test-orchestral

Some of our favorite orchestral test discs.

A Couple of Key Tracks to Play on Pictures at an Exhibition

LHot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old listing for Pictures at an Exhibition, so take it for what it’s worth.

This TAS List record with a Super Hot stamper side one has some of the best sound we have ever heard for the Shaded Dog Reiner/CSO Pictures, and side two, although it starts out a little weak, gets going soon enough and earns a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade as well.

Side one is open and natural in the best Living Stereo tradition, with rich lower strings that have virtually no Golden Age smear.

Turn it up and listen for the big cymbal crashes — that’s the sound we love. It’s so good it even allows me to enjoy Reiner’s performance, never one of my favorites.

Side One

A++, transparent and free from smear, not many copies are going to beat this one! A little more top would have been nice.

Listen to: Samuel Goldenburg und Schmuyle

Superb sound! The brass and strings on this part of the work are as good as it gets. No smearing of the brass — it’s clean and clear like it is in the concert hall. We’re so used to hearing it wrong that it takes a record like this to remind us how good a full brass choir can really sound. (more…)

Star Wars, Close Encounters and Other Multi-Miked Messes

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

This Mobile Fidelity LP contains the music of Star Wars and Close Encounters, conducted by Zubin Mehta. The MoFi pressing is far more transparent than the London pressings we have auditioned of the album, even the ones Half Speed mastered by Stan Ricker himself.

Yes, he cut the original Londons! At Half Speed! (We’ve also played some later pressings not mastered by Stan, of course. We don’t pretend to be able to predict which version would sound the best.)

It’s still one of the better MoFi remasters, all things considered. The music, to these ears, has always been hi-fi-ish schlock, and the recording itself is too multi-miked to be taken seriously. It sounds far too much like a bad Phase IV recording, and we know whereof we speak when it comes to Phase IV, good or bad. We’ve played them by the score.

This famous record from the Top Seven of the TAS Super Disc List has the same problem, but I never hear anybody mention it. Why that is I cannot imagine, other than our favorite explanation for just about everything that seems to fly under the audiophile radar, or perhaps a better description would be flying over the heads of the self-appointed audiophile cognoscenti, our old standby, reviewer malpractice.

Bottom line, a loser, but the original Londons in our experience are even worse!

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Dialing in the Anti-Skate with Massed Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

I once adjusted my anti-skate while playing this very album, at the time dialing it in to what I thought was a “T.” 

Over the years I’ve found that the best test for fine anti-skate adjustment is massed strings, and not just at the end of a side but right at the part of the record in which the anti-skate has been engaged. This will vary with different arms.

When you have all the rosiny texture, the high-end harmonic extension, the least shrillness and the widest and deepest staging, you are there — assuming that tracking weight, azimuth and VTA are correct as well.

Four variables to mess with admittedly is a bitch, but having the right record to test with is absolutely critical as well. Maybe we should call it five variables.

And if I only had one record to bring to someone’s house in order to evaluate their equipment, this would certainly be a top choice. If you can make this record sound the way it should, your stereo is cookin’. If you are having problems, this record will show them to you in short order.

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Violin Recordings and the Problem of Smear

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

This Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2129 had practically no smear on either the violin or the orchestra.

Try to find a violin concerto record with no smear.

We often say that Shaded Dogs, being vintage All Tube recordings, tend to have tube smear.

But what about the 70s transistor mastered Red Label pressings – where does their smear come from?

Let’s face it: records from every era more often than not have some amount of smear.

And we can never really know what accounts for it.

The key thing is to be able to recognize it for what it is.

(We find modern records, especially those pressed at RTI, to be quite smeary as a rule. They also tend to be congested, blurry, thick, veiled, and ambience-challenged. For some reason most audiophiles — and the reviewers who write for them — rarely seem to notice these shortcomings.)

Of course, if your system itself has smear it becomes that much harder to hear the smear on your records.  Practically every tube system I have ever heard had more smear than I could tolerate – it comes with the territory. And high-powered transistor amps are notoriously smeary, opaque and ambience-challenged. Our low-powered, all-transistor rig has no trouble showing us the amount of smear on records, including those that have virtually none.

Keep in mind that one thing live music never has is smear of any kind. Live music is smear-free. It can be harmonically distorted, hard, edgy, thin, fat, dark, and all the rest, but one thing it can never be is smeary.

That is a shortcoming unique to the reproduction of music, and one which causes many of the pressings we sell to have their sonic grades lowered.

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The Bloated Cello Sound Some Find Appealing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We made a crack about the Starker Mercury recordings below which we gernerally no longer agree with, although I am sure there are some pressings which have bloated sound. Those are the ones that don’t win shootouts.

On this pressing we were a bit surprised at how natural the cello sounded — more like the real instrument and less like the typical recording of it. 

Normally when recording the cello, the microphones are placed fairly close to the instrument. This often results in what’s known as the “proximity effect,” which simply describes a boost in the lower frequencies relative to the more linear response of the microphone when placed at a distance.

The famous Starker cello recordings on Mercury — you know the ones, the originals and even the reissues sell for hundreds and hundreds of dollars — suffer from this effect, which audiophiles seem to prefer. (The Mercury heavy vinyl reissues, at least the ones I’ve played, were ridiculously fat and bloated in the bottom.)

Audiophiles did not seem to mind much, judging by the apparently strong sales and the rave reviews I read. Bass shy systems, and that means most of the systems owned by audiophiles, probably benefited from the bass boost.

Systems with lots of large woofers — at least in our case — would of course make the sound of these pressings positively unbearable. That indeed was our experience.

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This Pressing of Carmen Had Dry Strings on One Side, Rich Strings on the Other

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

My notes for side two on a copy we recently auditioned read:

Could use more tubes.

Strings could be a bit smoother.

Needs a bit more weight down low.

My notes for side one:

Side one had all of this and more!

Some Common Issues with Londons and Deccas

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, which thins out the sound, easily heard in the lower strings, which sound washed out.

On some sides of some copies the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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A 45 RPM Audiophile Pressing to Put Them All to Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

This Japanese 45 RPM remastering of our favorite recording of Prokofiev’s wonderful Lt. Kije Suite has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND. For starters, there are very few records with dynamics comparable to these. Since this is my favorite performance of all time, I can’t recommend the record any more highly. 

Most of what’s “bad” about a DG recording from 1978 is ameliorated with this pressing. The bass drum (drums?) here must be heard to be believed. We know of no Golden Age recording with as believable a presentation of the instrument as this.

The drum is clearly and precisely located at the back of the stage; even better, it’s as huge and powerful and room-filling as it would have been had you attended the session yourself. That’s our idea of hi-fidelity here at Better Records.

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Sometimes Tubey Magic Comes at a Fairly Steep Price

Living Stereo Hot Stamper Orchestral Titles Available Now

This famous Shaded Dog, containing two superb performances by Monteux and the LSO, has many of the Golden Age strengths and weaknesses we know well here at Better Records, having auditioned hundreds upon hundreds of these vintage pressings over the last twenty years or so. 

The wonderful sounding tube compressors that were used back in the day result in quieter passages that are positively swimming in ambience and low-level orchestral detail. Tube compression is often a large part of what we mean when we use the term Tubey Magic.

If you want to know what zero Tubey Magic sounds like, play some Telarcs or Reference Recordings from the 70s and 80s. Or a modern digital recording on CD.

But all that sweet and rich Tubey Magic comes at a price when it’s time for the orchestra to get loud.

It either can’t, or the louder passages simply distort from compressor overload.

Fortunately, on this copy the orchestra does not distort, it simply never gets as loud as it would in a real concert hall, clearly the lesser and more preferable of the two evils.

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A Lively Hall Creates the Right Sound for Dances of Old Vienna

Hot Stamper Pressings on Two of Our Favorite Labels, Decca & London

Wow, what a find! Dances of Old Vienna is a WONDERFUL sounding record with vintage Decca / London sound. Even as late as 1968 Decca was still able to produce recordings that are tonally correct from top to bottom and full of Tubey Magic.

There is not a trace of hyped-up sound to be found on this record. It’s unbelievably spacious and three-dimensional, with depth to rival any recording you may own.

The sound is especially spacious partly because the recording is of a fairly small ensemble, playing in a lively hall, exactly the kind of venue in which this music was meant to be heard.

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Violin and Piano Concerto Recordings that Fall Apart

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Piano Concerto Recordings Available Now

Many of the vintage orchestral recordings we’ve auditioned over the years did a good job of capturing the lead instrument in a concerto — for example, the piano or violin — but fell apart completely when the orchestra came in, with unacceptable levels of congestion and distortion.

Orchestras are hard to record. Pianos and violins, not so much.

Here are some titles that often have congestion problems when they get loud. If you play your orchestral recordings at moderate levels, you may not be as bothered by this problem as we are, because we do not have the luxury of listening at moderate levels.

We have to put the records through the ringer, and one of the ringers they must go through is they must sound right at loud levels, because live music gets loud, and it does it without getting distorted or congested.

Congestion and distortion are problems for practically all the titles you rarely see on our site, the vintage pressings of recordings by EMI, DG, Philips, Columbia and dozens of others.

We discussed the problem here in more detail.