Heavy Vinyl Disasters

Rimsky-Korsakov – A Classic Records Disaster

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Our Favorite Performance of Scheherazade – Ansermet with the Suisse Romande

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records Classical LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

In 2009 or 2010, during our testing of the TT Weights turntable products, the record I played again and again — close to a hundred times over the course of two days — was a wonderful White Dog pressing of LSC 2446. The sound was glorious, some of the finest reproduction of a large orchestral work I have ever heard.  

(Late in life, Harry Pearson disgraced himself by putting this Classic Record on his TAS List of Super Discs.)

A week later I was still testing the system, and again using Scheherazade. A friend brought over his Classic pressing, probably the same one I would have sold him in the mid-’90s. Now we could compare the two.

It was a massacre. The sound on the reissue is simply AWFUL.

There is no transient information anywhere on that heavy vinyl pressing whatsoever. No instruments have any texture — not the strings, not the woodwinds, nothing. There is no air going through the flutes. There is no rosin on the bow of the solo violin.

The tympani are a blurry mess. Triangle: okay. Bass drum: okay. Everything else: FAIL.

Not having played it in years, I could not believe how much worse the record sounded than I remember. The gulf between the real thing and the Classic wannabe was now so huge that the reissue was nothing less than positively UNPLEASANT to listen to. Enjoyment? Out of the question.

TAS List? The original is, but the Classic is too. Now how messed up is that?

Disgraceful, that’s all I have to say about it.

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, obviously I would not have put this record on it.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, guaranteed.

And if for some reason you disagree with us about how good they sound, we will be happy to give you your money back.

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Bob Dylan / Blonde on Blonde – A Joke on Sundazed in Mono

More of the Music of Bob Dylan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Bob Dylan

Flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, sounding like most of the Sundazed records we used  to play all those years ago (and, shamefully, we even sold a few of their titles too).

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

Sundazed is clearly a label that should be avoided by audiophiles looking for high quality sound. Their incompetent remastering hack work on Blonde on Blonde is just more evidence to back up our low opinion of them.

There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are downright awful.

Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have!

Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.

(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and was avidly collecting records in the Seventies.)

How could so many be fooled so badly? You would think that some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how substandard these records sound.

Apparently that is not the case. The embrace of one third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing after another by the audiophile community has rendered absurd the pretense that their members ever developed anything beyond the most rudimentary critical listening skills, with stereo systems that are much better at hiding the faults of these records than revealing them.

Sadly, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the best explanation for the sorry state of audio these days, means they simply don’t know how little they know, and therefore see no reason to doubt their high opinions of their equipment and their audio acumen.

Progress in audio is possible, but only if you know that you are not already at the top of the mountain. For the vast majority of audiophiles, a lot of serious climbing remains to be done — but only if you want to hear your records right.

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Tchaikovsky / 1812 Overture on Telarc UHQR

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for the 1812 Overture

Sonic Grade: D

You can find this one in our Audiophile Hall of Shame, along with more than 250 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some Hall of Shame records, the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

This is what we had to say about the UHQR back in 2005 or so:

Having played this record all the way through, I have to comment on some of its sonic qualities. It’s about the most dynamic recording I’ve ever heard. This was the promise of digital, which was never really delivered. On this record, that promise has been fulfilled. The performance is also one of the best on record. It’s certainly the most energetic I can remember. 

DATELINE 2015

Now that we’ve heard the best pressings of the Alwyn recording on Decca, I would have to say that Alwyn’s is certainly every bit as energetic if not more so and dramatically better sounding as well.

In other words, in 2005 we had a lot to learn.

They only made 1000 of these, which makes it 5 times more rare than any MOFI UHQR. I had a sealed copy of this record on the site fifteen or twenty years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a sealed copy, as open ones are hard enough to come by.

Stone Age Audio Sound

Telarc makes clean, modern sounding records.

To these ears they sound pretty much like CDs.

If that’s your sound, you can save yourself a lot of money simply by avoiding vintage Golden Age recordings, especially the ones we sell. They’re much more expensive and rarely as quiet, but — again, to these ears — the colors and textures of real instruments seems to come to life in their grooves, and in practically no others. We discussed the subject, as well as a few others, in the commentary you see below:

We include in this modern group analog labels such as Classic Records, Analogue Productions, Speakers Corner, Reference, Sheffield, Chesky, Athena and the like. Having heard hundreds of amazing vintage pressings, at this stage of the game I find it hard to take any of these labels seriously.

Twenty years ago, maybe. But twenty years is a long time, especially in the world of audio.

We started a list of records that suffer from a lack of Tubey Magic like this one, and it can be found here.

Further Reading

Sarah Vaughan / Sassy on Speakers Corner Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sarah Vaughan

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing, recorded in 1956 and remastered, badly, in 1999.

The Speakers Corner version of this record is awful. It’s bright and GRAINY.

If you want a good Sarah Vaughan record, try the album just called Sarah Vaughan that Speakers Corner put out in 2004. 

Further Reading

Paul Simon – What to Think When the New Version Is Completely Unrecognizable?

More of the Music of Paul Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for Graceland

Sonic Grade: F

Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd come from?

Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version (maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened).

Can that possibly be a good thing?

Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.

On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.

We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.

Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.

The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.

Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!

Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.

But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.

VTA

You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.

The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.

You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?

The Bright Side

Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.

The CD already exists. It has a sound.

The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.

Or, dissatisfied with the sound of the original records and CDs above, and not in the market to spend hundreds of dollars on a good copy from us, you could look at the new Heavy Vinyl pressing as another option, a different take, a new approach, something along those lines.

Just don’t think that by doing so you’re going to hear Graceland the way Paul Simon, Roy Halee, or the folks at Sterling wanted you to hear it.

They produced millions of copies that mostly sound one way, and now some fellows — at least one of whom was involved with the new project, to be fair, but it was 40 years ago(!), and it’s fair to point that out too, right? — some new fellows have produced a few thousand copies that sound another way.

It’s clear to us who got it right, but based on what I’ve been reading in preparation for writing this commentary, the audiophile reviewers and at least some of the audiophile public at large see it quite differently.

Our Offer [no longer valid, sorry]

We are more than happy to let you decide the issue for yourself. Rather than throwing up our hands and saying “we give up,” we actually would like to help you make an informed decision.

To that end we will happily send you our copy of the Heavy Vinyl version along with your purchase of any Hot Stamper of Graceland on the site. Play them head to head and let the chips fall where they may.

The only thing we ask is that you return it to us so the next person who wants to compare the two can do so. (Assuming you like the Hot Stamper better of course. If you don’t, send them both back for a full refund, including the domestic shipping. No, really, we insist.)

Our latest preoccupation here on the blog is to point out as often as we can that the Modern Heavy Vinyl remastered pressing is often just too damn smooth.

Whether made by DCC, Analogue Productions or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, many remastered audiophile pressings started to have a tonality problem that we found insufferable from day one: they are just too damn smooth.

Other consistent problems found on the Modern Heavy Vinyl Reissue, in addition to being too smooth, are shortcomings that rob the music of its life and energy. Thick, opaque, and lacking in ambience, this is what we hear on record after record pressed on Heavy Vinyl.

It may be someone’s idea of “analog,” but it’s definitely not ours.

The remastered box sets of The Beatles (see: Pepper, Sgt.., etc.) are the poster boys for making records sound more “analog” by boosting the bass and smoothing the treble, like your old ’70s system used to do. (Those of you who were in the hobby back then know exactly the sound I am talking about. For those who would like to know more, we wrote this overview.)

The Beatles records that we sell as Hot Stampers have nothing in common with that absurdly artificial approach. Mid-Fi systems may benefit from more bass and less top end, but Hi-Fi systems worthy of the name will not, hence our distaste for this kind of EQ overreach.

More example of overly smooth modern records can be found here. More will be added as time permits.

Further Reading

Matthew Sweet / 100% Fun – Classic Records Debunked

90+ Reviews and Commentaries for Classic Records Heavy Vinyl LPs

More Bad Sounding Audiophile Records to Avoid

Sonic Grade: F

Our Zoo label original LP MURDERED the Classic heavy vinyl reissue. It’s not even close.

The Classic is a opaque, turgid, muffled piece of sh*t compared to the Zoo vinyl pressing we had on hand to play, and even the CD will kill this embarrassing audiophile reissue. 

This is not the easiest record to reproduce, but if you have a big dynamic system, one thing it can do is ROCK.  I happen to think it’s the best thing Matthew Sweet ever did, and you deserve to hear it sound right, which means stick with the thin, good sounding vinyl and not this heavy RTI trash from Classic.

This is yet another Disastrous Heavy Vinyl release with godawful sound.

What a murky mess. Dead as a doornail. Disgraceful in every way.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

It has to be. The CD is dramatically better. If you own this awful Classic record, buy the CD and find out for yourself if it isn’t better sounding.

A Confession

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we had auditioned. 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 that seem to impress so many audiophiles. They do nothing for us and haven’t since about 2007.

We’ll never know what it’s like to go back to the sound we had in the early 2000s. 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 what’s in the grooves of the records we audition.

Most of them sound fairly mediocre to us, but some audiophile records are so bad I put them on a bottom of the barrel list that I created for the kinds of audiophile records that are simply beyond awful.

As you may have guessed, this album is on it.

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.

Aretha Franklin / Soul ’69 – Four Men with Beards Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Aretha Franklin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues and R&B Albums Available Now

Four Men with Beards recut this record back in 2002. When it came out I was still selling Heavy Vinyl, and I liked some of the titles they had remastered. This one, however, sounded terrible to me and I was not interested in carrying it.

I fancied myself a curator back in those days, but I was not able to set the standards that we can now set for our records, for one simple reason. We hadn’t learned how to do it yet.

We did our first shootout twelve years later, and that’s when our real record education began.

This is a Must Own Soul Classic from 1969 that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection

The complete list of titles from 1969 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The music, of course, is top notch, and it’s even better when you don’t have the bad sound and groove distortion of the average copy getting in the way.

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The Violin is a Wonderful Instrument for Stereo Tweaking and Tuning

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings Featuring Jascha Heifetz

Our review for LSC 2314, comprising the Mendelssohn and Prokofiev Violin Concertos, described the wonderful sound we heard on some of the better copies.

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 this violin is 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 repressings of Heifetz’s RCA recordings of the classical masterpieces by the likes of:

need to find themselves a nice — maybe even one that’s not so nice — vintage RCA Shaded Dog or White Dog pressing of any of his albums just to see just how poorly the Classics stack up (with the exception of the Glazounov, which is very good).

Anyone has ever attended a classical music concert should recognize that the violin on any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings of these famous works sounds almost nothing like a violin in a concert hall ever sounds.

And I mean ever.

No matter where you sit.

No matter how good or bad the hall’s acoustics.

Solo violins in live performance are clear, clean and present. You have no trouble at all “seeing” them clearly.

Our vintage Hot Stamper pressings have that kind of clear and present sound for the violin. If they didn’t, they would not be Hot Stamper pressings.

We haven’t sold a violin concerto record with sound as bad as the typical Classic Records pressing since 2011, the year we stopped selling Heavy Vinyl. Since then we have dedicated ourselves to offering our customers pressings with audiophile quality sound. We believe that makes us unique in the world of audiophile record dealers.

All record dealers, when you stop to think about it.

Falling Apart

As an aside, many of the vintage orchestral recordings we’ve auditioned over the years did a good job of capturing the lead instrument in a concerto — for example, the piano or violin — but fell apart completely when the orchestra came in, with obvious and unacceptable levels of congestion and distortion.

Here are some titles that can have congestion problems when they get loud. If you play your orchestral recordings at moderate levels, you may not be as bothered by this problem as we are, because we do not have the luxury of listening at moderate levels. We have to put the records through the ringer, and one of the ringers they must go through is they must sound right at loud levels, because live music gets loud.

Congestion and distortion are problems for practically all the titles you rarely see on our site, the Golden Age recordings by EMI, DG, Philips, Columbia and dozens of others. We discussed the problem here in more detail.

Deep Purple – Another Ridiculously Bad DCC Remaster

More of the Music of Deep Purple

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Disastrous Heavy Vinyl release with godawful sound.

What a murky mess. Dead as a doornail sound. Disgraceful in every way.  

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Our advice: don’t do it.

There’s More Where This Pressing Came From

If this is the kind of sound you like, below are links to recordings that you may wish to pursue, with similar “qualities,” if I can use that term.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

These are the hallmarks of the modern Heavy Vinyl LP. Whether made by Speakers Corner, DCC, AP or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, the sound these labels preferred had an infuriating tonal balance problem we heard in practically every record we played.

A tonal balance that was just too damn smooth.

The phony boosted highs of the bad old audiophile pressing days are gone, replaced by the phony rolled off highs of today.

(Bernie Grundman cut hundreds of records for Classic Records starting in the ’90s, and it’s clear he chose to go a different way, but his way turned out to be every bit as problematical.)

Are the audiophiles who buy these new, super-smooth records any better off?

The ones with bright, phony systems probably are.

As we have been saying for years, first you need to have reasonably good sound. Then you can buy records that actually are good.

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.

Heavy Vinyl Commentaries

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Jethro Tull / Aqualung – One of the Worst Releases on DCC (and That’s Saying Something!)

More of the Music of Jethro Tull

Reviews and Commentaries for Aqualung

Sonic Grade: F

The DCC pressing is a complete disaster, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

As bad as the MoFi is, the DCC is even worse. Murky and bloated, to my ear it does almost nothing right, not on vinyl anyway. The DCC Gold CD is better, and it’s certainly nothing to write home about. 

Our Hot Stamper commentary below sorts out the DCC, the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing and the MoFi Half-Speed Mastered LP, as well as British and domestic originals.

We love this album and we’ve played every kind of pressing we could get our hands on. The winner? Read on!

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.

When the DCC 180g came along we liked that one better, and a few years back I was somewhat enamored with some original British imports.

Our first big shootout disabused us of any notion that the British originals were properly mastered. As we noted in our Hot Stamper commentary, “The original Brits we played were pretty hopeless too: Tubey Magical but midrangy, bass-shy and compressed.”

Another myth bites the dust.

The same is true for Thick As A Brick; the best domestic copies are much more energetic and tonally correct.

Further Reading

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years. Feel free to pick your poison.

And finally,

A Confession

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still 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 and even 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 things the same way.