Supraphon is generally agreed to have been the best of the labels originating behind the Iron Curtain. It is very well represented in the LP collection I’m putting on CD, and only partly because of the former owner’s devotion to Czech chamber music, as there is also Palestrina on Supraphon, Josquin on Supraphon and so on.
The recording quality is very good, as I appreciated when I came across a Supraphon re-release on Melodiya or a recording on Panton, and one can really enjoy the old-fashioned Eastern European brass sound in particular in orchestral works.
There are some production drawbacks, however. I really dislike the plastic inner sleeves, rounded at one end, which are a real pain to put back in the outer sleeve. There are the relatively early recordings which are mono remastered to sound like stereo. And then there’s 11 0395 11 – a recording of music by Suk in which his second string quartet, a single-movement work, is split between the two sides, breaking in the middle of a phrase! Why, Supraphon, why? The whole quartet lists under half an hour so it all could have gone on one side! I notice later LP releases of this recording place the quartet second on the disc so that the break is in a different place.