Hot Stamper Pressings of Genesis Albums Available Now
Reviews and Commentaries for Genesis on Vinyl
Sonic Grade: F
The Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing from 2000 is a smeary, lifeless mess next to the best early tan label British pressings. No Classic pressing of any of the Genesis albums that we’ve played sounded right to us.
The Peter Gabriel albums they remastered were just as bad. All of them earned a grade of F. We made no effort to do listings for most of them because they all were bad, and bad in the same way.
If I were to try to “reverse engineer” the sound of a system that could play this record and compensate for its many faults, I would look for a system that was thick, dark and fat, with added richness and a heaping portion of euphonic tube colorations.
I know that sound. I had a stereo in the 90s with many of those same shortcomings, but of course I hadn’t a clue about any of that. Back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I needed to put together a system with a lot more “Hi-fi” and a lot less “My-fi,” a process that took many years and a great deal of effort.
I’m glad to say things are different now.
What to Listen For
As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to have more compression.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to have more smear.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
Further Reading
The sonic signature of the modern Heavy Vinyl Classical reissue in four words: diffuse, washed out, veiled, and vague.
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 200 at this stage of the game.
A Confession
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.