HV Med

Heavy Vinyl mediocrities

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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Takin’ Off – A Cisco Record We Used to Like

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old review and it is doubtful we would be remotely as enthusiastic now as we were in 2006 when the Cisco pressing came out. Please take everything you read below with a big grain of salt (if such a thing can exist).

The sound is very good, with correct tonal balance and plenty of life. I was WAY TOO HARD on this album when it first came in. It’s playing right now and really swinging!

I just learned the secret to getting this one to sound right, and I am happy to share it with you. TURN IT UP! When you get some volume going, the musicians really come to life on this album. It may sound crazy, but you need to play this one as loud as you would play your average rock record.

Billy Higgins whacks the hell out of his snare on the second track on side one. He really goes to town on that thing. Imagine you are sitting twenty feet from him in a jazz club; it would be plenty loud, right? Now find the equivalent volume setting on your preamp, drop the needle and get ready to FEEL the music, the way you would feel it if you were in that club. 

Robert Pincus and Kevin Gray did a great job on this one. I put it right up there with the very best jazz records on Heavy Vinyl being made today. The first track is a tiny bit lean for my taste, but things get better after that.

Of course, how many copies do you really see of an album like this that aren’t beat to death, or minty but hundreds of dollars? Mighty few in our experience, so this has to be seen as a welcome addition to any audiophile’s jazz collection.

Who By Numbers on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

It’s not just bass that separates the real thing from the Classic Reissue. It’s weight, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, the area spanning roughly 150 to 600 cycles.

It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern.

It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Glyn Johns intended.

The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.

But not the Classic. Oh no, so much of what gives Who By Numbers its Classic Rock sound has been equalized right out of the Heavy Vinyl reissue by Chris Bellman at BG’s mastering house.

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California Dreaming on Cisco Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wes Montgomery Available Now

Beware any and all imitations, even this one, which I admit I used to like somewhat.

The Cisco pressing of California Dreaming barely begins to convey the qualities of the real master tape — scratch that, make that the recording — the way the best pressings do.

Our Hot Stampers exhibit huge amounts of ambience and spaciousness, with far more energy and the kind of “see into the studio” quality that only the best vintage pressings ever have.

Note especially how so much musical information is coming from the far sides of the soundfield on the best copies.

The Cisco reissue makes a mockery of that wall to wall sound, sucking it into the middle and flattening it into a single plane. You can thank Kevin Gray and his lousy cutting chain for all of the above and more.

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This Tsar Saltan Is Diffuse, Washed Out, Veiled, and Vague

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at most)

Year ago we cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare in a head to head comparison with a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out at the time. Here are the differences we heard.

The soundstage, rarely much of a concern to us at here at Better Records but nevertheless instructive in this case, shrinks roughly 25% with the new pressing. Depth and ambience are reduced by about the same amount.

But what really bothered me was this:

The sound was just so vague.

There was a cloud of musical instruments, some here, some there, but they were very hard to SEE. On the Londons we played they were clear. You could point to each and every one. On this pressing that kind of pinpoint imaging was simply nowhere to be found. (Here are some other records that are good for testing vague imaging.)

Case in point: the snare drum, which on this recording is located toward the back of the stage, roughly halfway between dead center and the far left of the hall. As soon as I heard it on the reissue I recognized how blurry and smeary it was relative to the clarity and immediacy it had on the earlier London pressings we’d played. I’m not sure how else to describe it — diffuse, washed out, veiled — just vague.

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

This particular Heavy Vinyl reissue is more or less tonally correct, which is not something you can say about many reissues these days. In that respect it’s tolerable and even enjoyable. I guess for thirty bucks it’s not a bad deal.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocre sound?

Yes, the cutting systems being used nowadays to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.

Are the tapes too old and worn?

Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?

Could the real master tape not be found, and a safety copy used to master the album instead?

To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.

We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them. If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue, we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot. (Someone did, which proves it can be done!)

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and most other audiophile LPs of all kinds. (These we like.)

So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this kind of sound bores us to tears.

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Heart Like A Wheel – Cisco Heavy Vinyl Reviewed

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in 2006. These days I doubt very much that I would consider this record a service to the audiophile community, as I mistakenly wrote at the time. Many of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound so good to me anymore.

Like most Heavy Vinyl, it is at best a stopgap.

Sonic Grade: C

This pressing beats the average Capitol LP in some ways, which is typically an aggressive, grainy piece of crap.

Take my word for it: I easily have 30-40 copies of this album, and I can tell you from years of experience that it is extremely difficult to find good sounding pressings of this music.

Cisco has done a service to the audiophile community by producing a very enjoyable LP of this, Linda’s masterpiece. It’s music that belongs in your collection. (If you have the bread, check out our Hot Stamper copies, guaranteed to kill any modern pressing — including this one — or your money back.) 

Cisco’s version is completely free from compression of any kind, and sometimes that works in favor of the overall sound and sometimes it doesn’t. I may have additional commentary discussing these issues down the road, but for now let’s just say you will have a hard time finding a better copy of Heart Like A Wheel on vinyl.

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Pet Sounds on DCC Is Yet Another Mediocre Remaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.

It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?

You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

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If Only I Could Remember My Name – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?

On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:

  • Noticeably more warmth,
  • Noticeably more sweetness,
  • Noticeably more delicacy,
  • Noticeably more transparency,
  • Noticeably more ambience,
  • Noticeably more energy,
  • Noticeably more size (width and height),
  • Noticeably more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).

in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.

The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.

A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.

By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.

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Black Byrd on Heavy Vinyl – Yes, You COULD Do Worse!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

We did a shootout for Black Byrd in 2025. We were fortunate to be able to include the Heavy Vinyl pressing that came out in 2002 along with the vintage pressings we had on hand.

The reissue was made back in the days when Rainbo Records was pressing records. (Scorpio carried a lot of Rainbo Records when I was still selling regular vinyl, and their pressings were often warped and defective, causing me to stop buying their releases.) Rainbo Records went under in 2011 (according to Discogs), not a moment too soon. They pressed mostly cheap junk vinyl aimed squarely at the lo-fi crowd.

But let’s get back to Black Byrd. Here is the way we described a Hot Stamper we put up on the site recently:

We played a bunch of these recently and only a few had the kind of sound we were looking for. This one was one of the best we heard — big, bold and lively with excellent presence. The bottom end is meaty and punchy, the highs are sweet and extended, and the mids sound right.

Most copies didn’t jump out of the speakers the way this one does. You’ll have a hard time finding such rich, smooth sound for this wonderful jazz album.

Some of these later pressings are just plain weak, but every now and then you find one like this that clearly benefits from the use of modern cutting equipment. The bass is tighter, the drums have more snap, and the soundfield has real depth. There’s excellent energy and good presence throughout, and the top end sounds just right.

Admittedly the above is fairly generic, but good records tend to do what good records always do, so why get specific? If you want to see in-depth notes for records that we’ve played in shootouts, we have a section full of them on the blog and you can be sure there are a great many more on their way if I have anything to say about it. (You can’t fire me — technically I still own the company.)

At around $30, all this Heavy Vinyl pressing would have to be is decent sounding. With a grade of 1+, it’s close, but just short of a cigar. Heavy Vinyl reissues of mediocre quality have their own section, mostly populated by the better releases on Speakers Corner, Cisco, Classic Records and others starting in the 90s.

We use the 1+ grade for vintage records that are passable, not good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper but not really a bad pressing either.

A mediocre grade puts it well ahead of the pack when you consider just how dreadful many of the releases we’ve played recently turned out to be.

(The Heavy Vinyl disasters section you see below has more than two hundred entries at this point, with many more on the way. As long as they keep making bad sounding remastered vinyl, we’ll keep publishing our notes, hopefully to help music lovers and audiophiles more easily recognize their shortcomings. Perhaps someday both groups will recognize what a waste of money these pressings are.)

We only played side two of this copy for some reason. It’s possible side one is better, but it may be worse, we honestly can’t say since we didn’t play it. Considering it was pressed by Rainbo Records, side one is unlikely to be any better.

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DCC + RTI = Audio Enervation

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was the first one I wrote criticizing the sound of DCC vinyl, probably around 2008 or so. There would be many to follow.

A well-known Joni Mitchell album we played the year before didn’t exactly set us on a different path, but it did have the effect of kicking us up into a higher gear, and Bonnie’s album was one of the early fruits of that change.

During our shootout for Bonnie’s first Capitol album, we found that the DCC pressing was lacking in so many ways that I felt compelled to spell out for our customers what its shortcomings were.

I had enthusiastically recommended the album in 1996 when it came out, but our first big shootout had shown me how wrong that judgment would turn out to be. Our complete commentary from 2008 is reproduced below.

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Nick Of Time is how completely they MURDER the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest.

Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound very good, but it can’t compete with the best original pressings. It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better original pressings. 

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music? You can try turning up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her a disservice.

The DCC Approach

The DCC, like a lot of modern remastered titles we”ve played, is too damn smooth.

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