Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now
UPDATE 2026
There was a time, perhaps ten years ago, that many EMI pressings finally started to sound a lot better to us than they had in the early- to mid-2000s when this commentary was written.
(2007 was the year everything changed, but it wasn’t 2007 yet. After being deep into audio for close to thirty years, it wasn’t until a few years later that we learned we still had a long way to go.)
Nowadays we can say that we are proud to offer some truly outstanding recordings conducted by Previn, Fremaux and others for EMI.
What to listen for on this album?
That’s easy: The all-too-common 70s EMI harshness and shrillness.
We could never understand why audiophiles revered EMI the way they did back in the 70s. Harry Pearson loved many of their recordings, but I sure didn’t.
The longer I stay in this hobby, the more clear it becomes that many of the records on the TAS list are better suited to the old school audio equipment of the 60s rather than the modern approach to audio that is possible today thanks to the many revolutionary changes to every aspect of music reproduction that have come along in the last thirty years or so.
(Obviously there are plenty of audio systems from every era that, for all appearances, seem unlikely to reproduce music well, which goes a long way in explaining most of the rampant enthusiasm for the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.)
These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s. Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.