smeary-strings

The Cisco Pressing of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings with Heifetz Performing

An audiophile hall of shame pressing from Cisco / Impex / Boxstar / whatever.

The Cisco pressing of LSC 2577 should not have sound that is acceptable to any person who considers himself an audiophile.

There is no violinist in front of you when you play their pressing.

There is someone back behind your speakers under a thick blanket, and his violin sure doesn’t sound very much like a real violin — no rosiny texture, no extended harmonics, no real body.

In short, the sound of this reissue is much too smeary, veiled, and lacking in presence to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately for those of us who love good music with good sound, Cisco’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject in more depth here.

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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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On Ballet Music From The Opera, How Much Tubey Magic Is Too Much?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2023

We have stopped buying the original LSC 2400 for the simple reason that it is not competitive with the budget VICS 1206 reissue from 1960 that replaced it in the RCA catalog.

The review we wrote for the Shaded Dog is probably close to twenty years old. There was a time when the shortcomings of the original RCA were not nearly as easy for us to recognize, but that time has long since past.

If any copy of the original, or any remastered version from the modern era sounds good to you, we can almost guarantee that you are mistaken about the quality of the sound, and, even better, we can offer you the pressing that makes our case better than any review can.

Our Old Review

The hall is HUGE — so transparent, spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA. (Many of Solti’s recordings from the decade are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.)

EMI recordings may be super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out-of-phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And often so mid-hall and distant. Not our sound, sorry.

We strongly believe that there will never be a modern reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found on the best of these Living Stereo original pressings.

Here are some of the strengths and weaknesses we noted on a copy we played way back when.

Side One

Big and lively. The Tubey Magical colorations are a bit much for us, with too much tube smear on the strings and brass to earn more than a single plus. 

Side Two

Even bigger and more spacious, with some smear caused by the serious amounts of tube compression being used, of course, but the quiet passages are magical. [Which is precisely what heavy tube compression is designed to accomplish.]

The Victrola Reissue

We much prefer the sound of the Victrola reissue, VICS 1206, which came out in 1966.

As for the Victrola pressing, we’re guessing — how could we possibly know for sure? — that less tube compression was used in the mastering.

It’s still plenty tubey, but more to our taste for not being overly tubey.

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This Blueback Was Somewhat Opaque and Crude – Does that Surprise You?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Felix Mendelssohn Available Now

Presenting our latest findings from 2023:

For our most recent shootout, the original we played earned grades of 1.5+ on both sides, a grade that is the absolute minimum for a Hot Stamper pressing to be listed on the site now.

Our best reissues killed it.

The 3D/3E stampers of our early Blueback copy can probably be beaten by others — assuming there are others — but this is just not a good bet for us when it comes to Mendelssohn’s famous Third Symphony, not when there are so many other pressings with superior sound.

Our favorite performance with top quality sound is made from the same recording you see here, but on a certain budget reissue that has much better sound.

It’s very possible that the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl pressing from 2003 pictured below would beat the original we describe. We make no claims that it doesn’t, or wouldn’t.

Our claim would be that a properly-mastered, properly-pressed version of the album is very unlikely to be bested by something from Speakers Corner, or any other label making records during the last thirty years.

What I would have played against the Speakers Corner pressing in 2003 would have been an original London Blueback, and maybe a Stereo Treasury or two. Both of them would have been obvious choices, and I was stuck making obvious choices because I simply did not understand enough about classical records at the time to do otherwise.

I confess I knew very little about the recording of the 3rd symphony back in those days, and I certainly didn’t know how good some of the right reissues could sound.

Obviously we needed to do a great deal more research and development, which we began to undertake over the course of the next twenty years in a much more serious way, making one discovery after another.

And that all happened out of the love for great sounding music on vinyl, and, every bit as importantly, because we get paid to do it.

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Maazel’s Pines of Rome Is Another Title Not Fit for a Super Disc List

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Pines of Rome Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at best)

I found a bit of commentary in a listing for Scheherazade, and right away it was clear to me that the shootout we did for that title showed us a recording that had much in common with the one we had done more recently for The Pines of Rome.

Here it is, with the necessary changes having been made.

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2021, one we had been planning for more than twenty years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London; the Maazel on Decca and London (the Decca being on the TAS List), the Kempe on Readers Digest, and quite a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the last movement being a real Ball Breaker, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Kempe. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing about twenty or so other pressings.

We learned from that first big go around something that we think will remain true for the foreseeable future: the 1960 Reiner recording with the Chicago Symphony on RCA just can’t be beat.

Could other pressings be better sounding? Of course they could.

Would we ever buy another copy? Not a chance.

The notes for the Decca pressing I played, mastered by G, Ted Burkett, can be seen above.

Hey, here’s an idea.

Why don’t you buy a bunch of them and see if any of them do not have the problems described on my notes.

If you find a good one, please let me know the stampers so I can go out and find one myself.

The above is of course all in good fun. We both know that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that anyone reading this commentary is going to go out and buy some Decca pressings of The Pines of Rome, clean them up, play them one by one and then critique their strengths and weaknesses.

The most likely thing is that, if you have any Decca pressing of Maazel’s Pines, it’s sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Odds are it has not been played in a very long time.

Which should tell you something. Good records get played and bad ones sit on shelves.

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Speakers Corner Peer Gynt Reviewed, with Handy VTA Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Sonic Grade: C+

The Fjeldstad has long been one of our favorite performances of Peer Gynt here at Better Records. 

This record is handy for VTA set-up as well, a subject discussed below in our listing from 2010.

The sound is excellent for a modern reissue*, but in the loudest sections the orchestra can get to be a bit much, taking on a somewhat harsh quality. (The quieter passages are superb: sweet and spacious.)

So I adjusted the VTA a bit to see what would happen, and was surprised to find that even the slightest change in VTA caused the strings to lose practically all their rosiny texture and become unbearably smeared.

This is precisely why it’s a good heavy vinyl pressing for setting up your turntable.

If you can get the strings to play with reasonably good texture on this record you probably have your VTA set correctly.

VTA

Correct VTA adjustment for classical records (as well as all other kinds of records) is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may in fact be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound or your records once you have taken the time to correctly set the VTA, by ear, for each and every record you play.

We heard the improvement on this very record, and do on all the classical LPs (and all other kinds of records) we play.

The Big Caveat

As for the asterisk (*) above, it concerns the caveat “…for a modern reissue…” What exactly do we mean by that? Allow us to reprint what we wrote about another Heavy Vinyl classical pressing, one that we actually used to like.

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Neither of These Tchaikovsky 5ths Made the Grade

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.

Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.

London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.

The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.

The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!

DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.

Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.

We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.

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Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 – An Overview of Decca’s Recordings

More of the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

This commentary was written close to a decade ago, when we were first trying to figure out which pressings and performances of the work were worth pursuing.

Please to enjoy.

We got off to a rough start with this piece of music. The early pressings we played were often sonically uninspiring, and that’s being charitable.

The London pressings with Kubelik (CS 6020) that we had thought were competitive with some of the better recordings we had on hand turned out to be disappointing.

The strings were often hard and shrill, the overall sound crude and full of smear.

These Londons cost us a pretty penny owing to the high quality condition we require them to be in for our shootouts. In the end, all that time, effort and money was for naught. A big chunk of dough was headed down the drain.

The Stereo Treasury pressing of this same performance sounded better to us than any of the Bluebacks we played but far from competitive with the recordings we ended up preferring.

The Londons and Deccas from 1967 with Kertesz conducting the LSO also left much to be desired sonically. After hearing the 9th on both London and Decca, we did a quick needle drop on the other symphonies from the complete cycle that Kertesz conducted and concluded that none of them were worth our time.

The trade-in pile was growing ever taller.

Then some good news came our way when we dropped the needle on the Decca/London recording with Mehta and the LA Phil. Our best London sounded shockingly good, much better than the one Decca pressing we had on hand.

His 8th Symphony (CS 6979) is also quite good by the way.

This is surprising because we rarely like anything by Mehta and the LA Phil. from this period — the recording in question is from 1975 — but of course we are happy to be surprised when the recordings sound as good as the ones we played.

The one that seemed to us to be the best balance of sound and performance was conducted by Istvan Kertesz, but not with the LSO.

His recording with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1961, his debut for Decca as a matter of fact, is the one that ended up winning our shootout of a dozen pressings or so.

We prefer a later mastering of the recording though, not the original.

Here are more reviews of music conducted by Kertesz, a man whose work we very much admire.

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Not as Good a TAS List Title as We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

We had a handful of copies of this famous TAS List title in the backroom, so we decided it was high time to get a shootout going. We pulled all the pressings of the music (both Billy the Kid and Rodeo) we had on hand on every label and proceeded to needle-drop them in preparation for a big Copland shootout.

Much to our chagrin, most of the copies of LSC 2195 we played were unacceptable. The sound, for the most part, was very much not to our liking. Our notes read:

  • Smeary — (more records with smeary sound can be found here),
  • Dry — (more records with dry sound can be found here),
  • Bright — (more records with bright sound can be found here),
  • Flat — (more records with flat sound can be found here),
  • Hi-Fi-ish — (more records with hi-fi-ish sound can be found here),

Those records weren’t cheap. That was a lot of money down the drain. Not only can’t we sell records that sound as bad as this Living Stereo — our customers simply would not buy them — but we would never even try. Unlike other record dealers, we actually know what our records sound like. We don’t care about the reputations of the records we sell. We only care about their sound.

Some of the records on the TAS List seem better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s, 70s and 80s than the modern systems of today.

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The First Classic Record We Ever Played – Thus Spake Zarathustra

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Way back in 1994, long before we had anything like the system we do now, we were finding fault with the “Classic Records Sound.”

With each passing year — 28 and counting — we like that sound less.  Some Classic Records pressings may be on Harry’s TAS list — disgraceful but true — but that certainly has no bearing on whether or not they are very good records. 

I had a chance to play LSC 1806 (pictured above) not long ago and I was dumbfounded at how bright, shrill and aggressive it was.

I still remember playing my first Classic Records title, their first release, which would probably have been in 1994. The deep bass of the organ at the start of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the horns and the tympani blasting out from a dead silent background, put a lump in my throat. Had they actually managed to remaster these old recordings so well that the vintage pressings I was selling for such high prices would soon be worthless? I really do remember having that thought race through my mind.

But then the strings came in, shrieking and as bright as the worst Angel or DG pressing I’d ever heard. It was as if somebody had turned the treble control up on my preamp two or three clicks, into ear-bleeding territory. All my equipment at the time was vintage and tube, and even though my system erred on the dark side tonally, the first Classic release was clearly off the charts too bright and transistory, with none of the lovely texture and sheen that RCA was famous for in the early days of Living Stereo.

I knew right then that my vintage record business was safe.

Here is our review from the ’90s, written shortly after the release of Classic’s first three titles. (With minor additions and changes for clarity and context.)

Hall of Shame Pressings, Every One

I’m reminded of the nonsense I read in TAS and elsewhere in the mid-’90s regarding the reputed superiority of the Classic Records Living Stereo reissues. After playing their first three titles: 1806, 1817 and 2222 (if memory serves), I could find no resemblance between the reviews I read and the actual sound of the records I played. The sound was, in a word, awful.

To this day I consider them to be the single worst reissue series in history.

UPDATE 2025

Analogue Productions now holds that crown, surely. Still going strong, producing one crap pressing for the mid-fi collector market after another, there is simply no recording they won’t see fit to ruin.

When Harry Pearson (of all people! — this is the guy who started the Living Stereo craze by putting these forgotten old records on the TAS list in the first place) gave a rave review to LSC 1806, I had to stand up (in print anyway) and say that the emperor clearly had removed all his clothes, if he ever had any to begin with.

This got me kicked out of TAS by the way, as Harry does not take criticism well. I make a lot of enemies in this business with my commentary and reviews, but I see no way to avoid the fallout for calling a spade a spade.

Is anybody insane enough to stand up for LSC 1806 today? Considering that there is a die-hard contingent of people who still think Mobile Fidelity is the greatest label of all time, there may well be “audiophiles” with crude audio equipment or poorly developed critical listening skills, or both (probably both, as the two go hand in hand), that still find the sound of the shrill, screechy strings of the Classic pressing somehow pleasing to the ear. Hey, anything is possible.

As I’ve said again and again, the better a stereo gets, the more obvious the differences between good vintage pressings and most current reissues become. Modest front ends and mediocre playback systems can disguise these differences and mislead the amateur audiophile.

And the “professional” too. We’ve all had the experience of going back to play a record from years ago that we remember as being amazing, only to find it amazingly bad.

The Japanese Led Zeppelin series from the 90s comes immediately to mind. How could my system have been so dull that those bright pressings actually fooled me into thinking they sounded good all those years ago? I’ve done a few Mea Culpas over the years, and that’s one of the bigger ones.

Remember when Chesky Records were all the rage? Does anybody in his right mind play that shit anymore?

A short anecdote: A good customer called me up one night many years ago. He had just finished playing the Chesky pressing of Spain, and had pulled out his Shaded Dog original to compare. The sound of his Shaded Dog pressing was so much better that he took his Chesky and, with great satisfaction, ceremoniously dropped it in the trash can, noting, “Of course I could have sold it or traded it away, but nobody should have to listen to sound like that.”

Another anecdote: when Chesky first got started in the remastering business, a friend picked up their pressing of LSC 2150, Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije with Reiner. He played it for me when I came over to hear his system, and he and I were both shocked that his ’70s Red Seal pressing was better in every way.

We wanted to know: What kind of audiophile label can’t even go head to head with a cheap reissue put out twenty years after the initial release just to keep the bins stocked and satisfy the needs of the low-budget classical record buyer?

The answer: Plenty of them, and definitely Chesky. Playing most Classic Records classical titles is a painful experience these days. I do not recommend it to anyone with good equipment. If you love the Living Stereo sound and cannot afford vintage pressings, consider playing the CDs RCA remastered. The one I know well is clearly better than Classic’s and AP’s LPs.

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