Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

• Nasal, upper midrange boost
• No real space
• Hard and smeary
• Sizzly rain intro
• Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

That doesn’t sound very much like the last Hot Stamper pressing we played. We described that copy this way:

“MASSIVE, powerful and spacious throughout – this original pressing is big, rich and solid like you won’t believe.

“The best copies are stunning Demo Discs – crank it up good and loud and if you have the system for it you can be sure your audiophile friends will never forget it.

“Sabbath recorded their set list more or less live in the studio. This give the recording an unprocessed quality that really stands out on the best copies. The best Green Label pressings sound raw and real, with sound that is a perfect match for the band’s powerfully dark music.

“If you like the raw, rockin’ sound of early Zep, you should have a blast with this album. It’s a classic of early hard rock/metal, as you most likely know. But what you might NOT know, particularly if you’re listening to the average pressing, is just how good it can sound.

If you want this effect:

“Sabbath’s slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness.”

You need a copy that sounds the way this one does!

That sound thrills us no end. It’s the reason the album is in our Top 100. It’s the reason we are constantly on the hunt for clean original pressings at any price. Shootouts for albums like this are the most fun part of the day in the listening room, and that goes for any day.

Kevin’s Take

Kevin Gray apparently did not want his version to sound anything like the original pressings we describe above, so he decided to take the sound in another direction.

Why would anyone let him do that? And who approved this miserable piece of vinyl trash? (You may have noticed we ask that question a lot these days.)

Does the record collecting world need a version of the album with any of the “qualities” he mastered into it?

Wouldn’t it have been better if he had just left the EQ alone and tried to get close to the sound of the long-out-of-print original?

That approach would have been of great benefit to those who don’t want to spend a hundred bucks or more for a noisy old record from 1970 — you know, the Hoffman forum types who think a hundred bucks is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on one record.

With all the record flippers out there now, this May 2024 release will set you back at least $95, with the median pressing selling for $120. Oh well. Seems that $39.99 ship has sailed.

At the end of this listing I have attached some screen captures of reviews left by mostly-ecstatic owners of the album. Some of them noticed the lack of bass, the drums that lost their punch, and the overall brighter and thinner tonal balance, but they are clearly a small minority, one out of ten or so.

You really have to read the reviews to believe them. I feel like the person at a UFO convention saying “you know, there really aren’t any such things as lizard people living among us, right?”

I guess the new recut, their fifth (starting in 2010 with Ron McMaster, then redoing the album in 2016, 2020, 2022 and 2023) must sound really good — I mean really good, the best ever — on whatever equipment these folks are using. I cannot imagine what system could make this pressing sound passable, let alone good, but I take these folks at their word that the record sounds great to them, so I can only conclude that such systems do exist.

On this blog I regularly link to some of my old stereo systems and note that I learned slowly, over long periods of time that they were not nearly as revealing as I thought they were when I owned them.

What on earth can the systems of these people be doing to hide the manifest shortcomings of this awful record? I could throw three blankets over my speakers and still hear how wrong it is.

How many blankets can these guys own?

Time for an Upgrade

On any properly-setup, halfway-decent stereo system, any original domestic pressing on the green label should murder this Heavy Vinyl piece of junk.

If you don’t have a system like that, we encourage you to build one.

You will save a lot of money by not buying crap vinyl like this, only to discover later just how bad it sounds on the higher quality equipment you eventually end up with. (Here is some good news on that subject.)

Although, to be honest, if you are buying these kinds of awful records, it’s hard to see how you will ever get out of the hole you are in. Some audiophiles manage it, but I suspect the odds are extremely high that most never will.

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