More of the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
Stick with stereo on this album.
The Mono pressings — at least the ones we’ve played — aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time).
needle-drops
Dvorak / Cello Concerto – Hard to Recommend on Living Stereo
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
I have never heard a copy of this record sound better than decent. This title is very unlikely to have the wonderful sound of the best Living Stereo pressings that you can find on our site, each of which has been carefully evaluated to the highest standards.
If you can get one for cheap, go for it. Otherwise I recommend you pass if what you are looking for is audiophile quality sound.
Perhaps the poor recording quality (I’m guessing; obviously I’ve never heard the master tape) explains the poor sound of the Classic Records remastered version from 1994.
Not that that stopped anybody from buying those awful 180 gram pressings! They may have been mastered by one of the greats, Bernie Grundman, but he was well past his prime when he was working for that awful label, as we explain here.
Have You Noticed?
If you are a fan of Living Stereo pressings, have you noticed that many of them – this one for example – don’t sound all that good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have. But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare LSC pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
There is an abundance of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and most of them are downright awful.
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.
It seems as if the audiophile public has completely fallen for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings.
Audiophiles have made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.
Maybe not this guy, or this guy, but there has to be at least some group of audiophiles, however small their number might be, with decent equipment and two working ears out there, right? (Excluding our customers of course, they have to know what is going on to spend the kind of money they spend on our records. And then write us all those letters.)
I would say RCA’s track record during the ’50s and ’60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.
But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one of them.
Another Bad Sounding Chet Baker Reissue – OJC 303
Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now
It Could Happen to You badly needed to be mastered with some tubes in the chain, but that didn’t happen. We’ve written a fair amount on that subject, and you can find more here.
It’s another case of an OJC with zero tubey magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. Maybe even better!
I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp (like the Mac 30 you see below), you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?
The OJC pressing of this album is obviously better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather 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 (although this one never did).
For a more complete list of those records, click here.
Sonny Rollins and The Original Jazz Classics Series – Not a Good Match!
More of the Music of Sonny Rollins
Pictured is OJC 029, one of the earliest Sonny Rollins titles they picked to remaster.
Too bad they didn’t do a very good job with it.
The copy we auditioned did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.
The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is unlikely to ever be of audiophile quality.
There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed? — but we’re pretty sure the OJC will always fall short of the mark.
We created two sections for the OJC label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the (probably, see the paragraph above) bad sounding ones.
If you know of a great sounding pressing of the album, feel free to let us in on what pressing you have and we might just pick one up and give it a listen.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 33 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.
Neither the Sound Nor the Performance Here Make the Grade
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now
In our experience this is not the recording of the work to buy, on either Decca or London. Of the two recordings by Ansermet, we much prefer the one made with the Suisse Romande in 1961 to that of the one he recorded with the Paris Conservatoire in 1954 (which was his second recording of the work with them).
We did a monster shootout for this music in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had shown potential.
The only recordings that held up all the way through — the fourth movement being THE Ball Breaker of all time, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Ansermet.
This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing those ten or so other pressings.
Here it is a year later and we’re capitalizing on what we learned from the first big go around, which is simply this: the Ansermet recording on Decca/London can not only hold its own with the Reiner on RCA, but beat it in virtually any area. The presentation and the sound itself are both more relaxed and natural, even when compared to the best RCA pressings.
The emotional content of the first three movements (all of side one) under Ansermet’s direction are clearly superior. The roller coaster excitement Reiner and the CSO bring to the fourth movement cannot be faulted, or equaled. In every other way Ansermet’s performance is the one for me.
There are other Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played recently that were disappointing, and they can be found here.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington on OJC
More of the Music of Thelonious Monk
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Thelonious Monk
This title badly needed to be mastered with some tubes in the chain, but that didn’t happen. More on that subject here.
It’s another case of an OJC with Zero Tubey Magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. And it may even sound better. For something close to ten bucks you could find out.
I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?
The Happy Blues on Vintage OJC Is Not Good
Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
Some vintage OJC pressings sound good and some don’t.
Typical bad OJC sound – thin and modern, lacking in the Tubey Magic that makes vintage pressings so musically involving. Gary Hobish mastered the record so I suppose he deserves the blame, but who knows how good the tapes were that he had to work with.
This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the OJC pressings we played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that that plays right into the prejudices of most record collectors and audiophiles, for whom nothing but an original will do. The OJC pressings were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the other LPs we played.
The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large sample.
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.
You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.
Rhapsody! – The Story of an Old Fave We Were Wrong About
Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London
A great example of an album We Was Wrong about.
As you can see by the commentary below, I used to think this was a wonderful sounding London “Sleeper” classical recording.
That was many years ago – five, six, seven, I cannot be sure. I ended up acquiring a half dozen copies of the album or so over the course of those years, had them cleaned up and proceeded to do a shootout.
It did not go well. Immediately I noticed that the pressings I was playing were sounding clean, clear and lively, but much too modern, too much like a good CD and not enough like the good Golden Age classical recordings we audition regularly.
Those recordings, on the right pressings, will take your breath away. Rhapsody! was leaving me asking myself what was wrong. The more I listened the more obvious the faults of the recording became.
The pressings I played lacked warmth, richness, sweetness, space, and a number of other analog qualities I won’t belabor here. Too much of what makes listening to vintage vinyl so involving was just not on these records no matter how much I may have wanted them to be.
The extreme top and bottom were also lacking, giving the sound a “boxy” quality. The presentation was wide but not tall. Of the five levels of sound we discuss on the site in various listings, levels one and five were not as evident as they should have been.
This is, again, what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.
We cannot rely on our previous judgments. With all the changes we’ve made over the years, we can now clean our records better and play our records better than ever before.
That means that some will rise and some will fall. This one fell, pretty hard in fact. Not a bad record, but not a good one either, and far from as good as I once thought.
Below is our previous commentary. All of this was true for my old stereo and room, my critical listening skills at the time, my old cleaning regimen. And by old I mean my approach from only about five or six years ago!
Things have changed, dramatically, and nothing in all of audio could make me happier.
DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is one of the greatest SLEEPER albums of all time.
This London reissue from 1979 of recordings from 1978 in Detroit, the year in which Dorati became director of the Detroit Symphony has the kind of orchestral sound we drool over here at Better Records. Dark and rich strings — the basses growl just like the real thing. Dynamic. Deep solid bass. Fluffy tape hiss, which sounds exactly the way it should. This tells you that the top end is untweaked. (Almost all Classic Records have funny sounding tape hiss as you may or may not know. It”s a dead give away that the top end is boosted. Tape hiss is like pink noise: it always sounds the same, unless somebody has fooled with it. Steve Hoffman taught me to listen for this quality and it was a lesson important to my growth as a critical listener.) (more…)
Sonny’s Story – Skip OBC-503
Some OJC (or OBC) Pressings Sound Good, Some Don’t – This One Doesn’t
The copy we auditioned did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.
The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is unlikely to be of audiophile quality.
There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed? — but we’re pretty sure the OJC will always fall short of the mark.
We created two sections for the OJC label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the (probably, see the paragraph above) bad sounding ones.
If you know of a great sounding pressing of the album, feel free to let us in on what pressing you have and we might just pick one up and give it a listen.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 33 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.
If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.
And if we can’t beat whatever LP you own or have heard, you get your money back. It’s as simple as that.
Tom Port
Better Records (more…)
Every Label Made Mediocre Records – London Released This One in 1963
More of the music of Franz Schubert
More of the music of Antonin Dvorak
The copy we auditioned was opaque and veiled, much like the Heavy Vinyl reissues that are flooding the market these days.
Looking for pressings with audiophile quality sound and mostly quiet surfaces? This link will take you to the Decca/London records that are currently available on our site. They’re guaranteed to have good sound. Quiet surfaces are harder to come by but we’re doing the best we can.
As far as we can tell, based on this single copy, CS 6357 is not an album worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.
We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding pressings of the album though. If we hear a better one down the road, we would certainly be open to the possibility of doing a shootout and making the best copies available to our customers.
Perhaps you have one you like. If so, please let us know. You can email me at tom@better-records.com