Labels With Shortcomings – Music Matters

Letter of the Week – “After a quick listen through them it was immediately obvious that they were dead…”

More Letters from Customers about Heavy Vinyl

“…and they’ve been sitting in their heavy vinyl glory on my shelf for most of the past year unplayed.”

One of our good customers asked us for our take on a Heavy Vinyl remastering label recently:

Also curious your thoughts on these guys: Music Matters

I replied:

Every label with a checkered history gets put into our Record Labels with Shortcomings Section (scroll down to the bottom to see the list), and in there toward the bottom you will find the two awful Music Matters records we have reviewed to date.

Really bad. And the guy that let me borrow them said that of all the heavy vinyl he owned by these idiots, he thought these were two of the best!

Until these records sound wrong to you in the ways I describe, you have work to do on the stereo. The better your stereo gets, the more wrong these records should sound.

They sound very wrong to me, and no mastering engineer in the history of the world made records that sound the way these do until sometime in the 90s when some audiophile labels started producing this crap.

That should tell you something.

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Music Matters – Tizzy Cymbals and a Bright Snare Drum, That’s Your Idea of Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in 2021.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, the audiophile world is practically drowning in them).

After discovering Hot Stampers and the mind-blowing sound they deliver, a new customer generously sent me a few of his favorite Heavy Vinyl pressings to audition, records that he considered the best of the modern reissues that he owns.

He admitted that most of what he has on Heavy Vinyl is not very good, and now that he can clearly hear what he has been missing, having heard some of our best Hot Stamper jazz pressings, he is going to be putting them up on Ebay and selling them to anyone foolish enough to throw their money away on this kind of junk.

We say more power to him.  That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just supposedly good sounding because they were custom manufactured with the utmost care and marketed at high prices to soi-disant audiophiles.

Audiophile records are a scam. They always have been and they always will be.

I haven’t listened to a copy of this album in a very long time, but I know a good sounding jazz record when I hear one, having critically auditioned more than a thousand over the course of the 33 38 years I have been in business. (To be clear, we only sold verified good sounding records starting in 2004.)

I knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.  Five minutes was all it took, but I probably wasted another ten making sure the sound was as hopeless as it initially seemed.

For those of you who might have trouble reading my handwriting, my notes say:

  • Bass is sloppy and fat.

The bass is boosted and badly lacks definition. It constantly calls attention to itself. It is the kind of sloppy bass that cannot be found on any RVG recording, none that I have ever heard anyway, and I’ve heard them by the hundreds.

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The Not-So-Magnificent Thad Jones – More Dreck on Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

After discovering Hot Stampers and the mind-blowing sound they deliver, a new customer generously sent me a few of his favorite Heavy Vinyl pressings to audition, records that he considered the best of the modern reissues that he owns.

He admitted that most of what he has on Heavy Vinyl is not very good, and now that he can clearly hear what he has been missing, having played some of our best Hot Stamper jazz pressings, he is going to be putting them up on Ebay and selling them to anyone foolish enough to throw their money away on this kind of junk vinyl.

We say more power to him.  That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just the ones that are supposed to be good sounding, perhaps because they were custom manufactured with the utmost care and marketed at high prices to soi-disant audiophiles.

Audiophile records are a scam. They always have been and always will be.

The three of us who do the critical listening here at Better Records dropped the needle on the first disc in this set and, once the VTA was properly adjusted, gave it a chance to show us just what expert remastering from vintage mono tapes, at 45 RPM, on two slabs of luscious, thick vinyl, could do for the sound of Thad Jones’s trumpet, circa 1956.

The reissue we are playing is the one Music Matters released in 2010. There was a single disc version released by them in 2016, recut by Kevin Gray and Ron Rambach. At the time of this writing, there is one for sale on Discogs for $235.

None of us had ever heard the album on any media, vinyl or otherwise, but we know a good sounding jazz record when we hear one, and we knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.

Two minutes was all it took, but we wasted another ten making sure it was as bad as we thought.

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