Acoustic Sounds Hired Doug Sax to Ruin a Classic Chet Baker Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

The less said about this awful mid-90s Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions the better. What a murky piece of crap it was.

Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing was very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, twenty-five thirty-one years later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day.

Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out for decades.


There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful they supposedly sound, but on the occasions when I actually sit down and play them, rarely do I find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are awful.

Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.

Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.

(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and record collecting in the Seventies.)

How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.

Maybe not this guy, or the “In Groove” guy, but there has to be at least some group of audiophiles out there, however small their number might be, with decent equipment and two working ears, right?

Excluding our customers of course, they have to know what is going on to spend the kind of money they shell out for our records. And then write us all those enthusiastic letters on top of it.


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