Classic Records – All

Classic Records 45 RPM Recut – This Is Your Idea of a Great Firebird?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

Many years ago, a customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him:

Steve, after starting to read Wayne’s take on the platters, I came across this:

That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn’t quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the “Infernal Dance” episode of Stravinsky’s Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording).

That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times.

This is why I have so little faith in reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago (04/2010) against a good original and the recut was at best passable in comparison. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say?

The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably mediocre and even just plain awful records. It’s the only real evidence we have for their credibility, and the evidence is almost always damning.

I want a reviewer who knows better than to play such an underwhelming pressing and then waste my time telling me about it. He should tell us what a good record sounds like with this equipment mod. Then I might give more credence to what he has to say.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

P.S.

This is one of the Classic Records titles on Harry Pearson’s TAS List of Super Discs(!)

P.P.S.

Allow me to quote a writer with his own website devoted to explaining and judging classical recordings of all kinds. His initials are A.S. for those of you who have been to his site.

Classic Records Reissues (both 33 and 45 RPM) – These are, by far, the best sounding Mercury pressings. Unfortunately, only six records were ever released by Classic. Three of them (Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) are among the very finest sounding records ever made by anyone. Every audiophile (with a turntable) should have these “big three”.

Obviously we could not disagree more. I’ve played all six of the Classic Mercury’s. The Chabrier, Ravel and Prokofiev titles are actually even worse than the Stravinsky we reviewed.

This same reviewer raved about a record we thought had godawful sound, Romantic Russia on MoFi, a label that never met an orchestral string section it didn’t think needed brightening.

Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

What is it with audiophile record reviewers? They seem to be taken in by the most unnatural sounding pressings. The world is full of wonderful vintage pressings that have no such problems. If you are an audiophile who feels himself qualified to write about records, shouldn’t you at least be able to hear the difference between a phony audiophile pressing and the vintage pressings it supposedly improved?

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Tchaikovsky on Classic Records and the TAS List

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now, a case of live and learn.

Our tube system from the 90s was very different from the one we are using now.

That system was noticeably darker and by all accounts far less revealing when we had auditioned the Classic sometime in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

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We Review the Classic Records Pressing of SR 90212

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

The Classic Records pressing of the famous Mercury is a gritty, shrill piece of crap.

I used to have a less-than-revealing all-tube system back in the 90s, but even that system, limited as it was and not remotely as revealing as the one we have now would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful record.

I don’t know how dull and smeary a stereo would have to be in order to play a record this phony and modern sounding in order to make it listenable, but I know that it would have to be very dull and very smeary, with the kind of vintage sound that might work for Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings but not much else.

It’s a disgrace, and the fact that it’s on the TAS Super Disc list is even more disgraceful.

Which all adds up to an audiophile hall of shame pressing and a record perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

Argenta and Ansermet

I much prefer Ansermet’s performances on London to those of Paray on Mercury.

As of 2022 we actually prefer the famous Argenta recording for Decca that’s on the TAS List, CS 6006.

Both are excellent and clearly superior to the Paray, even on the original Mercury pressings we’ve played.

UPDATE 2024:

This recording is no longer on the TAS Super Disc list. Our favorite, the London with Argenta, is however.

We call that progress! Maybe there’s hope for the TAS List yet.

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Michael Fremer Says You Should Own the Classic 45 of Time Out

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

Michael Fremer spends two hours and ten minutes on his site going through a list of 100 All Analog In Print Reissued Records You Should Own.

On this list is the 45 RPM Bernie Grundman cutting of Time Out. Fremer apparently liked it a whole lot more than we did. We think it is just plain awful.

The MoFi Kind of Blue is on this same list, another pressing that is astonishingly bad, or, at the very least, really, really wrong.

If you’re the kind of person who might want to give Michael Fremer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to All Analog records he thinks sound good, ones he thinks you should own, try either one of them. If you think they sound just fine, you sure don’t need me to tell you that they’re completely and utterly awful.

There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across in the five minutes I spent watching the video — I have very little tolerance for the sort of amateurishness he displays — I would suspect the winners are few and the losers many.

As a practical rule, if you want good sounding vinyl, you should avoid anything on his list.

And if you do try some and do like them, let me know which ones you think sound good and I will try to get hold of some copies and listen to them for myself.

Here is what we had to say about the Brubeck that Mikey recommends. We called it:

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records jazz LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes. Sonic Grade: F.

Our story:

Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of a shootout. My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:

  • Big but hard
  • Zero (0) warmth
  • A bit thin and definitely boring
  • Unnatural
  • No fun
  • No F***ing Good (NFG)

Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.

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What Willie and Nat Can Teach Us about Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Willie Nelson Available Now

This letter came to us many years ago. Updates have been added as of 2024.

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he had purchased:

Hello team,

I’ve been a little distracted here, I got married over the weekend! So, haven’t done as much listening over the past couple of weeks. However, I did have a chance to listen to Stardust and Love Is The Thing. They were both different than their Classic Records and Analogue Productions counterparts. Willie sounded a little smoother, more organic, and more integrated.

The strings on Love Is The Thing were very different, more pronounced and emotional, but Nat’s voice, and the sound overall, sounded a little strident, maybe “too” hot.

I’d like to send them both back to you, and if you have a chance to send back the discs I sent to you I’d very much appreciate it. All told, the two big sets of Better Records are really incredible, and only serve to make my want list grow. Here’s to you and the next set!

Doug,

We now have the update for those two titles.

I, along with the two other guys in our listening panels, sat down to play the Heavy Vinyl you sent us, and the long and short of it is that we were astonished that records that sound as bad as those two actually were approved for release.

Nat is wrong six ways from Sunday, and Willie is not so much wrong as just not very good.

Nat: “F,” one of the worst heavy vinyl disasters of all time, and Willie: “D” sound, more like a CD than a record. There are many pressings of this album that are not good, but this version is probably worse than most of them, hence the D grade.

The old Classic pressing is probably better, and it would earn about a C grade. [I honestly do not remember exactly what pressing Douglas sent us. All I remember is that it was on Heavy Vinyl.]

I suspect the CDs of both these pressings are much better sounding than this vinyl.

The DCC gold is definitely better by a long shot, and the plain old Willie CD is probably a step up as well. 

A Further Update

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Witches’ Brew on Classic Records and How Crazy Wrong I Was, Part One

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

Well below the reproduction of the front page of our old catalog you will find the review I wrote in 2007 for the Classic Records’ Heavy Vinyl pressing of Witches’ Brew.

Clearly I did not care for it in the least. In fact, I thought it was one of the worst reissues I’d ever heard, so aggressive, boosted and unnatural it defied understanding that anyone could ever play such a record and not notice how wrong it sounded.

Now when I think about the Classic Records reissue of Witches’ Brew and its awful sound, it’s obviously a modern remastering I could not possibly have liked.

However, in preparing to move to Georgia in 2022, I found myself digging through some old catalogs from the early Nineties. Something I read in one of them chilled me to the bone.

There it was in black and white: my rave review for the Classic Records pressing of Witches’ Brew.

It’s actually on the front page of the catalog, along with at least one other record that I would be mortified to sell today: the OJC pressing of Saxophone Colossus.

(As soon as I find my review in the old catalog for Saxophone Colossus, I will post it. I can hardly believe I wrote it, but I did. I wrote all my catalogs back then. My lack of competence and the guilt associated with my lack of expertise at the time is undeniable. It obviously would be foolish and wrong of me to try to deny any of it, so I don’t.)

Below you will find a commentary from 2007 detailing the shortcomings of the Classic.

I sure had a lot of nice things to say about it in 1994.

I thought my stereo was awesome back then, but it was not nearly as awesome as I thought it was. It was better than any system I had heard in a stereo salon, audio show or friend’s house, but that has to be seen as a pretty low bar, and it may even be lower now than it was back then.

I’ve written a bit about the limitations of my 90s system here.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is real, and I clearly suffered from it.

In 1994 I had been a fairly dedicated audiophile for more than twenty years, and a strongly opiniated audiophile record dealer, one who took pride in curating his vinyl offerings right from the start of the business in 1987.

I thought I knew what I was talking about. Looking back it’s clear I had a lot to learn.

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Led Zeppelin II on Classic Records – Seriously, What Could Be Sadder?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

An unmitigated disaster — ridiculously bright and ridiculously crude.

In short, a completely unlistenable piece of garbage, and, along with the MoFi pressing from 1982, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl Pressings as a “reference.” After all, the Classic pressings are considered by many — if not most — audiophiles as superior to other pressings.

What could be sadder?

In fact, you will find very few critics of the Classic Zep LPs outside of those of us (me and the rat in my pocket) who write for this Better Records, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence when they first came out.

Wrong on all counts.

Since then we’ve made it a point to review most of the Classic Zeps, a public service of Better Records. We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

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Another “Problematical” Classic Records Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of these works by Shostakovich, but I remember it as nothing special.

Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a Victrola reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D for below average.

The Classic Records pressing can currently be found on the TAS list, but we don’t think it has any business being there, along with a great many others, far more than we could ever find the time to play and review.

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By 2007 We Had Changed Our Minds about the Classic Who’s Next

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Here is our review from 2005.

After doing our next shootout for Who’s Next in 2007, and replaying the Classic afterwards, we changed our minds about Classic’s version of the album.

Apparently, a surprising amount of audio progress was made from 2005 to 2007, reflected in this review as well as dozens of others.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year  for us here at Better Records, although we certainly had no idea at the time that such dramatic changes had been put in motion.

For example, later that same year we swore off Heavy Vinyl (prompted by the less-than-enchanting sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time. To accomplish this we eventually ended up doubling the staff.

(Cleaning and playing every record you see on our site turned out to very time consuming. No one man band can begin to fathom the complex and random nature of the vinyl LP, which explains why the audiophile reviewers of the world are right about as often as the proverbially stopped clock.)

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. There is nothing advanced about these deceptively-packaged mediocrities if you have the stereo to reveal their shortcomings. After spending fifty years in audio (1975-2025, we do. )

This is how good Who’s Next sounds these days, when we have them, which is not often.

In 2007 we did a big shootout for Who’s Next, and as is so often the case, the shortcomings of the Heavy Vinyl version were mercilessly revealed when played head to head with The Right Vintage Pressing. (And not the original Track by the way.)

Oddly enough, and contrary to expectation, even the domestic Decca label copies had amazing sound, not just the British Track label pressings I had favored for so long. (To keep from being influenced by biases of any kind, when we do these shootouts the listeners have no idea which pressing they are evaluating.)

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Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 – The Classic Pressing Can Have Very Good Sound

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Somehow we managed to have a Classic Records pressing on hand to play in our most recent shootout for the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.

We knew all the way back in 1997 that Classic had done a good job with the record — we recommended it as one of the best Classic Records pressings in our catalogs at the time — but we sure didn’t expect it to do as well as it did, earning 2 pluses on one side and close to that on the other.

Years ago we wrote:

Here is the kind of sound that Classic Records could not ignore, even though the original was only ever made available as part of RCA’s budget reissue series, Victrola.

Don’t let its budget status fool you — this pressing puts to shame most of what came out on the full price Living Stereo label. (And handily beats any Classic Records reissue ever made.)

The top and bottom are wrong to varying degrees on both sides of the Classic, as you can see from our notes, which read:

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