Digital Versus Analog

Is Digital Really the Problem on this Cowboy Junkies Album?

More of the Music of the Cowboy Junkies

More Digital Recordings with Audiophile Quality Sound 

The RCA domestic pressings cut at Sterling are not worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

Our notes read:

  • Flat and dry vox.
  • Shifted up [tonally]
  • A bit scooped [or “sucked out” in the midrange, meaning the middle of the midrange is missing to some degree]

Don’t be like those analog types who point fingers at the fact that there was digital in the recording chain when their record doesn’t sound good.

It’s got nothing to do with digital. It has everything to do with Sterling doing a bad job mastering the domestic vinyl.

(And a large group of audiophiles, including some well-known reviewers, had no idea there was a digital step used in the process of making some records they raved about. Apparently it’s easier to hear when you know it’s there.)

We Don’t Defend the Indefensible

When good mastering houses like Kendun and Sterling and Artisan make bad sounding records, we offer no excuses for their shoddy work. The same would be true for the better-known cutting engineers who’ve done work for them, as well as other cutting operations. Individuals working for good companies sometimes do a bad job.

How is this news to anyone outside of the sycophantic thread posters, youtubers, and reviewers who write for the audiophile community?

Records are to be judged on their merits, not on the reputations of the companies or individuals making them.

We discussed the apparent distaste some audiophiles have for criticizing the demonstrably bad records made by formerly talented engineers here.

If someone can explain to me why we should like it when cutting engineers do bad work, please contact me at tom@better-records.com so that you can help me understand it better. I am at a loss.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that have been winning our Hot Stamper shootouts for years. The better copies sound their best:

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

More of the Music of The Grateful Dead

More Records that Sound Like CDs

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl Disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty).

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 sad.

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, a ghost of the real thing.

More Heavy Vinyl Reviews

Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 200 at this stage of the game. Feel free to pick your poison.

There are many kinds of audiophile pressings — Half-Speeds, Direct-to-Discs, Heavy Vinyl Remasters, Japanese Pressings, the list of records offered to the audiophile with supposedly superior sound quality is endless. Having been in the audiophile record biz for more than thirty years, it has been our misfortune to have played them by the hundreds,

How did we find so many bad sounding records? The same way we find so many good sounding ones. We included them in our shootouts, comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings..

When you can hear them that way, up against an actual good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.

Back to 2000

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were often impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate or worse.

When I say worse, I know whereof I speak. Some audiophile records have pissed me off so bad I was motivated to create a special ring of hell for them.

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Two CDs that Sound Nothing Like Their Vinyl Counterparts

Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers

Reviews and Commentaries for Back in Black

I made the mistake of buying both Back in Black and Sticky Fingers on CD to listen to in the car, and both are a disaster — no bass, no rock weight, with boosted upper mids, no doubt in a misguided attempt to provide more “clarity” and “detail.”

But trying to achieve more clarity at the expense of the rock and roll firepower that makes both of these albums Must Own Rock Records is beyond foolish.

These albums did not need a new sound or a more modern sound. The sound of the original pressings of both of them is superb, as close to faultless as you are likely to find in this world.

Mobile Fidelity managed to get more transparency in the midrange for their pressing, and look what it got them: our award for the worst version ever.

On both of these CDs, even in the car I couldn’t get past the third song.

If this is what the digital lovers of the world think those albums actually sound like, they are living in some kind of parallel universe.

The best pressings on vinyl sound nothing like them. In fact the best pressings sound so good they are on our Rock and Pop Top 100. Rest assured that you don’t get to be on our Top 100 with anemic, upper midrangy sound.

New to the Blog? Start Here

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Art Pepper – Which Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

More of the Music of Art Pepper

More Jazz Recordings featuring the Saxophone

This commentary is from 2010 or so.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them in our experience.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

Sonny Rollins – Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Sonny Rollins Albums We’ve Reviewed

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

Sonny Rollins Plus 4 on Two Slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl – Reviewed in 2010

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding audiophile record than this, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. 

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding audiophile more than thirty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads each with a track record more dismal than the next?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the ’90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update: I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is. Buy the CD and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone has wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting.

Presence? Gone!

Transients? Who needs ’em!

Ambience, Openness, Three-Dimensionality?

Uh, will you consider settling for Murk, Bloat and Smear? There’s a Special on them today at Acoustic Sounds.

And yet no one seems to have noticed, except us of course.

Inspected By… Nobody?

Ask yourself this question. How did this record get approved? Did no one ever play it? Hoffman and Gray let their names be put on this piece of crap? Kassem I can understand; he’s been making bad records for more than twenty years and wouldn’t know a good record if it bit him in the butt. But this is really beyond the pale. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test. I honestly don’t think I have a CD that sounds this bad, and I have hundreds of them. (I play them in the car.)

We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think for the most part they are awful and we want nothing to do with them.

But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.

Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?

I’m starting to feel like Mr. Jones: Something’s going on, but I don’t know what it is. Dear reader, this is the audiophile world we live in today. If you expect anyone to tell you the truth about the current crop of remastered vinyl, you are in for some real disappointment.

We don’t have the time to critique what’s out there, and it seems that the reviewers and forum posters lack the — what? desire, courage, or maybe just the basic critical listening skills — to do it properly.

Which means that in the world of Heavy Vinyl, it’s every man for himself.

And a very different world from the world of Old Vinyl, the kind we offer. In our world we are behind you all the way. Your satisfaction is guaranteed or you get your money back.

Now which world would you rather live in?

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