Boasting two INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this original Maroon Label pressing of these delightful orchestral works is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
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, and the crazy thing is we bought this one sealed, unplayed, so don’t expect to find one quieter than this, they didn’t know how to make them any quieter
The sound is big and open, and like so many Mercury recordings with the London Symphony, it’s rich and full-bodied, not thin and nasally as is so often the case with their domestically recorded releases
In many ways this album would certainly serve quite well as an audiophile Demo Disc – the timbre of the wide array of instruments used is right on the money
For those who haven’t been to our Skeptical Audiophile blog, this is a good example of a record which has the same stampers on every copy we played, but only one sounded the way this one does
The good stampers and the bad stampers are the same stampers, more evidence that the only way to find a pressing this good is to have a pile of cleaned copies and play them one at a time
This record was previously on the TAS Super Disc list but has since been dropped, which is only fitting since the current crop of nitwits running the show there has been watering the list down with one crappy title after another — many on Heavy Vinyl — since HP passed in 2014
