A Record Better Suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past
If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/fail record, I don’t know what would be.
It sounds as if someone went into the biggest room in the studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool out in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls. Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using.)
And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!
If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.
Aerial Boundaries is the second album by guitarist Michael Hedges released on the Windham Hill label in 1984. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Engineered Recording.
Music critic Daniel Gioffre, writing for Allmusic, wrote of the album “There are moments on Aerial Boundaries where it seems literally impossible that so much music is coming from one man and his guitar… The songs on Aerial Boundaries are all beautiful and haunting in their own right; and it is this emphasis on composition over technique that makes this such an important recording… Aerial Boundaries is simply one of the finest acoustic guitar albums ever made, and deserves a place in the library of all serious music fans.”
A PUBLIC SERVICE
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.
Some of these records may have passable sound but the music is too weak to be worthwhile. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading