Heavy Vinyl

Heavy Vinyl Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “My brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Midnight Blue.

Hi Tom,
I used the first track to compare this Super Hot Stamper pressing I bought to a ’63 original to the Music Matters pressing. This was kind of interesting.

The Music Matters is total junk, as it is completely lifeless. It just has that lifeless audiophile feel. So I’ll just take the MM right out of the equation.

My brain is used to the original pressing’s sound, which is more raw sounding.

The SHS is, simply put,way more of everything!

So much so that I had to turn the gain down… my brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers. The tubeyness factor is way way higher than the original. I eventually acclimated and turned it back up.

The original just has that sound that makes me think of long ago, and it is quite vibrant. Perhaps after some dozen listenings I will put it in the sell pile, but not quite yet.

Very happy to have this amazingly lush sounding LP.

Take Care, Michel

Michel,

It’s hard to imagine that you will be able to listen to the original “ear” pressing a dozen times. We never cared for it. Compared to the later pressings we sell it’s just too crude. (That may be what you actually mean by “raw”.)

Rudy would go on to recut the record much better down the road, and those are, in our experience, unbeatable.

As for Music Matters, most of their records are pretty bad sounding, but no worse than most of what is being marketed to audiophiles these days. Here are some of our reviews and commentaries for their crappy remasters.

Lifeless? Of course it is.

The records being made by the companies operating today have sound that is more often than not dead as a doornail.

It’s positively shameful, especially considering the quality of the original recordings.

Thanks for writing,

Best, TP

Further Reading

Highway 61 Revisited – Not So Good on Sundazed in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

I don’t think mono works for this Highway 61, so we never carried this Sundazed pressing, and we certainly would not have recommended it back in the days when we were still selling Heavy Vinyl (up to 2011).

Stick with the 360 stereo pressings for the best sound. (Other 360 pressings that win shootouts can be found here.)

To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that sound better in mono, click here.

Dylan Discography

Here you will find his albums through 1989, after which you are on your own. The later recordings have never sounded right to us and we have no plans to do shootouts for any of them.

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What Do You Get When You Buy a Record from Analogue Productions?

Skeptical Thinking Will Help You Identify Records with Better Sound

Chad Kassem, the man who founded Analogue Productions sometime in the 90s,  claims that all his pressings are superior to those of his competitors, as well as all previous reissues, and — gasp! — even the originals, or perhaps it would be better to say especially the originals.

In doing so he makes claims that can be tested. Our commentary today will look at how he came to believe in the superiority of his product. Naturally we disagree with him about the quality of his records, and have been doing so since the early-90s.

But don’t these disagreements just boil down to one opinion differing with another, our opinion versus his?

As a matter of fact, no. It turns out there are ways to run experiments which are guaranteed to identify the record pressings that actually do have better sound. We at Better Records have spent more than twenty years developing and refining a great many of these methods. Given the necessary resources, these methods are sure to produce reliable data.

This is data backed by evidence. Testable data. Data derived from experiments that may not eliminate the value of opinions, but removes them from the position they occupy most often in the world of audio, front and center, and relegates them to the margins where they are more appropriate.

So let’s get back to the question we asked above: What do you get when you buy a record on the Analogue Productions label?

In the simplest terms, you get a record that meets with Chad’s approval.

Since Chad appears — at least to me — to have no critical listening skills to speak of, he must instead rely on the assurances of the engineers who work for him. Yes, they tell him, they succeeded in making him a record of the very highest quality. There are no conflicts of interest they say. We all love music and are just interested in making the best record we can. Unsurprisingly, we made he best version ever.

Their professional opinions are then backed up by those that review and sell these very same records.

Everyone operating in this circular chain gets paid to agree that Chad’s records are indeed of the highest quality, exactly what one would expect to hear frmo those who know how they were made. (Confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — is surely the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of those who make and market audiophile records.)

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Direct Hits – Not Bad on Track, Awful on Classic Heavy Vinyl

More of The Who

This is a very nice looking original Track Black Label British Import LP. As anyone who knows the Who’s back catalog can attest, most of these songs were poorly recorded. Like all compilations, the sound here varies from track to track. Side two definitely has the better sound.

We guarantee that this pressing sounds better than the Classic reissue, which was so bad we never carried it.

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MoFi Proves Once Again It Has No Idea How to Make a Good Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Women Who Rock Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Learning to Crawl and wrote down our impressions as the record was playing that you see below.

We try to be very specific about the strengths and weaknesses of the records we play, which is why we reproduce our notes — in this case for audiophile records — whenever possible. (There are plenty of shootout notes for vintage pressings on the blog as well.)

The title at the top of our post-it sets the stage for what you are about to read: the specific faults of an “especially bad MoFi.”

Do they make any other kind? Well, sometimes, to be sure, but the good ones are few and far between.

It must be hard to make a record sound this bad, but if anyone can do it, Mobile Fidelity has proven that they are the men and women for the job. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Side One

Dull drums at intro.
Bass compressed and wooly.
Vocal present and hard.
Everything else recessed.

Side Two

Very dry snare and guitar.
Flat, edgy and lifeless.
Not even clear.
Just shitty.
Lacks bass here too.

Consensus

NFG.

This one definitely belongs in the Mobile Fidelity hall of shame (along with 66 of their other titles). My CD sounds better.

To aid you in understanding just how lost the buyers of these audiophile records are these days — and who am I to talk? — we reproduce the five most recent reviews from Discogs as of 5/2026 below.

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Latin ala Lee! The Record of the Year for 2003?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miss Peggy Lee Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It’s highly unlikely we would still agree with all the good things we had to say back in 2003 about Latin ala Lee! on Heavy Vinyl, but here it is anyway.

Plenty of records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore, for the simple reason that, in this case, since 2003 we’ve managed to make a huge number of changes to the system.

These changes resulted in more accurate and revealing playback, derived mostly from the testing we did with this group of records and others like them. (Here is a personal favorite.)

Unfortunately for all concerned, S&P’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discuss in more depth here.

As for the difficult remix, the more remixes I hear, the less I like them. The ones Hoffmann did for Nat King Cole (see here) drive me up a wall.

Our Old Review

The Record of the Year for 2003.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s true! If you don’t have a smile on your face fifteen seconds after playing track one, you better check your pulse, cuz, as the famous song has it: Jack, You Dead. Amazingly good sound, courtesy of a fabulous and painstakingly difficult remix by the mastering guru himself, Steve Hoffman. This is popular music for the previous generation — but why should we be denied these long forgotten treasures?

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Nobody Like Us Existed in the Record World of the 90s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A newer customer wrote to me years ago about the amazing sounding Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West that we’d sent him. He noted that his AP Heavy Vinyl pressing was “quite decent,” a characterization we found distressing.

Here is his original letter, along with some of what we wrote back. Newer comments and links have also been added.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

Some things have changed since I wrote that screed many years ago. For example, we don’t find the sound of the OJC pressing of the album acceptable these days, a subject I plan to address before too long [and have yet to do].

The bottom line is this:

The Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West you have now in your possession is the one that allows you to hear what that album is supposed to sound like.

Not the way Chad Kassem likes his records to sound: opaque, bloated, dull, smeary and compressed.

No, your White Hot Stamper has the brilliant sound that Roy DuNann recorded all those years ago, sounding, I believe, the way he wanted it to. This is of course only an opinion, but it is an opinion based on playing dozens of early Contemporary pressings and well as many vintage reissues that actually can beat them. Examples of both can be found here.

But Somebody Needed to Figure It Out, Right?

All that was needed was for some group to come along who could properly clean a batch of vintage pressings, original or otherwise, play them, figure out what the best copies do that the average copy doesn’t, identify that best copy, and send it your way.

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The Who Sell Out to Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2005 I think it was the stereo version we played of the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing, not the mono. Both were mastered by Chris Bellman, one of our least favorite mastering engineers.

Most of the records he’s cut for Bernie Grundman Mastering have such poor sound quality that they end up going into our hall of shame, which is exactly where they belong. If you have any of his badly-remastered vinyl in your collection, now is the time to pull it out, play it and see for yourself just how far off the mark this guy’s records are.

At this point, it’s no longer astonishing to us that there are still audiophiles who defend his work. Naturally, these include self-styled audiophile reviewers who are obviously in the wrong business and too clueless to know it.

We find it hard to say anything good about the man except this: he did an excellent job cutting Brothers in Arms at 45 RPM. (Our review for that pressing has been delayed since 2022 but it is coming one of these days, I swear on a stack of records.)

Our review from 2005:

Not our idea of good sound.

The only Classic Who record we ever carried was Who’s Next, which is actually pretty good — we gave it a B back in the day.

I suspect it would earn a poorer grade now. We had lower standards for Heavy Vinyl back then.

(Which is the understatement of all time. We had lower standards for every kind of record back then.)

We have since discussed how wrong we were about a great many records, including the Classic Records reissue of The Who’s Masterpiece, and in the case of that title more than once.

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A Random Copy of 52nd Street Tells You What, Exactly?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Sonic Grade:

Side One: F / Side Two: C+

The Impex (Cisco) 180 gram remastering of 52nd Street was cut by Kevin Gray, under the direction of Robert Pincus (aka Mr Record), at the now defunct AcousTech Mastering in Camarillo. We noted the following in a recent review for a much superior (how could it not be?) Hot Stamper pressing:

Side one is a joke (not much ambience, resolution, energy, etc.) but side two is actually quite good. Side two fixes the biggest problem with the album: hard, honky vocals.

In his review appearing in The Absolute Sound, Neil Gader plucks two songs out of the album’s nine as especially worthy of praise. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. If I didn’t know the album as well as I do, I might wonder why. 

In our review we went on to say:

But at a cost. It still sounds like a modern record, with not much in the way of space, transparency, richness, resolution and the like. You know, all that ANALOG stuff that old dinosaurs like us like our records to have.

For those of you who have thirty three dollars to spend, you could do a lot worse on side two. Side one is pretty bad and you would have a hard time doing worse.

Allow me to now quote Mr. Gader from The Absolute Sound, October 2011, Issue 216, Pg. 129

The Impex 180-gram remastering by Kevin Gray is superb. It replaces the spongy timing and dull top of the original Columbia LP with expansive space and sharp details. Its vivid and brightened treble is welcome compared to the warm but smothered original. Listen for Joel’s doubled harmonies, the pennywhistle in “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” and the burning horn section in “Half a Mile Away,” and you’ll hear what a difference a great remastering makes.

Mr. Gader has a bad original pressing, and like most reviewers he makes the mistake of assuming that other originals, and probably all the originals, perforce sound like his. Speaking from experience, they most assuredly do not. We will not be addressing his specific complaints in this commentary for one simple reason.

Nothing in his review describes the sound of the best copies. 

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The Violin is a Wonderful Instrument for Tweaking and Tuning

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Our review for LSC 2314, with both the Mendelssohn and Prokofiev Violin Concertos, described the wonderful sound we heard on some of the better copies as follows:

As usual for a Living Stereo Heifetz violin concerto recording, he is front and center, with his fingering and every movement of his bow clearly audible, without being hyped-up in the least. (Well, maybe just a bit.)

No violin concerto recording can be considered to have proper Living Stereo sound if the violin isn’t right, and fortunately we found the violin on this copy to be very, very right, with the kind of rosiny texture and immediacy that brings the music to life right in your very own listening room.

Audiophiles who cannot hear what is wrong with the Classic Records repressings of Heifetz’s RCA recordings by composers including:

may want to seek out a nice — maybe even one that’s not so nice — vintage RCA Shaded Dog of any of his albums, if only to see just how poorly the Classics stack up (with the exception of the LSC 2734, which we have to say, against all odds, is very good).

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