Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Albums Available Now
Sonic Grade: D
The best sounding of the Lovin’ Spoonful records I’ve heard on Sundazed, which means that the others would get an F for sound. Don’t waste your money.
I’d be surprised if the CDs weren’t better sounding. Many of the Sundazed CDs I’ve played are actually quite good.
Their records, however, are almost always flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail.
The Sundazed pressing of Daydream came out in 2002, probably the year that the review above was written. Little did I know that the sound of remastered records pressed on Heavy Vinyl was not only never going to improve, but would actually get worse over the coming decades.
For proof one need only look to the astonishingly bad sounding releases we’ve been reviewing since 2024.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 at this stage of the game in 2025.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still at least somewhat impressed with some of Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had 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 are enamored with 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 and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them. (Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records.)
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.
Further Reading