hard-sound

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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The Up-Front Vocals on Bringing It All Back Home Can Be a Bit Much

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

It’s hard to find copies of this album that give you the tubey richness and warmth that this music needs to sound its best. We’ve done this shootout a number of times over the years, but I can count the number of Hot Stamper copies that have hit the site on one hand.

A lot of copies seem to be EQ’d to put the vocals way up front, an approach that makes the voice hard and edgy. Copies like that sound impressive at first blush (“Wow, he’s really IN THE ROOM!”) but get fatiguing after a few minutes. When you get a copy that’s smooth, relaxed and natural, the music sounds so good that you may never want it to stop.

Our Hot Stamper Pressings from Years Ago

Side one is lively and present with a punchy bottom end and real depth to the soundfield. It’s also open and transparent with lots of natural ambience. Compared to the A+++ side two here, there’s a touch of grit and grain at times, but dramatically less than you get on most copies. We rated side one A++, which means you get excellent sound for Subterranean Homesick Blues, Maggie’s Farm, She Belongs To Me and a few more classic Dylan tracks.

Side two was UNSTOPPABLE — it was clearly As Good As It Gets based on years of listening and scores of copies auditioned over the years. Everything sounds right — the vocals and guitar sound wonderfully natural and correct with superb clarity and lots of richness and warmth. 

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Is the Heavy Vinyl from 2012 the Best Sounding Sgt. Pepper?

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

You might agree with some reviewers that EMI’s engineers did a pretty good job with the new stereo pressing of Sgt. Pepper mastered by Sean Magee from the 2009 digitally remastered tapes.

In the March 2013 issue of Stereophile Art Dudley weighed in, finding little to fault on this title but being less impressed with most of the others in the new box set. His reference disc? The MoFi UHQR! Oh, and he also has some old mono pressings and a domestic Let It Be.

Now there’s a man who knows his Beatles. Fanatical? Of course he is! We’re talkin’ The Beatles for Chrissakes.

When I read the reviews by writers such as these, I often get the sense that I must’ve fallen through some sort of Audio Time Warp and landed back in 1982. How is it that our so-called experts evince so little understanding of how records are made, how variable the pressings can be, and, more importantly, how absolutely crucial it is to understand and implement rigorous protocols when attempting to carry out comparisons among pressings.

Critically comparing LPs is difficult and time-consuming. It requires highly developed listening skills. I didn’t know how to do it in 1982. I see no evidence that the audiophile reviewers of today are much better at it now than I was in 1982.

Just to take one example: They all seem to be operating under the same evidence-free conceit: that the original is the benchmark against which other pressings must be compared.

To those of us who have played Beatles pressings by the hundreds, this is patent nonsense. To cite just one instance, a recent Hot Stamper listing notes [inaccurately as it turns out, see below]:

We defy any original to step into the ring with it. One thing we can tell you, it would not be a fair fight. The cutting equipment to make a record of this quality did not exist in 1967, not at EMI anyway.

We had the opportunity not long ago to audition a very clean original early pressing of the album and were frankly taken aback by how AWFUL it was in virtually every respect. No top end above 8k or so, flabby bass, murky mids — this was as far from Hot Stamper sound as one could imagine. If it were a Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile pressing we would surely have graded it F and put it in our Hall of Shame.

To be fair we have played exactly one early copy of the record on our current system. (Played a copy or two long ago but on much different equipment, so any judgments we might have made must be considered highly suspect.) Perhaps there are good ones. We have no way of knowing whether there are, and we are certainly not motivated to find out given the price that original Sgt. Pepper’s are fetching these days.

We can tell you this much: no original British pressing of any Beatles album up through Pepper has ever impressed us sonically. We’ve played plenty and have yet to hear one that’s not congested, crude, distorted, bandwidth-limited and full of tube smear. (The monos suffer from all of these problems and more of course, which is only natural; they too are made with the Old School cutting equipment of the day.)

If that’s your sound more power to you. It’s definitely not ours. The hotter the stamper, the less congested, crude, distorted, bandwidth-limited and smeary it will be. (Or your money back.)

UPDATE 2023

There is a copy of a Beatles album on the original label that was competitive with our best 70s pressings, this one. We explained why it’s not a problem to admit we were wrong about the album in question, For Sale, this way:

This finding about For Sale is precisely why live and learn is our motto.

We don’t know it all, and we’ve never claimed that we did. We constantly learn things about pressings in our daily shootouts. That should not be too surprising, as record shootouts are the only way to learn anything about the sound of records that’s actually worth knowing.

Start doing your own experiments and your record knowledge might just take off the way ours has. 99% of what we think we know about the sound of records we’ve learned in shootouts over the course of the last twenty years.

Here is our advice on getting started.

Before this, the only Beatles record we would sell on the Yellow and Black Parlophone label was A Collection of Oldies… But Goldies. That title does have the best sound on the early label. In numerous shootouts, no Black and Silver label pressing from the ’70s was competitive with the best stereo copies made in the ’60s.

Until now, it was clearly the exception to our rule. From With the Beatles up through Yellow Submarine, the best sounding Beatles pressings would always be found on the 70s reissue label.

The Best Pepper Pressings

How did we come to find the best Sgt. Peppers pressings? Our recent commentary about a wonderful Benny Carter record on the original Contemporary Black Label may serve to shed some light on the process.

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On LSC 2222, How Does the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl Compare?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

In 2005 we played an excellent original pressing of Debussy’s Iberia (LSC 2222) and compared it to the Classic Records reissue. We wrote:

This is a wonderful sounding Shaded Dog pressing. Side two is especially dynamic.

This has long been considered one of the Living Stereo triumphs. The spaciousness and tonal correctness are legendary.  However, this copy does not have the prodigious bass of some that I’ve heard.

The Classic reissue has plenty of deep bass, but it’s shrill and hard and altogether unpleasant, so the better bass comes at a steep price.

For better sounding recordings of Iberia, we know of two and they can be found by clicking here.

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Spirit – The Mono Rocks

More Psychedelic Rock

This review was written in 2010. I doubt we would prefer the mono pressings to the stereo pressings were we to do the shootout this year, but you never know. (Don’t get your hopes up. We simply can’t find clean copies of this album anymore.)

That’s what shootouts are for, to give you the data to back up your opinions and your guesses. Without more current data, who can say which of the two we would prefer?

Our old review:

A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock Hall of Fame, not for the best Hot Stamper stereo copies, but for this amazing MONO. 

This killer pressing from 2010 has almost EVERYTHING you want from this ’60s Psych Pop Masterpiece — the energy, presence and sheer rock and roll POWER made a mockery of every stereo copy we played.

Want a glimpse into the kind of energy the band was generating in the studio? Drop the needle on Fresh Garbage, the opening track of this amazing mono pressing, and you will hear this band come alive in a way you never imagined you’d ever hear them.

It’s positively startling how immediate and powerful the sound is here.

That said, from an audiophile point of view, mono does involve a sacrifice — the huge three-dimensional soundstage of the best stereo copies is nowhere to be found here.

From a musical or performance point of view, this mono cannot be beat; it shows the band at their best, fired up and ready to show the world that The Doors are not the only SoCal rock band who have innovative ideas about rock music and the performing chops to pull off their conceptions, not to mention the studio wizards backing them to get it all down on tape.

If I had to choose between The Doors’ first album and Spirit’s, say for a nice drive up the coast with the top down, no contest, Spirit would get the nod. I had the album on 8 Track back in high school and played it to death. Doing this shootout, hearing the album sound so good after so many years, was nothing less than a THRILL. (I went right up to Amazon and bought a CD for the car. Might just take a drive up the coast.)

If you like Surrealistic Pillow and Revolver/Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles and early Doors albums, and you don’t know this album well, you are really in for a treat. This album is a classic of its day that still holds up forty plus years later. I cannot recommend any current album on the site more highly.

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Dream With Dean, But Watch Out for Hard and Honky Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

Dream with Dean is great for finding any traces of “honk” in your midrange. Getting Deano’s baritone to sound tubey and rich, to get the sound that Bing Crosby could get just by opening his mouth, is not all that easy on some systems, mine included.

Correctly set VTA is critical in this regard, but pretty much everything must be working at its best for Dean to sound as intimate and natural as we know he can on the best pressings.

Balancing the lower mids with the upper mids is the goal, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. This album is great for testing, and guaranteed to bring practically any high-dollar system at a stereo showroom, a convention, or your very own home to its knees.

This is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet behind him (featuring Contemporary favorites Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell!) doing standards. On the best copies, the immediacy is absolutely mind-blowing. It’s a shame that there aren’t more Frank Sinatra records that sound like this.

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There’s a Riot Goin’ On – From the Analog Master!

More of the Music of Sly and the Family Stone

Sonic Grade: F

Ouch this record sounds bad. Some of the worst sound I have ever heard on Heavy Vinyl. The average cassette sounds better than this piece of crap.

My notes:

Side one: track one is thin and hard. Track two is not very tubey and the sibilance is harsh.

Side two: track two is full and tubey but track three shows that the sound may be tubey but it is very compressed.

But some people think that records that were made from the analog master tapes should sound good. 

Especially when those records were pressed on virgin vinyl.

But do they?

This one sure doesn’t. What could possibly have gone wrong?

We have no idea. We just play the records and listen to them. We let them tell us if they are wrong or right.

This one told us it may have been made from good tapes — may have been, the good folks at Columbia records might be lying to us about that, it wouldn’t be the first time and I certainly would not put it past them — but it sure wasn’t made very well.

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Bernie Grundman’s Work for Classic Records in Four Words

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.

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Slow Dancer – Common Problems

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Boz Scaggs

This is an album of wonderful white soul music. As a bonus, it also happens to be very well recorded. The problem we ran into on copy after copy was a brighter than ideal tonal balance, hard vocals and, on those copies that don’t extend fully on the top and bottom, a somewhat squashed, peaky midrange.

The better copies deal with those issues and, for the most part solve them. There’s lovely texture to the strings, plenty of punchy rich bass, and all the elements of the recording are properly balanced, something they still knew how to do back in the all analog days of 1974, I’m glad to report. (more…)

Strauss / Carnival in Vienna / Ormandy – Reviewed in 2011

More Johann Strauss

Side two of this two-eye Columbia pressing has EXCELLENT sound, rating a sonic grade of A+ to A++. With a grade such as that it ranks somewhere in the Top Five Per Cent of Columbia pressings I would guess, only because so many Columbias are just plain awful. Is even one out of ten passable? I doubt it. But this one is! It’s quite good in fact, with an extended top end and lovely texture to the strings. (more…)