Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jacques Offenbach Available Now
Reviewed back in 2009 in our pre-shootout days.
This Minty London Blueback LP has a WONDERFUL Tubey Magical Super Hot Stamper side one.
I have never heard this music sound better. Of course Ansermet is exactly the right conductor for these light and colorful orchestral pieces; the performances are uniformly superb.
But as audiophiles we want to make sure the sound is what it should be, and here side one does not disappoint. The string tone is perfection. I defy anyone to find a Heavy Vinyl reissue with string tone even remotely as good. In my experience there is simply no such record.
With vintage classical records there are always trade-offs of course. Here the loudest passages suffer from some mild compressor distortion, so common on these early pressings. A small price to pay for sound this lovely I say.
The Zampa overture by Herold is probably the best sound on the album — it’s gorgeous!
Side two is not quite as good. We rated it A Plus, with real weight and energy but a bit too much compression and distorton in the loud passages to be completely satisfying.
UPDATE 2025
Nowadays we would never list a record for sale as a Hot Stamper pressing with a grade of 1+ on either side.
And, more importantly, the grades we awarded these two sides were just estimates.
We did not put this copy in a shootout with a batch of similar pressings.
We played the record, liked what we heard on side one, liked what we heard on side two a bit less, and offered it to our customers with the description of the strengths and weaknesses you read about.
We could not have begun to conduct a shootout for this early London. Back in those days we simply could not find enough copies of such a rare title to make such a thing happen.
As for the compressor distortion on side one that we heard, it’s entirely possible that with better cleaning and better playback that the distortion we thought we heard would disappear. Blaming the record is rarely the ideal approach for making progress in audio.
