Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now
UPDATE 2026
In 2005 I think it was the stereo version we played of the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing, not the mono. Both were mastered by Chris Bellman, one of our least favorite mastering engineers.
Most of the records he’s cut for Bernie Grundman Mastering have such poor sound quality that they end up going into our hall of shame, which is exactly where they belong. If you have any of his badly-remastered vinyl in your collection, now is the time to pull it out, play it and see for yourself just how far off the mark this guy’s records are.
At this point, it’s no longer astonishing to us that there are still audiophiles who defend his work. Naturally, these include self-styled audiophile reviewers who are obviously in the wrong business and too clueless to know it.
We find it hard to say anything good about the man except this: he did an excellent job cutting Brothers in Arms at 45 RPM. (Our review for that pressing has been delayed since 2022 but it is coming one of these days, I swear on a stack of records.)
Our review from 2005:
Not our idea of good sound.
The only Classic Who record we ever carried was Who’s Next, which is actually pretty good — we gave it a B back in the day.
I suspect it would earn a poorer grade now. We had lower standards for Heavy Vinyl back then.
(Which is the understatement of all time. We had lower standards for every kind of record back then.)
We have since discussed how wrong we were about a great many records, including the Classic Records reissue of The Who’s Masterpiece, and in the case of that title more than once.
Old School
The Classic pressing is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I used to have an old school stereo, and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).
Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from similar afflictions.
Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great.
And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve top quality sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutionary advances in audio had not yet come to pass.
It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until we here at Better Records would have anything like the system we do now.
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.
We have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.