Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now
Sonic Grade: F
The DCC pressing of Night at the Opera is a disaster, one of the worst releases that Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman ever worked on together.
Murky, opaque and compressed: yes, we can agree it has never been an especially good sounding record on anything but the most difficult to find UK pressings [and we know exactly which ones those are now, which only makes this record sound even worse in comparison], but does it deserve this kind of mastering disrespect?
Isn’t the idea to try and FIX what is wrong, rather than to make it worse?
At collector prices no less.
Is it the worst version of the album ever made?
That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Our advice: don’t do it.
Heavy Vinyl
The better Heavy Vinyl pressings can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.
The bad Heavy Vinyl pressings can be found in this group.
And those in the middle end up in this group.
Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.
The reality audiophiles must face in their journey to higher quality sound is that buying good equipment, regardless of price or quality, will not get you there.
You can only teach yourself — painstakingly, over the course of many, many years — how to tweak and tune your equipment, regardless of its cost or purported quality, in order to reach the highest levels of audio fidelity.
And learning how to tweak and tune your equipment has other, fundamentally more important benefits in addition to its original purpose.
It helps you become a better listener, so that you notice aspects of the sound you were not aware of on your records.
The pressings we offer have been assigned the blog categories you see below.
If you are looking for other titles that share some of this Queen album’s strengths, please click on any of the links below to find them.
Note that our last shootout was in 2026 but all the copies went directly to customers who had this title on their want lists.
- Alive Rock, Pop, Etc.,
- Art Rock,
- Demo Discs – Rock, etc.,
- Demo Discs for Dynamics,
- Demo Discs for Energy,
- Demo Discs for Size and Space – Pop, Rock, Soul, etc.,
- Demo Discs with Big, Clear and Lively Choruses,
- Five Star Albums,
- Glam Rock,
- Import=Best,
- Masterpieces of Rock & Pop,
- Mike Stone, Engineer,
- Must Own Rock & Pop Titles,
- Reissue=Best,