Heavy Vinyl Reviewed

Heavy Vinyl Reviews and Commentaries

Mozart / Symphony No. 35 – A Cisco Recommended LP, or Is It?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now

I wrote this review in 2001, the equivalent of the stone age in my audio world — most everything of value that I’ve learned in audio over the last fifty years I learned in this century — and would now disagree with a great deal of what I said about the sound of the record.

The music and performances are fine, but the sound has all the hallmarks of bad cutting equipment and dead-as-a-doornail RTI vinyl.

This is the review I wrote in 2001:

Hearing this performance from Thomas Nee and his orchestra is like hearing the work for the first time. It may be difficult to reproduce the magic in these grooves but wonderfully rewarding when you do. You won’t be bored! The sound is intimate and immediate; this is the record for those of you who appreciate more of a front row center seat. Count me in; that’s where I like to sit myself.  

I worked hard on my system for about 4 hours one night, using nothing but this record as my test, because of its wealth of subtle ambience cues, excellent string tone, and massed string dynamics. There is a lot to listen for, and a lot to get right, for this album to sound right.

The performance of the Mozart’s 35th Symphony is definitive. Without a doubt this is the best Mozart record currently available, one that belongs in any serious record collection. I give it a top recommendation for its sublime musical qualities that set it apart from other current releases. In short, a Must Own.

UPDATE 2020

Twenty years and a great deal of audio progress later I have changed my tune. Now I would say:

Cisco’s titles had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discussed on the blog in some depth here. Other bad sounding records that he mastered can be found here.

An excerpt:

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.

A textbook case of live and learn.

Cisco Music had this to day about their record:

One of Mozart’s most popular symphonies is given a visceral and driving performance. Instead of slowing down the tempo in service to lyricism, conductor Thomas Nee chose to adhere to Mozart’s written instructions: ‘The first movement must be played with fire; the last, as fast as possible.’ Even if you own several recordings of this bright and joyous work, you’ve never heard it played like this, and certainly never with this kind of audiophile sound! 

This is exactly the kind of “audiophile sound” I fell for 20 25 years ago, long before I had a clue as to just how good the best orchestral recordings could sound.

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I’m Starting to Get a Bad Feeling About Record Store Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

For some reason, don’t ask me why, they keep hiring Chris Bellman to make Heavy Vinyl reissues of Neil Young’s albums, even though he has shown again and again that he has no idea what these recordings are supposed to sould like.

So far he’s ruined After the Gold Rush and Neil Young’s Greatest Hits, and there may be others he’s remastered to death, but no copies of those have come our way so we really don’t know, or care to know, to be honest.

If this is your idea of analog, you are most likely in the wrong hobby and should consider finding a different one. At the very least you are wasting your time and money on worthless crap vinyl pressings put out by the legion of Heavy Vinyl Grifters who emerge from the bowels of the earth on Record Store Day, targeting their rip-off LPs at the low- to mid-fi vinyl collector types who have yet to figure out what a giant scam the whole thing is.

These records have virtually no redeeming features, none that we could find anyway. Allow us to catalog the shortcomings of the three sides that comprise the 2017 Record Store Day release of Harvest Moon.

For the first time in five years we had finally been able to do a shootout for the imports we like, so we knew exactly how good the best pressings could sound. Long story short, they sure don’t sound like this!

Side One

Track Two (From Hank to Hendrix)

  • Blary harmonica
  • Much more treble
  • Still flat and dry
  • Just louder with less bottom
  • Edgy vocals in the chorus

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Houses of the Holy on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We can describe the sound of this miserable Bernie Grundman remaster in two words: ridiculously bright.

Honestly, what more do you need to know? It’s almost as bad as the Zep II he cut, and that record is an abomination.

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

(Oh but it does – this misbegotten series out of Japan will do nicely to illustrate how brighter is not necessarily better, it’s just brighter.)

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressings for comparison purposes. After all, these Classic LPs are what many — perhaps most — audiophiles consider superior to other pressings.

We sure don’t, but everybody else seems to. You will find very few critics of the Classic Zeps LPs outside of those who write for this blog, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence.

Wrong on all counts.

We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

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Classic Records – More of the Same Old Same Old

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

Weaver of Dreams is yet another Classic Records LP that’s hard to get excited about.

The notes I found attached to a copy in the backroom and played should be all you need to know to avoid the Classic pressing.

Shifted up (tonally) and hard.

Who wants a classic Columbia that sounds like that, especially one that was recorded in Columbia’s legendary Columbia 30th street studio recordings.

Years ago we wrote that Bernie Grundman’s work for Classic Records could be summed up in these four words. It seems that this Burrell record has some of those rather obvious shortcomings.

There are certainly some incredible sounding pressings of this album out there, but who has the resources it would take to find them?

Most of the early stereo 6-Eye pressings we come across these days turn out to have constant surface noise. Many have severely damaged inner grooves. Even the mintiest looking copies often turn out to be too noisy for most audiophiles.

This is of course why the hacks at Classic Records did so well for themselves — until they went under — hawking remastered versions of classic albums pressed on new, quieter vinyl.

The problem is that most of their stuff just doesn’t sound all that good, this album included. We’ve played it; it’s decent, but any Hot Stamper will show you just how much music you are missing.

If you want to hear this album with amazing fidelity but don’t want to spend the time, money and energy collecting, cleaning, and playing mostly mediocre copies until you luck into a good one, a Hot Stamper pressing is the only way to go.

That is, if you can find one on our site. We rarely have any stock of this album, for the reasons listed above.

We do have other Kenny Burrell albums, but even the records he made in the 70s are getting hard to find these days.

And if you are going to try to dig up your own top quality pressings, advanced record cleaning technologies are a must. Records pressed in the 60s are always in need of serious scrubbing, using the right fluids on the right machinery. Without the help of both of those, you have very little chance of success.

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Tchaikovsky’s None-Too-Impressive 6th Symphony on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, twenty years or more, but I remember it as none-too-impressive, playing into my natural prejudice against the earliest Living Stereo recordings and Classic Records themselves.

UPDATE 2025

Having heard some amazingly good sounding ones since this review was written many years ago, we are no longer prejudiced against the “earliest Living Stereo releases.” Many of them have superb sound.

The original is not good either in our experience. The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.

When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

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Sgt. Pepper’s and Mistaken Audiophile Thinking (Hint: the UHQR Is Wrong)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

This commentary was probably written between 2005 when we did our first shootout for the album and 2008, by which time it would have been a regular feature on the site. 

We charge hundreds of dollars for a Hot Stamper Sgt. Pepper, which is a lot to pay for a record. But consider this: the UHQR typically sells for a great deal more than the price we charge and doesn’t sound remotely as good. 

Of course the people that buy UHQRs would never find themselves in a position to recognize how much better one of our Hot Stampers sounds in a head to head shootout with their precious and oh-so-collectible UHQR.

They assume that they’ve already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and see no reason to try another.

I was guilty of the same mistaken audiophile thinking myself in 1982. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper and thinking how amazing it sounded and how lucky I was to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now it most likely would be positively painful. All I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice), and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard really good copies of Sgt. Pepper, like the wonderful Hot Stampers we put on the site from time to time, now the MoFi UHQR sounds so phony to me that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

UPDATE 2025

If you are still buying these remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.

At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is lacking on your copy of the album.

And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go to our Half-Speed mastering main page .

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Is Hate an Appropriate Emotion for Sound As Bad As This?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

We recently found ourselves with an unexpected opportunity — we were given the chance to hear the mono pressing of Saucerful of Secrets, the one that Bernie Grundman mastered for Record Store Day back in 2019.

We had ordered a vintage stereo pressing from a dealer, and instead of sending us what we ordered, we got the RSD mono instead.

Knowing the record well, we figured why not give it a listen. Maybe the mono mix is the way to go! Who can say until they’ve heard it.

Well, we’ve now heard it, and if there is a worse sounding version of the album, whether in stereo or in mono, we would find even the possibility of such a thing very hard to believe. You’re going to have to prove it to us, because this record is as bad as it gets.

I can’t say we hate a lot of records — most of the time we’re just disgusted and disappointed with all the crap Heavy Vinyl being produced these days — but we sure hated this one.

If you had played it, I can only hope you would have hated it too.

Side One

Track Four

  • Very flat and veiled and clean
  • This mix sucks compared to stereo

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Jimmy Page Makes a Mess of His Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In 2022 Geoff Edgers contacted me to find out what the story was with these so-called Hot Stampers we were selling, the ones that had so many audiophiles up in arms.

I told him our records will beat anything he can find to throw at them, so we arranged to meet at my studio and play anything he wanted to hear.

He brought with him three well known titles to play on our reference system in order to get my reaction to the sound of some of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that had found favor with reviewers and the audiophile community in general, including the 2014 remaster of Led Zeppelin II (excellent), the remaster of Brothers in Arms that Chris Bellman cut, released in 2021 (also excellent, review to come), and last and definitely least, the pricey Craft Recordings remaster by Bernie Grundman of Lush Life (astonishingly bad, review coming).

What shocked me about the sound of the Led Zeppelin II that Geoff brought over to play was how big, dynamic, present and alive it was. It sounded like a real record, not one of these remastered fakes.

At the time, it was simply not part of our experience to play a Heavy Vinyl pressing with those qualities.

We’d heard hundreds of them (and reviewed 330 on this blog as of 5/2025) that were small, flat, compressed, veiled and lifeless, but big, dynamic, present and alive were qualities we’d only experienced when playing the carefully-cleaned, properly-mastered, curated-for-sound-quality pressings we sell as Hot Stampers.

In fact, those are some of the very qualities that confer the status of Hot Stamper to a record during a shootout. That’s exactly what we’re listening for.

Houses of the Holy from the same series had a bad case of modern sound, lacking all the best qualities of the original Robert Ludwig-mastered pressings that we have come to adore. (Naturally those Ludwig masters are the only ones we would ever consider offering).

Now it’s time to talk about the first album, which I suspect will be the last of the Page remasters we will bother to play. It seems that II was a fluke.  Here is everything we didn’t like about it, which is pretty much everything.

Side One

Good Times Bad Times

    • Small, no real power

Babe I’m Gonna Leave You

    • Tonally fine
    • A very light sheen
    • Not extending high or low

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Universals’s Reissue of 10cc’s Masterpiece – Is Anyone in Charge Here?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

This review was written circa 2005.

This Universal Super De Luxe import LP appears to be the regular vinyl version that, for all we know, might actually still be in print in Europe. It appears to have been specially pressed on heavy vinyl for our domestic market as part of the new Universal Heavy Vinyl series.

Either that or it’s being made from the old metalwork for the LP that would have been available most recently in Europe (and out of print by now I should think).

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that it is not in any real sense remastered, if such a claim is actually being made for it, or the series.

Rather it has simply been repressed on Heavy Vinyl in Europe and imported to the states.

None of which is either here nor there because the record is an absolute DISASTER.

The top end is so boosted, after the cutter-head-emphasis gets done with it all that’s left is pure DISTORTION. No one with two working ears and even a halfway-decent stereo can fail to notice how awful this pressing sounds. How a record this poorly mastered (or pressed, perhaps it’s a manufacturing defect) could get through the Quality Control department at Universal is beyond me.

Wait a minute. Who say they even have a quality control department? 

They, like every other company that produces records these days, could apparently not care less whether the records they make are any good or not. There is not an iota of evidence to support the contention that anyone at any of these companies knows what the hell he or she is doing.

This is a classic example of a phrase that is widely misused, that phrase being “begging the question,” which typically refers to assuming something that one should be required to prove.

If you assume that any modern record label had a quality control department, you should be required to provide evidence of its existence. I am not aware of any.

Oh, but it’s ANALOG.

Folks, take it from me: because it’s on vinyl, heavy or otherwise, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with whether it sounds any good or not. The Hoffman-mastered DCC Gold CD is a million times more analog sounding than this piece of crap. Unlike this LP, the tonality of his CD is right on the money. It’s still a CD, and the Hot Stamper pressings we sell will trounce it sonically, but it’s worlds better than this Analog Vinyl.

If any record ever deserved a failing grade, it’s this one. After a few minutes you simply will not be able to be in the same room with it.

This link will take you to some other exceptionally bad records that, like this one, were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. On today’s modern systems, it should be obvious that they have nothing of the kind and that, in fact, the opposite is true.

Venerable or Execrable? If It’s Athena the Chances Are Good It’s the Latter

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

I spied an interesting quote on the Acoustic Sounds site many years ago:

“…Analogue Productions’ 45rpm remastering improves upon the venerable Athena LP release from the late 80s, with better dynamics and a fuller ‘middle’ to the orchestral sonority.” – Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound, October 2010

For some reason Andrew uses the word “venerable” when a better, certainly more accurate term would have been “execrable.” Having played the record in question this strikes us as the kind of mistake that would not be easy to make.

Athena was a godawful audiophile label that managed to put out all of five records before going under, only one of which was any good, and it’s definitely not this one.

It was in fact the Debussy piano recording with Moravec, mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig himself, a man who knows his classical music, having cut scores if not hundreds of records for Nonesuch and other labels in the 60s and 70s.

From the jacket:

Analogue Master Recording™

Unlike other remastering companies, Athena Records always uses the ORIGINAL ANALOG MASTER SESSION TAPES. In this case, The Master Lacquers were cut directly by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab so you know it will sound superb.

Our Hot Stamper listing for the Vox pressing:

This famously good sounding Vox pressing os Symphonic Dances has been remastered a number of times, but you can be sure that the Hot Stamper we are offering here will beat any of those modern pressings by a wide margin in any area that has to do with sound (surfaces being another matter and one we won’t go into here).

The sound of this recording on the best pressings is dynamic, lively and BIG. The music just jumps out of the speakers, bringing the power and vibrant colors of a symphony orchestra right into your listening room. Guaranteed to put to shame 95% or more of all the classical records you own, even if you own lots of our Hot Stampers. [Can’t say I would agree with that in 2023.]

The bass is phenomenal on this recording, assuming you have a copy that has the bass cut and pressed right. This one sure does! Few Golden Age classical recordings from the 50s will have the kind of bass that’s found on this record.

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