Heavy Vinyl

Heavy Vinyl Reviews and Commentaries

The Electric Recording Company Does My Favorite Things No Favors

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

My Favorite Things happens to be one of our favorite Coltrane records, but we much prefer the stereo pressing of the album. (This is almost always the case when an album has been recorded in stereo, as My Favorite Things was in 1960, later released on Atlantic vinyl in 1961.)

We even tell you what to listen for to help you separate the best pressings from the merely good ones: the piano.

A solid, full-bodied, clear and powerful piano. As we focused on the sound of the instrument, we couldn’t help but notice how brilliant McCoy Tyner is. This may be John Coltrane’s album, but Tyner’s contribution is critically important to the success of My Favorite Things.

The engineering duties were handled by Tom Dowd (whose work you surely know well) and Phil Iehle, who happens to be the man who recorded some of Coltrane’s most iconic albums for Atlantic: Giant Steps (1960) and Coltrane Jazz (also in 1961).

Our last shootout for My Favorite Things was in 2018, not exactly yesterday, but in our defense let me just say that we have done plenty of other Coltrane albums from this period and feel as though we would have no trouble recognizing the sound his engineers were going for.

Unfortunately for those of you who have bought into the idea that the Electric Recording Company produces records with audiophile quality sound, you will find an utterly alien My Favorite Things, one nobody has ever heard before and one that no audiophile should want anything to do with.

Allow us to lay out the specifics of our complaints:

Notes for Side One

Big and full but smeary, flat and dull sax

No space or depth anywhere

Bloated bass

A mess

Notes for Side Two

Side two is even worse

Where is the breathy detail of the sax?

Electric Recording Company

We’ve played a few other ERC releases produced by the gentleman who owns The Electric Recording Company, a Mr. Pete Hutchison.

As you no doubt know, we would not be correct in using the term “mastered.” He does no mastering. He does “transferring.” He transfers the tapes to disc and puts them in nice jackets of his own design.

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Our First Shootout for The Voice from 2007

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Sinatra

By 2007 we were doing regular shootouts for albums such as Sinatra’s The Voice (1955) whenever we had the stock, and of course we naturally would throw the Classic Records pressing in the mix to see how it compared to the real thing.

I was selling the Classic when it was in print back in 1999 although it had never impressed me much at the time. It was a “good enough” record for $30 back then.

We used to tolerate the differences between good vintage pressings and Classic Records reissues, but by 2007 the sound of many of these remastered titles was just too second- and third-rate to ignore, when they weren’t just awful as in the case of most of their orchestral titles.

By 2007 we had much better equipment, a better sounding room due to the room treatments we had purchased, and others we had developed, better cleaning technologies with our discovery of the Walker Enzyme Record Cleaning System, and probably a lot of other things to go with them.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records, although we certainly did not know it at the time.

Our review from 2007 follows.

This is a Six Eye Mono Original Columbia pressing. These originals have the Tubey Magical Midrange that is missing from the Classic Records heavy vinyl pressing.

In our experience these Six Eye Mono Original Columbia pressings are the only ones with any hope of having the Midrange Magic that is fundamental to the sound of Frank’s early Columbia LPs — and is clearly missing from the Classic Records heavy vinyl pressing. The Classic is clean and clear and tonally correct like a CD. Without the warmth and sweetness of analog and, in this case, tube mastering, the sound just isn’t “the real Frank”. (more…)

Pink Floyd / The Dark Side of the Moon – 2003 Heavy Vinyl Reviewed

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty).

The 30th Anniversary Heavy Vinyl pressing is too bright. There is a boost in the top end, probably in the 12K region, that appears to be a poor mastering choice the late Doug Sax made, one that is surely not doing this recording any favors.

In fact, in the case of this new pressing, it’s positively ruinous, assuming you have set your VTA correctly and have the properly functioning tweeters to show you how bright this record is. If you like the phony detail a boosted top end provides, this record should be right up your alley. However, you would do well to recognize that this is a blind alley, and the best way forward is to turn around and start heading in the opposite direction.  

Some audiophiles revere a record like this (last time I checked, the average selling price on Discogs was $149.50) because they need it to wake up their sleepy stereos. My stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play this 2003 recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.

As a service to the audiophile community, please click on the link below to find other records that your system should be able to make clear are too damn bright.

Heavy Vinyl

Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

We confess that even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed with 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 to be impressed by these days.

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 and often worse.

Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see — and hear — things the same way.

Further Reading

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Steely Dan’s Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Steely Dan

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s look at the facts. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustable supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the substantial amounts of both time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

We hope that at least some fraction of the audiophile public who own these titles will be able to hear for themselves the shortomings we have described and begin to consider the possibility that there might be another way.

That other way can be found in the bins of their local record stores or, for those with deeper pockets, on our site.

Either way, settling for the kind of sound found on these modern reissues is the one choice no one should be making. Especially in the case of this awful UHQR. For $150 no less. Our transcribed notes follow:

Side One – Black Cow

Very veiled vocals and snare.

Size and tonality aren’t far off.

Odd bass. A bit thick or “slow” feeling.

The hook isn’t very dynamic.

Gets hot and crunchy.

Side Three, Track One – Peg

Ugly snare and hi-hat.

Big and rich intro like the good ones then falls apart.

Flat and dry vocals.

Bluberry Half-Speed bass

Grade this side: 1+

Side Three, Track Two – Home at Last

Really hear the issues here.

Compressed, hard, flat.

Smeary hi-hat.

Summing Up the Sound

Size and tonality aren’t far off for tracks like Black Cow and Peg.

The sound is kind of rich but the mids are pretty flat and dead.

Really lacking the transparency, presence and breath in the vocals.

Lacking dynamics too.

Peaks get compressed and gritty.

Songs like Home at Last really suffer.

It’s hard, recessed and messy.

Final grades

Black Cow and Peg: 1+

Home at Last: NFG

We do not sell records with sound so mediocre that they have only earned a sonic grade of 1+.

As for NFG, what is there to say?

Note that in our review for the Cisco, Home at Last was the track with the most obvious problems there too. We said it was “the toughest song to get right on side two.”

From our point of view, it’s clear that the Bernie Grundman of 1977, age 34, had the skills and the equipment to knock Home at Last right out of the park. Contrast that with the record the Bernie Grundman of today has produced, at the age of 80, with different equipment (my money is on much worse equipment) and who knows what remaining skills.

Yes, it’s unfortunate he was stuck with a dub tape — those are the breaks — but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he made a right mess of Home at Last, a different mess but not a better mess than Kevin Gray made using whatever crappy dub tape he was stuck with.

A sad state of affairs for the audiophiles who love Steely Dan and Heavy Vinyl. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both, not with Chad calling the shots and Bernie doing his bidding.

What’s Up with Chad?

Speaking of the Bernie Grundman-Chad Kassem connection, we reproduce below the hopelessly mistaken advice we gave Chad after having played his not-that-terrible Can’t Buy a Thrill UHQR:

He used to like super-fat and tubey jazz records, and he hired Doug Sax to make some of those for him. For a while he liked MoFi-like records, and he hired Stan Ricker to make some of those for him. He hired Kevin Gray to make mediocrities like Quiet Kenny (review coming, but you can watch the Washington Post video to get the idea), and he hired George Marino to make a mess of Tea for the Tillerman.

If he’s hiring the best, as he likes to say he is, why all the second-rate and third-rate and just plain awful sounding records?

Our advice: Chad should fire all the other engineers he’s been hiring lately and just work with Bernie from now on. (The guy who cut this record should definitely not be rehired. When’s the last time he mastered a record that’s any better than passable?)

We give up. There is no hope for this guy and his astonishingly misnamed Quality Record Pressings.

There is an interview with Bernie Grundman about the making of this Aja UHQR which can be found on youtube easily enough. In it he admits that it’s mastered from a tape copy. Discogs notes:

“Mastered from an analog, non EQ’d tape copy.”

I guess audiophiles of a certain persuasion — those with an affinity for remastered Heavy Vinyl pressings know who I’m talking about — can take solace in the fact that this new Aja is still better than the unbelievably bad sounding Cisco pressing that came out in 2007. (That Cisco pressing was undeniably NFG on both sides.)

Fremer raved about that record, but now that Bernie has cut a better pressing for The Big Guy, he can obviously see how he got that one wrong, even though he seemed fairly confidant about the quality of the sound in his review from 2007.

Hey, do me a favor and take a minute and see for yourself. The guy who wrote this seems pretty confidant, right?

“This new Cisco reissue is vastly superior to both the original pressing (ABC AA 1006) and to Mobile Fidelity’s ½ speed mastered reissue (Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-0333).

‘If your stereo system (or your personal savior/used record dealer) tells you otherwise, blame it and/or him, not Elliot Scheiner, one of the original engineers on Aja who oversaw this reissue, or Donald Fagen (no introduction necessary), or Kevin Gray and Robert Pincus who mastered it from the original analog tape at AcousTech.”

In case you were wondering, the aforementioned “personal savior/used record dealer” might just be yours truly. I’ve been called worse.

No matter. He goes on to give the Cisco Aja a 10/10 grade. Seriously, those are the grades you see pictured. 10 over 10, no joke as Biden would say. (I guess the music got better in the 17 years that elapsed between the two pressings too. It happens.)

Shortly thereafter he writes:

“This remaster exudes the kind of musical honesty you might expect when one of the original engineers and the artistic center of gravity are involved in its production.”

To my knowledge, there is not a whit of evidence to support the idea that any such original engineer and any such artistic center of gravity were involved in the Cisco production.

Later on he adds:

“By the way, if someone says the reissue doesn’t sound any good, be sure to ask about that person’s playback system. For the record I listened on The Continuum Caliburn turntable with Cobra arm, the Grand Prix Monaco turntable with Graham Phantom arm and the Merrill MS21 turntable with Triplanar arm. Cartridges included Lyra Titan i, Koetsu Urushi Vermillion and Air Tight PC-1. Phono preamps included Einstein Turntable’s Choice and Manley Steelhead. Preamp was darTZeel and amps were Musical Fidelity kWs driving Wilson MAXX2s. Cables were TARA Labs Zero interconnects and Omega speaker cable. Believe me, I heard what’s on the vinyl loud and clear and it’s spectacular!”

Man, that’s got to hurt. If you own any of that stuff, my advice would be to get rid of it, and pronto.

Can Fremer really have wasted that kind of money on equipment that is so far off the mark that a piece-of-garbage record like the Cisco LP actually sounded right to him?

Yes, that’s apparently what happened. And if you have been in the audio game for any length of time, you know that Analog True Believers like him get taken to the cleaners every day of the week.

If Fremer used that same system to review any other records back then, you should seriously consider ignoring his reviews for those too. (My advice, starting in 1994, has never wavered: audiophiles who appreciate good sounding records should make a point of ignoring anything the man says or writes. Or doing the opposite of whatever it is that he advises. Now that I think about it, that might actually work better.)

I’m sure he will tell you that everything system-wise is better now. No doubt the list of equipment he owns is even longer and you can be damn sure the equipment on it is even more expensive.

Now he’s really got Aja’s number. It’s not a 10, it’s an 11!

Some of us remain skeptical. We bump into his writing from time to time, and it sounds pretty much the way it always has. If he’s learned anything about records in the last 30 years, I see no evidence of it.

You can find his Cisco reviews — the original one and the newly corrected one — on his site if you care to do the search. I honestly for the life of me don’t know why anyone would bother.

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Seriously, This is Your Idea of Analog?

Audiophile Quality Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

Well Recorded Classical Albums from The Core Collection Available Now

Whether made by Klavier or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-90s, many Heavy Vinyl pressings started to have a shortcoming that nowadays we find insufferable: they are just too damn smooth.

Smeary, thick, dull, opaque, and lacking in ambience, this record has all the hallmarks of the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue.

The sound is smeary, thick and opaque because, among other things, the record was mastered by Doug Sax from a copy tape, and not all that well either.

It is yet another murky audiophile piece of trash from the mastering lathe of the formerly brilliant Doug Sax. He used to cut the best sounding records in the world. Then he started working for Analogue Productions and never cut a good record again as far as I know.

On this record, in Doug’s defense it’s only fair to point out that he had dub tapes to work with, which is neither here nor there as these pressings are not worth the dime’s worth of vinyl used to make them.

Maybe the hearing-challenged Chad Kassem wanted this sound — almost all his remastered titles have the same faults as this Klavier — and simply asked that Doug cut it to sound real good like analog spossed to sound in the mind of this kingpin, which meant smooth, fat, thick and smeary.

Yes, this is exactly what some folks think analog should sound like.

Just ask whoever mastered the Beatles records in 2014. Somebody boosted the bass and smoothed out the upper midrange, and I don’t think they did that by accident. They actually thought it was good idea.

Harry Moss obviously would not have agreed, but he’s not around anymore to do the job right.

Here is the cover for the real EMI. No idea if the sound is any good, but it has to be better than the awful Klavier, doesn’t it?

Below are some thoughts from a recent classical listing that we hope will shed some light on our longstanding aversion to the sound of these modern remastered records.

What is lost in these newly remastered recordings? Lots of things, but the most obvious and bothersome is transparency.

Modern records are just so damn opaque.

We can’s stand that sound. It drives us crazy. Important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found.

That audiophiles as a whole — including those that pass themselves off as the champions of analog in the audio press — do not notice these failings does not speak well for either their equipment or their critical listening skills.

It is our contention that no one alive today makes records that sound as good as the ones we sell. Once you hear our Hot Stamper pressing, those 180 gram records you own may never sound right to you again. They sure don’t sound right to us, but we are in the enviable position of being able to play the best properly cleaned older pressings (reissues included) side by side with the new ones, where the faults of the current reissues become much more recognizable, even obvious. When you can hear them that way, head to head, there really is no comparison.

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There’s Something Not Quite Right about MoFi’s Blue

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a review Robert Brook wrote recently for the MoFi One-Step pressing of one of our favorite albums of all time, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, originally released in 1971.

BLUE: What’s the RIGHT SOUND For Joni Mitchell’s CLASSIC?

Blue Sounds Funny Now

Based on everything I am reading these days from Robert Brook, he has a good stereo, two working ears, and knows plenty about records and what they are supposed to sound like.

This was not always the case as he himself would tell you. His stereo used to be much better at hiding the faults of a record like the MoFi One-Step of Blue than the stereo he has now. He got rid of most of his audiophile electronics, got a better phono stage, cartridge and arm, improved the quality of his electricity, found some sophisticated vibration controlling platforms for his vintage gear and did lots of other things to make his playback more accurate and — we cannot stress this too strongly — more fun, more exciting and more involving.

When your stereo is doing a better job of reproducing what’s in the grooves of your records, the first thing you notice when playing a Mobile Fidelity or other Heavy Vinyl pressing is that the sound is funny and wrong. (Please excuse the technical jargon; those of you who have been audiophiles as long as we have will understand what I mean, the rest of you can just play along. All of this will make sense eventually.)

When you use colored-sounding audiophile equipment — but I repeat myself — then your colored-sounding audiophile records don’t sound nearly as colored as they would under other conditions.

For example, other conditions obtain if you have — again, sorry about the jargon — revealing, accurate, tonally correct, natural-sounding equipment, free from the colorations — euphonic and otherwise — that allow one piece of audiophile equipment to sound so different from another.

Robert, through dedication, hard work, perseverance, and, most importantly, a real love of music, has succeeded where so many have failed, and now he has a system that mercilessly reveals the flaws of these modern records in much the way that our system does. He takes no prisoners and neither do we.

It took us a very, very long time to build such a system. I got involved with high-end audio in 1975. A mere 32 years later I had a stereo that found faults with a Heavy Vinyl pressing that practically everybody in the audiophile community was raving about. With each passing year it has become more and more clear that we were right about that record and everybody else was wrong.

These other folks couldn’t hear the colorations and limitations in the sound of Blue because the colorations and limitations in their systems either drowned them out or made them too difficult to recognize.

As you may know, from that point on we never took the modern remastered records made by any audiophile label or mastered by any audiophile-approved mastering engineer at face value. We put them to the test and they failed almost every time. (We’re so glad to know that the only title we really like was not mastered or pressed for audiophiles. Whew! Still batting 1.000.)

Robert managed to compress those 32 years into a much more workable number by following our lead and taking our advice. The British writer Aubrey Menen states the idea succinctly in this quote:

The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.

If your audiophile records don’t sound like something is wrong with them, or something is missing, then it’s time to get to work and make some changes. Keep at it until the problems with these records become more clear.

Make no mistake, these records are doing some things well and some things not so well, and a proper stereo should be able to help you sort out which are which.

Most audiophile systems I have heard are not able to do this — in fact they act as an impediment to efforts of this kind. I assume it is one of the main reasons their owners have fallen for the modern remastered LP. (There are plenty of others too numerous to mention here. You can find some of them under the heading of mistaken thinking.)

Robert writes:

Not every listener will hear what’s missing from this One-Step. With most modern audiophile systems struggling to reproduce the subtle transients that make a record like Blue so compelling, I’d guess that most will not. I could even see how a lot of audiophiles would prefer this One-Step to even the best vintage copies. After all, it’s hard to find a vintage copy of Blue that plays quietly AND sounds good, and this MoFi checks both those boxes.

But make no mistake, something is missing on this MoFi, and it’s not something that can be brought back by playing it on a “better” or more expensive system. Some of the precious life of Blue has been lost in this One-Step, and it simply cannot be resuscitated. The only way to bring that life back is to find a great vintage copy and build a stereo that can play it back well.

We Know Blue

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, played copies of it by the score as a matter of fact, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for Blue on this very blog.

There is currently one on the site for those of you who really love the album and are willing to pay a premium-and-then-some price for it.

For everybody else, here is how to go about finding your own killer copy of Blue.

Our review for the MoFi One-Step of the album has been written and will be posted soon.

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This Speakers Corner Pressing Had Us Fooled

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

We were very impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001. We simply could not find a vintage pressing that could beat it. I actually took it over to a good customer’s house so that he could hear how much better the album sounded on Heavy Vinyl when played head to head with whatever vintage pressing he might have had in his collection.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. I could not have been more wrong.

His copy smoked mine right from the get-go. I wiped the egg off my face, wrote down the stamper numbers for his copy, and proceeded to get hold of some good early pressings so that I could find a copy that sounded the way his did — which was awesome, the best it had ever sounded, even on a system (Infinity speakers, Audio Research electronics) that I had never much cared for. (His system is set up in a basement with a low ceiling, a problem that cannot be solved with good equipment, room treatements or anything else for that matter.)

Eventually — eventually in this case being at least five years and maybe more —  we felt we had this album’s number and knew which pressings tended to have the goods and which ones didn’t. All that was left was to do  was to clean up the stock we had and do the shootout so that we could actually be sure, or sure enough, keeping in mind that all knowledge about records is provisional.

This would have been about 2010, and we would learn a lot, but we would keep learning more about the album with every subsequent shootouts, close to ten by now I should think.

Live and Learn

These kinds of Heavy Vinyl pressings used to sound good on older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.

Some of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

The Speakers Corner pressing is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination would it ever be able to compete with any Hot Stamper pressing you might see on our site.

Problem Solved?

Most pressings of this album are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled, smeary and full of compressor distortion in the louder parts. This is hardly a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.

The Speakers Corner pressing is not grainy, shrill, thin or distorted, but it is veiled, smeary and compressed, and all you need to do to recognize its shortcomings is compare it to a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned early pressing.

They may be rare, but there are good sounding pressings. You just have to work to find them.

Audiophile Sound to Die For

As you may have noticed, we here at Better Records are HUGE Sergio Mendes fans. Nowhere else in the world of music can you find the wonderfully diverse thrills that this group offers. We go CRAZY for the breathy multi-tracked female vocals and their layers of harmonies, the brilliant percussion, and, let us never forget, the critically important piano work and arrangements of Sergio himself.

Brasil ’66, Equinox and Stillness are ALL Desert Island Discs for us, but we enjoy the hell out of their other albums as well. This stuff never sounds dated to us. We love the albums of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao and Astrud Gilberto from the period, albums which no doubt served as templates for the style Sergio wanted to create with his new ensemble, but Brazil 66 is clearly a step up in every way: songwriting, arranging, production, and quality of musicianship.

For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. Almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but the first album and Equinox and specific tracks on their other albums are not far behind.

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

Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin II

More Classic Records Led Zeppelin Titles Reviewed

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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Neil Young’s Greatest Hits – Oh, So That’s Who Cut It

More of the Music of Neil Young

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Neil Young

When I reviewed the Classic Records record in 2005, I had never heard of Chris Bellman. As it turns out, he’s the guy who cut this piece of crap. I had no idea. And why would I care anyway?

The most shocking thing about the fact that he cut the album is not how awful it sounds.

No, there are plenty of awful sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings in the world, enough to fill up the glossy-paged catalogs of every mail order audiophile record dealer from here to Timbuktu.

What is shocking is that there are audiophiles — self-identified lovers of sound who are supposedly capable of telling a good sounding record from a hole in the ground — that defend this man’s work.

How does anyone take this guy’s records seriously?

To be fair, it should be said that I like one of the records Mr Bellman has cut, the 45 of Brothers in Arms, discussed here. An excerpt:

[In this video] I’m asked if I like any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I can think of is Chris Bellman, because he masterered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressings I know of that sounds any good, Brothers in Arms, released in 2021. I played it when Edgers [Geoff Edgers from WAPO] brought it by the studio when he first visited me in preparation for his article.

My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s mostly sounds right, and that surprised me because most of these modern records sound funny and weird and rarely do they sound right.

(Geoff brought over three records that day: Brothers in Arms, the remastered Zep II, and a ridiculously bad sounding Craft pressing of Lush Life, which was mastered by Kevin Gray, and one which I have not had time to review yet. It was my introduction to the Craft series, and let’s just say we got off on the wrong foot. I told Geoff it sounded like a bad CD, and that’s pretty much all I remember of it. The average price for that pressing on Discogs is roughly $69 these days. The CD is cheaper and there is very little doubt in my mind that it would be better sounding to boot.)

I stand by my admiration for Brothers in Arms, a very good reissue, something that might give one of our low level Hot Stamper pressings a run for its money.

But he has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to the other records of his we (and Robert Brook) have played. Reviews are coming, late as always, but for now here is what we’ve written about the records he’s credited with remastering.

Our Review from 2005

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock LP badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles on the lookouot for easy answers and quick fixes. Instead they got this turd, and, judging from the comments still up on the Steve Hoffman forum, it appears as though they like this kind of sh*tty sound. How that is possible I do not know. [1]

This is our review from 2005, when Classic first pressed the album.

Some reviewers loved it, we of course hated it, so what else is new? If you think this record sounds good, one thing is certain: you don’t own many — or any — good sounding Neil Young records.

The average Neil Young record, like the average record by anyone else you care to name, is nothing special. Why should it be? But that certainly doesn’t excuse Classic Records’ release of this dead-as-a-doornail hack job.

The sound of the Classic vinyl barely passes the laugh test.

What does it tell you when Neil Young’s CDs (Harvest in particular) sound better than this record in every way?

My question to the Vinyl True Believers of the world is this:  Why own a turntable if you’re going to play records like these?

I have boxes of CDs with more musically involving sound and I don’t even bother to play those. Why would I take the time to throw on some 180 gram record that sounds worse than a good CD?

If I ever found myself in the position of having to sell mediocrities like the above in order to make a living, I’d be looking for another line of work. The vast majority of these newly-remastered pressings are just not very good.

How Bad Is It?

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope, and if they devote sufficient resources of time and money to the effort, they can get where they need to be, the same way we did.

Tea for the Tillerman on the new 45 RPM cutting may be substandard in every way, but it is not a pass/not-yet pressing. It lacks one thing above all others, Tubey Magic, so if your system has an abundance of that quality, as many tube systems do, the new pressing may be quite listenable and enjoyable. Those whose systems can play the record and not notice this important shortcoming are not exactly failing. They most likely have a system that is heavily colored and not very revealing, but it is a system that is not hopeless.

A system that can play the MoFi Aja without revealing to the listener how wrong it is has to be on another level of bad entirely, and that is what would qualify as a failing system. My system in the ’80s played that record just fine. Looking back on it now, I realize it was doing more wrong than right.

We were still selling Heavy Vinyl when this Neil Young album came out in 2005, but a scant two years later we had had enough of the sonically-challenged titles that were being foisted on the public. It was then that we decided to focus all our energies on finding good vintage vinyl for our audiophile customers.

In 2007 we took the question we had asked rhetorically above and turned it into a full-blown commentary:

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Thriller Is Proof that Mobile Fidelity Is Cutting Some Real Crap These Days

More of the Music of Michael Jackson

More Reviews and Commentaries for Thriller

Don’t blame the digital step for the bad sound of this pressing. If it were all analog, you can be sure Mobile Fidelity would have screwed it up every bit as badly.

If this is the sound audiophiles are interested in, lord have mercy on their souls. They must be as lost as lost can be.

Side One:

Track One: thin and small, clear but badly lacks body and punch.

Track Two: unpleasant cymbals, no real dynamics.

Side Two:

Track One: no dynamics, bright and small.

Track Three: unpleasant and small.

Two Questions

Is this the worst version of the album ever made?

Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

Are any of these Mofi One-Step pressings any good?

I seriously doubt it. Until one comes along that doesn’t sound awful, the jury is out. Those of you looking for miracles are likely to be disappointed.

Having said that, I’m sure there are audiophiles and audiophile reviewers who like the sound of this pressing and have said so online.

Based on what we heard, how on earth are these people qualified to judge the sound of records? I guess that’s three questions.

How bad does a record have to sound before they notice? Make that four, sorry.

Bernie Was The Man

Bernie Grundman cut the original pressings of Thriller. About the nicest thing we can say about him these days is that his work at one time was excellent.

Our evidence? When you hear a killer copy of Thriller — a recording with a lot going on and one that no doubt was difficult to master — the fact that nobody else has even come close to cutting the album as well as he did all those years ago stands as proof that he will always be considered one of the greats. (If he would only stop taking Chad’s calls, the record world would be in a much better place.)

Speaking of Chad, we have now auditioned the new Aja UHQR and will be posting our review soon, so stay tuned.

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