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Sonic Grade: F
An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Disastrous Heavy Vinyl release with godawful sound.
What a murky mess. Dead as a doornail sound. Disgraceful in every way.
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.
There’s More Where This Pressing Came From
If this is the kind of sound you like, below are links to recordings that you may wish to pursue, with similar “qualities,” if I can use that term.
We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.
We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?
- More titles that are dark,
- More titles that are murky,
- More titles that are recessed,
- More titles that are compressed,
- More titles that are thick,
- More titles that are veiled,
- More titles that are opaque and
- More titles that are congested.
These are the hallmarks of the modern Heavy Vinyl LP. Whether made by Speakers Corner, DCC, AP or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, the sound these labels preferred had an infuriating tonal balance problem we heard in practically every record we played.
A tonal balance that was 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 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.
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. Feel free to pick your poison.
And finally,
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.