Elgar / Strauss
Enigma Variations / Don Juan / Haitink

This original import pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Enigma Variations / Don Juan Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1975
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren't veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we've heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

Learning the Record

For our shootout for this album, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You'll hear what's better and worse -- right and wrong would be another way of putting it -- about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle -- or fail -- to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain't rocket science, and we've never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we've explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own -- those may or may not have Hot Stampers -- but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

What We're Listening For On Enigma Variations / Don Juan

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Powerful bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Variations On An Original Theme, Op. 36 “Enigma” – Elgar

Side Two

• Variations On An Original Theme, Op. 36 “Enigma” – Elgar
14. Finale: E.D.U. (Allegro – Presto)


• “Don Juan” Op. 20 (Symphonic Poem After Nikolaus Lenau) – Strauss

Enigma Variations, for orchestra, Op. 36

At the end of an overlong day laden with teaching and other duties, Edward Elgar lit a cigar, sat at his piano and began idling over the keys. To amuse his wife, the composer began to improvise a tune and played it several times, turning each reprise into a caricature of the way one of their friends might have played it or of their personal characteristics. “I believe that you are doing something which has never been done before,” exclaimed Mrs. Elgar. Thus was born one of music’s great works of original conception, and Elgar’s greatest large-scale “hit”: the Enigma Variations. The enigma is twofold: each of the 14 variations refers to a friend of Elgar’s, who is depicted by the nature of the music, or by sonic imitation of laughs, vocal inflections, or quirks, or by more abstract allusions. The other enigma is the presence of a larger “unheard” theme which is never stated but which according to the composer is very well known. The identity of the phantom tune left the world with the composer, and guesses have ranged from “God Save the King” to a simple major scale.

This apparatus aside, the variations contain some of the most charming and deeply felt music Elgar ever penned, more than redeeming the work from the status of mere gimmickry. The main theme is hesitating, lean and haunting, and is reprised with the passionate first variation that represents Caroline, the composer’s wife, a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. The remaining variations are as follows:

• II. H.D.S.-P. — Hew Stuart-Powell, a pianist with whom Elgar played chamber music.
• III. R.B.T. — Richard Townsend, whose vocal pitch would rise when excited.
• IV. W.M.B. — William Baker, who after barking out plans for the day would leave the room with a vigorous door-slam.
• V. R.P.A. — Richard Arnold, son of the writer Matthew Arnold, who would punctuate serious discourse with a nervous laugh.
• VI. Isobel Fitton, a violist.
• VII. Troyte — Arthur Griffith, an architect and raucous pianist.
• VIII. W.N. — Winifred Norbury, a gracious and gentle friend.
• IX. Nimrod — Augustus Jaeger, Elgar’s close friend. The most beautiful and famous of the variations, this music describes a nighttime walk when Jaeger gave verbal encouragement to composer, recalling Beethoven’s determination in adversity. “Jaeger” means “hunter in German, and Nimrod was a biblical hunter.
• X. Dorabella — Dora Penny, whose infectious laugh is depicted in the woodwinds.
• XI. G.R.S. — George Sinclair, an organist depicted frolicking with his bulldog, Dan.
• XII. B.G.N. — Basil Nevinson, a cellist.
• XIII. *** — The identity of this person is not known, but she is thought to have been on an ocean voyage at the time — this divined from a quote from Mendelssohn’s “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.”
• XIV. E.D.U. — Elgar himself. “Edu” was Caroline’s nickname for her husband. This heartily extroverted, even boisterous, finale ties together the first variation and the Nimrod themes, as though to suggest that the composer has taken advice to heart and is determined to succeed. The entry of an organ in the final measures brings the work to a confident, happy close.

-Description by Wayne Reisig, All Music