*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.)

Houses of the Holy on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We can describe the sound of this miserable Bernie Grundman remaster in two words: ridiculously bright.

Honestly, what more do you need to know? It’s almost as bad as the Zep II he cut, and that record is an abomination.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

(Oh but it does – this misbegotten series out of Japan will do nicely to illustrate how brighter is not necessarily better, it’s just brighter.)

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressings for comparison purposes. After all, these Classic LPs are what many — perhaps most — audiophiles consider superior to other pressings.

We sure don’t, but everybody else seems to. You will find very few critics of the Classic Zeps LPs outside of those who write for this blog, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence.

Wrong on all counts.

We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

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The Wall Sounds Terrible on these “Audiophile” Rip-offs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

This Japanese import is one of the dullest, muddiest, worst sounding copies of The Wall we have ever played. It is clearly made from a second generation tape (or worse!).

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

And somehow this pressing, or one very much like it, ended up as on the TAS Super Disc List. I would hope that the copy Harry played sounded a whole lot better than this one.

The version on the TAS Super Disc list is EMI 4814, which I believe is the British original. Conventional wisdom? Is The Absolute Sound capable of any other?

And the CBS Half-Speed is every bit the mudfest that the Half-Speed is.

How is it that the worst sounding pressings are so often marketed to audiophiles as superior to their mass-produced counterparts? In our experience, more often than not they are just plain awful, inferior in every way but one: surface quality.

And the knock on these CBS Half-Speeds is that they are made from the same vinyl CBS used to press all their other records.

I remember buying them back in the late-70s at Tower Records. They were only $12.99 when Mobile Fidelity pressings were $17.99, garnering a premium price because they were pressed in Japan. Fool that I was, I bought plenty of both, not to mention those made by Nautilus, Direct Disk Labs and plenty of others too painful to think about.

Dear audiophiles, stop collecting crappy audiophile pressings with quiet vinyl and just switch to CD already. You’ll be getting better sound and saving yourself a lot of money to boot. You simply cannot defend analog with this kind of junk.

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Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

This review was written many years ago, shortly after the release of the album in the early-2000s.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we 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.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino bills their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they did starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.” If this is what vinyl sounds like I’d switch to CD myself.

And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them! I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine, thank you very much. I find this very, very sad. More proof, as if we needed it, that the audiophile record collecting world has lost its mind.

Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard. The Yes Album sounds like a cheap cassette as well, a ghost of the real thing.

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Tchaikovsky’s None-Too-Impressive 6th Symphony on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, twenty years or more, but I remember it as none-too-impressive, playing into my natural prejudice against the earliest Living Stereo recordings and Classic Records themselves.

UPDATE 2025

Having heard some amazingly good sounding ones since this review was written many years ago, we are no longer prejudiced against the “earliest Living Stereo releases.” Many of them have superb sound.

The original is not good either in our experience. The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.

When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

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A Trick Of The Tail – A MoFi Disaster to Beat Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

This review is fairly old, probably from 2005-2010.

Not long ago I played the MoFi pressing of Trick of the Tail and could not believe how ridiculously compressed it was.  Rarely have I heard sound as squashed as that which is heard on this LP.

On top of that, the midrange is badly sucked out (as is the case with most Mobile Fidelity pressings) making the sound as dead, dull and distant as can be.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition. I have the CD and it’s fine. It sounds like a digital version of the British pressings we favor (the domestic pressings having been made from dubs of course).  The MoFi is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

You think Modern Heavy Vinyl pressings are lifeless? Play this piece of crap and see just how bad an audiophile record can sound.

And to think I used to like this version! I hope I had a better copy back in the 80s than the one I played a few years ago. I’ll never know of course. If you have one in your collection give it a spin. See if it sounds as bad as we say. If you haven’t played it in a while (can’t imagine why, maybe because it’s just plain awful), you may be in for quite a shock.

If you are still buying these audiophile pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered records.

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Is Hate an Appropriate Emotion for Sound As Bad As This?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

We recently found ourselves with an unexpected opportunity — we were given the chance to hear the mono pressing of Saucerful of Secrets, the one that Bernie Grundman mastered for Record Store Day back in 2019.

We had ordered a vintage stereo pressing from a dealer, and instead of sending us what we ordered, we got the RSD mono instead.

Knowing the record well, we figured why not give it a listen. Maybe the mono mix is the way to go! Who can say until they’ve heard it.

Well, we’ve now heard it, and if there is a worse sounding version of the album, whether in stereo or in mono, we would find even the possibility of such a thing very hard to believe. You’re going to have to prove it to us, because this record is as bad as it gets.

I can’t say we hate a lot of records — most of the time we’re just disgusted and disappointed with all the crap Heavy Vinyl being produced these days — but we sure hated this one.

If you had played it, I can only hope you would have hated it too.

Side One

Track Four

  • Very flat and veiled and clean
  • This mix sucks compared to stereo

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Universals’s Reissue of 10cc’s Masterpiece – Is Anyone in Charge Here?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

This review was written circa 2005.

This Universal Super De Luxe import LP appears to be the regular vinyl version that, for all we know, might actually still be in print in Europe. It appears to have been specially pressed on heavy vinyl for our domestic market as part of the new Universal Heavy Vinyl series.

Either that or it’s being made from the old metalwork for the LP that would have been available most recently in Europe (and out of print by now I should think).

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that it is not in any real sense remastered, if such a claim is actually being made for it, or the series.

Rather it has simply been repressed on Heavy Vinyl in Europe and imported to the states.

None of which is either here nor there because the record is an absolute DISASTER.

The top end is so boosted, after the cutter-head-emphasis gets done with it all that’s left is pure DISTORTION. No one with two working ears and even a halfway-decent stereo can fail to notice how awful this pressing sounds. How a record this poorly mastered (or pressed, perhaps it’s a manufacturing defect) could get through the Quality Control department at Universal is beyond me.

Wait a minute. Who say they even have a quality control department? 

They, like every other company that produces records these days, could apparently not care less whether the records they make are any good or not. There is not an iota of evidence to support the contention that anyone at any of these companies knows what the hell he or she is doing.

This is a classic example of a phrase that is widely misused, that phrase being “begging the question,” which typically refers to assuming something that one should be required to prove.

If you assume that any modern record label had a quality control department, you should be required to provide evidence of its existence. I am not aware of any.

Oh, but it’s ANALOG.

Folks, take it from me: because it’s on vinyl, heavy or otherwise, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with whether it sounds any good or not. The Hoffman-mastered DCC Gold CD is a million times more analog sounding than this piece of crap. Unlike this LP, the tonality of his CD is right on the money. It’s still a CD, and the Hot Stamper pressings we sell will trounce it sonically, but it’s worlds better than this Analog Vinyl.

If any record ever deserved a failing grade, it’s this one. After a few minutes you simply will not be able to be in the same room with it.

This link will take you to some other exceptionally bad records that, like this one, were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. On today’s modern systems, it should be obvious that they have nothing of the kind and that, in fact, the opposite is true.

This Beethoven Ninth Started Out with Two Strikes Against It

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

MoFi took the shortcomings of a mediocre-at-best Decca recording from 1972 and made them even worse by means of their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system.

They should not have chosen this performance of the Ninth Symphony in the first place, and they certainly should not have added the treble they chose to add, which they did to this title and to every classical recording they remastered without regard to whether or not the recording needed brightening. None that I know of did. Try telling that to the brain trust running MoFi.

(They hired this guy to do their one-step digitally remastered pressings and from the get-go he’s been giving audiophiles the most ridiculously phony sounding records that collectors with way too much money can buy.)

The Decca recording of the Ninth from 1972 is opaque, lacks size and space, and comes off as a bit flat and dry.

Like practically every later Decca pressing we play, it’s passable at best.

Londons and Deccas from this era (1972 in this case) rarely sound very good to us.

Here is what we specifically don’t like about their sound.

If you want to know what’s wrong with the Mobile Fidelity pressing, take the above faults and add some others to them.

Start with an overall brighter EQ, add a 10k boost for extra sparkly strings, the kind that MoFi has always been smitten with, and finish with the tubby bass caused by the half-speed mastering process itself.

Voila! You are now in the presence of the kind of mid-fi trash that may have fooled some audiophiles way back when but now sounds as wrong as the records this ridiculous label is still making today.

Here are some other pressings with bright string tone that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound.

1981 Was a Long Time Ago

Old school audio systems are notorious for being dark, dull and lacking in transparency. They might need bright records in order to sound good, but high quality modern systems do not.

If these two MoFi pressings sounds right to you, you are very likely living with one of those old school systems and it is long past time to get rid of it.

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Daydream – The Best You Can Hope for from the Brain Trust at Sundazed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

The best sounding of the Lovin’ Spoonful records I’ve heard on Sundazed, which means that the others would get an F for sound. Don’t waste your money.

I’d be surprised if the CDs weren’t better sounding. Many of the Sundazed CDs I’ve played are actually quite good.

Their records, however, are almost always flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail.

The Sundazed pressing of Daydream came out in 2002, probably the year that the review above was written. Little did I know that the sound of remastered records pressed on Heavy Vinyl was not only never going to improve, but would actually get worse over the coming decades.

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Kevin Gray Returns to the Scene of the Crime for One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Robert Brook wrote about the Tone Poets remastered pressing of One Flight Up a few year back. We noted at the time:

We have never heard the Tone Poets pressing that Robert played against the Van Gelder cutting he discusses in his commentary.

We have one in stock and are just waiting to do the shootout for the album so that we can compare it to the better pressings we know we will find.

You may have read that we were knocked out by a killer copy way back in 2007. We expect to be no less knocked out in 2023.

Make that 2025. (Clean Blue Note pressings are hard to come by.)

Robert concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is an excerpt:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

Now that we’ve played the Tone Poets pressing against the best Blue Notes we could find, we know exactly what he means!

Kevin Gray had previously cut the record for Cisco and made a real mess of it, so we are not the least bit surprised that this newer version is every bit as bad sounding as that one.

Why anyone is hiring this hack to make records is a mystery to those of us who play them, and if for some reason it isn’t a mystery to you, it should be.

How inaccurate and unrevealing does a stereo have to be in order to hide the shortcomings of this incompetently mastered record? If you have such a stereo — and there seem to be plenty of them out there in audio land, judging by the fact that Tone Poets is still in business — now is the time to get rid of it, or, at the very least, start making major improvements.

You might want to consider taking some audio advice from us along those lines.

Robert Brook has plenty to say on that subject as well.

Here are the notes we took while playing the Tone Poets pressing after completing our shootout. We had already heard some killer copies, the White Hot shootout winners, so we knew just how good the record could sound.

Side One

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