Heavy Vinyl Reviewed

Heavy Vinyl Reviews and Commentaries

Allow Us to Make the Case that Even CDs Have Better Sound than Classic’s Vinyl

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Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 1903 is a disaster: shrill, smeary and profoundly unmusical.

In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records Living Stereo pressing.

The best Heifetz records on Classic were, if memory serves, LSC 2734 (Glazunov), LSC 2603 (Bruch) and LSC 2769 (Rozsa).

They aren’t nearly as offensive as the others, and one is actually quite good. If you can pick one up for ten or twenty bucks, you might get your money’s worth depending, I suppose, on how critically you listen to your classical records.

The CDs are better for all I know. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s generally poor track record.

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Blow-Up Soundtrack on Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Years ago, probably sometime in 2002 when this remastered record was released, we wrote the following:

TOP RECOMMENDATION from Better Records. What an amazing discovery! I can’t take credit for it, the credit belongs to Four Men with Beards.

Herbie Hancock manages to get a lot of different jazz artists to play some of the most interesting jazz I’ve ever heard. I have no idea who all is playing but each of the different songs involved different players playing in different groupings: sometimes it’s guitar and organ, sometimes it’s saxophone-led quartet; it pretty much runs the gamut of jazz. And the amazing thing is every track is great. And the sound is great.

If you want a jazz primer that introduces you to the different ways jazz groups are arranged, I can hardly think of a better record.

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Sorry, This Is Just Not Our Sound and Never Will Be

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The sound of the 45 RPM 2 disc version of Giant Steps cut by Bernie Grundman did not exactly tickle our fancy.

It sounded thick, dull, and entirely too smooth.

It reminded us of the awful Deja Vu Bernie remastered years ago for Classic Records.

As is the case with so many of the Heavy Vinyl reissues released these days, the studio ambience you hear on these pressings is a pitiful fraction of the ambience the real pressings have encoded in their grooves.

Real pressings like, you know, the ones mass-produced by Atlantic, original and reissue alike. What’s Bernie’s excuse?

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Today’s Bad Heavy Vinyl Pressing Is… Aqualung!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock LP badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

By the time the guitars at the end of the title track fade out you will be ready to take your heavy vinyl Classic Record pressing and ceremoniously drop it in a trashcan. (Actually, the best use for it is to demonstrate to your skeptical audiophile friends that no heavy vinyl pressing can begin to compete with a Hot Stamper from Better Records. Not in a million years.)

We Was Wrong on All Counts

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 from the early 80s. Wrong. Proof positive that in the early 80s I didn’t have good reproduction or know much about records — but I sure thought I did!

When the DCC 180g came along in 1997 we liked that one better. Wrong again. It didn’t have MoFi’s usual midrange suckout and sloppy bass, but it was bad in so many other ways that it is hard for me to believe I ever liked it. But I did, to some degree anyway.

Back then I was a DCC believer, a mistake I would come to recognize once a few more years had passed. See here and here.

And a few years back I was briefly enamored with some original British imports. Wrong for the third time.

After playing more than two dozen pressings of Aqualung in our recent [circa 2010] shootout, it’s pretty clear that the right early Reprise pressings KILL any and all contenders. Forget all the Green Label Chrysalis pressings. Forget the reissues. Forget the imports. It’s original domestic Reprise or nothing when it comes to Aqualung.
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It’s Official – The Audiophile World Has Lost Its Mind

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

  • Nasal, upper midrange boost
  • No real space
  • Hard and smeary
  • Sizzly rain intro
  • Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

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Another Fine Entry for Our Heavy Vinyl Hall of Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It just so happens that I had the time to listen to this work from start to finish twice just last night, 2/11/2026. Saw it performed live just a few months back at Atlanta Symphony Hall.

This wonderful work never gets old.  Next time we do a shootout for the performance we like with Muti on EMI I hope you will see your way to picking up a copy. You won’t regret it.

The Classic Records repressings of Pictures at an Exhibition — whether at 33, 45, or any other speed, on one disc or four –are all godawful sounding.

(Yes, we have auditioned both versions, for as long as we could stand them, which wasn’t long as the sound was painfully bad. The details can be found below.)

Everything that was bad about the worst original Shaded Dog pressings not only hasn’t been fixed, it’s been made even worse!

Yes, we admit to having played a good pressing of LSC 2201 in 2024, but there are just too many bad pressings of the album to bother doing a shootout for it. It’s hard to justify the cost when so few have the sound we are looking for.

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my head hurt and my skin crawl. After a minute or two of listening to sound this bad I’ve had it.

And can you believe that HP put this miserable remastered pressing on his TAS Super Disc List? Sad but true.

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Fandango! Is Yet Another Hoffman/Gray Mediocrity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of ZZ Top Available Now

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play against it?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring.

Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)

So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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Can You Hear the Bloated Bass on This DCC Pressing?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written many years ago, around 2004 I think. This was one of the first DCC records I did an early pseudo-shootout for up against run-of-the-mill Mastering Lab domestic pressings.

I found, somewhat surprisingly, at least at that time, that the DCC came up short, as you will see in the review below. Down the road, Paul and Judy showed me once again what a fool I had been. In 2007, Joni was the last straw.

As much as I admire Steve Hoffman’s work for DCC, on this title the DCC is not as good as the best domestic copies.

The best domestic pressings are just plain more fun.

The DCC sounds thick in the midrange and fat in the bass, although some of that boost in the bass could have been used to the advantage of some of the domestic pressings we played. 1 DB or so at 50-60 cycles would help, but the DCC has a boost in the middle and upper bass that causes the bass to sound bloated next to a properly-mastered, properly-pressed LP. 

I like rich sounding records just like Steve does, but his version of this title is too rich for my blood. If your system is lean sounding you may prefer the DCC, but we found it less than agreeable over here.

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Look Around on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary, about how wrong I was about the Look Around album on Speakers Corner, was written shortly after that pressing came out in the early 2000s.

My foolishness is a textbook case of live and learn. One thing I can tell you for certain is that, although I didn’t know it, I sure had a lot to learn back in those days.

2007 was the year that the penny finally dropped and we finally gained a better understanding of what was going on with the sound of the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue.

Practically everything we would do in audio from that point onward would take us down a very different path than the one we had unknowingly been on. We saw the light, and there was simply never going to be a way to unsee it.

Our Old Review

We were fairly impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001.

Since then we have learned a thing or two. Their version is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination can it compete with any Hot Stamper pressing found on our site.

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