and give away the stock to our good customers for free.

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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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Rozsa / Ben Hur

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

This TAS List Super Hot Stamper pressing of one of the greatest and most famous Orchestral Blockbuster Soundtracks ever recorded more than lives up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done RIGHT.

As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious ANALOG!

The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.

The layering of depth is really something to hear on this copy, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep. Transparency – a quality you find on both sides of this copy — is what makes this all sound so REAL.

Side One

So big and rich! This is why audiophiles love these records! A little more extension up top and you would have yourself a nearly flawless record. (The harps and bells aren’t quite as clear as they should be.)

Side Two

Again, a little more extension up top would have helped. Listen to how the trumpets just JUMP out of the soundfield! What a record!

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. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those labels and the others like them. (more…)

Vivid and Accurate Timbre for Reeds and Percussion – A Demo Disc Like No Other

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

This is one of the most phenomenal sounding records I have ever heard in my life.

Take the best sound you’ve ever heard from the best authentic Mercury classical record you own (not that Heavy Vinyl BS) and translate it into pop arrangements for clarinets, flutes, saxes, oboes, bassoons, percussion and who-knows-what-else and what do you have?

Sound that leaps out of the speakers with absolutely dead on tonality.

But what is most shocking of all is how vivid and accurate the timbre of every instrument is.

Yes, it’s multi-miked, and sometimes the engineers play with the channels a bit much (especially at the start of the first track).

That said, if you have the system for it, it’s very possible you have never heard most of these instruments sound this real on any other recording. It’s as if you were standing right in the studio with them. Yes, it’s that crazy good.

For our last shootout, it took two copies to provide you with top sound on both sides. Clean stereo pressings are very hard to find. Most copies are mono, and most copies are beat, and that combination makes for some slim pickings indeed. This side two is not especially quiet but it’s the best we can find, and we hope that when you hear the glorious sound the surfaces will be easy to ignore. If not, send it back.

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Sibelius, Liszt, Dukas et al. – A Lousy London Phase 4 LP

More of the Music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Jean Sibelius

Sonic Grade: F

While preparing for a Finlandia shootout recently, we happened to drop the needle on this album, a 1977 Phase 4 recording made in Kingsway Hall and engineered by Arthur Lilley. We could hardly believe how bad it sounded. The multi-miking is the worst I have ever heard!

We like lots of Phase 4 recordings — especially those of Bernard Herrmann — but this is definitely not one of them. 

Are they all bad? Who can say? We sure aren’t going to be wasting any more time and money on the album in order to find out, I can tell you that.

The Obsession soundtrack is a dog as well. Audiophiles looking for good sound are best advised to avoid them both.