red-seal-bad

The RCA Red Seal pressings for these titles did not sound good to us on the copies we played. What they sound like on other copies we cannot say. Either way we will not be buying them anymore

The Riddle of the Vastly Different Sides Has Been Solved

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings Featuring the Violin

About ten or fifteen years ago we came across a puzzling Shaded Dog pressing of the Bruch / Vieuxtemps recording from 1962 with Heifetz, LSC 2603.

We were surprised at the time how much worse one side sounded than the other. That had rarely if ever happened back in those early Living Stereo shootout days.

We sold the record as a one-sided disc with one complete performance in top quality sound, The Scottish Fantasy. Obviously the Vieuxtemps / Concerto No. 5 wasn’t worth playing; the sound was sub-par, a pale shadow of the sound of the other side of the record. You can read all about it here.

Well, we ran into those stampers again, or at the very least we ran into a copy with the same bad stampers for side one, 5s. Something sure went wrong somewhere, as you can see from our notes below.

At the time we described this curious pressing this way:

The violin is captured beautifully on side two. More importantly there is a lovely lyricism in Heifetz’s playing which suits Bruch’s Romantic work perfectly. I know of no better performance.

The performance of the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 is also wonderful, but the sound is not. Want proof that two sides of the same record can have vastly different sound? Here it is. Note how oversized the violin on side one is, how smeary the orchestra, how little texture there is to anything in the soundfield. This side one is no Hot Stamper.

All true, and now that we know that 5s etched stampers are responsible for the bad sound and not just some pressing anomaly, we can all sleep peacefully once again.

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Grieg / Peer Gynt Suites – Were We Wrong? Probably

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Below are the notes for a later pressing we played many years ago. I doubt if we would like this Red Seal pressing much now. The later RCA pressings we’ve played lately left much to be desired.

I get the feeling it lacks Tubey Magic, as well as weight in the lower registers, and we are much less tolerant of those two shortcomings now than we were then.

Our review from 2008

Fiedler is wonderful here, which is to be expected. What’s unusual about this Red Seal is how good the sound is. It’s extremely transparent and tonally correct.

It sounds to me like a flat transfer.

Some tubey colorations would be nice, especially in the louder passages.

The sound also lacks a bit of weight in the bottom end.

But these faults are mostly made up for by the tremendous clarity and freedom from distortion that this pressing has. I doubt if the Shaded Dog has those qualities.

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The RCA Later Label Pressings from the 70s Fall Short Yet Again

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Many of the later RCA pressings we’ve played recently have left a lot to be desired.

We’re on record as telling audiophiles that it’s never a good idea to judge records by their labels, so when it came time to do a shootout for this famous Heifetz recording from 1963, LSC 2652, it was only fitting that we force ourselves to clean and play every pressing we had on the shelf, including the White Dogs and Red Seal reissues.

The White Dog did fine (2+ for the Bruch on side one, 1.5+ for the Mozart on side two).

The Red Seal had all the hallmarks of the transistory sound RCA apparently preferred in the 70s.

There are Red Seal pressings with excellent sound — some of them have won shootouts — but this one had too many similarities to the awful Classic Record classical titles produced in the 90s. You know the ones I’m talking about. They have bright, screechy string tone that no self-respecting audiophile with even passable equipment should find tolerable.

(The fact that many of them remain on the TAS list speaks volumes about the self-identified experts’ ability to distinguish a good record from a bad one. More on that subject below.)

More of the Same

Below you will find links to other records we’ve played that had the same problems as this RCA and are best avoided by audiophiles looking for high quality pressings to play.

There is no shortage of other records that we’ve run into over the years with these kinds of obvious shortcomings.

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This Is How Wrong We Were about Shaded Dogs and Red Seals

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This old (2010) and embarrassing commentary shows just how wrong we were about the sound of various pressings of this Living Stereo title, LSC 2377.

We much prefer the Shaded Dog pressings these days, as can be seen from our most recent listing.

To see our available Hot Stamper pressings of the work, please click here. For more reviews and commentaries, please click here.

Back in 2010 we liked reissue pressings of Living Stereo recordings a lot more than we do now. Only the advent of top quality cleaning equipment and much improved playback made it possible for us to reproduce the early Shaded Dogs in all their glory.

When my system was darker and less revealing, a lot of records that were mastered to be cleaner and brighter sounded great to me. Records like RCA Red Seal pressings, some OJC jazz titles, and lots of other bad records that I used to like were a good complement to my system back in those days.

Now, not so much. When we encourage our readers to get good sound so they can recognize and acquire good records, it’s because we learned that lesson again and again the hard way, by getting lots of great recordings wrong.

Here is our mistaken commentary from 2010:

The Shaded Dog original RCA pressings are the best, right?

Not in our experience. We think that’s just another record myth.

Turns out we were wrong about that. The early pressings win all our shootouts these days. In the case of LSC 2377, the conventional wisdom which holds that the original pressings will most likely have better sound than the vintage reissues turns out to be right.

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Our Old Prediction for LSC 2563 Came True

Hot Stamper Pressings that Feature the Violin

Many years ago we wrote:

This is a very old review and it’s doubtful we would not prefer the right Shaded Dog pressing these days.

That turned out to be the case, as we had two late-label 70s Red Seal pressings in the shootout we just did and only one of them was even passable.

A few things about the new pressings and the old commentary caught my eye.

First off, 3s is a fairly low number. The Shaded Dogs that win the shootout must be lower, which means they are either 1s or 2s. Not much to choose from there!

Secondly, the commentary you see below goes into great detail regarding what each piece found on the pressing was doing right and wrong.

It makes us sound like we knew what we were talking about when it came to this specific Red Seal pressing of the album we had played.

I assure you that we did not.

On the web I come across lots of reviews for audiophile pressings in which the writers go on for page after page about how much better the new Heavy Vinyl pressing is compared to the old record the reviewer owns.

This is no longer hard for me to understand. They are simply as lost as I used to be.

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Pines and Fountains of Rome – Our Mistaken Review from 2006

More of the music of Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)

Back in 2006 we liked Red Seal pressings of Living Stereo recordings a lot more than we do now, so take this commentary with a huge grain of salt.

Only the advent of top quality cleaning equipment and much improved playback made it possible for us to hear the earlier pressings in all their glory.

A lot of records that I used to like because they were cleaner and brighter — later Red Seal Living Stereos, some OJC jazz, some reissues of rock — sounded much better when my system was darker and less revealing.

There are a lot of live and learn entries about these records, and this is one from many years ago that could not be more wrong (probably, the record is long gone and not around to be played).

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For Scottish Fantasy, Forget the Red Seal Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

The 70s Red Seal pressings we’ve played recently have all left a lot to be desired, but, since we had one sitting on a shelf in the backroom with lower stampers, we figured what the hell, let’s clean it up, throw it into our next shootout and hope for the best.

As you can see, the best was not to come.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 36 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, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better records that works. If you know of one, please write me!

We are not the least bit interested in pressings that are “known” to sound the best.

Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of records.

I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature.

We’re looking for the pressings of albums that actually do sound the best.

You know, when you actually play them.

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