Rhino / Warners

John Coltrane – Another in a Very Long Line of Disappointing Rhino Remasters

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we like to call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

In other words, it sounds too much like a CD.

Any properly-mastered, properly-pressed 70s copy on the red and green label will be richer, fuller, sweeter, and just plain more enjoyable than this 180 gram version.

It’s below average, which means it merits a D.

That said, “Giant Steps” is not an easy record to find in good condition, because any serious jazz lover would have played it plenty. It is inarguably one of John Coltrane’s greatest achievements. 

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be unsatisfactory, with sound quality substantially lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

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Why Own a Turntable if You’re Going to Play Mediocrities Like These?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Aja Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Aqualung Available Now

This commentary was posted in 2007 and amended later with the statement that we would no longer be ordering new Heavy Vinyl titles. The thrill was gone and there was no sign of it ever coming back. It took a while to sell off the inventory, but by 2011 we had eliminated them completely from our site.

As it happens, 2007 turned out to be a milestone year for us here at Better Records.

If you bought any Heavy Vinyl pressing from us, ever, please accept our apologies.

Now is the perfect time to find out just how much a Hot Stamper pressing can do for your musical enjoyment. (You might consider taking the enthusiastic advice of these customers regarding that subject.)

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 trinkets 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.”)

UPDATE

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 it. Look at what is happening with reissues of The Beatles’ catalog.

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Blue on Heavy Vinyl – We Broke Through in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Thoughts on the so-called definitive vinyl version

Yet another milestone event in the history of Better Records.

In 2007 a customer took issue with our decision to reject the sale of the newly remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing of Blue, the one put out by Rhino and mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray.

We actually used to give the record away for free with every purchase of a Hot Stamper Blue, making it easy for our customers to hear for themselves just how superior sounding our Hot Stamper pressings were.

UPDATE 2024

With every purchase of a Hot Stamper Led Zeppelin II, we give our customers the Page-remastered version for free so that they can hear for themselves why our pressing costs well over $1000 and Jimmy’s a small fraction of that figure, sometimes as small as one hundredth!

We did this partly out of necessity. I had foolishly taken the advice of a Mr. Robert Pincus (the discoverer of Hot Stampers let us never forget) that the new version was indeed all it was cracked up to be and proceeded to put in an advance order for twenty copies to sell to our audiophile customers.

We were still selling Heavy Vinyl in 2007, but it would not be long before we decided to end the practice. Within a few years we were only selling records that we had cleaned and played and could guarantee both their superior sound quality and audiophile-quality playing surfaces.

So we had about twenty copies of Blue we did not think qualified as “better records” and decided to just give them away.

After spending quite a number of hours evaluating the new version, I got fairly worked up over the disappointing sound, worked up enough to write a very long commentary about the album, which I entitled Blue, The Game.

Rather than detailing the shortcomings of the new pressing, in this particular commentary, the first of its kind, I decided to take a different tack.

I implored the reader to do his own shootout for the album and tell me what he heard on the various pressings he might have at hand to work with. (Nothing much came of it of course, and not too surprisingly. Shootouts are hard and the vast majority of audiophiles are averse to them in our experience, hence the sorry state of audiophile records and the systems that fail to reveal their shortcomings — but that’s a horse that gets flogged regularly enough on this site. Enough is enough.)

Tom, 

I find it curious you are not carrying the new Joni Mitchell Blue vinyl issue. Even to the point of saying you can do better… for 25 bucks? After clicking on the LP cover and reading the comments from over the years it makes me wonder what your agenda really is. I paid $250 for a wonderful WLP and this Rhino issue smokes it, even as good as it is. I even have a CD cut from this mastering session off the analog FLAT, not Dolby tapes and this vinyl even beats it…. of course just my opinion.

I have listened on $100,000 systems, all the way down to portable units, solid state and tube and there is no denying this is the definitive vinyl version….. and again for 25.00. What a bargain.

Maybe all you did was look at that Rhino sticker and think back to the Grateful Dead records they did a few years ago (horrible) and just assumed this wasn’t up to Better Records standards.

Thanks for reading. I enjoy your e mails and store….

Tom

Tom,

We don’t review records based on their labels or stickers. And of course we never assume anything about the sound of a record. We talk about this stuff all the time. Here’s a relevant quote:

My approach to reviewing records is pure skepticism: a record sounds good if it sounds good, regardless of how it was made, who made it, or why. I’ve heard lots of expensive so-called audiophile equipment do a pretty poor job of making music over the years, the owners of which had an armful of reasons for why the sound should be truly awe-inspiring. But it just wasn’t. Most fancy gold faceplates are nothing but lipstick on a pig in my opinion.

I once heard Blue poorly reproduced at a friend’s house, and this is probably the best explanation for this letter writer’s inability to understand our position on Blue.

And paying $250 for a White Label Demo that apparently doesn’t sound good is the height of audiophile collector foolishness.

That money should have gone for better equipment or room treatments or tweaks, something, anything, to make this guy’s stereo and room work better than they apparently do.

Actually this brings up a good point. If I had to choose one record that separates the men from the boys, the stereos that really work from the artificial, restricted audiophile systems you might read about in the magazines or hear in a showroom or at an audio show, Blue would be a darn good choice.

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Fandango! – Another Warners Heavy Vinyl Mediocrity

More of the Music of ZZ Top

Sonic Grade: C

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play it against?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring. Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)

My Aim Is True – More Heavy Vinyl Trash from Rhino

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

I’m embarrassed to say we used to like the Rhino Heavy Vinyl version, and in our defense let me tell you why: it was (for the most part) tonally correct, fairly low distortion, and had tight punchy bass.

Boy, Was We Ever Wrong. 

Now it sounds positively CRUDE and UNPLEASANT next to the real thing — if by “the real thing” you mean an honest to goodness properly-mastered, properly-pressed copy (also known as a Hot Stamper).

Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system did this album no favors.

The average copy of this record is aggressive and unpleasant. 

The British pressings are mud.

You either have to work very hard to find a good domestic pressing (which means buying, cleaning and playing lots and lots of them), or you have to luck into a good one by accident.

Or just buy one from us and save yourself all the trouble.

The Definitive Vinyl Version? Perhaps There Is a Third Way

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Available Now

If I had to choose one record that separates the men from the boys, the stereos that really work from the typical audiophile system you might read about in the magazines or hear at an audio show or high-end salon, Blue would make a darn good choice.

The problem there is that you have to be one serious record collector to have a great copy of Blue. But good pressings are out there, if you can clean and play them properly. This is exactly why we created a game you can play with Blue.

Naturally we are happy to do the shootouts for you and charge you the pretty penny the winners command, but for those of you who want to find out what’s wrong with the new Blue from Rhino and don’t want to buy a Hot Stamper from us, there is a third way: Blue, the game.

Finding a killer pressing of Blue may be difficult but it’s definitely doable. We are happy to help you get there, but the unfortunate reality is that most of the work has to be done by you.

Playing The Blue Game is designed to help you get started.

Further Reading

Coltrane’s Sound – A Very Good Reissue by Bernie Grundman

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Sonic Grade: B+ (at least)

This is one of the better sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings we have played recently.

What makes it different from so many others that fail to live up to the remastering hype that surrounds them? (And regularly irritates the hell out of those of us who actually know what a good record actually sounds like.)

  • It’s tonally correct from top to bottom. At most five or ten per cent of the audiophile repressings we’ve played in the last ten years can make that claim.
  • The bass is not boosted or poorly defined. This eliminates at a minimum 98+% of all the Mobile Fidelity pressings we have ever played. Nobody seems to notice how bad the bass is on their records. A real puzzler, that fact.
  • It’s not exceptionally veiled or recessed. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Heavy Vinyl pressings that are not far too veiled and recessed to compete with their vintage vinyl brethren.

It is slightly veiled, and lacks some of the life, the space and obviously some of the presence of the real thing, the real thing in this case being an early stereo pressing on the Blue and Green Atlantic label.

Still, for your money you are getting a helluva good record.

One of the top two or three Rhino records to date.

(Bernie did a great job on this Coltrane album, but whatever you do, don’t waste your money on his recut of Lush Life. It is just plain awful, an audiophile hall of shame pressing that’s so bad it defies understanding. Something sure went wrong somewhere, I can tell you that. Stay tuned for my review.)

• Lacquers cut by Bernie Grundman
• LPs cut from the original analog masters
• Packages replicated to the finest detail manufactured with more care than ever

Our Previous Hot Stamper Commentary for Coltrane’s Sound

This is yet another superb Tom Dowd recording of Coltrane in his prime, with support from the brilliant McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.

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The Soft Parade on Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Soft Parade Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

A Gold Label original pressing blew our minds many years ago, after which we wrote “Need I even mention how much better this copy sounds than the 180g version from the Rhino Box Set, digitally remastered by Bernie Grundman? That thing is just awful, possibly the worst sounding pressing I have ever heard.” 

The Gold CD Hoffman did for Audio Fidelity is very likely to be night and day better. So much for the concept of vinyl superiority. Not with Bernie at the helm anyway.

Rhino has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

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Ron McMaster Strikes Again – Who Approved This Miserable LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Roots Rock Albums Available Now

Flat, compressed, no top end, no Tubey Magic, this Band release is Ron McMaster’s work at its worst, helped along by the fact that he does not have the original master tape or even a copy of it to work with, but instead the new remix that was made a few years back because the original tape had been lost.

And somehow there are audiophile reviewers who like it.

When you see that little RM in the dead wax of one of these new Heavy Vinyl reissues, you should get the sinking feeling that there’s a very good chance you’ve just flushed your money down the toilet.

There ought to be a warning label on the jacket: Mastered by Ron McMaster. On some records there is! I saw one not long ago with his mastering credit right on the front of the jacket.

It’s only a warning to those of us familiar with his work of course. The general public, and that includes the general audiophile public, probably won’t have much of a problem with the sound of this record or anything else he does. He still has his job, doesn’t he? What does that tell you?

A well-known reviewer notes that “…the Capitol LP is very good, believe it or not.”

Well, I don’t believe it, not for a minute. It’s pretty much a joke and I’m guessing that even Hoffman’s new CD would be better. I don’t care much for Hoffmann’s CD, but at least it has a top end.

UPDATE 2013

I can’t stand it as a matter of fact. It badly lacks weight and warmth, which is what the RL vinyl has going for it in spades.

Strange Days – Rhino and DCC Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Sonic Grade: DCC: B / Rhino: C

It’s not easy for us to find copies of Strange Days that outperform the DCC, but our best Hot Stampers beat it handily. We also put our original copies up against the 180g version from the Doors Box Set and it was an absolute bloodbath.

We understand that a well-known reviewer likes the sound of those Doors pressings (along with just about every Heavy Vinyl reissue that hits his table) but we here at Better Records prefer to set higher standards.

We think you deserve better, and at these prices the record better deliver a world of sound that the Heavy Vinyl pressing only hints at. And it does. (more…)