Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now
Way back in 2015 we wrote:
There are certain stampers that seem to have a consistently brighter top end. They are tolerable most of the time, but the real magic can only be found on the copies that have a correct or even slightly duller top. Live classical music is never “bright” the way recordings of it so often are.
On the other hand, it’s rarely “rich” and “romantic” the way many vintage recordings are — even those we rave about — but that’s another story for another day.
We recently did the shootout again, and now with a much more resolving, clear, accurate upper midrange and an even more extended top end, the stampers that we used to find “brighter than ideal” are almost always just too damn bright, period.
We will never buy another copy with those stampers except by accident or misfortune.
We was wrong and we don’t mind admitting it. We must be learning something in our shootouts, right?. We ran an experiment, we discovered something new about this album, and that should be seen as a good thing.
If you have been making improvements to your system, room, electricity, etc., then you too own records which don’t sound as good as you remember them. You just don’t know which ones they are, assuming you haven’t played them in a while.
One Stamper to Rule Them All
Which leaves one and only one stamper that can win a shootout. There is another stamper we like well enough to offer to our discriminating customers, but after that it is all downhill, and steeply.
Here are some of the other albums we’ve discovered for which one set of stampers has been consistently winning shootouts for years now.
Wouldn’t you know it — the right stampers are the hardest ones to find.
Which of course pretty much explains why you will rarely see a copy of the album for sale on our site.