Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
This record has no marks that play appreciably, but that RCA vinyl is up to its old tricks again.
Mint Minus Minus with constant light surface noise underneath the music in the quieter sections is the rule. The first half inch of side two is where you will notice it the most.
We are of the opinion that good sound and good music allow you to pretty much ignore surfaces such as these (scratches being another thing entirely of course).
Better Front Ends
I would make the further point that the better your front end is, the less likely you are to have a problem with vinyl like this, which is the opposite of what many audiophiles perceive to be the case. In other words, some of the cheaper tables and carts seem to make the surface noise more objectionable, not less. (They also tend to collapse completely under the weight of a mighty recordings.)
On the other hand, some pricey cartridges — the Benz line comes to mind — are consistently noisier than those by Dynavector, Lyra and others, in our experience anyway.
Vintage Vinyl
As long as vintage vinyl is the only vinyl with sound worth pursuing, as is surely the case these days and will be the case for the forseeable future — we have ample evidence to support this statement for this who are interested in that lamentable reality — a quiet cartridge and a very high quality arm are essential to your being able to recognize good records and reproduce them properly.
Our Dynavector 17Dx gets down deep into the groove, where vintage used records have the least number of problems created by their previous owners.
And we run it nude for even better sound. I discovered this possibility more than a decade ago — so long ago that I cannot remember where I came by the information — but the sound was immediately so much better that all questions were answered moments after dropping the needle.
Not a lot of things are obvious, but that sure was.