Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now
Michael Fremer spends two hours and ten minutes on his site going through a list of 100 All Analog In Print Reissued Records You Should Own.
On this list is the 45 RPM Bernie Grundman cutting of Time Out. Fremer apparently liked it a whole lot more than we did. We think it is just plain awful.
The MoFi Kind of Blue is on this same list, another pressing that is astonishingly bad, or, at the very least, really, really wrong.
If you’re the kind of person who might want to give Michael Fremer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to All Analog records he thinks sound good, ones he thinks you should own, try either one of them. If you think they sound just fine, you sure don’t need me to tell you that they’re completely and utterly awful.
There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across in the five minutes I spent watching the video — I have very little tolerance for the sort of amateurishness he displays — I would suspect the winners are few and the losers many.
As a practical rule, if you want good sounding vinyl, you should avoid anything on his list.
And if you do try some and do like them, let me know which ones you think sound good and I will try to get hold of some copies and listen to them for myself.
Here is what we had to say about the Brubeck that Mikey recommends. We called it:
An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records jazz LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes. Sonic Grade: F.
Our story:
Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of a shootout. My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:
- Big but hard
- Zero (0) warmth
- A bit thin and definitely boring
- Unnatural
- No fun
- No F***ing Good (NFG)
Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.
But this is the kind of sound that Bernie Grundman managed to find on Classic Record after Classic Record when he began cutting for them in the mid-90s.
We’ve been complaining about the sound of these records for more than twenty years, but a great many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them told us we were wrong. If you have a copy of this album on Classic, at 33 or 45, play it and see if you don’t hear the problems we describe.
To see what we had to say about the 33 RPM version on Classic many years ago, click here.
Maybe we got a bad 45 and the others are better. That has not been our experience.
In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.
Not all of their records are as bad sounding as Time Out. We favorably review some of the better ones here.
Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it since the 90s and see no reason to stop now.
A Must Own Jazz Record
We consider Time Out a masterpiece. It’s a recording that should be part of any serious jazz collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.
If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs
At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is wrong with your copy. of the album.
And if for some reason you believe that the pressing you own sounds better than the Hot Stamper we send you , we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.
Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.
We confess that even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed with some 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 many audiophiles are impressed by these days.
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 or even worse.
Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was so pissed off I created a unique circle of vinyl hell to put them in.
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, we know that our customers see — and hear — things the same way.