Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now
For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings) on the plum label are the way to go, right?
In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.
And the FR pressing of the Rachmaninoff record you see pictured above may indeed have the best sound.
The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.
(We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping this title closer to the vest.)
Note that we had FR1, FR2 and FR3, all originals, yet none of them could be considered good enough to offer our customers.
It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.
Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.
Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?
