Commentaries on Heavy Vinyl

The Law of Large Numbers Can Help You Find Better Records

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Roy Orbison

More Commentary on the Remastered Heavy Vinyl LP

Presenting another entry in our series of Big Picture observations concerning records and audio.

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

I’m going out of my frigging mind on this White Hot stamper of Roy Orbison Greatest Hits. What a piece of sh*t is my DCC test pressing.

Naz

Naz,

I used to like the DCC vinyl too.

Then my stereo got a lot better, which I write about under the heading Progress in Audio.

Eventually it became obvious to me what was wrong with practically all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that were put out by that label.

The good ones can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.

The bad ones can be found in this group.

And those in the middle end up in this group.

Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right,, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.

Every listing in this section is about knowing now what I didn’t know then, and there is enough of that material to fill its own blog if I would simply take the time to write it all down.

Every album shootout we do is a chance to learn something new about records. When you do them all day, every day, you learn things that no one else could possibly know who hasn’t done the work of comparing thousands of pressings with thousands of other pressings.

The Law of large numbers[1] tells us that in the world of records, more is better. We’ve taken that law and turned it into a business.

It’s the only way to find Better Records.

Not the records that you think are better.

No, truly better records are the records that proved themselves to be better empirically, by employing rigorous scientific methodologies that we have laid in detail for anyone to read and follow.

Being willing to make lots of mistakes is part of our secret, and we admit to making a lot of them

Knowing what I know now, and having the system currently that I’ve put together over the course of the last twenty years or so, I guarantee you the DCC Gold CD is dramatically better sounding than their vinyl release. They almost always are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer the DCC’s CDs to their records.

DCC’s CDs did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we have discussed on the blog in some depth here.

[1] Wikipedia on the Law of large numbers:

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The Beatles / Rubber Soul – How Does the Heavy Vinyl Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul

Reviews and Commentaries for Rubber Soul

[This review was originally written in 2015.]

We are so excited to tell you about the first of the Heavy Vinyl Beatles remasters we’ve played! As we cycle through our regular Hot Stamper shootouts for The Beatles’ albums we will be of course be reviewing more of them*. I specifically chose this one to start with, having spent a great deal of time over the last year testing the best vinyl pressings against three different CD versions of Rubber Soul.

The short version of our review of the new Rubber Soul vinyl would simply point out that it’s awful, and, unsurprisingly, it’s awful in most of the ways that practically all modern Heavy Vinyl records are: it’s opaque, airless, energy-less and just a drag.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to take Michael Fremer, the foremost champion of thick vinyl from sources far and wide, to task in expectation of his rave review, when to my surprise I found the rug had been pulled out from under me — he didn’t like it either. Damn!

MF could hear how bad it was. True to form, he thinks he knows why it doesn’t sound good:

As expected, Rubber Soul, sourced from George Martin’s 1987 16 bit, 44.1k remix sounds like a CD. Why should it sound like anything else? That’s from what it was essentially mastered. The sound is flattened against the speakers, hard, two-dimensional and generally hash on top, yet it does have a few good qualities as CDs often do: there’s good clarity and detail on some instruments. The strings are dreadful and the voices not far behind. The overall sound is dry and decay is unnaturally fast and falls into dead zone.

It strikes me as odd that the new vinyl should sound like a CD. I have listened to the newly remastered 2009 CD of Rubber Soul in stereo extensively and think it sounds quite good, clearly better than the Heavy Vinyl pressing that’s made from the very same 16 bit, 44.1k remixed digital source.

If the source makes the new vinyl sound bad, why doesn’t it make the new CD sound bad? I can tell you that the new CD sounds dramatically better than the 1987 CD I’ve owned for twenty years. They’re not even close. How could that be if, as MF seems to believe, the compromised digital source is the problem?

Fortunately I didn’t know what the source for the new CD was when I was listening to it. I assumed it came from the carefully remastered hi-rez tapes that were being used to make the new series in its entirety, digital sources that are supposed to result in sound with more analog qualities. Well, based on what I’ve heard, they do, and those more analog qualities obviously extend to the new Rubber Soul compact disc. At least to these ears they do.

Possibly my ignorance of the source tape allowed me to avoid the kind of confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — that is surely one of the biggest pitfalls in all of audio.

Doors Progress

He raved about the digitally remastered Doors Box Set when it came out, but now that Acoustic Sounds is doing Doors albums on 45 he is singing a different tune:

Whatever I wrote about that box then [5/1/2010 if you care to look it up], now, by comparison, the best I can say for The Doors on that set is that it sounds like you’re hearing the album played back on the best CD player ever. It’s smoooooth, laid back and pleasant but totally lacks balls, grit, detail, spaciousness and raw emotional power. The entire presentation is flat against a wall set up between the speakers. The double 45 has greater dynamics, detail, spaciousness and appropriate grit—everything the smooooth 192k/24 bit sourced version lacks.

We, on the other hand, had no trouble at all hearing how bad it was right from the start. For our last Hot Stamper shootout winner of The Soft Parade we noted:

Need I even mention how much better this copy sounds than the recent 180g version from the Rhino Box Set, digitally remastered by Bernie Grundman? That thing is just awful, possibly the worst sounding pressing I have ever heard. The Gold CD Hoffman did for Audio Fidelity would be night and day better. So much for the concept of vinyl superiority. Not with Bernie at the helm.

To his credit MF finally recognizes his mistake, but let’s stop and think about how he came by this insight. He did it by playing a pressing that, to his mind, has every reason to sound better, being sourced from analog tapes and mastered at 45. Now he hears that Bernie’s cutting sounds like a CD. To us it sounded worse than a CD when we played it the first time, vinyl or no vinyl. We even recommended the Hoffman-mastered DCC Gold CDs for those who didn’t want to spring for one of our Hot Stamper pressings. As we like to say, good digital beats bad analog any day.

Real Progress

Then again, who are we to talk? Bear in mind that as recently as 2000-something we were still recommending the DCC vinyl pressings, records that I can’t stand to listen to these days. My system couldn’t show me how colored and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

It’s amazing how far you can get in 10 years if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough and are willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio. This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers.

That’s Fremer’s world, not ours. He’s making progress in some areas, not so much in others, but man, he sure has a long way to go. At this rate it will take him forever. It just goes to prove that Mistaken Thinking can really slow down your progress.

Take our advice (and stop taking his, which is also our advice) and you will be amazed at the positive changes that are sure to come your way.

So, What’s The Grade?

MF’s grade for the new Rubber Soul pressing was a 5 on a scale of 1 to 11. If we were to follow the more standard scale of 1 to 10, we would probably give Rubber Soul a 2, at most 2.5 (and that’s only if we were in an expecially generous mood). The new record is a drag, and even the remastered CD is better. Under those circumstances how can the 180 gram pressing be a 5? Maybe in Fremer’s world you automatically get three points for being made out of vinyl. He seems to really like the stuff, even when it doesn’t sound good. Never could figure that one out.

More Beatles Heavy Vinyl?

Due to the heavy volume of mail on the subject (2 emails flooded in!) we finally broke down and bought the set. As we pursue our Hot Stamper shootouts of The Beatles’ catalog we will be commenting on how the new pressings sound from time to time and in no particular order. We’re also in no particular hurry; practically nothing on Heavy Vinyl impresses us these days and we expect The Beatles records to be no different, rave reviews (for most of them) from audiophile reviewers notwithstanding.

UPDATE 2021

After playing two titles and hearing the same mediocre sound, this survey is on indefinite hiatus.

Who has the time to play crappy records, especially when there are so many good ones, or potentially good ones, that we don’t find the time to get to as it is?

Arrogant and Elitist Skeptics – They’re the Worst!

Some Thoughts on Tubes in Audio

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound

Below you will find a link to a reasonably fair and balanced look at the battle between transistors and tubes from Brian Dunning’s skeptoid website, worthwhile reading for those of us who favor a skeptical approach to life (and especially this hobby).

Thirty plus years ago, when I started my little record business, I knew that most records marketed to audiophiles offered junk sound (half-speed masters, Japanese pressings) or junk music (direct to discs by artists nobody ever heard of). As our playback has improved, fewer and fewer of these “specialty” pressings have survived the test of time, a subject we write about endlessly on our site and here on this blog.

For the longest time our motto has been “Records for Audiophiles, Not Audiophile Records,” and we see no reason to change it.  If anything, the modern manufacturers of Heavy Vinyl pressings are making records that get worse sounding by the day. Many of the most egregious offenders can be found here.

More commentaries about Heavy Vinyl can be found here. We are not fans of the stuff, not because it’s our competition, but because it just doesn’t sound very good to us.

I Confess

Here is the article. I confess I sped through it quickly, barely skimming it, because I have heard plenty on the subject of  tubes versus transistors, most of it misguided if I’m being honest. This is my fifth decade in audio and I know where I stand on the subject. I offer it to those who might be interested in a less conventional view.

Our Approach

In order to do the work we do, our approach to audio has to be fundamentally different from that of the audiophile who listens for enjoyment. Critical listening and listening for enjoyment go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

The first — developing and applying your critical listening skills — allows you to achieve good audio and find the best pressings of the music you love.

Developing critical thinking skills when it comes to records and equipment is not a bad idea either.

Once you have a good stereo and a good record to play on it, your enjoyment of recorded music should increase dramatically.

A great sounding record on a killer system is a thrill.

A Heavy Vinyl mediocrity, played back on what passes for so many audiophile systems these days — regardless of cost — is, to these ears, an intolerable bore.

If this sounds arrogant and elitist, so be it. We set a higher standard. Holding our records to that higher standard allows us to price our records commensurate with their superior sound and please the hell out of the people who buy them.

For those who appreciate the difference, and have resources sufficient to afford them, the cost is acceptable. If it were not we would have gone out of business years ago.

Hot Stampers are not cheap. If the price could not be justified by the better sound quality and quieter surfaces, who in his right mind would buy them? We can’t really be fooling that many audiophiles, can we?

Our approach to equipment and records is explained in more detail below, in a listing centered around an early pressing of a Ted Heath Big Band album from the Fifties that knocked our socks off.  The right record at loud levels on Big Speakers can do that.

heath

Years ago we went wild over a marvelous copy of the Ted Heath record you see pictured. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound was positively uncanny. This was vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve upon it.

This is our kind of sound. It’s also important to keep in mind that our stereo seemed to love the record. (Stereos do that.) Let’s talk about why that might be the case.

Our system is fast, accurate and uncolored. We like to think of our speakers as the audiophile equivalent of studio monitors, showing us exactly what is on the record, with nothing added and (hopefully) nothing taken away.

When we play a modern record, it should sound modern. When we play a vintage Tubey Magical Living Stereo pressing, we want to hear all the Tubey Magic, but we don’t want to hear more Tubey Magic than what is actually on the record. We don’t want to do what some audiophiles like to do, which is to make all their records sound the way they like all their records to sound.

They do that by having their system add in all their favorite colorations. We call that “My-Fi”, not “Hi-Fi”, and we’re having none of it.

If our system were more colored, slower and tubier, this record would not sound as good as it does. It’s already got plenty of richness, warmth, sweetness and Tubey Magic.

To take an obvious example, playing the average dry and grainy Joe Walsh record on our system is a fairly unpleasant experience. Some added warmth and richness, with maybe some upper-midrange suckout thrown in for good measure, would make it much more enjoyable. But then how would we know which Joe Walsh pressings aren’t too dry and grainy for our customers to enjoy?

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The Sound of the Heavy Vinyl Reissues Doug Sax Mastered in the ’90s

More of the Music of Sonny Rollins

More Records Mastered by Doug Sax

Longstanding customers know that we have been relentlessly critical of most audiophile LPs for years, especially in the case of these Analogue Productions releases from back in the early ’90s. A well-known reviewer loved them, I hated them, and he and I haven’t seen eye to eye on much since.

Newflash!

Just dug up part of my old commentary discussing the faults with the original series that Doug Sax cut for Acoustic Sounds. Check it out.

In the listing for the OJC pressing of Way Out West we wrote:

Guaranteed better than any 33 rpm 180 gram version ever made, or your money back! (Of course I’m referring to a certain pressing from the early ’90s mastered by Doug Sax, which is a textbook example of murky, tubby, flabby sound. Too many bad tubes in the chain? Who knows?

This OJC version also has its problems, but at least the shortcomings of the OJC are tolerable. Who can sit through a pressing that’s so thick and lifeless it communicates none of the player’s love for the music? If you have midrangy bad transistor equipment, go with the 180 gram version (at twice the price). If you have good equipment, go with this one.

[We are no longer fans of the OJC of Way Out West, and would never sell a record that sounds the way even the best copies do as a Hot Stamper. It’s not hopeless the way the Heavy Vinyl pressing is, but it’s not very good either. It’s yet another example of a record we was wrong about. Live and Learn, right?]

The following commentary comes from our catalog from the mid- to late-’90s, back when I could still find great jazz records like Alternate Takes. Note also that the AP records were in print at the time.

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in TAS had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

Anyone who owns a representative sample of records engineered by Roy Dunann knows that the overly sweet, delicate sound of the cymbals on the Analogue Productions Way Out West is unusual — if not positively unheard of — for him. His cymbal sound is lively, aggressive, with much more “splash” — more impact, more presence.

These “live music” qualities have been equalized out on the remastering and other patently euphonic qualities equalized in.

Anyway, the important thing is not the sound I or some reviewer or anybody else likes. It’s what you like that counts.

With that in mind, I’m so sure you’ll prefer the sound of Alternate Takes, that you’ll recognize and appreciate the differences I’m talking about, that I’m willing to make you this very special offer:

If Alternate Takes isn’t about the best sounding jazz record you ever heard, send it back to me and I’ll give you $30 toward anything else in the catalog! If you own any Analogue Productions LP, mail or fax me a copy of your receipt (along with your order) and I will give you a better sounding jazz record free as a bonus!

If you don’t own the AP Way Out West, call Chad up and order it. You really owe it to yourself to hear this mess! What have you got to lose? Acoustic Sounds offers a money-back guarantee. They say “guaranteed better than the original.”

What they don’t say is “guaranteed better than a plain old everyday standard-issue domestic copy which is still available from that pain-in-the-ass Tom Port over at Better Records” — because it’s not (better, although it may be still available)!

Robert Brook discovered a killer Way Out West not long ago which caused the heavens to open up and the angels to sing. I know exactly what he talking about. It’s happened to me more times than I can remember.

His story:

We added some thoughts of our own in this commentary:

We think both are worth reading.

Now Back to Our More Recent Commentary

Hey, here’s a question for you. When was the last time you read a word about those Heavy Vinyl pressings, so incompetently mastered by Doug Sax. With no real presence and bloated bass, they’re pure audiophile “smile curve” trash of the worst kind.

They’ve rather fallen from favor, have they not? I wonder why. Could it be that they were as ridiculously bad as I said they were back in 1995, and it just took the rest of the world a little longer to recognize that fact? Perhaps audiophiles are making progress. It’s just taking them a long, long time. Hey, it took me a long, long time, so who am I to talk?

[This prediction turned out to be way off the mark. If anything, the remastered records being made today sound worse than ever.]

No doubt most audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them think that making records the “right” way should result in better sound, but we have found precious little evidence to back up that theory, and volumes of evidence to refute it.

Yes, those Analogue Productions records sucked, they continue to suck, and they will always suck. The “audiophile” records of that day did lack presence, and the passage of time is not going to change that fact. Play practically any Reference, Chesky or Classic title from 1995 to the present and listen for the veiled midrange, the opacity, the smeary transients, and the generally constricted, compressed, lifeless quality of its sound, a sound that has been boring us to tears for close to two decades, and fundamentally undermining the very rationale for the expense and hassle of analog itself in the modern digital age, a much more serious charge.

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Steppenwolf – Gold: Their Great (But Awful Sounding) Hits

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals

More Heavy Vinyl Commentaries and Reviews

There is an interesting story behind how I got my mitts on this particular Heavy Vinyl pressing.

Months ago [now years], a fellow contacted us to buy some of our Hot Stamper pressings.  We sent him one or two, and he soon wrote back to say he was not happy with the sound. We exchanged emails with him for a while, trying to rectify the situation in the hopes that we could get him some records that he would be happy with.

In the middle of all this back and forth, we thought it would be worthwhile knowing what this gentleman thought was a good sounding record, seeing as how ours were not meeting his standards. Our discussion soon crossed over into Heavy Vinyl territory. We asked, “Were there any that he liked the sound of?”  Why yes, there were.

You guessed it. The above-pictured album from Analogue Productions is one he recommended. (There was another he also said we should try, but after playing this one we decided against buying any more records he recommended, for reasons that will soon be evident.)

So we bought a copy. Soon enough we found ourselves playing our newly remastered Heavy Vinyl LP.

Right from the get-go, thick, murky, compressed, lifeless, ambience-free, dead-as-a-doornail sound was now coming out of my speakers. Like sludge from a sewer you might say. The stereo had sounded fine moments before. What the hell was happening?

I quickly grabbed a Super Hot copy of the album off the shelf and put it on the table.

Here was the energy, clarity, presence, space and more that had been missing mere moments ago while the Heavy Vinyl pressing played. Now, coming out my speakers was everything that makes a good vintage pressing such a joy to listen to.

I felt like turning it up and rocking out. The first song is Born to Be Wild. Who doesn’t love to blast Born to Be Wild?

What a difference. Night and Day. Maybe more!

If this Steppenwolf LP isn’t the perfect example of a Pass/Not-Yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.

As I was thinking about the turgid, compressed, veiled, overly smooth but not tonally incorrect sound coming out of my speakers, I thought back about the kinds of stereo systems that can produce that sound on command. They often look like the one you see below.

If this is your idea of good sound, you are in luck. You can buy your Limited Edition Heavy Vinyl audiophile pressings from Acoustic Sounds to your heart’s content.  They’re sure a helluva lot cheaper than our records, and they apparently do a bang up job of giving you precisely the sound you’re looking for.

To finish up with our little story, to no one’s surprise we never could satisfy our new customer. We ended up refunding him all his money. It seems our records were expensive, and simply not much better than records he owned or could find cheaply enough.  Ours might be even worse! Who the hell do we think we are?  The nerve.

I also know he wasn’t playing them on an old console. He took great pains to tell me all about his fancy handmade tonearm, custom tube preamp and screen speakers. State of the Art stuff in his mind, no doubt about it.

But if your system is so ridiculously bad that an Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl LP doesn’t call attention to its manifold shortcomings, doesn’t actually make your head hurt and your blood boil at the very idea that someone would charge money for such bad sound, you might want to think about scrapping your precious audiophile equipment and starting over.

Of course, this guy and the thousands of other audiophiles like him would never do such a thing. They are thoroughly invested in whatever approach to audio they have taken, and nobody can teach them anything.

They already know more than you ever will.

They’re also the ones keeping hopelessly incompetent labels like Analogue Productions in business.  They supported Classic Records before it went under, they support Mobile Fidelity to this day. They are the guys that buy Heavy Vinyl records and extoll their virtues on audiophile forums far and wide.  Some even make youtube videos about this crap now and get tens of thousands of hits.

It’s sad, but there is nothing we can do but keep on doing what we are doing: finding good pressings for audiophiles who  appreciate the difference.

Another way we can help is this.

Use the guide below when you do your shootouts for records, Heavy Vinyl and otherwise. Perhaps you will avoid the mistakes the above-mentioned gentleman made.  We include them in practically every listening of every record we sell.

What We Listen For

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
  • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
  • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
  • Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
  • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

And this blog is full of advice explaining practically everything there is to know about records, all of it gained using one approach and only one approach: by conducting experiments.

Letting go of theories that don’t produce good results is but one of the many steps you will end up taking on the long road to better sounding records. It’s a step you can take right now. Should you start on this journey, you may come to realize what a watershed moment it turned out to be.

We Can Help

If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.

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Let It Be on Heavy Vinyl – The Gong Rings Once More

More of the Music of The Beatles

More Reviews and Commentaries for Let It Be

At the end of a shootout for Let It Be back in June of 2014, we decided to see how the 2012 Digitally Remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing would hold up against the 12 (yes, twelve!) British copies we had just critically auditioned.

Having evaluated the two best copies on side two, we felt we knew exactly what separated the killer copies (White Hot) from the next tier down (Super Hot). Armed with just how good the recording could sound fresh in our minds, we threw on the new pressing. We worked on the VTA adjustment for the thicker record for a couple of minutes to get the sound balanced and as hi-rez as possible, and after a few waves of the Talisman we were soon hearing the grungy guitar intro of I’ve Got a Feeling.

My scribbled first notes: not bad! Sure, there’s only a fraction of the space and three-dimensionality of the real British pressings, but the bass seemed to be there, the energy seemed decent enough, the tonality was good if a bit smooth and dark — all in all not a bad Beatles record.

Then we played One After 909 and the sound just went off a cliff. It was so compressed! The parts of the song that get loud on the regular pressings never get loud on the new one. The live-in-the-studio Beatles’ rock energy just disappeared.

We couldn’t take more than a minute or two of the song, it was that frustrating and irritating. What the hell did they do to make this record sound this way? We had no idea.

Didn’t matter. It was game over. The gong from The Gong Show had rung. The record had to go.

We had played twelve British copies, all with stampers that we knew to be good on side two. Two or three of those copies did not merit a Hot Stamper sonic grade. Nothing new there, happens all the time.

Yet even the worst copy we played of the twelve had more jump-factor, more life and more dynamic energy than the new Heavy Vinyl pressing.

Which means that there’s a very good chance that any copy you pick up on British vinyl will be better sounding — maybe not a 100% chance but easily a 90+% chance. Which makes buying the new Heavy Vinyl LP — not to mention playing it — entirely pointless.

Heavy Vinyl Shortcomings

As a general rule, a Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer. (Our Hot Stampers are the same ones, of course, that you can find for yourself, aided by the improved critical listening skills you will acquire from the practice. This assumes you have what is required (the records, the cleaning equipment, the time, etc.) and are willing to do the work.)

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 badly I was motivated to create a special ring of hell 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 things the same way.

Graham Nash – Remixed and Ruined on Classic Records

More of the Music of Graham Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Songs for Beginners

Sonic Grade: D

I’ve listened to Nash’s first solo outing countless times over the last thirty years, even more than Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album. As I was listening to the Classic pressing, I recall thinking “Wow, I don’t remember that sound being there; this version is so much better I can hear things I never heard before!”

Well, owners of this album (all five of you) will certainly hear things you never heard before, because some of the tracks on this album have been remixed and some of the instruments re-recorded. How about them apples.

Both the snare and the kick drum on some songs are clearly too “modern” sounding for anything recorded in 1971. For Pete’s sake, they’d be right at home on Nevermind.

Sometimes the vocal tracks are different—probably alternate takes I would think, as Graham obviously can’t sing like he did thirty years ago to even attempt a re-recording.

As you can imagine, remastering a well-known title and creating a new sound for it is a huge bête noire for us here at Better Records. This Classic Records release is like nails on a blackboard to me now.

No doubt the idea was Graham’s but it was a very bad one indeed. (If you can get hold of the original unadulterated CD, I highly recommend it. The sound is excellent.)

Our old commentary from the early-2000s, the pre-shootout era

I haven’t played this record in a long time — years in fact. During that time there have been dramatic improvements in my analog playback. I’m guessing that if I played this Classic Record now I would hear what I hear on almost all of them — less midrange magic than the best originals, some boost on the top, and maybe a bit too much bottom, and a slightly dry bottom at that.

Those of you with really magical originals are encouraged to hang onto them and pass on this Classic. As those do not grow on trees, if you want a good pressing of this album, the Classic may be just the ticket. If you find a hot original, you will have a benchmark against which to judge it.

One Helluva Well-Recorded Album

Most of the credit must go to the team of recording engineers, led here by the esteemed Bill Halverson, the man behind all of the Crosby Stills Nash and Young albums. Nash was clearly influenced by his work with his gifted bandmates, proving with this album that he can hold his own with the best of the best. Some songs (We Can Change The World, Be Yourself) are grandly scaled productions with the kind of studio polish that would make Supertramp envious. For me, a big speaker guy with a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

Others (Sleep Song, Wounded Bird) are quiet and intimate. Their subtlely is highlighted by the big productions surrounding them. This is that rare album in which every aspect of the production, from the arrangements to the final mix, serves to bring out the best qualities in the songs, regardless of scale.

The recording is of course superb throughout, in the best tradition of Crosby Stills and Nash’s classic early albums: transparent, smooth and sweet vocals, with loads of midrange magic ; deep punchy bass; lovely extension on the top to capture the shimmer of the cymbals and harmonic trails of the acoustic guitars; with the whole balanced superbly by one of our all-time heroes, Glyn Johns.

The Real Songs for Beginners on Vintage Vinyl Checks Off Three Big Boxes for Us

It’s a Must Own record.

It’s a Rock and Pop Masterpiece.

And it’s a Personal Favorite of mine.

The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as these.

In my opinion, this is also a record that should be more popular with audiophiles. If you have not heard this classic, check it out. It is the very definition of the kind of Big Production Rock I have been listening to since I first fell in love with it back in the Seventies. That was about fifty years ago and I still play the album regularly for enjoyment. I have never tired of the music in all that time and I don’t think I ever will.

I’m sure you have plenty of records you feel the same way about in your collection. This is one of mine.

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Iberia on Classic Records – What, Specifically, Are Its Shortcomings?

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

Album Reviews of the music of Claude Debussy

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records LP debunked.

The Classic of LSC 2222 is all but unlistenable on a highly resolving, properly setup hi-fi system.

The opacity, transient smear and loss of harmonic information and ambience found on Classic’s pressing was enough to drive us right up a wall. Who can sit through a record that sounds like that?

The Classic reissue has plenty of deep bass, but the overall sound is shrill and hard and altogether unpleasant. The better bass comes at a steep price.

Way back in 1994, long before we had anything like the system we do now, we were finding fault with the “Classic Records Sound” and said as much in our catalogs. (Sometimes. Sometimes we were as wrong as wrong can be.)

With each passing year — 29 and counting — we like that sound less.  The Classic may be on Harry’s TAS list — sad but true — but that certainly has no bearing on the fact that it’s not a very good record.

For a better sounding recording of Iberia, click here.

Here Are More Titles that Are Good for Judging These Recording Qualities

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If You Can’t Make a Good Record, Why Make Any Record At All?

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Can’t Buy A Thrill

This has to be one of the worst sounding versions ever pressed.

You think the average ABC or MCA pressing is opaque, flat and lifeless, not to mention compromised at both ends of the frequency spectrum?

You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!

As bad as the typical copy of this album is, the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl is even worse, with not a single redeeming quality to its credit.

If this is what passes for an Audiophile Record these days, and it is, it’s just one more nail in the coffin for Heavy Vinyl.

But that’s not the half of it.

Go to Acoustic Sounds’ website and read all the positive customer reviews — they love it! Is there any heavy vinyl pressing on the planet that a sizable contingent of audiophiles won’t say something nice about, no matter how bad it sounds? I can’t think of one.

To sum up, this record is nothing less than an affront to analog itself. I guarantee you the CD is better, if you get a good one. I own four or five and the best of them has far more musical energy than this thick, dull, opaque and boring piece of audiophile analog trash.

It was probably made from a digital copy of the master, or more likely a digital copy of an analog dub of the master — three generations, that’s sure what it sounds like — but that’s no excuse.

If you can’t make a good record, don’t make any record at all. Shelve the project. The audiophile vinyl world is drowning in bad sounding pressings; we don’t need any more, thank you very much.

Every Day Is Record Store Day at The Electric Recording Company

Our Review of The Electric Recording Company’s Release of Forever Changes

Recently we took the Electric Recording Company to task for their botched mastering of Love’s Forever Changes.

At ERC they like to point out they are doing things differently, and boy are they ever. They do not remaster the tapes, they simply transfer the tapes onto disc without any interference from equalizers, compressors and the like.

Naturally, they seem less willing to discuss the sludge-like sound their vintage tube cutting amplifiers bring to every tape that’s forced to go through them before it gets to the cutting stylus. I hope to discuss this issue in more depth down the road.

What Is It, Exactly

For now, let’s try to get to the heart of what this pressing is.

This is not an audiophile record, properly understood.

No member of the audiophile community, those lovers of sound you’ve heard so much about, could possibly put up with a record that sounds as bad as this one does.

Having played two of their releases and knowing how all of them are made, I would be surprised if any of this company’s records are any better than awful.

No, this is plain and simply a collectible.

It exists because it could be made as a very limited edition at a profit.

It exists because it could be made with exceptionally high quality packaging.

The vinyl inside the fancy packaging is only there to make sure that all the elements of a collectible release are accounted for.

All the value is tied up in the collector appeal of the release, none in the vinyl, because the vinyl is junk.

Record Store Day

If the price were a tenth of what ERC is asking, it would have made a perfectly good Record Store Day release.

Think about it: Collectors would have lined up around the block to get one of the only 350 numbered pressings made available. At 35 bucks, no doubt they would sell out within minutes of the doors opening. At 350 bucks, maybe it would take a bit longer, but they would sell out just the same.

Of course, Pete Hutchison does not want to wait a whole year to put out his cool, collectible records, one at a time. He sends them out to the customers on his waiting lists all year long.

Record lovers are buying these records with no way of having the vaguest clue as to how they sound. By the time the reviews come out, they are already out of print and on the collector market at multiples of their original price.

Why would an audiophile rush out to buy a record whose sound quality he has no way of knowing?

An audiophile wouldn’t. A record collector would though.

Record Collectors and Audiophiles

There are a great many more record collectors — here defined as those folks who just like collecting records — than there are audiophile record collectors, defined here as those who are trying, not always successfully, to collect good sounding records.

I suspect that most audiophiles of an analog persuasion fall into both camps.

They like having a collection of high quality pressings, and they like owning collectible records, often viewing the latter as a kind of investment that will pay off with profits in the future.

Collectors scramble to get in on the ground floor to own a cool new release, knowing that it’s sure to be worth more than they are paying for it.

If the sound quality is abysmal, what difference does that make?

No self-described audiophile should want a record that sounds as bad as those being produced by this ridiculous label.

But collectors should. The attention to detail in the packaging, the oh-so-limited production run, the fact that the records are indeed sourced from the master tape and mastered with tubes — these are qualities that appeal to collectors.

None of these things has a lot to do with the sound quality of the finished product except, in the case of this label, guaranteeing that it will be terrible.

A Nutty Approach to Making Records

As a lifelong skeptic, I know a crackpot when I see one, and Pete Hutchison is the dictionary definition of a crackpot. The idea that records don’t need to be mastered is not quite the same as the earth is hollow or the government is run by lizard people, but it falls into the same category: anything for which supporting evidence is non-existent.

crackpot: “one given to eccentric or wildly foolish notions.”

Transferring the tapes without the benefit of mastering equalization? That is a crackpot idea. Nobody does that except under the rarest of circumstances.

Are the great mastering engineers of the past — men like Robert Ludwig, Doug Sax, Bernie Grundman and others — known for their flat transfers? Did they ever hook up archaic tube equipment to their cutting lathes?

In the case of Robert Ludwig, we know his interventions in the case of Led Zeppelin II were as intense as they come. That explains why no other version of the album sounds like his version.

Would the world be better off had he not altered the sound of the tape in such a massive way? Is the bass on any other version of the album remotely as good as the bass on his version?

He put that bass on the record. It’s not on the tape. If it were on the tape somebody else would have come along and mastered it on to a record in the intervening 54 years since its release.

Without Robert Ludwig’s efforts, and the mastering equipment he had available to him in 1969, there can be no “hot mix” for Le Zeppelin II.

If you were to tell me that somebody new would get into the business of “remastering” records, on heavy vinyl, with fancy packaging, I would say “of course they will.” The world is full of these guys and they are making a fortune. Why wouldn’t somebody else want a piece of the action? That’s how the free enterprise system is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to drive down prices and drive up quality.

Marketing Everything But High Quality Sound

Which is what makes The Electric Recording Company’s records so interesting.

They take a different approach to the market.

They offer the worst sound with the best packaging at the highest prices.

They engage in the pretense of offering audiophile sound when in fact they are doing no such thing.

But the audiophiles who are falling for this scam apparently cannot tell how bad sounding these ERC records are.

Perhaps they are so impressed by the packaging, the backstory, the collectability and who knows what else that they fail to notice how bad the sound is.

That would be the most charitable way of understanding how this label came to be so successful. I’m quite sure Mr. Hutchison is a millionaire many times over.

His snake oil is no cure for anything, but the story behind it and the fancy bottle it comes in is all that matters to the gullible types who are standing in line to fork over their cash and take their punishment.

And surely there are a good many owners of these records who know they are terrible and are just in the game to profit off those who have fallen for the collector hysteria that accompanies each new release.

As long as the status quo holds, and there simply are no audiophile reviewers with even the most rudimentary critical listening skills — the kind of basic skills that would be required to expose this fraud — then our English crackpot can continue to offer a product that appeals to the three groups who buy his records:

  1. collectors,
  2. speculators, and
  3. the hard of hearing.

Audiophiles with any sense — hopefully those who read this blog! — will steer clear of this man’s cosmetically appealing trash.

Further Reading

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