Robert tries to remain positive when choosing the words that would best describe the award winning Impex release of Legrand Jazz. In the end he goes with the spoken word over the written one.
Years ago I wrote about how important the Legrand Jazz album was for me in my growth as a critical listener. It’s yet another example of an album that helped make me a better audiophile by showing me the error of my tweaking and tuning ways.
Let’s watch the video and see what Robert has learned about Impex’s recent release.
Michael Fremer gives the Impex pressings an 11 for sound. He writes (bolding added by me):
“This IMPEX reissue is sourced from an “analog mix-down transfer of the original 1958 work tape by Mark Wilder at Battery Studios” and cut by Chris Bellman and Bob Donnelly at Bernie Grundman Mastering on Grundman’s all-tube mastering system. I have a clean, original 6-Eye pressing that this superbly pressed reissue betters in every way. This will make both your stereo and your heart sing. Some of the greatest jazz musicians of that or any era wailing and clearly having a Legrand time. Limited to 3000 copies. Don’t miss it!”
Who are you going to believe, the Self-Appointed Vinyl Experts of the World and Bestowers of Prestigious Audio Awards (which you may have never heard of; I sure hadn’t), or some guy who’s just dedicated to being an Analog Audiophile and knows a good record when he hears one? (Or doesn’t hear one, as the case may be.)
Like Robert, I tried being kinder and gentler, but it didn’t take. I may resolve to try harder in 2024. Then again, I may not. If we’re nicer to the people currently making Heavy Vinyl records, aren’t we running the risk, a la P.J. O’Rourke, of encouraging them?
Various and Sundry
We just finished a shootout for the originals of Legrand Jazz and will be listing them soon.
We’ve also played the Impex pressing and will be discussing its sound at some point.
More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we have.
This album has some of the worst sound I have ever heard in my life, worse than The Hunter even, and that’s saying something.
If this kind of crap is what audiophiles choose to play, then they deserve all the derision heaped upon them.
We’re glad we no longer offer embarrassments such as The Well, although we used to, many years ago. In our defense we would simply offer up this old maxim: de gustibus non est disputandum.
Our old slogan was Records for Audiophiles, Not Audiophile Records, but we also followed this business rule: Give the Customer What He Wants.
Now we give the customer what he wants, as long as he wants one of the best sounding pressings of the album ever made. (In this case obviously there is no good sounding pressing.)
How Bad Is It?
If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.
Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope, and if they devote sufficient resources of time and money to the effort, they can get where they need to be, the same way we did.
Tea for the Tillerman on 2 LPs at 45 RPM may be substandard in every way, but it is not a Pass/Not-Yet pressing. It lacks one thing above all others, Tubey Magic, so if your system has an abundance of that quality, as many tube systems do, the new pressing may be quite listenable and enjoyable. Those whose systems can play the record and not notice this important shortcoming are not exactly failing. They most likely have a system that is heavily colored and not very revealing, but it is a system that is not hopeless.
A system that can play the MoFi pressing of Aja without showing to the listener how wrong it is is on another level of bad entirely, and that is what would qualify as a failing system. My system in the ’80s played that record just fine. Looking back on it now, I realize my system was doing more wrong than right.
We were still selling Heavy Vinyl when this Jennifer Warnes album came out in 2001, but six years later we had had enough of the sonically-challenged titles that were being foisted on the public. It was then that we decided to focus all our energies on finding good vintage vinyl for our audiophile customers.
In 2007 we took the question we had asked rhetorically above and turned it into a full-blown commentary:
Looking back, 2007 turned out to be a milestone year for us here as Better Records.
If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.
The best way out of that predicament is to hear how mediocre these modern records sound compared to the vintage Hot Stampers we offer.
Once you hear the difference, your days of buying newly remastered releases will most likely be over.
Even if our pricey curated pressings are too dear, as the English say, you can avail yourself of the methods we describe to find killer records on your own.
Bernie cut this record — Ms Warnes would never trust anyone else — and this link will take you to other commentaries you may find of interest concerning Bernie Grundman‘s accomplishments.
Pretty bad, on a par with the transistory, shrill crap Classic Records has been dishing out for years, but in the opposite tonal direction: dull and dead as a doornail.
I often mention on this blog that Cisco’s releases (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject on the blog in more depth here.
Not one instrument sounds remotely like it should, and that is surely an insult to audiophiles of every stripe.
The problem was that so many self-identified audiophiles did not seem bothered by the execrable sound, certainly not the way we were.
Oh, but it’s on vinyl! That solves all the problems with the recording, doesn’t it?
Yes, the CD was bad, but the vinyl was no better. I had them both and couldn’t tolerate the sound of either of them.
[1] Note that some of our favorite records are on this list. Yes, they are heavily-processed, “unnatural” recordings, but the engineers, producers and artists who worked on these albums were attempting to create a unique sound for the music they were making, not recreate one, and in many cases the results of their efforts are some of the most powerful and enjoyable albums we’ve ever played.
You will have a hard time finding any pressing that doesn’t sound better than this “dubby” Cisco LP. (The DMM reissues are worse — no Blue Note pressings could possibly be so ridiculously bad as they are — but I can’t think of any others offhand that would be. The CDs, maybe, who really knows, but that’s a case of apples and oranges.)
Another in our series of Home Audio Exercises with specific advice on What to Listen For (WTLF) as you critically evaluate your copy of Aja.
Our track commentary for the song Home at Last makes it easy to spot an obvious problem with Cisco’s remastered Aja: This is the toughest song to get right on side two.
Nine out of ten copies have grainy, irritating vocals; the deep bass is often missing too. Home at Last can sometimes be just plain unpleasant, which is why it’s such a great test track.
Get this one right and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there on out.
If you own the Cisco pressing, focus on Victor Feldman’s piano at the beginning of the song. It lacks body, weight and ambience on the new pressing, but any of our better Hot Stamper copies will show you a piano with those qualities in spades on every track. It’s some of my favorite work by the Steely Dan vibesman.
The thin piano on the Cisco release must be recognized for what it is: a major error on the part of the mastering engineers.
I wrote this review in 2001, practically the stone age in my world, 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!
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.
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.
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 years ago, long before I had a clue just how good a great orchestral recording could sound.
Like most of the folks who pursue records in search of higher quality sound, I sure thought I did, which is why it’s easy for me to write about it. I’ve been there.
TheImpex(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.
So now we know, or at the very least suspect, that Mr. Gader’s copy of the album is not very good. Oh joy. What exactly does that have to do with the price of tea in China, or anything else for that matter? Should I now go through a pile of random original pressings and review one for you? What exactly would be the point of that?
Random Record Reviews
Reviewing randomly chosen copies of a record is an exercise in futility, with no bearing whatsoever on the sound of any other randomly chosen copy — mine, yours or anybody else’s.
So much for the value of Mr Gader’s review. But I do have to say that I find it more than coincidental that the songs he recommends are both on the “good” side of the album. Could he really have failed to notice how bad side one is?
After reading hundreds of reviews in the audio mags over the last thirty-plus years, one thing I’ve learned. With audiophile reviewers anything is possible. I’ll leave you to make of that what you will.
Hey, but wait a minute. Wasn’t my Impex pressing a random copy?
Why yes, it was. You are free to make of that what you will too.
Shootouts Are a Bitch
Shootouts are a great deal of work if you do them right.
If you have just a few pressings on hand and don’t bother to clean them carefully, or follow rigorous testing protocols, that kind of shootout anyone can do. We would not consider that a real shootout. (Art Dudley illustrates this approach, but you could pick any reviewer you like — none of them have ever undertaken a shootout worthy of the name to our knowledge.)
Many of our customers have, however, and you can read about how they went about proving to themselves how much better our vintage pressings are than the others they had on hand here.
If you guessed the Cisco LP from 2007, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever pressed, you win a prize!
When I go searching the web to find out something about a record, occasionally I come across something I had no idea existed.
Look what I found today: a survey of various pressings of Aja!
Aja is an album I think I know pretty well. I’ve been playing it since the day it came out in 1977 and still listen to it regularly.
Play the video and tell me if you think you are learning anything useful from the guy. Does he seem to understand much about the sound of the pressings he is reviewing?
I didn’t think so. If you know much about records you should be appalled at the nonsensical opinions coming out of this guy’s mouth. This video will of course garner many ten of thousands of hits, but that is to be expected.
Phony record gurus like this guy — as opposed to authentic record gurus like us — have found a home in every corner of the web, full of bad advice for those foolish enough to take it.
We Can Help
Would you like some helpful advice, some “actionable intelligence” vis-a-vis Aja?
When you are done you can make your own video if you like.
And if you follow our methods, your video, unlike this video, would actually be of value to audiophiles trying to find a better sounding pressing of Aja. It sure ain’t the Cisco. If that pressing doesn’t come in last place in the shootout, you need to try harder: you’re not doing it right. (The Japanese pressing you see pictured should also do poorly.)
If this guy had better playback equipment and had developed some basic critical listening skills, he would not be recommending the Cisco pressing. He would be telling you how awful it is, just the way we did back in 2007 when it came out.
The Cisco pressing, so beloved by the gentleman above, also happens to be a good example of a pass/fail record. We describe Pass/Fail records this way:
Some records are so wrong, or so lacking in qualities that are crucial to the sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the advocates for these records, reviewers and audiophiles alike, have clearly failed to judge them accurately.
Tea for the Tillerman on the new 45 may be substandard in almost every way, but it is not a Pass/Fail pressing. It lacks one thing above all others, Tubey Magic, so if your system has an abundance of that quality, the way many vintage tube systems do, the new pressing may be quite listenable and enjoyable. Those whose systems can play the record and not notice this important shortcoming are not exactly failing. Audiophiles of this persuasion most likely have a system that is heavily colored and not very revealing, but it is not a system that is hopeless.
A system that can play the MoFi of Aja without revealing to the listener how risibly wrong it is is clearly on another level of bad entirely, and that we would characterize as a failing system. My system in the ’80s played the MoFi just fine. Looking back on it now, I realize my system was doing more wrong than right. Over the next forty years I worked hard to make it right. It is at the heart of everything we do here at Better Records. Without it there could be no Hot Stampers.
The value of identifying such records is simply this: if you know anyone, or come across anyone, that has anything nice to say about records that are as awful as the ones on this list, you should know that such a person cannot tell a good record from a bad one, and therefore nothing they say about anything on the subject of either audio or records will be of any real value to you if you care about good sound.
Our video maker above fits neatly into this category. Why is he talking about better and worse versions of Aja when he clearly cannot tell the good ones from the bad ones? Why indeed.
Helpful Tips from Real Record Experts (Us)
In our Hot Stamper Aja listings you can find the following advice. It can help you find your own killer pressings of Aja, or it may be used to evaluate the copy we send you as you compare it to whatever pressings you may already have.
Our track commentary for the song Home at Last makes it easy to spot an obvious problem with Cisco’s remastered Aja: This is the toughest song to get right on side two.
Nine out of ten copies have grainy, irritating vocals; the deep bass is often missing too. Home at Last is just plain unpleasant as a rule, which is why it’s such a great test track.
Get this one right and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there on out.
If you own the Cisco pressing, focus on Victor Feldman’s piano at the beginning of the song. It lacks body, weight and ambience on the new pressing, but any of our better Hot Stamper copies will show you a piano with those qualities in spades. It’s some of my favorite work by the Steely Dan vibesman.
The thin piano on the Cisco release must be recognized for what it is: a major error on the part of the mastering engineers.
Bonus Listening Test for Side Two
The truly amazing side twos — and they are pretty darn rare — have an extended top end and breathy vocals on the first track, Peg, a track that is dull on nine out of ten copies. (The ridiculously bright MoFi actually kind of works on Peg because of the fact that the mix is somewhat lacking in top end. This is faint praise though: MoFi managed to fix that problem and ruin practically everything else on the album.)
If you play Peg against the tracks that follow it on side two most of the time the highs come back. On the best of the best the highs are there all the way through.
Listening Tests for Side One
Generally what you try to get on side one is a copy with ambience. Most copies are flat, lifeless and dry as a bone. You also want a copy with good punchy bass — many are lean, and the first two tracks simply don’t work at all without good bass. And then you want a copy that has a natural top end, where the cymbals ring sweetly and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone isn’t hard or honky or dull, which it often is on the bad domestic copies.
Also listen for grain and honk in the vocals on Black Cow. The better your copy is, the less grainy and honky the vocals will be.
Shockingly Good Sound
It’s SHOCKING how good this record can sound when you get a good copy. We played more than a dozen of these for the big shootout we conducted many years ago, most of which had already been designated as sounding good. (Almost as many were noisy or bad sounding. Those we just toss or trade back in to local stores.)
I could literally spend hours describing what sets the best copies apart from the very good ones, having critically listened to well over a hundred copies of the album at this point.
And I did! For those of you who would like to join me in taking a deeper dive into all seven tracks on Aja, click here.
We Now Return to The Revolution, Which Is Already in Progress
This music belongs in any serious audiophile record collection worthy of the name. As audiophiles we all know that when an album sounds this good, it makes you appreciate the music even more. I never cared all that much for Aja until a few years ago when I discovered just how amazing the most amazing copies could sound.
That’s what the revolutionary changes in audio link is all about. If you haven’t taken advantage of the new technologies that make LP playback dramatically better than it was five or ten years years ago, Aja won’t do what it’s supposed to do. Trust me, there’s a world of sound lurking in the grooves of the best Aja’s that simply cannot be revealed without Walker cleaning fluids, the Talisman, Aurios, Seismic Sinks, Hallographs, top quality front ends, big speakers and all the rest.
Our playback system is designed to play records like Aja with all the size, weight and power of the real thing. We live for this kind of Big Rock sound here at Better Records. We’re prepared to do whatever it takes to play records like this with Maximum Fidelity, secure in the knowledge that a system that can play Aja right can play pretty much anything right.
Folks, if you made the mistake of buying the Cisco Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album, and you manage to grab one of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are really in for a treat.
I have to confess that when this record came out in 2003 I had a hard time coming to grips with what was wrong with it. I knew I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure exactly why. I wasn’t sure what it was doing wrong. It seemed tonally correct and natural sounding. Why didn’t I like it?
It wasn’t phony up top with sloppy bass like a MoFi. It wasn’t hard and transistory like so many Classic Records of the day.
I didn’t know the record so I had nothing to judge it by. But there was definitely something lacking in the sound that had me confused.
Eventually I figured it out. Looking back on it now, the problems with the Cisco I could not identify were these:
The Cisco lacks presence. It puts Doc Watson further back than he should be, assuming that he is where he should be on the good vintage pressings, which sound right to me, some better, some worse of course. Moving him back in the sound field does him no favors.
The Cisco lacks intimacy, which is key to the best pressings. The shootout winners remove all the veils and put you in the presence of the living, breathing Doc Watson. The Cisco adds veils and takes the intimacy right out of the record.
The Cisco lacks transparency. It frustrates your efforts to hear into the recording.
Doc is in a studio, surrounded by the air and ambience that would naturally be found there. The Cisco is airless and ambience-free, with Doc performing in a heavily damped booth of some kind. At least that’s what it sounds like.
And the last thing you notice is the lovely guitar harmonics on the originals and early reissues, harmonics that are attenuated and dulled on the Cisco.
As my stereo got better and better, and my critical listening skills improved in tandem, it became more and more obvious to me what was wrong with the Cisco. When we play modern Heavy Vinyl pressings these days, especially albums we know well, it usually doesn’t take us two minutes to hear what they are getting wrong.
We go back and forth between the new pressing and one of our Hot Stampers a few times, make some notes, and proceed to put the review up on the blog, and maybe mention it in our listings for the album. A half hour or an hour is the most it takes these days. Like I say, these records are obviously doing some things poorly, and these failings are easy to spot if you know the album well, a little harder, but not that much harder, if you don’t.
MoFi Review Coming
The 45 RPM two disc version of Dire Straits’ first album MoFi cut at half speed not long ago is a disaster of epic proportions. There will be a video of me and my assistant Sunshine playing the record against some wonderful UK pressings and describing just how badly the brain trust at MoFi ruined the album.
It will be a while before it comes out, but until then you might want to do some searches for reviews, professional and otherwise, of their half-speed mastered recut. I have not seen anyone tear it to shreds, but I fully plan on doing so as soon as the video comes out.
I mention on this blog that Cisco’s releases (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject on the blog in more depth here.
We only got around to putting the Cisco pressing in our Audiophile Hall of Shame recently. There are just not enough hours in the day…
Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, tubey sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.).
Hot Stamper sound is rarely about the details of a given recording. In the case of this album, more than anything else a Hot Stamper must succeed at recreating a solid, palpable, real Doc Watson singing live in your listening room. The better copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but less than one out of 100 new records do, if our experience with the hundreds we’ve played over the years can serve as a guide.
As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:
Here are some 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.
Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Edvard Grieg
More of the Music of Billy Joel
More of the Music of Doc Watson