shrill-strings

These pressings suffer from shrill string tone.

Strings that are screechy or shrill are the kiss of death on classical and orchestral recordings. Any recordings, come to think of it.

Mahler / Symphony No. 4 – Another Disappointing Shaded Dog

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The Decca recording with Solti from 1961 on London (CS 6217) is still the king on this title, as far as we know.

The review below is for a White Dog pressing of the Reiner performance that we’d played way back in 2007.

We’ve played others over the years, but nothing has impressed us all that much, so we are still going through the process of acquiring more copies of the London and have yet to do a shootout for them.

Our 2025 notes for LSC 2364 on Shaded Dog is that it is rich, but the strings are somewhat shrill and it has an unfortunate tendency to become more congested than we would like in the louder passages.

The sound is passable I suppose, but it’s hardly the pressing you want to play when it comes time to hear the music properly performed, and with top quality sound. This is of course the service we offer — the actual pressing that has audiophile sound with a performance to match — so we hope to see Hot Stamper pressings of the London coming to the site in 2026.

Fun Fact

Note that this recording from 1961 was rereleased on London in 1971 with a different catalog number (CS 6781) and a different cover, as well as notably inferior sound. Audiophiles would do well to avoid it.

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Venice on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical and Orchestral Music

Classic Records remastered the tapes for LSC 2313 and even the people who like the sound of Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings used to complain about it, so you can imagine what we think of it.

What a piece of garbage. With smeary, shrill, screechy strings, it gives no indication of the beauty that is on the tape. 

The Victrola reissue, VICS 1119, is dramatically better sounding than any other reissue of the album we have played, including of course the Classic, and may even be better sounding that the Shaded Dog original itself.

This Heavy Vinyl reissue is noticeably lacking in a number of areas that are important to the proper presentation of orchestral music. If you own a copy of this title, listen for the qualities we identified above in the sound that came up short.

Below you will find links to other records that have the same shortcomings we heard when playing the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2313.

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Hungarian Rhapsodies 1, 4, 5 & 6 – Wait a Minute

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year in our experience. Just the opposite in fact.

The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.

It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.

But wait a minute.

Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.

How did they get this one so wrong?

We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.

Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.

One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.

We actually like testing records, and we’ve refined* a method for testing that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.

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This Carmen Ballet Is a Great Test Disc for Shrill, Gritty Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

I’ve added some tubes-versus-transistors commentary at the bottom of this posting.

This Angel Melodiya pressing of Bizet’s Carmen, rearranged by Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin for strings and 47 percussion instruments, has two incredible sides. Demo Quality Sound barely begins to do it justice. If you have the system to play it, this copy is a KNOCKOUT.

But boy is it a difficult record to reproduce. You better have everything working right when you play this one — it’s guaranteed to bring practically any audiophile system to its knees.

Speed, resolving power and freedom from distortion are what this record needs to sound its best.

Is your system up to it? There’s only one way to find out.

And if you have any peaky audiophile wire in your system, the kind that is full of detail but calls attention to itself, you are in big trouble with a record like this.

More than anything, this is a record that rewards your system’s neutrality.

Testing

This is a superb Demonstration Disc, but it is also an excellent Test Disc. The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce.

Musicians are banging on so many different percussion instruments (often at the far back of the stage, or, even better, far back and left or right) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge — and when you’ve met it, a thrill. If you’ve done your homework, this is the kind of record that can show you what you’ve accomplished.

On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly gritty as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem.

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This Mercury Copland Record Had Screechy, Shrill Strings

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Our notes for SR 90246 read:

Lively and clear but screechy strings. Dry and bright sound.

To help you avoid records with these sonic faults, we’ve linked below to others with similar problems.

Here are some titles we’ve found that tend to have dry sound, and here are some that tend to have bright sound.

And of course shrill strings are the kiss of death on any orchestral record. (Classic Records, I’m talking to you!)

None?

None of the copies of SR 90246 we played were any good, but the RFR3 / RFR6 was the worst of the bunch.

Are there good sounding pressings of the recording?

There may well be. We didn’t hear any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

However, we have no intention of spending more money trying to find them. If you know of some killer stampers for the album, please shoot us an email.

We tend to like Dorati’s work with the London Symphony Orchestra, but in this case the better Dorati/Copland record was recorded in Minneapolis in 1959, SR 90172.

If You’re a Fan

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have.

But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

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MoFi’s Pictures at an Exhibition Is as Wrong as Wrong Can Be

moussmofiHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mussorgsky Available Now

If you like orchestral spectaculars, have we got the record for you.

It’s the same recording of the works, but the one you want is on the real EMI label and pressed on UK import vinyl, not this awful Half-Speed recut from Japan.

The record you see pictured is awful sounding, a true hall of shame pressing.

And why are the colors of the album jacket so washed out? Compare their cover to the real thing below. As we often find ourselves asking after reviewing one of these MoFi records: What were they thinking?

The MoFi mastering of Pictures at an Exhibition and The Firebird here are a bad joke played on credulous audiophiles. And yes, I bought them both back when they came out. I was as credulous as everybody else buying these so-called superior pressings.

All that phony boosted top end makes the strings sound funny and causes mischief in virtually every other part of the orchestra as well. Not surprisingly, those boosted highs are missing from the real EMIs.

These appear to be the unbearably bright strings that Stan Ricker favors — why, we have no idea.

The proof? Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

The last time I played a copy of the MFSL I found the sound so hi-fi-ish I couldn’t stand to be in the room with it for more than a minute. Of course the bass is jello as well.

The EMI with the right stampers is worlds better.

(Warning: The domestic Angel regular version and the 45 are both awful.)

MoFi had a bad habit of making bright classical records. (More reviews here.) I suppose you could say they had a bad habit of making bright records in general. A few are dull, some are just right, but most of them are bright in one way or another.

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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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The Four Seasons Direct to Disc at 45 RPM

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Antonio Vivaldi Available Now

This RCA Direct-to-Disc 45 RPM Double LP has awful sound, with exceptionally hard and shrill string tone.

This is precisely why we dislike Japanese pressings as a rule — they sound like this audiophile trash.

If you own this album, it should make a good one for testing string tone and texture. The strings on this record are awful, and they should sound awful on your stereo too.

The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile

You may have seen this text in another listing, but it bears repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.

There has been one big change from the days when I self-identified as a freshly minted audiophile in the ’70s.

Yes, the records being marketed to audiophiles these days may have second- and third-rate sound, but at least now they have good music. That’s progress, right?

The title reviewed above is a good example of the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to put up with back in the old days, long before we had anything resembling a clue.

This one clearly belongs on our list of bad audiophile records.

You might be asking: What kind of audio fool was I? to buy a dumbass record like this.

It’s a fair question. Yes, I admit I was foolish enough to buy records like this and expect it to have good music, or at least good sound. Of course it had neither. Practically none of these kinds of records ever did. Sheffield and a few others made some good ones, but most Direct to Disc recordings were crap.

As clueless as I was, even back in the day I could tell that I had just thrown my money away on this lipsticked-pig in a poke.

But I was an audiophile, and like a certain Mr. Mulder, I wanted to believe. These special super-hi-fidelity records were being made for me, for special people like me, because I had expensive equipment and regular records are never going to be good enough to play on my special equipment, right?

To say I was wrong to think about audio that way is obviously an understatement. Over the course of the last forty years, I (and to be fair, my friends and my staff) have been wrong about a lots of things in the worlds of records and audio.

You can read more about many of the things we got wrong under the heading: live and learn.

The good news? Audio progress is real and anyone who goes about doing audio the right way can achieve a great deal.

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This MoFi Makes My Head Hurt

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Strauss Available Now

Is the painting on the cover that of a man whose head is suffering from the ridiculously shrill string tone of this MoFi?

Doubtful. Impossible actually. But that’s exactly how my head feels when I play one of these awful MoFi classical LPs.

Their rock, pop and jazz remasters were hit and miss in the old days, with some real winners hidden amongst the junk, but their classical releases that I’ve played, without exception, was a dog.

Want a good way to know you’re dealing with bad records and collector mentality?

When you find one of these records in your local used record store, it is almost guaranteed to be pristine.

Good records get played. MoFi’s classical releases, like plenty of other classical records audiophiles found attractive, got collected and spent most of their days sitting on a shelf, out to pasture so to speak.

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We Were Way Off the Mark with this Rodrigo Recording in 2010

More of the music of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

In 2010 we did a shootout for this title and thought we had found a good one. We wrote:

A good side one backed with a lovely side two! We shot out a stack of these recently and side two of this copy was one of the few sides that really impressed us. The sound is transparent and full of energy. Side one is pretty good but a bit crude in the louder passages.

This is a wonderful record. The performance here by the first family of guitar is legendary. More importantly, the music is delightful and belongs in any serious classical collection.

RFR-1 stampers. What the best originals like this one give you is immediacy. The attack of the guitar is more real.

Comparing this with the Golden Import shows you that some of the transients are smoothed over on that pressing.

If you’ve got the front end that can deal with the Mercury upper midrange and transient attack, the strings will sound textured and clear, not harsh or shrill. (A badly mastered version of this record would make your ears bleed.)

More importantly, this copy captures the sounds of the guitars perfectly. I doubt if anybody could do it as well as Mercury.

Recently we did the shootout again and came up with very different findings:

Now those same stampers are tubey and weighty, but the strings are too hot (bright and shrill) and flat (lacking richness).

We can sum up the sound of these stampers — on a different copy of course, something to keep in mind — in one word:

Ouch.

Please allow us to help you avoid making the same mistakes we did:

  • More records with bright sound can be found here
  • More records with flat sound can be found here

What’s So Golden About These Imports Anyway?

And by the way, we would never even bother to reserve the studio time to play a Golden Import pressing these days. I can count on one hand the titles that actually sound good to me and it’s just not worth the labor to find the one out of fifty that has hi-fidelity sound as we currently define it.

This commentary gets at our disappointed feelings about the label.

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