Labels With Shortcomings – Analogue Productions

Judging the Sound of Heavy Vinyl We’ve Never Played

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

We freely admit that we have never played the Heavy Vinyl pressing of The Alternate Blues on the Analogue Productions label. It started life in 1996 as APR 3010, part of the Analog Revival Series on 150 gram vinyl (average price on Discogs these days: $99), and now it seems to be in print on 180 gram vinyl, made from the same metalwork by the looks of it.

The mastering of the Analog Revival Series pressing may have been credited to Bruce Leek and Stan Ricker, but the stamper information is TML, The Mastering Lab all the way.

In case you, unlike us, are tempted to try one or both of the AP pressings, or perhaps already own one or both, here is our advice on how to recognize the fairly predictable shortcomings of Chad’s pressing, or any pressing mastered by Doug Sax in the 90s for that matter. Every one we’ve ever played has suffered from the same suite of sins.

The Best Part

And we expect that the AP pressing’s failures in some areas will be so obvious that you really don’t need any other copy of the album to be able to hear them.

Just focus on the two qualities that Analogue Productions’ records have always failed to deliver: transparency and freedom from smear.

In our 2011 shootout notes we drew the reader’s attention to both:

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Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus Is a Bloated Mess at 45 RPM from Hoffman, Gray and Kassem

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

We played an amazing Hot stamper copy that got the bottom end on this album as right as we’ve ever heard. The contribution of the bass player was clear and correctly balanced in the mix, which we soon learned to appreciate was fundamentally important to the rhythmic drive of the music.

The bass was so tight and note-like you could see right into the soundstage and practically picture Monte Budwig plucking and bowing away.

This is precisely where the 45 RPM pressing goes off the rails.

The bloated, much-too-heavy and poorly-defined bass of the Heavy Vinyl remaster makes a mess of the Brazilian and African rhythms inherent in the music. If you own that $50 waste of money, believe me, you will not be tapping your foot to Cast Your Fate to the Wind or Manha de Carnival.

Our rule of thumb: he better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered records will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

Is this 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. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment like the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, these remastered records have your name all over them.

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?

If you want to know what a properly-mastered, properly-pressed copy sounds like, we put the last one up in 2023.

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Pet Sounds: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out between two pressings of Pet Sounds – the Analogue Productions pressing and one of our Hot Stampers.

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for Pet Sounds on this very blog.

PET SOUNDS: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

I have never heard the AP pressing, and have no plans at this time to get one, mostly because not a single one that I have heard on my system was better than mediocre. If your experience has been different, we have some questions for you.

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“What I’m all about is saving the world from bad sound.”

Check Out Some of Our Reviews (and Those of Our Customers’) for Albums on the Analogue Productions Label

Saving the world from bad sound you say? Hey, that’s what I’m about too!

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it, laying out, often in great detail, exactly what’s wrong with these new Heavy Vinyl records being put out by the likes of Mobile Fidelity and Analogue Productions.

We have over 250 listings for them right here on the blog. Are there some good ones I missed?

Apparently the writer for the Times thinks there are, although some of the ones he mentions do not do much for his credibility. (Aja comes to mind, made from a copy tape — Chad goes that extra mile all right! To see what Sisario has to say about the album, with our take as well, just scroll to the bottom of this commentary.)

Let’s see what Sisario has to say about the man from Kansas and his vinyl empire.

An article about Chad Kassem and Analogue Productions has just come out, written by Ben Sisario for The New York Times.

Sisario is the guy who was as enamored with Pete Hutchison of the Electric Recording Company as he seems to be of the fellow you see pictured, a man who he has no trouble calling “The Wizard of Vinyl,” and with a straight face as far as I can tell.

Audiophiles in my experience tend to be credulous — I should know, I was as credulous as they come about everything audio back in my twenties and thirties — but it seems that writers for The New York Times will believe almost anything somebody tells them about records. (Perhaps Sisario will be taken to task in the comments section, but I’m sure not going to waste my time trying to find out.)

I would love to have him come to Westlake so we could play him some of the albums he seems to think are so great. That would be one helluva wake-up call. Not only would he have to retract this article, he would have to retract the one about Hutchison. That would be a win win in my book!

Some quotes you may find interesting, or, if you are, like me, congenitally of a more skeptical bent, absurd. At the very least, let’s just say unfounded.

Chad Kassem is on a mission — saving listeners “from bad sound” — at the rural factory where he pores over LPs from some of music’s most important artists.”

One record on the QRP production line was “Fragile,” the 1971 prog-rock favorite by Yes, in a two-disc, 45-r.p.m. edition that sells for $60, as part of a series marking the 75th anniversary of Atlantic Records. It is Analogue Productions’ third iteration of that album in two decades, while Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, another reissue label, made a two-disc version as recently as 2019, and Rhino, Atlantic’s corporate cousin, offers its own “Fragile” vinyl. Labels know the value in feeding collectors’ endless hunt for the white whale.

“The fact that we can still beat some of the earliest, original pressings,” said Craig Kallman, a top Atlantic executive, “was the idea behind the Chad partnership.”

This is not a fact by any definition of the word that I am familiar with.  It is at best a claim, and one we had no trouble refuting when we played the flat-as-a-pancake Fragile that Rhino put out under his auspices. Maybe the new one is better. But how can you trust anyone that would put out anything as bad as that Fragile?

“I’m doing what I love for a living,” he added. “I mean, what’s more satisfying than picking your favorite childhood record, getting the master tape and getting it to sound better than it’s ever sounded before? What’s better than that?”

That would indeed be awesome if someone could do it. We know of only a couple of modern remasterings that can claim superior sound when played up against the best vintage pressings we have auditioned. You can read about one of them here. And no, it is not mastered by any engineer mentioned on any audiophile site or forum. Nobody knows who it is, not even us!

On another note, in the same article about Chad, Mobile Fidelity defends their use of digital, which strikes me as a reasonable defense as far as it goes:

In a statement, a spokesman for Mobile Fidelity defended its process, and said that its digital step (now disclosed) offers various advantages: “For example, we can endlessly tweak it for levels, alignments and adjustments. None of this is possible with original analog master tapes, whose fragile condition subjects them to potential damage with each pass. Our approach represents the best of all worlds — and allows us to continue our role as historical caretakers that safeguard, preserve and respect the irreplaceable original.”

A fellow who goes by DC Moderate wrote in to say he doubted these records are being made with an all-analog chain.

I’m a member of a Facebook group that debates these issues. Two bald-faced assertions have been made by some of the members of that group, and I welcome a reply either from Kassem or from Ben Sisario.

The first is that Kassem, Bernie Grundman and Kevin Gray do not, in fact, have access to the “original master tapes,” as these are locked away in vaults by the record companies. I’m not sure how a rebuttal could be made to such an assertion, as it is the equivalent of being asked “when will you stop beating your wife?” My response has always been that both Gray and Kassem have posted photos of the original master tapes that they utilize. What more can they say?

The second is based upon various posts on You Tube that argue that ALL of these analog mastering studios have digital equipment, and at some point in the mastering process, ALL so-called AAA records are converted to digital. Sisario’s article doesn’t explicitly respond to that allegation, and I therefore welcome a response from Sisario or Kassem. Although implicitly, Sisario and Kassem are already saying that the entire chain is analog.

Ben Sisario replies:

I can’t comment on the practices of Bernie Grundman or Kevin Gray, although I’ve spoken to both of them and they are some of the most esteemed engineers in the industry. And it’s true that some labels don’t let tapes out of the vaults. But I saw with my own eyes that Analogue Productions has access to real masters, and I witnessed their mastering setup in use; they have the old console of Doug Sax, another of the greats.

I can’t comment on the second “allegation.” But I would note that after the Mobile Fidelity fiasco a few years ago, you now see other labels being a bit more specific and clear in how they describe their sources and mastering.

Analog Shmanalog

Now it’s my turn. The following is my reply to the friend who sent me the NYT article. He had been to my studio and heard for himself the sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that “The Wizard of Vinyl” produces. Up against properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LPs, they are at best mediocre, and more often than not just plain terrible. (Aja is a good example of a cross between mediocre and terrible, see below.)

This “pure analog versus analog tainted with digital” debate needs to stop.

It completely avoids the only question worth asking: are these new records any good?

Who cares how they make them?

Only the deaf! Those who can hear know how badly they suck and could not care less.

You sat me down and we played records. They all failed.

That is the only true test.

Put all of these new records to the same test! Please, somebody!

Somebody with a top quality system can volunteer to do shootouts for any and all of them and let the chips fall where they may.

Finding such a system may be impossible, but we can at least try. This is getting us nowhere.

There is no testing going on, just claims being made with nothing to back them up.

None of this matters. Literally, none of it.

Of course, we at Better Records could volunteer to do it, publicly, with blindfolded listeners under controlled conditions.

But we need to make money and there is no money in bashing crap vinyl.

We play a few from time to time and I post the notes from the shootout on this blog, mostly as a public service.

If you have a good stereo, properly set up in a good room, you should know by now not to buy this crap. Everybody else is falling for this man’s fool’s gold and there is nothing any of us who know better can do about it.

TP

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Sounds Unheard Of! – Another Analogue Productions Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring Shelly Manne Available Now

Remember the 90s Acoustic Sounds Analog Revival series mastered by Stan Ricker? This was one of the titles they did, and completely ruined of course, as was the case with all the titles from that series that we played.

Ricker boosted the hell out of the top end, as is his wont, so all the percussion had the phony MoFi exaggerated sizzle and tizziness that we dislike so much around here at Better Records.

Yes, it’s the very same phony top that many audiophiles do not seem bothered by to this day. 

The whole series was an audio disaster, but oddly enough, I cannot remember reading a single word of criticism in the audiophile press discussing the shortcomings of that series of (badly) Half-Speed mastered LPs — outside of my own reviews of course. Has anything in audio really changed?

If I were to try to “reverse engineer” the sound of a system that could play this record and hide its many faults, I would look for a system that was thick, dark and overly smooth, with no real extension on the top end to speak of. Stan’s 10k boost — along with other the colorations he favors — is just what the doctor ordered for such a system.

I know that sound. I had a system in the 90s with many of the same shortcomings, but of course I didn’t know any of that.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then.

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Letter of the Week – “Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a copy of Lush Life he purchased not long ago.

Hi Tom,

Even a 2+ [Super Hot] was enough to eliminate the 2021 Concord/AP [Analogue Productions] 33 RPM KPG [Kevin Gray] LP on 180 gram which was my copy until this Hot Stamper.

I listened to side 1 first. Well shit … it sounds clean, it sounds nice, a bit flat but that’s how I thought it was supposed to be, and sounds quite audiophile.

Simply put, the BR copy truly brings the music to life.

Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.

All I know is the BR LP destroyed the above to smithereens.

As always, many thanks!

Michel

Dear Michel,

You are more than welcome.  When you mention that you thought the album sounded clean, nice, a bit flat, you were in the same boat as all the other audiophiles who own these modern remasterings who have been putting up with their mediocre sound. Why?

Because they thought the recordings were at fault.

After all, Chad must know what he’s doing, he’s the biggest guy in the business.

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The Timekeepers Is Probably Bad on Heavy Vinyl, But Who Can Be Bothered to Find Out?

More of the Music of Count Basie

Analogue Productions remastered this longtime favorite of ours, The Timekeepers, on 45 RPM vinyl. Considering their dismal track record — an unbroken string of failures, scoring not a single winner that I am aware of — I’m guessing the Hot Stamper we offered here would have blown the doors off their version, as well as any other Basie album they have done or ever will do on vinyl.

A good customer emailed us back in 2012 with the quote below, authenticating our rather negative disposition at the time concerning the AP releases from the ’90s:

Recently I unearthed a pile of “The Tracking Angle” magazines, MF’s short-lived venture in publishing, that I’d kept all these years (this may damn me in your eyes, but at the time he was one of the more animated [animated but consistently wrong, not a good tradeoff] writers on audio). I dutifully reread the very first issue (Jan. 1995) for the first time in many years, even a review of “Tea for the Tillerman,”… I was flabbergasted to come across this:

So what does Mr. “Better Records” think? In a newsletter where he says a digital remastered OJC vinyl title sounds better than Acoustic Sounds’ all analogue version and says the whole lot of them “suck” and “simply cannot sound good on a good stereo,” he calls this Cat Stevens reissue “Fabulous. Very dynamic with plenty of presence in the midrange, unlike the ‘audiophile’ records of today.”

We proudly stand behind every word. If the comparable OJC title sounds better than the remastered one Acoustic Sounds is peddling, then it sounds better, digital remastering or no digital remastering.

We don’t pay any attention to who makes the records, how they make them or why they make them.

We just play them and let the chips fall will they may. Mr. Fremer thinks that making records the “right” way should result in better sounding records, but we have found precious little evidence to back up that theory, and volumes of evidence which utterly 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 day 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 decades as well as fundamentally undermining the very rationale for the expense and hassle of analog itself in the modern digital age, a much more serious charge.

Ask yourself, where are those records now?

Piled on the ash heap of analog history, that’s where (apologies to Leon Trotsky). Nobody writes about them anymore, and it’s not because they were so good, no matter what any audiophile-type reviewer thought or may think about them.

As long as Analogue Productions is around, at least no one can say that Mobile Fidelity makes the worst sounding audiophile records in the world. They are certainly some of the worst, but not so hopeless that they have never made a single good sounding record, which is the title that Chad Kassem holds.

To the best of our knowledge. Obviously we have only played a small fraction of the records released on his godawful label. In our defense let me say that a small fraction was all we could take.

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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Letter of the Week – “I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions Reissue…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sonny Rollins’s Albums Available Now

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

Dear Tom and Fred

After having had the opportunity to listen to the next batch of 7 more records, here are my observations on the now 40 records I bought from you.

First to my listening experience. After receiving the CSNY 4 Way Street and looking for my own record, I thought was a German press easy to beat I realized it was a white label promo first press and thought, oh, did I make a mistake to buy this for this kind of money from you guys, this may be a tough one to crack?

Not so, your SH Stamper clearly beat the WL promo, check!

Next up was the Miles Davis Sketches of Spain White Hot Stamper, one of my very top Miles favorites.

I did not recall that I had the six eye first press, and on side 2, with identical stampers (when your 3/3 WH show up, you do not have the time to check this but hurry :-since your WH 3/3s sell like hot cakes!).

So even more difficult to beat?? Promising start: your WH was clearly better on side 1, now to the identical stampers side 2: not as clearly but still just more transparent, better drums, less shrill on track 2, check!

But it certainly cannot get better than this 3/3 WH stamper, can it?

Next up is Sonny Rollins 3/3 WH Stamper [of Way Out West]. Hard to believe, but yes, even better than the great Miles 3/3 WHS, and I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions reissue which I always thought was quite decent.

And so it goes on…

Christian

Christian,

In less than a year you have acquired a large number of simply amazing sounding records. Congratulations.

As you point out about the stampers, you may have a pressing with the right stampers, but our copy will still beat it. How it was pressed and how it was cleaned are critical to the sound, and that is not something the stamper numbers can tell you. It’s a subject we discuss all over this blog. Here is a good place to start.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

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Analogue Productions and Sterling Produce a Disastrous Scheherazade

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

Wikipedia has a nice entry for some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ideas behind the final movement of the piece:

These [later] works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups. The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.

Wikipedia

Could not have said it better myself!

We’ve written at length about the thrills to be had when playing the last movement of Scheherazade — not brilliantly, to be sure, as the writer for Wikipedia has done, but serviceably I hope. Unfortunately, not every pressing of Reiner’s performance is able to communicate the musical values of the work the way the best pressings can.

As you can see from our notes for the this Heavy Vinyl Analogue Productions pressing, the thrill was barely there on the first side, and by the second side it was completely gone.

The notes from our 2024 shootout read:

  • Not dry or squawky
  • Really lacking depth and dynamics.
  • Big, thick bass gets annoying.
  • Big brass not too bright but it is over-textured and flat.

Plenty of modern records suffer from these as well as lots of other shortcomings. For some reason, the writers for The Absolute Sound who put this crappy LP on their Super Disc list didn’t seem bothered by them the way we were.

If you own this pressing, here are the kinds of things you might want to listen for in order to recognize its many, and quite serious, failings.

When played head to head against any properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP, this pressing will fall short in a number of important areas. Linked below are titles we’ve found to be good for testing these same qualities in a recording.

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