Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now
Sonic Grade: F
This DCC pressing is a disaster, one of the worst releases that Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman ever mastered.
Murky, opaque and compressed: yes, we can agree it has never been an especially good sounding record on anything but the most difficult to find UK pressings [and we know exactly which ones those are now, which only makes this record sound even worse in comparison], but does it deserve this kind of mastering disrespect?
Isn’t the idea to try and FIX what is wrong, rather than to make it worse?
Whether made by DCC or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-90s many audiophile pressings started to have a shortcoming that we find insufferable these days — they are just too damn smooth.
At collector prices no less. Don’t waste your money.
Is it the worst version of the album ever made?
That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Our advice: don’t do it.
Heavy Vinyl
The better Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.
The bad Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group. And those in the middle end up in this group.
Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.
Every listing in this section is about knowing now what I didn’t know then, and there is enough of that material to fill its own blog if I would simply take the time to write it all down.
Every album shootout we do is a chance to learn something new about records. When you do them all day, every day, you learn things that no one else could possibly know who hasn’t done that work, comparing thousands of pressings with thousands of other pressings.
The law of large numbers tells us that in the world of records, more is better. We’ve taken that law and turned it into a business.
What We Believe
We believe it is the only way to find Better Records.
Not the records that you think are better, were told are better, expect to be better, or want to be better.
No, truly better records are the records that have proven themselves to be better empirically. They can only be found by the use of rigorous scientific methodologies. Fortunately for some, these methodologies are laid out in detail for anyone to read and follow right here on this blog.
Being willing to make lots of mistakes is part of our secret, and we admit to making lots and lots of them.
Knowing what I know now, and having access to the system that I’ve put together over the course of the last twenty years or so, I guarantee you the DCC Gold CD is dramatically better sounding than their vinyl release. They almost always are.
Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer the DCC’s CDs to their records.
DCC’s CDs did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we have discussed on the blog in some depth here.
Whether made by Speakers Corner, DCC, AP or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-90s, the sound these labels produced had an infuriating tonal balance problem we hear in practically every pressing they made.
A tonal balance that is just too damn smooth.
The phony boosted highs of the bad old audiophile pressing days are gone, replaced by the phony rolled off highs of today.
(Bernie Grundman cut hundreds of records for Classic Records starting in the 90s, and it’s clear he chose to go a different way, but his way turned out to be every bit as problematical.)
Are You Better Off?
Are the audiophiles who buy these new, super-smooth records any better off?
The ones with bright, phony systems probably are.
As we have been saying for years, first you need to have reasonably good sound. Then you can buy records that actually are good.