Orff
Carmina Burana / Jochum

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This vintage Deutsche Grammophon 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 Orff's Modern Masterpiece 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 1968
• 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.

What to Listen For

Number one: Too many instruments and voices jammed into too little space in the upper midrange. When the tonality is shifted-up, even slightly, or there is too much compression, there will be too many elements vying for space in the upper part of the midrange, causing congestion and a loss of clarity.

With the more solid sounding copies, the lower mids are full and rich. Above them, the next "level up" so to speak, there's plenty of space in which to fit all the instruments and voices comfortably, without piling them on top of one another as so often happens on the records we play. On the better copies the upper midrange space does not get overloaded and overwhelmed with musical information.

Number Two: edgy vocals, which is related to Number One above. Many copies will reveal some edge on the vocals, but the best copies keep the edge well under control or do away with entirely, without sounding compressed, dark, dull or smeary.

(As an aside, those last four adjectives you see above would describe more than 95 percent of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we have had the misfortune to audition over the last twenty years or so. How so-called audiophiles can tolerate the blatantly obvious shortcomings found on these modern records is beyond us? We cannot understand it, and we likely never will.)

The highest quality equipment will play the loudest and most difficult-to-reproduce passages of this amazing recording with virtually no edge, grit or grain, even at very loud levels.

What We're Listening For On Carmina Burana

• 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.

A Big Group of Musicians Needs This Kind of Space

One of the qualities that we don't talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record's presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings are just plain more involving. When you hear a copy that does all that -- a copy like this one -- it's an entirely different listening experience.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus 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.

A Must Own Classical Record

This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Classical Music Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

1. O Fortuna
2. Fortune Plango Vulnera

I Primo Vere

1. Veris Leta Facies
2. Omnia Sol Temperat
3. Ecce Gratum

Uf Dem Anger

1. Tanz
2. Floret Silva Nobilis
3. Chramer, Gip Die Varwe Mir
4. Reie
5. Swaz Hie Gat Umbe
6. Chume, Chum Geselle Min
7. Swaz Hie Gat Umbe
8. Were Diu Werlt Alle Min

Side Two

In Taberna

1. Estuans Interius
2. Olim Lacus Colueram
3. Ego Sum Abbas
4. In Taberna Quando Sumus

Cour D’amours

1. Amor Volat Undique
2. Dies, Nox Et Omnia
3. Stetit Puella
4. Circa Mea Pectora
5. Si Puer Cum Puellula
6. Veni, Veni, Venias
7. In Trutina Mentis Dubia
8. Tempus Est Iocundum
9. Dulcissime

Blanziflor Et Helena

1. Ave Formosissima

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

1. O Fortuna