Classic Records – All

Axis: Bold As Love Is More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix sounds just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

Further Reading

Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.

Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.

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We Review the Classic Records Pressing of SR 90212

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

The Classic Records pressing of the famous Mercury is a gritty, shrill piece of crap.

I used to have a less-than-revealing all-tube system back in the 90s, but even that system, limited as it was and not remotely as revealing as the one we have now would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful record.

I don’t know how dull and smeary a stereo would have to be in order to play a record this phony and modern sounding in order to make it listenable, but I know that it would have to be very dull and very smeary, with the kind of vintage sound that might work for Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings but not much else.

It’s a disgrace, and the fact that it’s on the TAS Super Disc list is even more disgraceful.

Which all adds up to an audiophile hall of shame pressing and a record perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

Argenta and Ansermet

I much prefer Ansermet’s performances on London to those of Paray on Mercury.

As of 2022 we actually prefer the famous Argenta recording for Decca that’s on the TAS List, CS 6006.

Both are excellent and clearly superior to the Paray, even on the original Mercury pressings we’ve played.

UPDATE 2024:

This recording is no longer on the TAS Super Disc list. Our favorite, the London with Argenta, is however.

We call that progress! Maybe there’s hope for the TAS List yet.

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Michael Fremer Says You Should Own the Classic 45 of Time Out

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

Michael Fremer spends two hours and ten minutes on his site going through a list of 100 All Analog In Print Reissued Records You Should Own.

On this list is the 45 RPM Bernie Grundman cutting of Time Out. Fremer apparently liked it a whole lot more than we did. We think it is just plain awful.

The MoFi Kind of Blue is on this same list, another pressing that is astonishingly bad, or, at the very least, really, really wrong.

If you’re the kind of person who might want to give Michael Fremer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to All Analog records he thinks sound good, ones he thinks you should own, try either one of them. If you think they sound just fine, you sure don’t need me to tell you that they’re completely and utterly awful.

There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across in the five minutes I spent watching the video — I have very little tolerance for the sort of amateurishness he displays — I would suspect the winners are few and the losers many.

As a practical rule, if you want good sounding vinyl, you should avoid anything on his list.

And if you do try some and do like them, let me know which ones you think sound good and I will try to get hold of some copies and listen to them for myself.

Here is what we had to say about the Brubeck that Mikey recommends. We called it:

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records jazz LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes. Sonic Grade: F.

Our story:

Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of a shootout. My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:

  • Big but hard
  • Zero (0) warmth
  • A bit thin and definitely boring
  • Unnatural
  • No fun
  • No F***ing Good (NFG)

Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.

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What Willie and Nat Can Teach Us about Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Willie Nelson Available Now

This letter came to us many years ago. Updates have been added as of 2024.

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

Hello team,

I’ve been a little distracted here, I got married over the weekend! So, haven’t done as much listening over the past couple of weeks. However, I did have a chance to listen to Stardust and Love Is The Thing. They were both different than their Classic Records and Analogue Productions counterparts. Willie sounded a little smoother, more organic, and more integrated.

The strings on Love Is The Thing were very different, more pronounced and emotional, but Nat’s voice, and the sound overall, sounded a little strident, maybe “too” hot.

I’d like to send them both back to you, and if you have a chance to send back the discs I sent to you I’d very much appreciate it. All told, the two big sets of Better Records are really incredible, and only serve to make my want list grow. Here’s to you and the next set!

Doug,

We now have the update for those two titles.

I, along with the two other guys in our listening panels, sat down to play the Heavy Vinyl you sent us, and the long and short of it is that we were astonished that records that sound as bad as those two actually were approved for release.

Nat is wrong six ways from Sunday, and Willie is not so much wrong as just not very good.

Nat: “F,” one of the worst heavy vinyl disasters of all time, and Willie: “D” sound, more like a CD than a record. There are many pressings of this album that are not good, but this version is probably worse than most of them, hence the D grade.

The old Classic pressing is probably better, and it would earn about a C grade. [I honestly do not remember exactly what pressing Douglas sent us. All I remember is that it was on Heavy Vinyl.]

I suspect the CDs of both these pressings are much better sounding than this vinyl.

The DCC gold is definitely better by a long shot, and the plain old Willie CD is probably a step up as well. 

A Further Update

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Witches’ Brew on Classic Records and How Crazy Wrong I Was, Part One

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

Well below the reproduction of the front page of our old catalog you will find the review I wrote in 2007 for the Classic Records’ Heavy Vinyl pressing of Witches’ Brew.

Clearly I did not care for it in the least. In fact, I thought it was one of the worst reissues I’d ever heard, so aggressive, boosted and unnatural it defied understanding that anyone could ever play such a record and not notice how wrong it sounded.

Now when I think about the Classic Records reissue of Witches’ Brew and its awful sound, it’s obviously a modern remastering I could not possibly have liked.

However, in preparing to move to Georgia in 2022, I found myself digging through some old catalogs from the early Nineties. Something I read in one of them chilled me to the bone.

There it was in black and white: my rave review for the Classic Records pressing of Witches’ Brew.

It’s actually on the front page of the catalog, along with at least one other record that I would be mortified to sell today: the OJC pressing of Saxophone Colossus.

(As soon as I find my review in the old catalog for Saxophone Colossus, I will post it. I can hardly believe I wrote it, but I did. I wrote all my catalogs back then. My lack of competence and the guilt associated with my lack of expertise at the time is undeniable. It obviously would be foolish and wrong of me to try to deny any of it, so I don’t.)

Below you will find a commentary from 2007 detailing the shortcomings of the Classic.

I sure had a lot of nice things to say about it in 1994.

I thought my stereo was awesome back then, but it was not nearly as awesome as I thought it was. It was better than any system I had heard in a stereo salon, audio show or friend’s house, but that has to be seen as a pretty low bar, and it may even be lower now than it was back then.

I’ve written a bit about the limitations of my 90s system here.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is real, and I clearly suffered from it.

In 1994 I had been a fairly dedicated audiophile for more than twenty years, and a strongly opiniated audiophile record dealer, one who took pride in curating his vinyl offerings right from the start of the business in 1987.

I thought I knew what I was talking about. Looking back it’s clear I had a lot to learn.

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Led Zeppelin II on Classic Records – Seriously, What Could Be Sadder?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

An unmitigated disaster — ridiculously bright and ridiculously crude.

In short, a completely unlistenable piece of garbage, and, along with the MoFi pressing from 1982, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl Pressings as a “reference.” After all, the Classic pressings are considered by many — if not most — audiophiles as superior to other pressings.

What could be sadder?

In fact, you will find very few critics of the Classic Zep LPs outside of those of us (me and the rat in my pocket) who write for this Better Records, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence when they first came out.

Wrong on all counts.

Since then we’ve made it a point to review most of the Classic Zeps, a public service of Better Records. We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

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Another “Problematical” Classic Records Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of these works by Shostakovich, but I remember it as nothing special.

Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a Victrola reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D for below average.

The Classic Records pressing can currently be found on the TAS list, but we don’t think it has any business being there, along with a great many others, far more than we could ever find the time to play and review.

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By 2007 We Had Changed Our Minds about the Classic Who’s Next

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Here is our review from 2005.

After doing our next shootout for Who’s Next in 2007, and replaying the Classic afterwards, we changed our minds about Classic’s version of the album.

Apparently, a surprising amount of audio progress was made from 2005 to 2007, reflected in this review as well as dozens of others.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year  for us here at Better Records, although we certainly had no idea at the time that such dramatic changes had been put in motion.

For example, later that same year we swore off Heavy Vinyl (prompted by the less-than-enchanting sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time. To accomplish this we eventually ended up doubling the staff.

(Cleaning and playing every record you see on our site turned out to very time consuming. No one man band can begin to fathom the complex and random nature of the vinyl LP, which explains why the audiophile reviewers of the world are right about as often as the proverbially stopped clock.)

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. There is nothing advanced about these deceptively-packaged mediocrities if you have the stereo to reveal their shortcomings. After spending fifty years in audio (1975-2025, we do. )

This is how good Who’s Next sounds these days, when we have them, which is not often.

In 2007 we did a big shootout for Who’s Next, and as is so often the case, the shortcomings of the Heavy Vinyl version were mercilessly revealed when played head to head with The Right Vintage Pressing. (And not the original Track by the way.)

Oddly enough, and contrary to expectation, even the domestic Decca label copies had amazing sound, not just the British Track label pressings I had favored for so long. (To keep from being influenced by biases of any kind, when we do these shootouts the listeners have no idea which pressing they are evaluating.)

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Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 – The Classic Pressing Can Have Very Good Sound

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Somehow we managed to have a Classic Records pressing on hand to play in our most recent shootout for the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.

We knew all the way back in 1997 that Classic had done a good job with the record — we recommended it as one of the best Classic Records pressings in our catalogs at the time — but we sure didn’t expect it to do as well as it did, earning 2 pluses on one side and close to that on the other.

Years ago we wrote:

Here is the kind of sound that Classic Records could not ignore, even though the original was only ever made available as part of RCA’s budget reissue series, Victrola.

Don’t let its budget status fool you — this pressing puts to shame most of what came out on the full price Living Stereo label. (And handily beats any Classic Records reissue ever made.)

The top and bottom are wrong to varying degrees on both sides of the Classic, as you can see from our notes, which read:

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Hearing Is All It Should Take, Right?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Some person on some audiophile forum might feel obligated at some point to explain to you, benighted soul that you are, that the old classical records you — and other audiophiles like you — revere so highly have to be recognized these days for what they are: drastically compromised by the limits of their old technology.

Simply put, there’s just no way they can sound good.

It’s just a fact. It’s science. Technology marches on and those old records belong on the ash heap of history collecting dust, not sitting on the platter of a modern turntable.

That’s why the audio world was crying out for Bernie Grundman to recut those Living Stereo recordings from the 50s and 60s on his modern transistorized cutting equipment and have RTI press them on quiet, flat, high-resolution 180 gram vinyl, following the best practices of an industry that everybody knows has been constantly improving for decades.

Right?

For those of us who actually play these records, there is little evidence to support this narrative.

It’s a story made up mostly of assertions, along with an unhealthy amount of faith in so-called experts. [1]

Note that Bernie had no experience cutting classical music. He was a rock, pop and jazz guy. Robert Ludwig was the classical guy, cutting hundreds of albums for labels like Nonesuch in the 60s. What a different world it would be if he was the guy who cut for Classic Records! This review gets to the heart of the matter.

However, the contrarian view outlined above only really holds true for a very small minority of audiophiles of the analog persuasion: those given to empirical testing of such propositions. [2]

For an audiophile to compare the new pressings to the old ones, proper testing requires that the following four conditions can are met:

  1. He or she has a revealing, accurate stereo,
  2. A good record cleaning system, and
  3. Knows how to do shootouts using his or her
  4. Well-developed critical listening skills

If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you’ve probably read by now that the first three on this list are what allow you to achieve the fourth.

Compromises?

The best classical recordings of the 50s, 60s and 70s were compromised in every imaginable way, yet still they sound amazing.

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