Hot Stamper Pressings with Jascha Heifetz Performing
Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings Featuring Jascha Heifetz
Years ago we wrote:
This is a very old review, probably from the early 2010s, so take it for what it’s worth. I suspect we could find a much better sounding copy of the album today than we could back then, before we had the cleaning systems and playback equipment we do now.
All that turned out to be true.
In 2024 we did another shootout for this album, our first in more than ten years! I am happy to say the sound was a knockout on the best copies, some of the finest violin concerto sound we have ever heard.
Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are happy to help you do that.)
Our old comments follow:
Both sides of this Shaded Dog pressing of Heifetz and the New Symphony Orchestra of London have sound that earned the quite respectable sonic grades of A+ to A++.
Side one is tonally correct and lively, but suffers from a bit of the all-too-common tube smear, no doubt from the mastering chains and record presses that were in use at the time.
Most modern mastering chains and record presses are, to our ears, even worse, so this is not to denigrate the engineers at RCA in any way. It’s simply to say that with Tubey Magic you often get tubey smear. (more…)