{"product_id":"verdiballe_fistoulari_2508_2_4x__","title":"Verdi \/ Saint-Saens \/ Rossini \/ Mussorgsky - Ballet Music from the Opera \/ Fistoulari - Nearly White Hot Stamper","description":"\u003cp\u003eThese \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/nearly-white-hot\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNearly White Hot Stamper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e pressings have top-quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers (\"relative\" meaning relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full \u003ca href=\"\/pages\/money-back-guarantee\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003erefund\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e, no questions asked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePay attention to the brass -- yes, it may have some tubey smear, but listen to how huge and powerful it is! Drop the needle and watch (or listen) as the sound comes jumping out of your speakers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eModern records can’t do that.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese Decca-derived recordings are highly sought after, and with good reason. It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful audiophile disc, both in terms of the program and the quality of the sound.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the precisely the kind of big, bold, lifelike sound Decca engineers were able to capture on tape, and RCA mastering engineers were able to master from that analog tape, 60+ years ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe original RCA (LSC 2400) sells for many, many hundreds of dollars in clean condition and may not have especially good sound, if our experience is any guide. Some of the ones we’ve played have been quite shrill. In other words, you could easily spend a ton of money on one and end up with a bad sounding collector piece destined to sit on your shelf for years between playings.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOr you could buy the Classic 180g reissue and end up with one of the biggest disasters in the history of remastering. More about that later.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEven though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s a superb example of Living Stereo Tubey Magic at its best. It is our belief that there will never be a reissue of this recording that even remotely captures the energy, transparency, sweetness and richness of the sound of this copy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the hall is \u003cu\u003ehuge\u003c\/u\u003e -- so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA. (EMI is super spacious but much of that space is weird, coming from out of phase back channels folded in to the stereo mix. And so often mid-hall and distant. Not our sound, sorry.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat The Best Sides Of Ballet Music from the Opera Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe most Tubey Magic, without which you have \u003ci\u003ealmost\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%221960%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1960\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNatural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTransparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. \u003ci\u003ePlaying the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above,\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCopies with \u003cstrong\u003erich lower mids and nice extension up top\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTop end extension\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTube smear\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eExtraordinary Performances\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAct III of the William Tell is played with breathtaking orchestral vigor and skill. What a showpiece for Fistoulari and The Paris Conservatory! I would not expect to hear a better performance, not in this lifetime anyway.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eClassic Records — Let’s Try and Forget The Sound. This Means You, HP\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eClassic Records, as expected, ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than this pressing, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance. In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. If you’re tempted to pick one up for a few bucks to hear how badly mastered their version is, go for it. If you actually want a record to play for enjoyment, don’t bother; you’ll be wasting your money.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost audiophiles (including, apparently, audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of this quality. If they had, Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us upon their release in 1994.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled (HP, how could you?), but I can honestly say that we certainly weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. (We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the We Was Wrong entries to prove it.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the fact that so many of them are currently on the TAS list is a sad comment on how far the mighty have fallen. Can the TAS list still have any value when it contains so many mediocre pressings?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat We're Listening For On Ballet Music from the Opera\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eEnergy\u003c\/strong\u003e for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eThe Big Sound\u003c\/strong\u003e comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThen \u003cstrong\u003etransient information\u003c\/strong\u003e -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePowerful bass\u003c\/strong\u003e -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNext: \u003cstrong\u003etransparency\u003c\/strong\u003e -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eExtend the top and bottom\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003ci\u003evoila\u003c\/i\u003e, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eVinyl Condition\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMint 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.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThose 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Verdi, Giuseppi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51398316491048,"sku":"verdiballe_fistoulari","price":199.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0257\/3415\/2295\/files\/varioballe.png?v=1747155969","url":"https:\/\/better-records.com\/products\/verdiballe_fistoulari_2508_2_4x__","provider":"Better Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}