Classic Records – All

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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Classic Records and Begged Questions

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

A typical review of a Classic Records classical release here on the blog might read more or less as follows:

Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played a sampling of their classical reissues would have expected.

Their version is dramatically more harsh and aggressive than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with transistory shrill string tone and almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

In fact, their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. 

With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, Classic’s remastered classical offerings have managed to sound progressively worse. How could that be, you ask?

Because higher quality playback stops hiding the shortcomings of bad sounding records.

At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths of good sounding records.

Begging the Question

But what actually is a good record? Don’t I have to offer some evidence for what causes a record to be good rather than simply asserting that the original is good and the Heavy Vinyl reissue is bad (or at least worse)?

Luckily for you, dear reader, you are actually on a blog that has much to say about these issues.

The main reason we feel qualified to make these judgments is that we make sure to play the records we review under rigorously controlled conditions in what amounts to “blinded” experiments. (Certainly as blinded as is practical.)

And our approach to finding the best sounding pressings for any given album has gone through a host of changes over the course of decades in order to allow us to carry out this difficult work. Work we actually enjoy doing.

It’s also the kind of work that practically nobody else does.

And certainly no one does it at anything approaching the scale of our efforts, with a full time staff and a monthly record purchasing budget in the tens of thousands of dollars.

An amazingly good stereo set up in a heavily-treated room with clean electricity doesn’t hurt either.

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On the Concerto in F, String Tone Is Key

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Gershwin Available Now

I must admit Classic Records did a passable job with LSC 2586, RCA’s recording of Gershwin’s Concerto in F, with Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops.

The two things that separate the good originals from the Classic reissue are in some ways related.

Classic’s standard operating procedure is to boost the upper midrange, and that, coupled with their transistory mastering equipment, results in strings that are brighter, grittier, and yet somehow lacking in texture and sheen compared to the originals,

This to us is a clear sign of a low-resolution cutting chain.

Once you recognize that shortcoming in a pressing, it’s hard to ignore, and I hear it on every Classic Record I play. (This commentary has more on the subject.)

RCA is more famous for its string tone than anything else.

If the strings on the Classic Records LPs don’t bother you, you can save yourself a lot of money by not buying authentic RCA pressings — and get quieter vinyl to boot.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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Bernie Grundman’s Modern Standard Operating Procedure Strikes Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bruce Springsteen Available Now

If you own the Classic Records reissue of this album from the early 2000s, hearing a Hot Stamper pressing is almost sure to be a revelation.

The Classic pressing was dead as a doornail.

It was more thick, it was more opaque, and it was more compressed than most of the originals we played, originals which we noted often had problems in all three areas to start with.

Bernie did the album no favors, that I can tell you.

Head to head in a shootout, our Hot Stampers will be dramatically more lively, solid, punchy, transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short.

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Tommy on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Sonic Grade: C

The Classic Tommy is bass shy. It could have had amazing bass, like Classic’s Who’s Next, but it doesn’t. Why, I have no idea.

The overall sound is thin, so thin that we immediately knew there was no point in carrying it (back in the old days when we carried Heavy Vinyl, pre-2008).

The only Classic Who record we ever carried was Who’s Next; the rest of them vary from mediocre to dreadful.

Remastering Out The Good Stuff

What is lost in the newly remastered recordings so popular with the record buying public these days?

Lots of things, but the most obvious and irritating is the loss of transparency.

Modern records tend to be small, veiled and recessed, and they rarely image well. But the most important quality they lack is transparency. Almost without exception they are opaque.

They resist our efforts to hear into the music and get lost in it.

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Peter Gabriel on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

Sonic Grade: D (or worse!)

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock album badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

We have a special section for bad sounding records that are marketed to audiophiles, and you can find that section here.

It currently has 281 entries, but if someone wanted to audition more of them — that person is definitely not me, although I cannot imagine anyone more qualified — the number could easily hit 500.

If one were to do just the Music Matters and Analogue Productions albums released to date, a thousand would be no problem.

And if one were simply to include vintage Japanese pressings, the kind many audiophiles regularly bought in the 80s and 90s for their quieter vinyl and supposedly higher quality mastering, our bad audiophile record section would contain multitudes. Multitudes I tell you!

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Classic Records 45 RPM Recut – This Is Your Idea of a Great Firebird?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

Many years ago, a customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him:

Steve, after starting to read Wayne’s take on the platters, I came across this:

That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn’t quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the “Infernal Dance” episode of Stravinsky’s Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording).

That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times.

This is why I have so little faith in reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago (04/2010) against a good original and the recut was at best passable in comparison. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say?

The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably mediocre and even just plain awful records. It’s the only real evidence we have for their credibility, and the evidence is almost always damning.

I want a reviewer who knows better than to play such an underwhelming pressing and then waste my time telling me about it. He should tell us what a good record sounds like with this equipment mod. Then I might give more credence to what he has to say.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

P.S.

This is one of the Classic Records titles on Harry Pearson’s TAS List of Super Discs(!)

P.P.S.

Allow me to quote a writer with his own website devoted to explaining and judging classical recordings of all kinds. His initials are A.S. for those of you who have been to his site.

Classic Records Reissues (both 33 and 45 RPM) – These are, by far, the best sounding Mercury pressings. Unfortunately, only six records were ever released by Classic. Three of them (Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) are among the very finest sounding records ever made by anyone. Every audiophile (with a turntable) should have these “big three”.

Obviously we could not disagree more. I’ve played all six of the Classic Mercury’s. The Chabrier, Ravel and Prokofiev titles are actually even worse than the Stravinsky we reviewed.

This same reviewer raved about a record we thought had godawful sound, Romantic Russia on MoFi, a label that never met an orchestral string section it didn’t think needed brightening.

Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

What is it with audiophile record reviewers? They seem to be taken in by the most unnatural sounding pressings. The world is full of wonderful vintage pressings that have no such problems. If you are an audiophile who feels himself qualified to write about records, shouldn’t you at least be able to hear the difference between a phony audiophile pressing and the vintage pressings it supposedly improved?

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Tchaikovsky on Classic Records and the TAS List

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now, a case of live and learn.

Our tube system from the 90s was very different from the one we are using now.

That system was noticeably darker and by all accounts far less revealing when we had auditioned the Classic sometime in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

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