Here is how we described a recent Shootout Winning copy of Porgy and Bess.
Spacious, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, with Ella and Louis front and center, this is the sound you want to hear on their brilliant collaboration from 1958.
Two vocal giants came together to perform Gershwin’s timeless opera, revered by both music lovers and audiophiles to this day. If you’ve never heard exceptionally well recorded male and female vocals from the 50s, this is a great opportunity to have your mind blown.
Speakers Corner contracted Ryan Smith at Sterling to remaster their Heavy Vinyl pressing in 2013, which might sound like a wise move — Sterling has a good reputation around these parts, even if RKS does not — but the results were disastrous.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Our notes tell the story of the sound, and it’s not pretty. Painful is actually the word that comes to mind.
Pity our poor listening panel that had to sit through a record that sounds as bad as this one does.
(This is a four sided set but we could not see the point in playing all of them when the first two sucked so badly.)
(Technically they don’t “have to” play these Heavy Vinyl pressings. We don’t force our talented staff to waste their time on modern records. They do it because they choose to, in order to have a better idea of what the competition is up to. Turns out the competition is up to no good.)
Our two sentence review should tell you everything you need to know. Let us hope it saves you from throwing your money away the way we did.
- Loud, dry and pinched.
- Hot vocals, no space, very sour and lacking bass.
When the voice is wrong, the sound is wrong. What more do you need to know?
And when the voice is wrong on a legendary recording such as this, you have a worthless piece of vinyl no matter how much you may have paid for it. (Current price on Discogs: about a hundred bucks.)
Other titles that get the voice wrong and therefore should be avoided by audiophiles of all stripes can be found here.
Shortcomings
If you want to read about other records that have many of these same shortcomings, there are links below to some of the ones we’ve auditioned. Our advice would be to avoid them, and if you own some of these pressings, perhaps now is the time to give them another listen and see if you don’t hear the same faults we did.
And, of course, the Hot Stamper pressings we offer, when played side by side with any of these Heavy Vinyl remasters, can help you to see more clearly just where these new records are going wrong, or, in the case of Porgy and Bess, completely off the rails.
Here are more records that we found to have similar shortcomings. They are, to one degree or another:
- Lacking in ambience
- Artificial sounding
- Hard sounding
- Lacking in transparency
- Lacking in richness
- Tonally leaned out
- Sour sounding
- Lacking any trace of Tubey Magic
Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years. Feel free to pick your poison.
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d 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 seem impressed by.
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 sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.
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.
