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We judged these vintage RCA records to have unacceptable sound based solely on the specific pressings we played.

We can’t say that other pressings won’t sound better. We just don’t plan on playing any more copies to find out.

Don’t Waste Your Money on this Living Stereo from 1964

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The copies of LSC 2606 we’ve played to date have never impressed us with the quality of their sound.

They are tonally natural, sure, but the acoustic tends to be too dry for our taste.

We are officially giving up on it since it’s very unlikely to sound good enough on the high quality modern equipment we, as well as our customers, use.

It’s much better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s, but we would be surprised if anyone reading this blog still has one of those in this day and age.

Audio has come a long way since then.

Higher quality playback has revealed that some vintage records are dramatically better sounding than anything that has come after them over the course of the last fifty years.

Others have been left behind, and rightly so. Based on our experience of playing and critically listening to thousands and thousands of vintage pressings, it is our belief that the latter group must now include LSC 2606.

If you see a copy sitting in the bins of your local record store, by all means pick it up (for cheap) if you’re interested in the repertoire. Audiophiles looking for higher quality sound are advised to look elsewhere.

On that note, readers might want to consider trying something from our Hot Stamper Classical section. It typically has close to a hundred titles and they are all guaranteed to demonstrate dramatically better sound than any other pressing of the same album you can find, especially when compared to any record pressed on Heavy Vinyl.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Living Stereo from 1959

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The sound of the copies we’ve played of LSC 2293 with Piatigorsky performing these two works for cello have never impressed us with their sound.

They are tonally natural but the acoustic is much too dry for our taste.

Perhaps Radio Recorders was not the ideal place to record this music.

Or we got unlucky with the copies we’ve played. Either way, we are not going to pursue this one. It’s a title that is very unlikely to sound right on high quality modern equipment.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

1959 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2025 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and seventy titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.

We think there are close to 50 that belong in any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

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Skip the Living Stereo of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Cliburn

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

We recently dropped the needle on a copy of LSC 2601 — the first one we’ve played in years — and found a great deal to fault in the sound. Our copy with 3s/3s stampers was awful sounding.

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is a wonderful piano concerto, one that belongs in any serious record collection, but the sound on the pressing we played was definitely not up to our standards.

The piano was cranky, the overall sound a dry mess overall. It just sounded much too much like an old record.

A Shaded Dog pressing such as this might be passable on an old school audio system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality (mostly) modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

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LSC 2433 – Hard to Recommend on Living Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

I’ve never liked this recording of the Grand Canyon Suite, but not having played a copy in twenty years or so, I thought we should get one in and give it a spin before we give up on it entirely.

That was money down the drain. The sound was thick, bright and crude.

Definitely not our sound, and we hope not yours either.

Lots of Morton Gould’s recordings for RCA from this era have been disappointing. We’ll add this one to the list.

If you want to avoid records with these problems, click on any of the links below to see the titles we’ve found over the years to have the same issues.

There are quite a number of pressings that we’ve played with crude sound. It’s unlikely that anyone reading this blog would be happy with such crude sounding pressings.

Here are some with thick sound and here are some with bright sound. Audiophiles would do well to avoid all of them.

Lewis Layton is one of our favorite engineers, but this album is clearly not up to his usual standards, at least it isn’t on the copies we’ve played.

Waking Up a Dull Stereo

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way old school systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up sound guaranteed to bring it to life in no time.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than the average vintage pressing, or Heavy Vinyl counterpart: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With such a stereo you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and audiophile pressings, as wall as vintage Golden Age classical records that don’t sound good, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled: some stereos make it difficult to find the best sounding pressings

My advice is to get better equipment, and that will allow you to do a better job of recognizing bad records when you play them.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this RCA from 1961

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

These Beethoven “Appassionata” And “Funeral March” sonata recordings have never impressed us sonically.

On the Shaded Dog pressings of LSC 2545 that we’ve auditioned, the piano is too thin.

Who likes a thin sounding piano?

If you have big speakers that can move air with authority, the kind needed to reproduce the size and power of a concert piano, then check out some of the titles we’ve found to have especially weighty piano reproduction.

The sound is not awful — you could certainly do worse — but we do not see the value in this title considering it will be neither cheap nor quiet.

We say pass.

Lewis Layton is clearly one of our favorite engineers, but this album does not seem to be up to his usual standards, or ours.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with noticeable shortcomings.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

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On Porgy and Bess, Stick with the Early Pressings on the Black Label

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Belafonte Available Now

A Living Stereo knockout! We sometimes forget to spend time with records like this when there are so many Zeppelin and Floyd records waiting to be played (and a lot more customers waiting to get hold of them to add to their collection).

We’ve always enjoyed Belafonte At Carnegie Hall, but when we’ve dug further into his catalog we’ve been left cold more often than not. However, when we finally got around to dropping the needle on a few of these many years ago we were very impressed by the music and blown away by the sound on the better pressings.

Just make sure that you avoid the orange label reissues.

They are dry, gritty and spitty. The notes below show a side one earning a single plus (1+) not-quite-Hot Stamper grade. We discuss its faults on the far right, and the other orange label pressing we played was even worse, earning a grade of NFG.

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RCA Released This Awful Living Stereo with Reiner in 1958

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Some audiophiles buy albums with their favorite labels. For example, this pressing from the Golden Age of RCA Living Stereo might appeal to a certain kind of audiophile who treasures LSC’s on the Shaded Dog label.

More than that, he might even limit himself to 1S Indianapolis pressings.

However, many records from this era simply do not sound good, and this is one of them.

We have never heard a good sounding copy of LSC 2112, and we’ve played plenty of them over the decades we’ve been in the business of selling Golden Age classical records.

A copy came in just last week [which was many, many years ago] and I figured it was time to give it a spin and see if there was any reason to change my opinion. Hey, maybe this one had Hot Stampers! Can’t say it wouldn’t be possible. Unlikely, yes, impossible, no.

So here’s what I heard: A wide stage. A bit dry.

But then the trouble started: Shrill strings?!

That’s all she wrote.

A Johann Strauss record with shrill strings is a non-starter. All is not lost however. Decca knew how to record Strauss, and they had halls with wonderful acoustics to do it in.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

Never liked the performance. The sound can be quite good on the best pressings, but too many copies are congested in the loudest passages.

We recently found a pressing that was quite a bit better than the other Reiner pressings we had on hand, which simply means that good pressings exist, but they are very hard to find.

However, without a good cleaning, this record is very unlikely to sound right on high quality modern equipment.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

It may be on the TAS super disc list, but that doesn’t mean the sound is up to our standards.

We much prefer Muti’s performance from 1979 for EMI.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Living Stereo from 1962

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

LSC 2612, released in 1962 on the Shaded Dog label, offers Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks with Stokowski conducting, engineered by one of the greats, Robert Simpson.

The sound is terrible however.

The copies we had on hand were loud and crude, with steely strings and not much in the way of hall space. In other words, LSC 2612 seems to suffer from the “old record” sound that we’ve found on many of the hundreds of vintage pressings we’ve auditioned over the years as we were looking for top quality recordings to put in our Hot Stamper shootouts.

If you want a good Water Music, the right stamper pressings of the Philips recording with Leppard are the best we’ve ever played.

The Shaded Dog of LSC 2612 might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

Leave this RCA to the collectors. Some audiophiles are of the opinion that vintage Living Stereo recordings on the original label can do no wrong, but we have never subscribed to that view.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.

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

1962 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles as of 2024, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.

When it comes to classical and orchestral titles, more than a dozen are so good that we would consider them Must Owns.

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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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