Heavy Vinyl Mediocrities

Heavy Vinyl mediocrities

The DCC Pressing of Hotel California – Not Bad!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

Side one: B+ / Side two: B-

The DCC for this album is not a total disaster. In fact, the first side of the DCC is one of the better DCC sides we’ve played in recent memory. We dropped the needle on a few copies we had in the back (pressing variations exist for audiophile records too, don’t you know) and they averaged about a B+ for sound on side one. Side two was quite a bit too clean for our tastes — no real ambience or meaty texture to the guitars, about a B- for sound.

To flip something we say often: you can do worse, but you can do a LOT better.  

Differing Grading Scales

Note that the grading scale for Hot Stampers is slightly different than the grading scale we all grew up with in school.

The best Hot Stampers receive a grade of A Triple Plus.

This DCC record for side one is three steps down from that.

Three steps down from an A+ grade in school, the highest grade one could earn, would be a B+, hence the B+ grade you see above.

Our Most Recent Commentary

  • This vintage copy was giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning excellent grades from top to bottom
  • In our experience, whatever the reasons may be, finding quiet vinyl on this album almost never happens – New Kid in Town is fairly ticky on probably 80% of what we can find of the originals (which are the only ones that sound any good)
  • If you have any modern remastered pressing of the album, please order this one so you can hear what you have been missing all these years
  • A Better Records Top 100 pick – here’s a copy that’s transparent and hi-rez, with all the energy and Tubey Magic that can only be found on the right pressings of the originals
  • Speaking of the right pressings, the right stampers are ten or twenty times as rare as the run-of-the-mill stampers that show up on ebay every day, which should explain why this multi-million selling title rarely makes it to the site

We are having a devil of a time finding this album in audiophile playing condition these days, which is why you practically never see them on the site anymore, and copies quieter than Mint Minus Minus are rare indeed

We just finished a shootout for this title and this bad boy is truly a Demo Disc quality classic rock LP.

From first note to last, this pressing has superb, mind-blowing, Demo Disc Quality Sound. Drop the needle on any track on either side to hear what we’re talking about. The highs are silky and delicate, the bottom end is tight and punchy, and the vocals sound AMAZING. The bass is PERFECTION, which really brings out the feel of the song “Hotel California.” It’s so deep and loping, the effect is practically narcotic.

“Life In The Fast Lane” is possibly the toughest song on the album to get right — it tends to have that transistory, compressed sound that we’ve come to expect from Bill Szymczyk. On this copy, it REALLY ROCKS — super-punchy with amazing presence and lots of meaty texture to the guitars. It will always sound a bit harsher than ideal on any copy with real presence, texture, and energy; that’s just the sound they were going for. It is what it is, which makes it not a good track to judge the first side by.

On side two, one of the better sounding tracks is “Try And Love Again.” On a superb copy like this one, it’s off the charts. The wonderful clarity and punchy bass here take this song to a whole new level.

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Lady in Satin on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billie Holiday Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic Records pressing that came out in 1998, but I remember it as nothing special, tonally correct but with somewhat low-rez (not breathy) vocals and lacking in both space and warmth.

Records made for audiophiles are rarely any good, so rarely in fact that we are positively shocked when such records are even halfway decent. After playing so many bad audiophile records for so many years it’s practically a truism here at Better Records.

A recording like this is the perfect example of why we pay no attention whatsoever to the bona fides of the disc, but instead make our judgments strictly on the merits of the record spinning on the table. The listener normally does not even know the label of the pressing he is reviewing. It could be a Six Eye original, the 360 reissue, or even a (gasp!) ’70s-era LP.

We don’t care what the label is.

What does that have to do with anything? We’re looking for the best sound. We don’t play labels, we play unique pressings of the album.  We assume that every pressing sounds different from every other pressing. Our job is to figure out what each of them is doing, right or wrong. 

We mix up all our copies and play them one after another until we come across the best sounding one.

This approach has opened up a world of sound that most audiophiles — at least the ones who buy into the hype associated with the typical audiophile pressing — will never be able to experience.

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The Royal Ballet – Gala Performances – on Classic Records

More Reviews of Classic Records Classical Titles

Sonic Grade: C or Better 

Probably a fairly good Classic Records album. When I played this record years ago, I thought it was one of the better Classic RCA titles. You can be sure it won’t sound like the original — [almost] no Classic record does — but it might be pretty good all things considered. One thing to consider is that the original in clean condition sells for many thousands of dollars!

Here are a few commentaries you may care to read about Bernie Grundman‘s work as a mastering engineer, good and bad.

Bridge Over Troubled Water – Classic Records Reviewed

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

Sonic Grade: C

What’s an easy way to recognize the better pressings?

They’re the ones with textured strings in the orchestral arrangements.

The string tone on the average copy is hard and steely.

The Classic 200 gram pressing suffers from a case of steely strings. When the strings are blasting away at the end of the title song, you want to be able to hear the texture without the strings sounding shrill and edgy.

This is no mean feat, for the record or the stereo.

Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered are good for testing string tone and texture.

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Ben Webster / Meets Oscar Peterson on Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Ben Webster

This is a Speakers Corner 180g LP. Years ago we wrote:

“Superb music and sound! This one gets a Top recommendation. This recording captures an intimate Webster session. Ben is at his best in this sort of setting. (He’s at his worst when called upon to “battle” with a gang of loud, frantic exhibitionists.)”

I doubt we would like it as much now as we did then, but if you can get one for cheap, and can stand the typical faults of most Heavy Vinyl pressings being made these days, we say go for it.

Liner Notes

The sensitive, alert and propulsive Peterson Trio frames his stories and statements handsomely, and contributes many notable statements of its own. Pianist Peterson, inspired perhaps by Ben, is in a fine, funky frame of mind (his Kansas City heritage.)

The artists take a bunch of strong, standard songs and personalize them — to say the least. With wonderful humor, Ben can take a sophisticated show tune like This Can’t Be Love (Rodgers and Hart) or Ray Noble’s romantic The Touch of Your Lips and turn it into an earthy finger-poppin’ affair. Or he can paint a picture of profound sadness in his tender, moody When Your Lover Has Gone, or that one-time Sinatra soliloquy, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.

FURTHER READING

New to the Blog? Start Here

Speakers Corner – Jazz

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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Paganini / Concerto No.1 – Testament Records

The Music of Paganini Available Now

More Reviews of the Music of Paganini

Sonic Grade: C

We used to sell the Testament pressing you see pictured to the left. Many years later, in our review for the budget Angel Seraphim pressing, we said:

This copy KILLS the out of print Testament 180 gram version from circa 2000 (which is not a bad record by any means). Can’t say how it compares to the original — we haven’t had one in years.

When I was selling the Testament Heavy Vinyl pressing all those years ago, I had never heard an original.

But doesn’t it strike you as sad that even the cheapest domestic reissue from the ’70s (I think that’s when it was released), put out on a budget label, absolutely mops the floor with the higher priced, much more prestigious, ostensibly superior, imported from the UK Testament LP?

I was an audiophile then and I’m an audiophile now, and I am glad to say I’ve learned a few things about records in the last twenty or so years.

One of the things I leaned was that most Heavy Vinyl pressings are a fraud perpetrated on a far-too-credulous segment of the record buying public, principally made up of record buyers who describe themselves as audiophiles.

I fell for the hype twenty years ago but, as I say, I’ve learned a few things since then and now I know just how easily fooled most audiophiles are when it comes to buying records, especially the ones marketed to them by the major audiophile record dealers (who, truth be told, make even worse sounding records than this Testament. I’m looking at you, Mobile Fidelity and Acoustic Sounds).

Our Most Recent Review of a Hot Stamper Seraphim Pressing

The AMAZING Michael Rabin is the principal violinist. His playing of these exceptionally difficult pieces is legendary. Recorded by Capitol in the late ’50s, his fiery performance is breathtaking, with the kind of energy, excitement and technical proficiency that is second to none in our experience.

There’s a very good chance that you have NEVER heard a better sounding violin concerto record than this one. It’s clearly superior to most of the pressings that audiophiles would hold dear; we’ve played them by the score. The fact that it’s on a budget label reissue label, to my mind, is the icing on the cake. (There’s a valuable lesson here to be learned if only more audiophiles will make the effort to learn it.)

There are two recordings of the Paganini Concerto No.1 we like currently; this one, and the Menuhin on EMI. We prefer Rabin’s sound and performance, but the EMI engineers managed to record their orchestra with slightly more natural fidelity. Both are of course superb. (We love the mono recording Ricci did for London in the mid-’50s but the sound and surface quality are not competitive with the two recordings above.)

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An Import in 2004 Killed the Speakers Corner Reissue of Ella and Basie

More of the Music of Count Basie

More of the Music of Ella Fitzgerald

And back in 2004 that actually surprised us!

This review was written in 2004. We had never heard a clean, domestic original copy up to that time, mostly because they were always in such poor condition. Eventually we did, figured out how to clean it, and never looked back.

You might consider this a Wake Up Call. By 2007 we were awake enough to stop buying Heavy Vinyl to sell. The better our system became, the less competitive those modern remasters sounded. It was yet another Milestone Event in the history of Better Records. Please to enjoy our commentary.

This early British import (similar to the one you see above) KILLS the Speakers Corner 180 gram reissue.

I still like their version, but this is what it should have sounded like: tonally much fuller and richer.

The 180 gram copy suffers from the standard reissue MO — brighter is not necessarily better, and definitely not when you have a big band and a vocalist, as is the case here.

I’ve never heard this album sound better and I doubt that it really can sound much better than this. This copy makes me want to turn it up as loud as the stereo will go and let those wonderful Quincy Jones arrangements come to life.

UPDATE 2025

To doubt that the record can sound much better than the import we played? That was a silly thing to say. Of course it can. That’s what shootouts are for. Here is what we had to say about our last White Hot Stamper pressing of the album.

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Today’s Heavy Vinyl Mediocrity Is… Fragile

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Yes Available Now

The Analogue Productions 180g reissue shown here is mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray, two guys with reputations for doing good work, but the results of their collaboration [can you believe this record came out in 2006!?] leave much to be desired.

The overall sound is too lean.

This is especially noticeable on the too-thin-sounding guitars and vocals.

Believe me, it’s no fun to play a Yes album with thin guitars and vocals.

Also, there’s a noticeable lack of ambience throughout the record. What comes to mind when I hear a record that sounds like this is the dreaded D word: dubby.

I find it hard to believe they had the actual two-track original master tape to work with. The sound is just too anemic to have come from the real tape. If they did have the real tape, then they really botched the job.
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Who’s Next – An Overview

More of the Music of The Who

The following was written in the early 2000s. Some of the commentary has been added or modified.

Who’s Next has been remastered for audiophiles many, many times, more often than not quite badly in our opinion.

To be fair, we should point out that our opinion has changed quite a few times over the course of the last twenty years.

This then is our story.

MCA MASTERPHILE

Back in the days when I was foolishly in the thrall of half-speed mastered audiophile pressings, I thought that the MCA Masterphile was king. That was probably the mid to late ’80s.

BRITISH TRACK LABEL ORIGINALS

By the early 90s I had discovered how good the Black Label Original British Track pressings could be and started preferring those. A bit murky but Tubey Magical, full and rich, precisely the way a good British Rock recording (Faces, Jethro Tull) should be.

JAPANESE AND GERMAN

Of course by then I had played numerous Japanese and German pressings, none of which sounded right to my ears, then or now. The Japanese did what they like to do to most of the records they master, from whatever dub tapes are sent to them: they brighten up the sound.

When I had much darker, less-revealing system, the Japanese pressing did better than most of the other pressings I played.

But it was wrong, and the better my stereo got the more wrong it sounded. This process comes under the general heading of audio progress 

MCA HEAVY VINYL

In 1995 the MCA Heavy Vinyl version came out, mastered by Kevin Gray. I quite liked it at the time but no longer do; it’s brightened up, opaque, airless and much of the fine detail of the recording is missing, all due to the crude cutting system Kevin employed at the time. It’s also notoriously badly pressed, resulting in stitches in the vinyl that are audible on practically every copy. (more…)

Gounod / Ballet Music from Faust – Classic Records Reviewed

More of the music of Georges Bizet (1838-1875)

Reviews and Commentaries for Guonod / Faust Ballet Music

Sonic Grade: C

Classic Records did a passable job with LSC 2449, one of their better efforts, but of course it has almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have, and they have them more often than not in abundance.

Their version is not awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and considering that the original goes for many, many hundreds of dollars, might be worth picking up at a reasonable price.

Most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of the quality of a good original. If they had Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us way back in 1994, as soon as we had a chance to play them.

I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled (HP, how could you?), but I can say that we weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. (We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the We Was Wrong entries to prove it.)

And the fact that so many of them are currently on the TAS List is a sad comment on how far the mighty have fallen.

Classical Living Stereo Titles Available Now

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