Sonic Grade: F (DD Labs) / D (MoFi)
If you have the Direct Disc Labs Half-Speed of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road you have one truly awful record in your collection, so sucked out in the midrange, so compressed everywhere, what the hell were they thinking making this rockin’ album sound like that? It’s positively disgraceful.
It makes MoFi look like they knew what they doing, and we know that sure isn’t true.
To be honest we did not actually have a copy of the MoFi handy for this shootout, but in our defense let us just say that we’ve heard their pressing many times over the course of the last twenty years. It’s better than the DD Labs version but not good enough for me to want to play it — compressed and sucked-out like practically every record they ever made, just not as badly as the DD Labs version.
The most obvious problems with the sound of this album are ones common to many if not most rock records of the era: lack of presence, too much compression, smear, lack of weight from the lower mids on down — we hear lots of Classic Rock records with this litany of shortcomings.
But it’s not the fault of the master tape, it’s probably not even the fault of the mastering engineer most of the time.
It’s just plain bad pressing quality. The sound simply doesn’t get stamped onto the vinyl right and the result is one or more of the problems above.
And if you don’t know how to clean your records properly, forget it, you have virtually no chance of hearing good sound on GYBR. Our last shootout was 2022 if that tells you anything, and it’s rare for us to have any Hot Stamper pressings of any of his albums in stock on any given day.
The Average Copy
Years ago we discussed how tough a nut to crack this one has been for us:
It should be noted that good sounding Brit copies of this record are almost IMPOSSIBLE to find! If you find a copy with even one good sounding quiet side you should consider yourself very lucky. Most copies are noisy and dull as dishwater.
And that was strictly for the Brit copies. The domestic copies we played were bright, transistory, spitty and aggressive as all get out. If you had one of those bad domestic pressings and bought the half-speed at least you could play the record without your ears bleeding. But you would run the danger of falling asleep somewhere in the middle of a side, always a danger with the kind of lifeless sound that labels using half speed mastering seem to find attractive. This, it should go without saying, is not our sound here at Better Records.
Modern Reissue Sound
Some copies on some sides sound too much like a modern reissue; they tend to lack weight and be “clean” sounding. We take serious points off when records sound modern, a sound the current spate of reissues cannot get away from and one of the main reasons we gave up on them. Not our thing, sorry. All the other major audiophile record dealers sell that junk, so if you like that sound you will have no trouble finding plenty of titles that offer it. It frankly bores us to tears. Why do audiophiles like the sound of records that sound like good CDs? We like to play records that sound like good records. It sounds so real that it lets us forget we’re even listening to a record.
If you are still buying these remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.
At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is lacking on your copy of the album.
And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.
Further Reading
- Collecting better sounding records
- More on the subject of Half-Speed mastering
- Letters comparing top quality pressings to their Half-Speed mastered counterparts