weak-performance

Mehta’s Petrushka Is Just Not Very Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

We’re big fans of Decca/London Records in general, but in this case the sound and the performances of this album are simply not good enough. 

We had three original UK pressed copies of CS 6554 and none of them sounded right to us.

What’s worse, Mehta and the Los Angeles Phil. play the work poorly. How this album got released I have no idea. Maybe it was a case of a contract is a contract. Or maybe others like it and we are simply wrong about the sound and the performance. Who can say?

This London might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we (and we hope our customers) use.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

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VICS-1030 Can Have Passable Sound for Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.

This Victrola pressing, VICS-1030, with Graffman performing, had good, not great sound. We’ve played them before and none of them was ever better than middling.

Some specifics we noted in the sound:

  • The piano was loud and clear, close-miked.
  • Boxy sound, could be richer
  • Orchestration not too compressed but veiled and small.
  • Not a standout performance.

A decent-enough record I suppose, but lacking in too many of the qualities our customers are looking for, especially at the prices we charge.

This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner for LSC 2575:

We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.

For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.

Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?

Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly, a public service from your friends here at Better Records.)

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Gabor Szabo / Mizrab – Not Much Here for Us Audiophiles

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Guitar Recordings Available Now

A weak effort from CTI in 1972.

Neither the music nor the sound, at least on the copies we played, is worth your time. 

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.

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The Enigma Variations on Mercury Was Not to Our Liking (Although We Sure Love the Cover)

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1959 Mercury (SR 90125) impressed us when we did a shootout for the work years ago.

The performance of the Enigma Variations here seems rushed, and the two other recordings of the work that we like, one on Philips, the other on RCA, are better.

The Philips with Haitink is probably the better of the time and our favorite at this time. Of the three recordings that we felt had the best combination of music and sound, the Merc with Barbarolli was our least favorite, so we decided to concentrate on the best two recordings in our shootout and get rid of the Mercury pressings we had on hand.

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Blary Brass Ruins Another Mercury – This Time It’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

The sound of the pressings we’ve played over the years has always been awful.

On SR 90217, the brass is just too sour and blary. To our knowledge, no copies of the album do not suffer from these problems.  They may exist — who can say they don’t? — but we’ve yet to play one and have no intention of seeking them out, not when there are other superior performances with top quality sound.

The performance is awful, too.

When the horns have clarity, correct tonality, plenty of space around them and a solid, full-bodied sound, probably every other instrument in the soundscape will too.

One minute into side one we knew that this Mercury had failed the brass test.

It was simply much too unpleasant to be played on modern high quality equipment.

The less revealing systems some audiophiles seem to favor can make the shortcomings of a recording such as this more tolerable, but we’ve worked very hard for many decades to make sure our system is as truthful and unforgiving as possible.

We knew right from the get-go this Mercury was not going to make the grade. Here are some others that we’ve found seriously wanting. We’ve also compiled a list of more than 40 of the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings of orchestral and classical music, and it can be found here.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky Available Now

Never liked the performance. The sound can be quite good on the best pressings, but too many copies are congested in the loudest passages.

We recently found a pressing that was quite a bit better than the other Reiner pressings we had on hand, which simply means that good pressings exist, but they are very hard to find.

However, without a good cleaning, this record is very unlikely to sound right on high quality modern equipment.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

It may be on the TAS super disc list, but that doesn’t mean the sound is up to our standards.

We much prefer Muti’s performance from 1979 for EMI.

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Neither of These Tchaikovsky 5ths Made the Grade

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.

Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.

London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.

The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.

The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!

DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.

Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.

We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.

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In 1959 Columbia Let Leonard Bernstein Record an Awful Version of Scheherazade

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Even worse, they made the mistake of releasing it!

Bernstein’s performance here is far too slow to be taken seriously. This is a record you can find in the bins for five bucks, and for five bucks it’s worth picking up just to hear how awful it is.

Our favorite Scheherazade has long been the one Ansermet conducted for Decca in 1961.

Outstanding Hot Stamper pressings of recordings from 1959, a great year for records, can be found here.

The complete list of titles from 1959 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Well Recorded Pointless Music from Dave Brubeck

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings

“Well Recorded Pointless Music” – the very definition of the Bad Audiophile Pressing. In 2010 or thereabouts we wrote the following:

This Direct Disk Labs Double LP is an exceptionally WELL-RECORDED Direct-to-Disc. The bass is punchy, the piano sounds tonally Right On The Money (ROTM) and the recording overall is lively and immediate. It’s one of the better sounding Direct-to-Discs we’ve played lately.

The music goes nowhere however, hence the grade can only be F for Failing.  

Do you buy records to hear good sound or do you buy records to listen to good music? If you’re on this site, hopefully you want both.

There are many records with music that I personally do not care for. As an unabashed systematizer — hence the hundreds of categories and tags of every possible sort on this very blog — I am naturally inclined to have a section for those records, and it can be found here.

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Mel Torme & Buddy Rich – Together Again For The First Time on Direct to Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of Big Band Recordings Available Now

This is a Century Direct-to-Disc featuring Mel Torme fronting the Buddy Rich Big Band. And it’s a pretty big band with four trumpets, three trombones, five saxes and a tuba! One of the best tracks is “Here’s That Rainy Day”, with guest soloist Phil Woods. The beginning is just Mel and Phil, a duet of sorts, with a lovely sense of melancholy.

However, both men seem tired and the session doesn’t swing much.

Or could it be that they’re playing it safe, afraid to make a mistake and then have to start the live-to-disc session over from the top?

Hard to know, but that’s the problem with direct to disc recordings — avoiding mistakes, even engineering ones, can suck the life right out of the music.

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