*Bad Audiophile LPs

Linked below are a group of audiophile records numbering more than 275 as of 2026. Most of them are here because these particular pressings have awful sound, awful enough to make us want to create this special list for them.

If you have any of this junk hiding in your collection, pull some of them out, play them and see if what we’ve said about them is true. If your stereo is any good at all, it should not take long to hear their many faults.

They do not deserve a place in any audiophile’s home. Sell them to those who collect audiophile records and remain ignorant of their poor sound quality. (You should have no trouble finding buyers.)

How Good Is the Sibelius Violin Concerto on Classic Records?

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Classic remastered this title in the 90s — of course they did, it’s clearly one of the better Heifetz recordings.

As expected, Classic’s remastered pressing of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (LSC 2435) was awful, as bad as LSC 1903, 1992, 2129 and others too numerous to list. 

(There is one Classic violin concerto record that is actually better than every RCA Living Stereo we have ever played — which amounts to scores of them since we have done shootouts for them all — and one of these days you will be able to read about it right here on this very blog!)

The Classic is both aggressive and lacking in texture at the same time, the worst of both worlds.

Bernie’s cutting system is what I would call Low Resolution — the harmonics and subtleties you would expect to hear are simply not there. He brightens the tonal balance, causing screechy strings whenever they get loud.

The world is full of these kinds of third-rate records. They make up the bulk record collectors’ collections as well as the ones audiophiles have sitting on their shelves.

Old School

The Classic is clearly better suited to the old school duller, less-revealing audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today by audiophiles who have done the work.

These 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 thought sounded good in the dark days of the 80s and 90s don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did,. I regret to say I did sell them, but in my defense let me add that I never recommended them when they were coming out by the dozens all through the 90s).

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The Most Serious Fault of the Typical Half-Speed Mastered LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary must be fairly old because we haven’t bothered to play anything put out by Sundazed in longer than I can remember.

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.

It’s dead-as-a-doornail sound, plain and simple.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? (Apparently the guy who wrote this absurd list of records you should buy It has a number of inexcusably at best mediocre and mostly awful sounding Sundazed records.)

But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.

So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.

But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.

The current record holder for Most Compressed Mobile Fidelity Record of All Time? This shockingly bad sounding release, a record I admit to owning and liking back in the 80s. I had a lot of very expensive equipment back then, but it sure wasn’t helping me recognize how bad some of my records were.

How many audiophiles are where I used to be? Based on what I read on audiophile forums, and the kinds of audiophile pressings I see discussed on youtube videos, it seems that most of them are.

In practically every Hot Stamper listing on the site you will find some standard boilerplate that looks very much like what you see below. These are the qualities we want our records to have. I cannot begin to understand what audiophiles are listening for on these new reissues. Most of them do practically nothing well.

This is not AI-generated. This is copy and paste.

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More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix is just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

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Giant Steps Is Another in a Very Long Line of Disappointing Rhino Remasters

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in the early 2000s, long before we had enough data to recognize just what a hack Kevin Gray would turn out to be, remastering one awful sounding record after another for the next twenty years.

His list of failures is surely one of the longest in the business. Of course, we can only guess about most of them, as we are not in the business of playing junk Heavy Vinyl. We much prefer the business we are in: selling the best sounding vintage pressings of the greatest albums of all time.

Reviewing an awful pressing such as this is simply a service we offer to help audiophiles from throwing away their money, at least those audiophiles who have not bought the hype surrounding this incompetent engineer’s consistently shameful work.

Scroll down to see proof that somebody actually paid 80 bucks for this lousy record, along with the rave reviews from a few of those who flushed their money down the toilet. What could be sadder?

Our 2003 Review

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we like to call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

In other words, it sounds too much like a CD.

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Highway 61 Revisited – Not So Good on Sundazed in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

I don’t think mono works for this Highway 61, so we never carried this Sundazed pressing, and we certainly would not have recommended it back in the days when we were still selling Heavy Vinyl, which we officially stopped doing in 2011).

Stick with the 360 stereo pressings for the best sound. (Other 360 pressings that win shootouts can be found here.)

To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that sound better in mono, click here.

Dylan Discography

Here you will find his albums through 1989, after which you are on your own. The later recordings have never sounded right to us and we have no plans to do shootouts for any of them.

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Direct Hits – Not Bad on Track, Awful on Classic Heavy Vinyl

More of The Who

This is a very nice looking original Track Black Label British Import LP. As anyone who knows the Who’s back catalog can attest, most of these songs were poorly recorded. Like all compilations, the sound here varies from track to track. Side two definitely has the better sound.

We guarantee that this pressing sounds better than the Classic reissue, which was so bad we never carried it.

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Tchaikovsky on UHQR – What Happened to the Colors of the Orchestra?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This is what we had to say about the Telarc UHQR back in 2005 or so:

Having played this record all the way through, I can say this about it:

It’s about the most dynamic recording I’ve ever heard.

This was the promise of digital, which, as we all know, was never really delivered. On this record, that promise has been fulfilled. The performance is also one of the best on record. It’s certainly the most energetic I can remember. 

UPDATE 2015

Now that we’ve heard the best pressings of the Alwyn recording on Decca, I would have to say that Alwyn’s is certainly every bit as energetic if not more so, and dramatically better sounding as well.

In other words, in 2005 we had a lot to learn. Boy, did we ever.

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Direct to Discs on Crystal Clear – What Was I Thinking?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings

These are just some of the many recordings on Crystal Clear Direct to Disc that we auditioned over the years and found wanting.

Without going into specifics — who would bother to take the time? — we’ll just say these albums suffer from poor musical performances, poor sound, or both, and therefore do not deserve a place in your collection.  

The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile

You may have seen this text in another listing, but it bears repeating. There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.

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The Who Sell Out to Classic Records

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.

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A Random Copy of 52nd Street Tells You What, Exactly?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Sonic Grade:

Side One: F / Side Two: C+

The Impex (Cisco) 180 gram remastering of 52nd Street was cut by Kevin Gray, under the direction of Robert Pincus (aka Mr Record), at the now defunct AcousTech Mastering in Camarillo. We noted the following in a recent review for a much superior (how could it not be?) Hot Stamper pressing:

Side one is a joke (not much ambience, resolution, energy, etc.) but side two is actually quite good. Side two fixes the biggest problem with the album: hard, honky vocals.

In his review appearing in The Absolute Sound, Neil Gader plucks two songs out of the album’s nine as especially worthy of praise. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. If I didn’t know the album as well as I do, I might wonder why. 

In our review we went on to say:

But at a cost. It still sounds like a modern record, with not much in the way of space, transparency, richness, resolution and the like. You know, all that ANALOG stuff that old dinosaurs like us like our records to have.

For those of you who have thirty three dollars to spend, you could do a lot worse on side two. Side one is pretty bad and you would have a hard time doing worse.

Allow me to now quote Mr. Gader from The Absolute Sound, October 2011, Issue 216, Pg. 129

The Impex 180-gram remastering by Kevin Gray is superb. It replaces the spongy timing and dull top of the original Columbia LP with expansive space and sharp details. Its vivid and brightened treble is welcome compared to the warm but smothered original. Listen for Joel’s doubled harmonies, the pennywhistle in “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” and the burning horn section in “Half a Mile Away,” and you’ll hear what a difference a great remastering makes.

Mr. Gader has a bad original pressing, and like most reviewers he makes the mistake of assuming that other originals, and probably all the originals, perforce sound like his. Speaking from experience, they most assuredly do not. We will not be addressing his specific complaints in this commentary for one simple reason.

Nothing in his review describes the sound of the best copies. 

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