90+ Reviews and Commentaries for Classic Records Heavy Vinyl LPs
More Bad Sounding Audiophile Records to Avoid
Sonic Grade: F
Our Zoo label original LP MURDERED the Classic heavy vinyl reissue. It’s not even close.
The Classic is a opaque, turgid, muffled piece of sh*t compared to the Zoo vinyl pressing we had on hand to play, and even the CD will kill this embarrassing audiophile reissue.
This is not the easiest record to reproduce, but if you have a big dynamic system, one thing it can do is ROCK. I happen to think it’s the best thing Matthew Sweet ever did, and you deserve to hear it sound right, which means stick with the thin, good sounding vinyl and not this heavy RTI trash from Classic.
This is yet another Disastrous Heavy Vinyl release with godawful sound.
What a murky mess. Dead as a doornail. Disgraceful in every way.
Is it the worst version of the album ever made?
It has to be. The CD is dramatically better. If you own this awful Classic record, buy the CD and find out for yourself if it isn’t better sounding.
A Confession
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we had auditioned. 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 that seem to impress so many audiophiles. They do nothing for us and haven’t since about 2007.
We’ll never know what it’s like to go back to the sound we had in the early 2000s. 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 what’s in the grooves of the records we audition.
Most of them sound fairly mediocre to us, but some audiophile records are so bad I put them on a bottom of the barrel list that I created for the kinds of audiophile records that are simply beyond awful.
As you may have guessed, this album is on it.
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.