Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Saint-Saens Available Now
Yet another murky, smeary audiophile piece of vinyl trash from the mastering lathe of the formerly brilliant Doug Sax. He used to cut the best sounding records in the world. (Exhibit A: this one.)
Then he started working for perhaps the worst record label of all time and to my knowledge never cut a good sounding record again.
This record may be on the TAS Super Disc list, but we don’t think it belongs there. Instead, it belongs on the bad TAS list that we created specifically for these far-from-super records.
To be fair, the real EMI is on there as well, ASD 2753. However, including the Klavier on the list brings into doubt the compentence of whoever is curating it these days.
This Klavier pressing, along with all the Classic Records titles, as well as other modern reissues, renders the advice found there all but useless. Is anyone calling attention to all the bad sounding records that have lately been recommended by The Absolute Sound? I think we might just be the only ones. If you know of any others, please email me at tom@better-records.com.
Doug Sax
For those of us who remember the consistently superb work Doug Sax was doing in the 70s, we sadly note that he passed away in 2015. I was honored to have met him a few years before then at a Chopin concert with Lincoln Mayorga performing on the piano. (Impressively performing, I might add. He played the complete Chopin Preludes from memory, all 24 of them.)
Both he and Lincoln were gentlemen and artists of the highest caliber. Needless to say, I hope this awful sounding Klavier is not the kind of record that he would want to be remembered by.
On this record, in Doug’s defense it should be noted that he had only second generation tapes to work with, which is neither here nor there as these pressings are not worth the dime’s worth of vinyl used to make them and should never have seen the light of day.
Can this dubby, smeary sound possibly be what EMI engineer Stuart Eltham was after?
Hard to believe. We’ve played plenty of his recordings and we cannot ever remember any of the non-audiophile pressings having this kind of sound.
But isn’t that just the way? The mainstream labels mass produce the good sounding pressings and the audiophile labels produce the limited edition junk.
Now there’s a rule of thumb you might want to keep in mind, especially if you’ve made the mistake of buying any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we reviewed in 2024 and 2025, a parade of horribles that defy understanding.
Actually, if we understand that there is a need for vinyl product for the lo- to mid-fi record collector market, it makes perfect sense. That’s what Klavier was in the business of producing, and now everybody wants in on the action, hence the proliferation of crap Heavy Vinyl pressings coming to market, practically every one even worse sounding than the last.
Our Service to You
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad. These are also records you can safely avoid.)
Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.
When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.
Further Reading