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 (zero 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 meritorious. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. I 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 think our records should 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.
Practically nothing in his review has anything to do with 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.)
If you guessed the Cisco LP from 2007, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever pressed, you win a prize!
Occasionally, when I go searching the web to find out something about a record, I find something I had no idea even existed. Look what I found today: a survey of various pressings of Aja, an album I think I know pretty well. I’ve been playing it since the day it came out in 1977.
Are you learning anything useful from the guy in this video? 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 advice for those foolish enough to take it.
We Can Help
Would you like some helpful advice, some “actionable intelligence” vis-a-vis Aja?
Good. You’ve come to the right place! This blog is full of information you can use to do your own shootouts, for Aja as well as any other record you’ve a good supply of.
When you are done you can make your own video if you like.
And if you follow our methods, unlike this video, your 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.
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 all the way through. 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 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.
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.
This commentary was posted in 2007 and amended later with the statement that we would no longer be ordering new heavy vinyl titles starting in 2010. By 2011 we had eliminated them completely from our site.
If you bought any Heavy Vinyl pressing from us, ever, now is the time to get rid of it and hear what a Hot Stamper can do for your musical enjoyment.
Three of the Top Five sellers this week (8/22/07) at Acoustic Sounds are records we found hard to like: Aja, Aqualung and Blue. Can you really defend the expense and hassle of analog LP playback with records that sound as mediocre as the Rhino pressing of Blue?
Why own a turntable if you’re going to play records like these? I have boxes of CDs that sound more musically involving and I don’t even bother to play those. Why would I take the time to throw on some 180 gram record that sounds worse than a good CD?
If I ever found myself in the position of having to sell mediocrities like the ones you see pictured in order to make a living, I’d be looking for another line of work. The vast majority of these newly-remastered pressings are just not very good.
We Aren’t Walmart and We Definitely Don’t Want to Be Walmart
We leave that distinction to our colleagues at Acoustic Sounds, Elusive Disc and Music Direct (Walmart, Target and Sears perhaps? [Yes, Sears existed when I wrote this screed! Time flies.]).
They sell anything and everything that some hapless audiophile might wander onto their site and find momentarily attractive, like shiny bits of glass dangling from a tree, glittering as brightly as fool’s gold. They know their market and they know where the real money is. (Hint: it ain’t records, dear reader, it’s equipment. If you haven’t seen one of their thick full-color catalogs lately, count how many pages of equipment you have to wade through at the front before you get to the “recommended recordings.”) [I would amend that to say that it probably is records now. Since 2007 they have become much more popular and profitable. Apparently you can cut the same title 16 different times and audiophiles will just keep buying them.]
The Hall of Shame
We had no business selling Neil Young’s Greatest Hits — the typical dead-as-a-doornail remastering job we’ve come to expect from Classic over the years — and now it can be found only in our Hall of Shame where it should have been located from the start.
Which, by the way, has a new member: In Through the Out Door. We were doing a shootout in time for the mailer this week and decided to crack the Classic open to give it another listen, since my review was about five years old at this point, a lifetime in the world of audio. (My world of audio, anyway, and hopefully yours.)
Well, it turned out to be nothing but an absolute piece of crap. Tonally wrong from top to bottom, compressed, lacking presence, life, energy — an unmitigated disaster, joining the Classic pressings of II, III and Houses, three of the other worst sounding Zeppelin records I have ever had the misfortune to play. It’s a perfect We Was Wrong entry — watch for it soon — and we owe an apology to anyone who bought one from us. So sorry!
This Cisco 180 gram LP has EXCELLENT SOUND. Without a doubt this pressing is a HUGE improvement over the majority of shrill originals. Robert Pincus, Mr. Record himself, loaned me his best original Columbia pressing for the shootout. Not surprisingly it sounded every bit as hard, shrill and aggressive as others I have heard. Sounds lovely in the quiet passages, but you better cover your ears in the tuttis.
That’s why you see so few Columbia classical LPs on our site; the sound is usually terrible, and almost always in the same way: boosted upper midrange/ lower highs.
These records no doubt sounded great on the consoles of the day, with speakers aimed at your knees, but on modern hi-fi rigs they are positively deadly.
The aforementioned Mr. Record was also kind enough to provide us with an acetate of the very same recording, one which was cut a bit too loud and couldn’t be used. It sounded very much like our test pressing — warm, rich, and natural, with not a hint of phony sound from top to bottom. It was, however, a bit more textured, spacious and resolving of detail, exactly what you would expect. That said, the finished record has more than enough of all the best qualities we look for in a classical LP, especially that rare quality of Right On The Money Tonality. The string tone is superb. Not many modern remasterings can make that claim. Very few in fact.
This wonderful music belongs in any serious collection. Now that the sound matches the performance, it can be yours, on quiet vinyl no less.
This one gets a Top Recommendation from Better Records as one of the few heavy vinyl pressings that can actually beat some if not most of the originals.
We can’t be sure we would still agree with any of this but I’m guessing the Cisco pressing is still a good sounding record at the price. (more…)
You will have a hard time finding any pressing that doesn’t sound better than this “dubby” Cisco LP. (The DMM reissues are worse, 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.)
If smeared transients and zero ambience are your kind of sound, this is the record for you!
[An old review. We would not stand behind what we say here about the superiority of the Cisco pressing over the Shaded Dog.]
The performances here are of course extraordinary, but this has never been one of RCA’s best recordings.
The originals have more Tubey Magic; these 180 gram versions more accuracy of presentation, clarity and definition. Much less distortion too.
Notes From Cisco
It has to rate as one of the most beautiful apologies ever written. Brahms and legendary violinist Joseph Joachim were close friends and professional supporters over thirty years until the composer wrote a letter of support for Joachim’s wife Amalie, during her divorce proceedings against her husband. For six years, Joachim refused to communicate with Brahms. Heartbroken over this, the composer wrote his double concerto as an apology. It worked, to some extent, to mend their friendship. The concerto was Brahm’s last orchestral composition. The debut performance on October 18th 1887, featured the composer conducting, Joachim on violin and (another mutual friend) Robert Haussman on cello. Though not as successful a work as the two piano or the violin concertos, the Double Concerto stands as one of Brahms’ most accomplished compositions.
Jascha Heifetz, no stranger to the works of Brahms, had already recorded the Double Concerto with Emmanuel Feuermann (with Eugene Ormandy conducting) and the Violin Concerto for RCA (with Fritz Reiner conducting). He had also previously performed with his legendary neighbor Gregor Piatigorsky–also signed to RCA at the time. Having them pair up here is convenient and inspired. On this wonderfully dynamic recording, there is none of the “thickness” and “heaviness” Double Concerto recordings are often accused of having. Wallenstein, principal conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, allows his titanic leads to engage the music with passion, lightness and, most of all, joy. This is Brahms affectionately played by some of the world’s greatest musicians.
Cisco’s gorgeous reissue of this Living Stereo classic captures all the magic and excitement of Heifetz and Piatigorsky’s historic 1960 session. Features 180-gram vinyl, a large, 6-page historical notes insert for informative reading and the kind of warm, glorious sound Cisco Music is now famous for.
This review was written long ago, when the sonic problems of even the best Heavy Vinyl pressings were not as bothersome as they are now that we have a much improved playback system (equipment, tweaks, room, electricity, cleaning regimen and all the rest).
“C” would probably be the grade I would give the record now. For the price — cheap compared to anything we can sell you — it might represent good value to audiophiles on a budget.
This new Cisco 180 gram LP has WARM, SWEET, TUBEY MAGICAL sound. Tired of the shrill Classic with Heifetz? Here’s a romantic violinist with the kind of tone that draws you into this enchanting music. And Cisco’s sound here will have the same effect. This is a WONDERFUL record in every respect. We love what Milstein did with the famous Dvorak concerto. We think you will love his performance of the Tchaikovsky work every bit as much.
When it comes to romantic violinists, Milstein is The Man.
“It’s another offering from Cisco’s favorite violinist, Nathan Milstein, performing Tchaikovsky’s emotionally enigmatic and structurally sophisticated violin concerto. Every memorable melody and sharply dynamic contrast teems with yearning, purpose and subtext. Milstein’s silvery tone and respectful phrasing illuminates the rich orchestral detailing and majestic arrangement.”
More of the Music of Billy Joel
More of the Music of Doc Watson
More of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin