Dateline 8/29/2010
Classic Records has officially gone under. They will not be missed, not by us anyway, except for this reason: to borrow a line from Richard Nixon, I guess we won’t have Classic Records to kick around anymore. We’ve been beating that dead horse since the day they started back in 1994. There are scores of commentaries on the site about their awful records for those who care to read about such things.
The last review we wrote for them, for their remastered Scheherazade, is one in which we awarded the Classic a sonic grade of F.
TAS Superdisc List to this day? Of course it is!
With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, their records have somehow managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop carrying them in 2011.) That ought to tell you something.
Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of bad records.
At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths and beauty of good records.
Which of course begs the question of what actually is a good record — what it is that makes one record good and another bad — but luckily for you dear reader, you are actually on a site that has much to say about those very issues.
Every Hot Stamper commentary is fundamentally about the specific attributes that make one copy of a given album better than another, and how much of them you’re getting for your money with the unique pressing on offer.
There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile as you’ve no doubt read by now. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.
With an old school system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled all those years ago.
Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We would love to help you find it.
One Hot Stamper just might be all it takes to get the ball rolling.
Oh no, someone is going to keep pressing Classic’s shitty records! And selling them!
And wouldn’t you know it’s the same guys who’ve been making bad records since before Classic got into the game.
I advised them to dump them in a landfill, but they apparently had other ideas.
So now it’s one stop shopping for all the bad sounding Heavy Vinyl you might be foolish enough to buy. Or perhaps you were misguided by the ridiculous comments and reviews pedaled on audiophile websites extolling the virtues of these pressings.
Don’t believe a word of it. You can count the good sounding records put out by these guys on one hand. I honestly cannot think of one I would have in my house, to tell you the truth.
More of the music of Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
We love the Starker recordings on Mercury. Wish we could afford to buy some and do a shootout. At the prices they command these days, that is very unlikely to happen.
