Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

A Hot Stamper pressing of this amazing sounding album, a title we regret to say we have in stock only rarely, might be described this way:

Some of the best sounding live rock and roll sound you will ever hear outside of a concert venue. If you want to understand the unique appeal of the band, there’s no better place to start than right here.

It’s one of our all-time favorite live recordings and their single best release – a true Masterpiece.

I have lately been listening to this album in its entirety at the gym (playing the standard cassette over headphones) and enjoying the hell out of it. As good as their best studio albums are, and I count myself as big a fan of the band as there is, Waiting for Columbus is surely the pinnacle of their recorded output. It is as close to perfect as any live album I know.

(The Last Record Album is my personal favorite of their studio albums, but since nobody seems to want to buy it at the prices we charge, I regret to say we had to stop doing shootouts for it years ago. We were losing too much money that way.)

But Bernie Grundman’s version is just another one in a very long line of disastrous recuts, the kind of crap he has been churning out for the last thirty years. It’s all but unplayable on modern high quality equipment. (If it’s not on your system, you might consideer the idea that you still have plenty of work left to do, audio-wise.)

As you can see from the notes below, record one may be passable, but record two is NFG. How is it possible to turn such a wonderful recording into such a ridiculously bad sounding pressing? Even Mobile Fidelity did a better job with the album, and they’re one of the most incompetent remastering outfits that the audiophile world has even known.

We’re frankly at a loss to understand any of it.Bernie Grundman used to make good sounding records. We know that for a fact, having played them by the hundreds. Apparently those days are gone, and, based on this album and plenty of others, there is very little chance of them returning.

Notes on the Sound

• Artificial top end, especially disc 2, which is just awful.
• Big and loud but hi-hat and vox are so thin and spitty.
• Disc 1 is not as bright.
• Sloppy but rich bass.
• More or less tonally correct/relaxed vox but it’s veiled and small.
• Judging from other recent BG cuts we’ve played, I’m guessing disc 2 closer to intended sound.

Compared to What?

Is the Rhino pressing the worst version of the album ever made?

If I were to try to “reverse engineer” the sound of a system that could play this record and hide its many faults, I would look for a system that was thick, dark and fat, with plenty of tubey colorations and no real top end to speak of.

I know that sound. I actually had a system thirty years ago with many of these shortcomings, but of course I didn’t have a clue about any of that.

Like every other audio enthusiast I met back then, I didn’t know just how much I didn’t know. I’m glad to say things are different now, I think.

On any even halfway-decent stereo system, any original pressing with TML in the dead wax should murder this Heavy Vinyl piece of junk. If you don’t have a system like that, we encourage you to get one. You will save a lot of money by not buying crap vinyl like this, only to later discover just how bad it sounds on the higher quality equipment you eventually end up with.

Although, to be honest, if you are buying these kinds of mis-mastered records and they sound fine to you, it’s hard to see how you will ever get out of the hole you are in. We are happy to help, and so is Robert Brook, but all the real work has to be done by you, and it is a lot.

Some audiophiles manage it, but I suspect only a very small minority ever do.

The first step we would advise any audiophile who wants to be able to enjoy better sound is to stop buying any of these Heavy Vinyl records no matter how attractive they may be. We think that bad records may actually inhibit your audio progress, a subject we discussed in some detail here, so step one is to stop buying them and damaging your propects.