Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now
UPDATE 2024
Our favorite Scheherazade for about the last 10 years or so has been the one Ansermet conducted for Decca in 1961.
The review below was written long before we discovered how good the best pressings of the Ansermet on London could be, when you can find one with the right stampers.
We started to get some clues in 2015 about the Ansermet, and by 2019 we had enough evidence to be sure of our findings.
In 2015 we still had a lot to learn, even though we had been playing this wonderful piece of music on vintage vinyl since the early-90s. (I’m quoted about my preference for certain pressings of LSC 2446 in The RCA Bible, which was published in 1993. Don’t believe anything you read in it though, at least whatever is attributed to me. I was as lost as everybody else in audio back in those days.)
Clearly we needed to do more research and development,
Our Review from Then
White Hot on Side One! Big brass, so full-bodied and dynamic. The solo violin is present and so real you will not believe it. The highest resolution we have ever heard for this performance. Hard To Fault (HTF).
This copy is huge in every dimension, just as all the best ones always are, with maximum amounts of height, width, and depth. The transparency is also superb — you really hear into this one in the way that only the best Living Stereos (and other golden age recordings) will allow. (more…)