Labels With Shortcomings – Classic Records – Jazz

Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster on Classic Records

More of the Music of Coleman Hawkins

More of the Music of Ben Webster

Probably a good Classic Records Jazz album.

Years ago we wrote:

A top top jazz title! This is one of our favorite Classic Records LPs from the old days when we were selling Heavy Vinyl. We haven’t played this record in a long time but we liked it very much when it was in print in the ’90s.

We can’t be sure that we would still feel the same way. My guess is that this is still a fairly good record if you can get one for the 30 bucks we used to charge.

New to the blog? Start here

What exactly are Hot Stamper pressings?

Important lessons we learned from record experiments 

Heavy Vinyl commentaries and reviews

Classic Records Stops Making Bad Records But Acoustic Sounds Picks Up Where They Left Off

classicclaritybox

More Heavy Vinyl Commentaries 

Dateline 8/29/2010

Classic Records has officially gone under. They will not be missed, not by us anyway, except for this reason: to borrow a line from Richard Nixon, I guess we won’t have Classic Records to kick around anymore. We’ve been beating that dead horse since the day they started back in 1994. There are scores of commentaries on the site about their awful records for those who care to read about such things.

The last review we wrote for them, for their remastered Scheherazade, is one in which we awarded the Classic a sonic grade of F.

TAS Superdisc List to this day? Of course it is!

With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, their records have somehow managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop carrying them in 2011.) That ought to tell you something.

Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of bad records.

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

Which of course begs the question of what actually is a good record — what it is that makes one record good and another bad — but luckily for you dear reader, you are actually on a site that has much to say about those very issues.

Every Hot Stamper commentary is fundamentally about the specific attributes that make one copy of a given album better than another, and how much of them you’re getting for your money with the unique pressing on offer.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile as you’ve no doubt read by now. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an Old School System you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled all those years ago.

Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We would love to help you find it. (more…)

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

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Reviews and Commentaries for Time Out

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 likes it a whole lot more than we do. 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 least very, very 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 unlistenable.

There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across over the span of the five minutes I spent watching the video, 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 maybe I will 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.

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Dave Brubeck – The Classic Records Repress on 45 Is Another in a Long String of Failures

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Reviews and Commentaries for Time Out

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records Jazz LP.

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 our shootout for the album.

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.

But this is the kind of sound that Bernie Grundman managed to find on Classic Record after Classic Record starting in the mid-90s when he began cutting for them.

We’ve been complaining about the sound of these records for more than twenty years but a great many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them told us we wrong.  If you have a copy of this album on Classic, at 33 or 45, play it and see if you don’t hear the problems we ascribe to it.

To see what we had to say about the 33 RPM version on Classic many years ago, click here.

Maybe we got a bad 45 and the others are better. That has not been our experience.

In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.

Not all of their records are as bad sounding as Time Out. We favorably review some of the better ones here.

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Classic Records – More of the Same Old Same Old

More of the Music of Cannonball Adderley

More of the Music of Miles Davis

Reviews and Commentaries for Somethin’ Else

Sonic Grade: C

Another Classic Records LP that’s hard to get excited about.

There are certainly some incredible sounding pressings of this album out there, but who has the resources it takes to find them? Most of the original Blue Notes we come across these days turn out to have mediocre sound, and many of them have severely damaged inner grooves. Even the mintiest looking copies often turn out to be too noisy for most audiophiles, Blue Note vinyl being what it is.

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 hot, 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 quiet one, a Hot Stamper pressing is the only way to go.

Further Reading on Heavy Vinyl

Back In Bean’s Bag on Classic Records LP Sounds Pretty Good

More of the Music of Coleman Hawkins

More of the Music of Clark Terry

Sonic Grade: B

We’re not the least bit embarrassed to admit we used to like their version very much, and happily recommended it in our catalog back in the day.

Like many Classic Records, the master tapes are so good that even with their mediocre mastering — and pressing: RTI’s vinyl accounts for at least some of the lost sound quality, so airless and tired — the record still sounds great, at least until you get hold of the real thing and hear what you are missing.

What do you get with Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue? Dramatically more warmth, sweetness, delicacy, transparency, space, energy, size, naturalness (no boost on the top end or the bottom, a common failing of anything by Classic); in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, in our experience anyway.

The Classic is a nice record, a Hot Stamper pressing of the album is a MAGICAL one.

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Ben Webster And ’Sweets’ Edison on Classic Records – Reviewed in the ’90s

More of the Music of Ben Webster

More of the Music of Harry ’Sweets’ Edison

Sonic Grade: B?

Probably a good Classic Records jazz album. Both the music and sound are excellent.

The right Columbia pressing will kill it, but it’s probably a fairly good value if you can get one for the 30 bucks we used to charge. 

Our Old Hot Stamper Review

This is a Minty looking Columbia 360 Label LP. As good as the now out of print Classic Records version was, my guess is that this pressing will be clearly superior in terms of warmth, richness, and sweetness. It’s been years since I’ve seen a copy of this album, but I remember liking it very much back in the days when the Classic version was in print.

I’ve also had a chance to go back and listen to lots of early Columbias like this one and have been extremely impressed with the naturalness of the sound. I picked up a copy of Time Out recently that was as good as it gets on side one. No heavy vinyl reissue ever sounded like that!

Classic Records – Classical

Classic Records – Jazz 

Classic Records – Rock and Pop 

Heavy Vinyl Commentaries

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Dave Brubeck – A Classic Case of Live and Learn

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Reviews and Commentaries for Time Out

Another example of We Was Wrong

When we did a shootout for this album way back in October of 2007, we took the opportunity to play the Classic Records 200 gram pressing. Maybe we got a bad one, who knows, but that record did not sound remotely as good as the real thing. (6 eye or 360, both can be quite good. Skip the Red Label ’70s reissues.)

The piano sounded thin and hard, which was quite unexpected given the fact that we used to consider the Classic LP one of their few winners and actually recommended it.

As we said in our shootout: “We dropped the needle on the Classic reissue to see how it stacked up against a serious pressing. Suffice it to say, the real Time Out magic isn’t going to be found on any heavy vinyl reissue!”

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, I would not have put this record on it.

Here are some others that we think do not qualify as Super Discs.

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums

Classic Records – Jazz 

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Duke Ellington & Johnny Hodges – Back to Back – A Classic Records Winner

More of the Music of Duke Ellington

More Large Group Jazz Recordings

As I recall, this was one of the better sounding Classic titles from their Verve series, and the music is excellent.

Finding a clean original is no mean feat, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Further Reading

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years. Feel free to pick your poison.

And finally,

A Confession

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d 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 seem impressed by.

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 sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.

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.

Kenny Burrell on Classic Records

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Kenny Burrell

Reviews and Commentaries for Midnight Blue

Sonic Grade: D

Pretty flat and lifeless. You would never understand why audiophiles rave about this recording by listening to the Classic Records pressing of it.

We played it up against our best, and as expected it was nothing to write home about. Since Rudy has remastered and ruined practically all the Blue Note CDs by now, you will have your work cut out for you if you want to find a good sounding version of Midnight Blue. This sure ain’t one.

Of course we would be more than happy to get you an amazing sounding copy — it’s what we do — but the price will be five to ten times (or more) what the Classic costs. In our opinion it’s money well spent, as you will see in our review below.

Since the Classic conveys very little of what the musicians were up to whilst recording the album, our advice is to cross it off your list of records of interest. It’s thirty bucks down the drain. (more…)