Month: November 2022

Katy Lied – A MoFi that Beggars Belief

Katy Lied is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

By the time I was avidly collecting Mobile Fidelity records in the late 70s, this title had already gone out of print, one of the first to do so. My guess is that even the cloth-eared audiophiles at MoFi knew when they had a turkey on their hands and mercilessly put this one out of its misery.

Yes, the sound is so bad that even the brain trust at MoFi could hear it. 

Compressed and lifeless (almost as lifeless as the screen speakers so popular at the time), it’s hard to imagine any version sounding worse than this one. (Which is why it’s on this list.)

And yet I continued to play my copy, for enjoyment of course, oblivious — I must have been oblivious, right? — to the bad sound.

Why? That’s hard to say, but here’s a stab at it.

The vinyl was exceptionally quiet for one thing, and for another, as an audiophile I knew this MoFi pressing had been made with tender loving care, using a putatively superior process, Half-Speed mastering, from the original master tapes, and had been pressed in Japan on the quietest, flattest vinyl in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

My old story about One Man Dog gets to the heart of it.

I didn’t understand records very well and I sure didn’t understand the value of doing shootouts — or even how to do them — using multiple copies of the same album.

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Rachmaninoff / Favorite Classics for Piano / Pennario

More of the music of Franz Liszt (1811-1880)

More Classical ‘Sleeper” Records We’ve Discovered

We found White Hot Stamper sound on side two of this solo piano recording.

It’s big, rich and above all REAL sounding, with natural studio space. The legendary soloist Leonard Pennario is presented here at the height of his powers.

Superb choice of material, from Clair De Lune to Liebestraum to the Hungarian Rhapsody No . 2.

On the rare Stereo pressing of course — we want to hear all that studio space reproduced, just as your two ears would have heard it (more or less).

Side One

Graded Super Hot for the huge, solid-sounding piano, played with such verve and skill. The musical power on this side is stupendous. 

Side Two

Even better! No smear, with incredible clarity, and no sacrifice in weight or richness.

All of which adds up to a top quality piano recording in every way.

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Jackson Browne – His Debut Is Still His Best Album By Far

More Jackson Browne

More Asylum Label Recordings

  • Balanced, musical, present and full-bodied throughout – this copy was a big step up from most of what we played, particularly on side two
  • “… Jackson Browne’s first album is among the most auspicious debuts in pop music history”
  • 5 stars: “… the album has long since come to seem a timeless collection of reflective ballads touching on still-difficult subjects — suicide (explicitly), depression and drug use (probably), spiritual uncertainty and desperate hope — all in calm, reasoned tones, and all with an amazingly eloquent sense of language.”
  • If you’re a Jackson Browne fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1972 is clearly one of his best, and one of his two best sounding, the other one being The Pretender.
  • The complete list of titles from 1972 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Debussy / Clair de Lune / Agoult

The Music of Claude Debussy – Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for The Music of Claude Debussy

  • This rich, sweet and full-bodied UK pressing boasts excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from top to bottom – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Side one gives you not only a wonderful Clair De Lune, but a number of shorter works by Faure, Massenet and Elgar as well, with side two highlighted by meditative pieces by Bach, Tchaikovsky and others
  • We can’t imagine a more beautiful record, both in terms of the program and the sound – this record is a wonderful example of what the Decca recording engineers (Kenneth Wilkinson in this case) were able to capture on tape
  • It’s the same recording as the famous Living Stereo Clair De Lune, LSC-2326, but with a couple of extra tracks included
  • The other main difference between the Living Stereo pressing and our Decca here is that the Decca has better sound

Transparent and spacious, wide and naturally staged, clean yet rich, with zero coloration, there is nothing here to fault. So relaxed and natural you will soon find yourself lost in the music.

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording. We were impressed with the fact that it excelled in so many areas of reproduction. The illusion of disappearing speakers is one of the more attractive aspects of the sound here, pulling the listener into the space of the concert hall in an especially engrossing way.

The 1959 master has been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer.

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Boz Scaggs’ Rich, Solid Piano – The Forgotten Sound of the Seventies

xxxReviews and Commentaries for the Music of Boz Scaggs

What do you hear on the best copies? Well, the first thing you hear is a rich, solid piano, a piano sound that’s practically missing from the CBS Half-Speed and 90% of the reissues we’ve played.

Like so many recordings from the ’70s, this album is surprisingly natural sounding. I’ve had the same experience with Billy Joel’s ’70s records. I was surprised to hear how well recorded they are — and how full-bodied the piano is — after I stopped listening to the audiophile and import pressings and went back to the original domestic copies. When you get the right ones — that’s how we see our job, finding the right ones — they’re wonderfully rich and smooth (but not too smooth), the way good analog should sound.

And these were the kinds of records that we audiophiles were complaining about back in the day. We lamented the fact that these pressings weren’t audiophile quality, like the best MoFis and Japanese pressings. Can you imagine?

This is how bad even good equipment must have been back then.

Of course we got what we deserved. We got lots of phony, hyped-up pressings to fool us into thinking we were hearing better sound, when in fact the opposite was true. I regret to say that nothing has changed — most pressings aimed at audiophiles are still mediocre and some of them are surely the worst versions of the album ever produced. That’s pretty bad, wouldn’t you say? (For some unfathomable reason, nobody but us ever does say.)

The other record that immediately comes to mind to show you the sound that’s missing from many pressings, both vintage and modern, is Aja. Here’s what we had to say about it:

If you own the Cisco 180 gram pressing, focus on Victor Feldman’s piano at the beginning of the song. It lacks body, weight and ambience on the new pressing, but any of our better Hot Stamper copies will show you a piano with those qualities in spades. It’s some of my favorite work by the Steely Dan vibesman. The thin piano on the Cisco release must be recognized for what it is: a major error on the part of the mastering engineers.

A full piano is key to the sound of the best pressing of Silk Degrees.

The other thing you hear on the best copies is a smooth, sweet top end, which is likewise missing from the above mentioned pressings.

Most copies lack presence and top end.

Dull, thick, opaque sound is far too common on Silk Degrees, which may account for some audiophiles finding the Half-Speed preferable.

Of course, our Hot Stampers give you the presence and highs that let this music come to life. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be Hot Stampers now would they?

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Another Good Demo Disc / Bad Test Disc from Willie Nelson

More of the Music of Willie Nelson

Much like Stardust, a Hot Stamper pressing of this record is a real treat for the audiophile, no matter where they may be on the audio scale.

The transparency and in-the-room presence on the best copies will be nothing less than astonishing.

It’s what we like to call a Great Demo Disc / Bad Test Disc.

Even if your system isn’t all that good, or isn’t performing at its best, a killer copy of this record will still sound both musical and musically involving.

On the other hand, if you’ve spent the time and energy to really get your stereo cooking, you’re going to be in for some seriously good Tubey Magical vocal reproduction.

If you are looking for a challenge, we have a whole section of records that are difficult to reproduce. If you can play these albums good and loud, you can probably play anything.

Without a Song is not on that list. It will sound good on practically any system, which is why it is not a good test disc.

Andy Johns Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Andy Johns Engineered Albums with Hot Stampers

Andy Johns Engineered Albums We’ve Reviewed

More of Our Favorite Engineers

ANDY JOHNS is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

Many of his recordings can be found in our Rock and Pop Top 100 List of Best Sounding Albums (limited to titles that we can actually find enough copies to do our Hot Stamper shootouts).

Partial Discography

You may notice that we have done shootouts for a great many of these titles!

  • Stand Up – Jethro Tull (1969)
  • Town and Country – Humble Pie (1969)
  • Spooky Two – Spooky Tooth (1969)
  • Ssssh -Ten Years After (1969)
  • Blind Faith – Blind Faith (1969)
  • Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin (1969)
  • Traffic – John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)
  • Led Zeppelin III – Led Zeppelin (1970)
  • Highway – Free (1970)
  • Led Zeppelin IV – Led Zeppelin (1971)
  • Sticky Fingers – Rolling Stones (1971)
  • Brain Capers – Mott the Hoople (1971)
  • Exile on Main St. – Rolling Stones (1972)
  • Living in the Past – Jethro Tull (1972)
  • Goats Head Soup – Rolling Stones (1973)
  • Houses of the Holy – Led Zeppelin (1973)
  • It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll – The Rolling Stones (1974)
  • Physical Graffiti – Led Zeppelin (1975)
  • “Eddie Money” – Eddie Money (1977)
  • Shadows and Light – Joni Mitchell (1980)
  • Coda – Led Zeppelin (1982)

Hovhaness / Giannini – Sym. No. 4 / Sym. No. 3 / EWO

More Mercury Label Classical Recordings

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • An original Maroon Label Mercury pressing of these enchanting symphonies for winds boasting incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades throughout – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Both of these sides are big, clear and lively, with no trace of smear, and clearly reproduced harmonics on every instrument – a Demo Disc to be sure
  • The woodwinds are so rich and natural, with none of the “nasally” quality one hears on so many Mercury records
  • The brass at the end of the record are full-bodied and smooth in the best tradition of vintage analog

These symphonies for winds are an audiophile delight. Mercury is famous for their wind band recordings and this is clearly one of their best.

The idea of a symphony performed only by wind instruments (with added harp and percussion) is novel, to me anyway, and I found the music nothing short of enchanting. One of the first wind recordings I fell in love with decades and decades ago was British Band Classics on Mercury with the EWO under Fennell. Whenever a copy comes in I play it and fall in love with it all over again. You may feel the same about this very record.

I’ve been a fan of the Hovhaness piece here for many years. Finding enough clean copies with which to do a shootout took a very long time, but eventually we had enough and this copy was doing more of what we wanted than practically all others we played.

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These Choruses Really Get Up and Going

Hot Stamper Pressings with Big, Clear and Lively Choruses Available Now

At about the two minute mark the big chorus in Watching the River Run is also a great test for weight, resolution, dynamic energy, and freedom from strain in the loudest parts. When the whole band is really belting it out, the shortcomings of any copy will be exposed, assuming you are playing the album at loud levels on big dynamic speakers.

It was a key test every pressing had to pass. That’s what makes it a good test disc.

When the music gets loud you want it to get better, with more size, energy and, especially, emotional power, just they way it would be heard in concert.

Any strain or congestion in the choruses we hear in our shootout causes the pressing in question to be downgraded substantially.

Hot Stampers are all about the life of the music, and when this music gets lively, it needs to be clear and clean.

This is of course one of the biggest issues we have with Heavy Vinyl — it never gets up and it never gets going the way vintage records can. “Boring” is the adjective we most commonly use to critique the few we hear, and who wants to listen to boring records?

EQ Issues

Practically all copies have a midrange equalization problem, with a lack of lower mids and boosted upper mids, which often thins out the vocals and leads to hardness and honkiness.

The better copies manage to keep the EQ anomalies within bounds while giving us full-bodied pianos; rich, lively vocals, full of presence and brimming with enthusiasm; harmonically-rich guitars, and a three-dimensional soundstage that reveals the space around them all.

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Are Hot Stampers original pressings?

Reissue Pressings with Hot Stampers Available Now

They certainly can be, but quite often they are not, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to any serious record collector, and definitely not to any member of our listening crew.

Reissues come out on top in our record shootouts fairly regularly.   

Yes, most of the time the original will beat the reissue, but most of the time is far from always, and since we have to play a big pile of copies anyway (and always with the person doing the grading kept in the dark about the pressing being auditioned), why not evaluate both the originals and the reissues at the same time, on the merits and not on our prejudices?

But this discussion bypasses an important question: What IS an original? Is a record with a 1A stamper an original and a record with a 1B stamper not an original, or slightly less original? Is every copy on the original label an original, and only the copies with the later labels reissues?

To be honest, attempting to lay down strict rules about what constitutes an original is best understood as a fool’s errand, an audiophile parlor game of little use in the real world of records, and one we never cared to play even when we didn’t know how pointless it would turn out to be.

To be blunt about it, we are not the least bit interested in how original a pressing may or may not be.

On this site we are only interested in one thing, the answer to the question: Which copy of the record sounds the best? (Also: In what way? So I guess that’s really two things we are interested in.)

The rest of it we leave to our record collecting brethren.

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