*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.)

Bernie Leaned Out the Vocals on Morrison Hotel, to Ruinous Effect

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Sonic Grade: D (at best)

A few years back we played the 180 gram reissue of Morrison Hotel that came out in 2009. Initially we thought it pretty good, but the longer it played, the more leaned-out and unpleasant it sounded.

Just listen to the vocals — they’re all wrong.

Jim Morrison has one of the richest and most distinctive baritone voices in the history of rock. When he doesn’t sound like the guy I’ve been listening to for more than forty years, something ain’t right.

And what ain’t right — not to put too fine a point on it — is the sound of that record.

Here are a few commentaries you may care to read about Bernie Grundman‘s work as a mastering engineer in the modern era.

We much prefer the work he did back in the old days.

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Speakers Corner Ruins a Classic Mercury, Part One

More of the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

This commentary was written in 2004.

We carried Heavy Vinyl back then, and for that, knowing what I know now, I can only apologize.

Back then, I thought I knew a great deal more about records and  how to reproduce them than I actually did.  Yes, I have to admit it: I suffered from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

On the bright side, there is one very powerful benefit that I gained from being so mistaken. Having failed to recognize my own shortcomings, the signs that someone thinks they know more than they do are easy for me to spot. Here is one of my favorite examples. I link to it a lot.

If you want to see the effect played out in the cyber world, go to any audiophile forum and start reading any thread about records you find there. The D-K effect is hard to miss. Some of the experts on these forums have even convinced themselves that they know things that cannot be known, which is always a sure sign they know a great deal less than they think they do.  

Our Old Commentary

Some thoughts on the new 180 gram Mercury reissues by Speakers Corner and a bunch of other record related stuff.

The Absolute Sound weighed in with their view of the series:

Speakers Corner has given these recordings the respect they deserve. The packaging is gorgeous: a black album titled “The Living Presence of 20th Century Music” and displaying the Mercury logo holds the three records with their original covers and liner notes. In addition, there are informative annotations on the music and Dorati, and a history of Mercury Living Presence…They sound at least as good and in some ways better than the originals…There are no negatives and not enough superlatives to describe these magnificent reissues. It’s rare that performance, sound, and musical value combine at this level in a recording.

Arthur B. Lintgen, The Absolute Sound, February/March 2004

Let me start by saying that I have not listened to a single one of the new Mercury titles.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me state for the record that the chances of the above statements being true are so close to zero that they cannot be calculated by anything but the latest Cray computer.

Has Speakers Corner produced a single classical record that’s better than a well-mastered, properly-pressed vintage pressing? One or two. Maybe. [These days we would say zero is the right number.]  So what are the chances they did so with these? Almost none I would say.

The above review reminds me of the nonsense I read in TAS and elsewhere in the mid-’90s regarding the supposed superiority of the Classic Living Stereo reissues. After playing their first three titles: 1806, 1817 and 2222, I could find no resemblance between the reviews I read and the actual sound of the records I heard.

The sound was, in a word, awful. To this day I consider them to be the Single Worst Reissue Series in the History of the World. [Presently there are too many contenders for that title to hold that view anymore.]

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Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – Classic Records Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records Classical LP we found seriously lacking in some of the most important qualities we listen for on the classical and orchestral recordings we audition.

The Classic pressing of this album does not present the listener with the sound of a real, wood instrument, bowed by horsehair, in a physical space.

It is an airless fraud, a cheap fake reproduction that’s incapable of fooling anyone currently in possession of two good ears, a properly set up hi-fi system and a decent collection of Golden Age violin concerto recordings.

The fact that a great many writers identifying themselves as audiophiles embraced Classic’s mediocre-at-best reissues tells me that they were lacking some or all of the above.

Notes from a Recent Hot Stamper Pressing (more…)

If This Is Your Idea of a Reference Record, You Are in Real Trouble

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums Available Now

An astoundingly bad Sound Show!!

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Half-Speed mastered disaster if there ever was one. If this Reference LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be. It is just awful.

Mastered by none other than Stan Ricker. RR-7 also appears to still be on Harry Pearson’s TAS List.

My recent notes can be seen below. (The 1 in the upper left hand corner is my abbreviation for side one, which seems to be the worst side of the two here.)

Track two, the Red Norvo selection, is a real mess, highlighting the problems typically caused by Half Speed Mastering, especially at the hands of one of the most notorious “Audiophile” Mastering Engineers of All Time, the late Stan Ricker. Who cut as many bad sounding records as SR/2 himself? No one I can think of comes close.

His records, with few exceptions, suffer from bad bass (probably bloated and poorly defined in this case, my notes don’t say but after playing these records for thirty years I doubt I’m very off with this guess) and phony, boosted highs, which cause the striking of the mallets to be emphasized in an especially unnatural and unpleasant way.

Arthur Lyman had dramatically better sound in the 50s.

How come none of the audiophiles at Reference Records bothered to figure out how he did it?

Can anybody take sound like this seriously?

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The Pretenders on Nautilus – Dead As a Doornail Sound

More of the Music of The Pretenders

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Half-Speed mastered audiophile LP reviewed and found wanting.

This pressing is completely lifeless. The brain trust at Nautilus managed to take all the rock out of this rock and roll band.

It’s yet another ridiculous joke played on a far-too-credulous audiophile public.  If this Nautilus LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.

But look who’s talking? I bought plenty of Nautilus pressings in the ’70s and ’80s, some good ones, some not so good. And some of them I still liked well into the 2000s. What’s my excuse?

Even as recently as, say, fifteen years ago, I still had yet to achieve much of the progress in audio I would need to achieve in order to get past the last of the audiophile pressings I still clung to.

And there’s still one that just cannot be beat, even now.

Keep in mind I had been heavily into audiophile equipment and high quality records for thirty years at that point.

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Sassy on Speakers Corner Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing, recorded in 1956 and remastered, badly, in 1999.

The Speakers Corner version of this record is awful. It’s bright and GRAINY.

If you want a good Sarah Vaughan record, try the album just called Sarah Vaughan that Speakers Corner put out in 2004. 

Further Reading

100% No Fun – A Classic Records Disaster

More Bad Sounding Records Audiophiles Should Avoid

UPDATE 2025

I can find no record of the existence of any regular Zoo label pressing. The only ones on Discogs are mastered by Bernie Grundman, on 150 or 180 gram vinyl.

My advice now would be to buy the CD. I own one and it’s great.

Our Zoo label original LP MURDERED the Classic heavy vinyl reissue. It’s not even close.

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Soul ’69 on Four Men with Beards Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Aretha Franklin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues and R&B Albums Available Now

Four Men with Beards recut this record back in 2002. When it came out I was still selling Heavy Vinyl, and I liked some of the titles they had remastered. This one, however, sounded terrible to me and I was not interested in carrying it.

I fancied myself a curator back in those days, but I was not able to set the standards that we can now set for our records, for one simple reason. We hadn’t learned how to do it yet.

We did our first shootout twelve years later, and that’s when our real record education began.

This is a Must Own Soul Classic from 1969 that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection

The complete list of titles from 1969 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The music, of course, is top notch, and it’s even better when you don’t have the bad sound and groove distortion of the average copy getting in the way.

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Jethro Tull – One of the Worst Releases on DCC (and That’s Saying Something!)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The DCC pressing is a complete disaster, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

As bad as the MoFi is, the DCC is even worse. Murky and bloated, to my ear it does almost nothing right, not on vinyl anyway. The DCC Gold CD is better, and it’s certainly nothing to write home about. 

Our Hot Stamper commentary below sorts out the DCC, the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing and the MoFi Half-Speed Mastered LP, as well as British and domestic originals.

We love this album and we’ve played every kind of pressing we could get our hands on. The winner? Read on!

Over the course of the last 25 years we was wrong three ways from Sunday about our down-and-out friend Aqualung here. We originally liked the MoFi.

When the DCC 180g came along we liked that one better, and a few years back I was somewhat enamored with some original British imports.

Our first big shootout disabused us of any notion that the British originals were properly mastered. As we noted in our Hot Stamper commentary, “The original Brits we played were pretty hopeless too: Tubey Magical but midrangy, bass-shy and compressed.”

Another myth bites the dust.

The same is true for Thick As A Brick; the best domestic copies are much more energetic and tonally correct.

The Classic Records Pressing of Finlandia Is Dreadful

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Sonic Grade: F

Classic Records ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than our good vintage pressings, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

[This turns out not to be true, as we discovered to our chagrin in 2014.]

In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at anything other than a nominal price.

Our current favorite pressing is this one on a budget Decca reissue. Go figure.

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