Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now
Here is how we described a recent Shootout Winning copy of Porgy and Bess.
Spacious, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, with Ella and Louis front and center, this is the sound you want to hear on their brilliant collaboration from 1958.
Two vocal giants came together to perform Gershwin’s timeless opera, revered by both music lovers and audiophiles to this day. If you’ve never heard exceptionally well recorded male and female vocals from the 50s, this is a great opportunity to have your mind blown.
Speakers Corner contracted Ryan Smith at Sterling to remaster their Heavy Vinyl pressing in 2013, which might sound like a wise move — Sterling has a good reputation around these parts, even if RKS does not — but the results were disastrous.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Our notes tell the story of the sound, and it’s not pretty. Painful is actually the word that comes to mind.
Pity our poor listening panel that had to sit through a record that sounds as bad as this one does.
(This is a four sided set but we could not see the point in playing all of them when the first two sucked so badly.)
(Technically they don’t “have to” play these Heavy Vinyl pressings. We don’t force our talented staff to waste their time on modern records. They do it because they choose to, in order to have a better idea of what the competition is up to. Turns out the competition is up to no good.)
Our two sentence review should tell you everything you need to know. Let us hope it saves you from throwing your money away the way we did.
- Loud, dry and pinched.
- Hot vocals, no space, very sour and lacking bass.
When the voice is wrong, the sound is wrong. What more do you need to know?
And when the voice is wrong on a legendary recording such as this, you have a worthless piece of vinyl no matter how much you may have paid for it. (Current price on Discogs: about a hundred bucks.)
