Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now
Hard, sour, colored and crude.
Oh, and airless. Make that five words.
It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of Balalaika Favorites, but I remember it as unpleasantly hard and sour.
Many of the later Mercury reissues — some pressed by Columbia, some not — had that sound, so I was already familiar with it when their pressing came out in 1998 as part of the just-plain-awful Mercury series they released.
I suspect I would hear it that way today. Bernie Grundman could cut the bass, the dynamics, and the energy onto the record.
Everything else was worse 99% of the time.
The fast transients of the plucked strings of the Balalaikas were way beyond the ability of his colored and crude cutting system.
In addition, harmonic extension and midrange delicacy were qualities that practically no Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing could claim to have.
Or, to be precise, they claimed to have them, and whether audiophiles really believed they did or not, Classic Records sure fooled a lot of them, along with the reviewers that vomited out the facile and reductive superficialities that pass these days for audio journalism.
The better your stereo gets, the worse those records sound, and they continue to fall further and further behind with each passing year.
