transparent

Phase IV and the TAS List – Three-Dimensional Depth, Transparency and Space

Hot Stamper Pressings of Phase 4 Recordings Available Now

The best Hot Stamper pressings of this TAS List album, one of the greatest and most famous orchestral blockbuster soundtracks ever recorded, more than live up to our expectations for Decca Phase 4. This is Phase 4 done right.

As with all the best Herrmann releases, the huge size and scope you hear is the sound of orchestral music recorded in glorious analog.

The sound is so clear, spacious and three-dimensional that you will feel as if your speakers have disappeared before your very eyes.

The layering of depth is really something to hear on the best copies, with choirs of brass instruments located precisely in space, some further back, some off to the side of the soundstage. And what a soundstage it is, so wide and deep.

Transparency is what allows this all to sound real.

Opacity Vs. Transparency

Note that we have been especially anti-Heavy Vinyl in our recent commentaries for their consistently opaque character, the opposite of what makes it possible to hear into the music, deep into the soundstage, to see and hear all the instruments, even the ones placed far back.

Try that with any Classic Records or Speakers Corner pressing. It’s records like this that show you precisely what you have been missing all these years if you have been collecting and playing releases from those two labels and the others like them.

Tubey Magic with Clarity

Yes, Decca in 1977 managed to keep its lovely Tubey Magical analog sound without getting mired in the muck of tube smear and thickness, the kind that bedevils so many pressings from the 50s.

Couple that with real bite to the brass and texture to the strings and you have the best of both worlds on one record.

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The Power of the Orchestra – Remastered by the Brain Trust at Chesky

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pictures at an Exhibition Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Lifeless, compressed and thin sounding, here you will find practically none of the weight and whomp that turn the best Living Stereo pressings into the powerful listening experiences we know them to be.

We know that because we’ve played them by the hundreds on big speakers at loud levels.

It’s clean and transparent, I’ll give it that, which is no doubt why so many audiophiles have been fooled into thinking it actually sounds better than the original.

But of course there is no original. There are thousands of them, and they all sound different. (A concept we embraced many years ago and have never found any reason to doubt.)

The commentary reproduced below, from way back when, discusses a pair of records that proves our case in the clearest possible way.

We sold a 2-pack of Hot Stamper pressings, one with a good side one and one with a good side two. Why? Because the other sides were terrible! If you have a bad original, perhaps the Chesky will be better.

Our advice is not to own a bad original, or this poorly-mastered Chesky reissue, but instead we advise that you make the effort to find a good original, or two or three, as many as it takes to get two good sides.

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Compression Works Its Magic on The Christmas Eve Suite

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Some notes about the compression effects we heard on side two of a Blueback pressing of The Christmas Eve Suite album back in 2012. We wrote:

Side two is even more transparent and high-rez than side one. The texture on the strings and the breathy quality of the woodwinds make this a very special pressing indeed.

The horns are somewhat smeary and do get a bit congested when loud.

There is more compression on this side two than there was on the best copy we played, and that means low level detail is superb, but louder parts, such as when the more powerful brass instruments come in, can present problems.

Note how good The Flight of the Bumble Bee sounds here.

Compression is helping bring out all the ambience and detail in the recording, and there’s no downside because the orchestra is playing softly, unlike the piece that precedes it.

A classic case of compression having sonic tradeoffs.

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Schubert / Death and the Maiden / Julliard String Quartet

More of the Music of Franz Schubert

  • This rare and highly sought after Shaded Dog pressing finally returns to the site, here with solid Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or BETTER from start to finish
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be amazed at how big and rich and tubey the sound is
  • Our shootout winner in this case, like many of the rare Living Stereo titles we do offer, looked fine but played with too much surface noise to be enjoyable on highly resolving equipment
  • Both of these sides are remarkably transparent, with real “rosin on the bow” resolution and naturalness that is lacking on many of the RCA chamber recordings we’ve played in the past
  • Lewis Layton engineered this TAS-approved recording and he nailed it, perfectly capturing the rich, textured sheen on the strings, the hallmark of Living Stereo sound in the 50s and 60s
  • 1960 was a great year for classical recordings – other Must Own orchestral releases can be found here

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Beethoven / Haydn / The Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings Featuring Jascha Heifetz

This is a lovely sounding pressing of cello and violin, with smooth, natural, tonally-correct sound and correctly-sized instruments, something you don’t hear often on recordings with Heifetz. They tend to have huge violins and small orchestras.

In these chamber works perhaps the engineers had an easier time of getting it right.

The sound is transparent, spacious and three-dimensional in the best Living Stereo tradition.

If you love the sound of violin and cello, played by virtuosi of the highest order, this is the record for you.

Side One

Beethoven: Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 1

Side Two

Haydn: Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra 
Rozsa: Tema con Variazioni

This is an older classical/orchestral review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

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801 – 801 Live

More Brian Eno

More Live Recordings of Interest

  • 801 Live rocks as hard as ever on this original UK Island copy boasting outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We shot out a number of other imports and this one had the presence, bass, and dynamics that were missing from most of what we played, not to mention that live rock and roll energy that old records have and new records don’t
  • Recorded at Queen Elisabeth Hall in September 1976 – one of only three gigs the group (a side project of Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera) did over a two-month period
  • 4 1/2 stars: “This album marks probably one of the last times that Eno rocked out in such an un-self-consciously fun fashion, but that’s not the only reason to buy it: 801 Live is a cohesive document of an unlikely crew who had fun and took chances. Listeners will never know what else they might have done if their schedules had been less crowded, but this album’s a good reminder.”
  • If you’re an Eno fan, or perhaps more a fan of mid-70s Art Rock, this title from 1976 is surely a Must Own.

801 Live has some of the biggest, boldest sound we have ever heard. It may not be seen as an audiophile album but it should be, if you have the system to play it. The sound is glorious — wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and as rich and dynamic as it gets.

It’s clearly a big speaker demo disc. Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

It’s also transparent, with a large, deep soundfield that really allows you to hear into the music and the space of the venue in which it was recorded.

The real kicker is the amount of energy and musical drive that these two sides have going for them.

This is what the master tape is really capable of — mind bogglingly good sound.

Top of the List

801 Live ranks near the top of the list of my All Time Favorite Albums — a desert island disc if ever there was one.

I stumbled across it decades ago and have loved it ever since. (It started when a college buddy played me the wildly original “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the album and asked me to name the tune. Eno’s take is so different from The Beatles version that I confess it took me an embarrassingly long while to catch on.)

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Hey Mr. Fantasy – Where’s the Bass?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

For our newest take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy, please click here.

A long, long time ago, probably at the start of the 2000s, we put up this early UK pressing on the Island pink label.

Charged good money for it, too, justified by the fact that the early pink label pressing would be assumed to have the best sound for audiophiles in search of higher fidelity.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right reissues are dramatically better sounding.

In fact, they handily win our shootouts, something they have been doing for at least the last ten years or so.

The pink label pressing we review below is very unlikely to earn a grade high enough to qualify for Hot Stamper status.

Our Old Listing

This pink label original Island pressing has amazingly sweet, open, extended and transparent mids and highs.

It has two major shortcomings: a lack of bass, and a fair amount of surface noise.

If you can add a few — let’s say three — dB around 50 cycles and can put up with some surface noise and scratches, you are guaranteed to hear some wonderful sound in the best tubey Island tradition. 

Side two sounds better than side one. It has more bass and is more tonally correct overall.

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.)

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Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, et al. / Music of Old Russia / Milstein

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

  • Music of Old Russia finally returns to the site on this rare, hard to find original Blue Angel Stereo pressing with two INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides
  • To call this title hard to find with the right stampers is quite an understatement — our last shootout for the album took place in 2013 (!)
  • Both of these sides are remarkably transparent, with huge amounts of space around the players, the unmistakable sonic hallmark of the properly mastered, properly pressed vintage analog LP
  • This is one of the better violin showpiece albums we have ever offered on the site

This rare, hard to find original Blue Angel stereo pressing has exquisite sound. As we noted in our listing for Milstein’s Saint-Saens Third, it is the rare Heifetz album on Shaded Dog that can compete with it.

We would rank this Angel recording/pressing with the best of Rabin and Milstein on Capitol, as well as the wonderful Ricci and Campoli discs on London/Decca.

The transparency of both sides lets you “see” the orchestra clearly, without sacrificing richness or weight.

What a record! What a performance from Nathan Milstein.

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Beethoven and Richter – Our Favorite Performance on Vinyl

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

  • A stunning copy of this wonderful concerto performance that boasts a Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, and reasonably quiet vinyl for a Shaded Dog from 1961
  • This pressing has the real Living Stereo magic in spades, but unlike most of the RCA concerto recordings, Richter, the brilliant soloist featured here, is not overly spotlighted, hence the much more natural “concert hall” sound
  • The piano is part of the orchestra, and properly sized, allowing the contributions of the other musicians to be heard more clearly, laid out as they are so elegantly across a huge and deep Boston Symphony Hall stage

In orchestral music, when it comes to clarity there is nothing close to the sound of the live performance, but some records, this one especially, give you the sense that you are hearing it all. Audio may be an illusion but it can be a very convincing one.

The spaciousness and three-dimensionality of the recording are also exceptional. Through the efforts and skill of the RCA engineers, that striking openness in the recording is somehow combined with an electrifying immediacy in the sound of the piano, no mean feat. One rarely hears both, except of course live (and not always even then).

There may be other performances of merit, but I know of no recording of this music with better sound. If you are demonstrating naturalistic sound, not bombastic Hi-Fi spectacularity, this pressing more than qualifies as a Demo Disc.

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Gounod / Borodin / The World of Ballet, Vol. 2

More Orchestral Music Conducted by Ernest Ansermet

Reviews and Commentaries for Guonod / Faust Ballet Music

Side one contains one of the most famous and sought-after pieces of music in the entire Living Stereo catalog, the wonderful Faust Ballet Music that takes up side one of LSC 2449. (The Carmen that makes up side two of the original Shaded Dog has never impressed us sonically. There are so many better recordings of the piece, the Ansermet recording on London being one of the best.) 

The hall is HUGE — so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the ’70s ushered in for the major labels such as London and RCA. (EMI is super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out of phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And often so mid-hall and distant. Sorry, just not our sound.)

Or maybe you own a batch of dense Londons from the ’70s. How many Solti records are not ridiculously thick and opaque? One out of ten? If that. We’re very wary of records recorded in the ’70s; we’ve been burned too many times.

And to tell you the truth we are not all that thrilled with most of what passes for good sound on Mehta’s London output either. If you have a high-resolution system these recordings, like those on Classic Heavy Vinyl we discuss below, leave a lot to be desired. (The Planets is a favorite whipping boy around here as you may know.)

Opacity is a real dealbreaker for us. Most of the classical records we play from later eras simply do not have the transparency that’s essential to us suspending our disbelief. (more…)