Record Labels with Shortcomings

You Say the Budget Stereo Treasury Has Better Sound than the Speakers Corner?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Borodin Available Now

The Borodin album you see pictured is a decent enough Speakers Corner Decca repress.

The Heavy Vinyl reissue of this title is not bad, but like a number of reissues, it lacks the bottom end weight found on the early London pressings.

(Classic Records pressings rarely had that problem. Just the opposite in fact. The bass was boosted most of the time, especially the deep bass, but for some reason the lower strings are never rich the way the best vintage pressings can be.)

I remember this Speakers Corner pressing being a little flat and bright.

Since I haven’t played it in years, there is some chance that I could be wrong. I have never had trouble admitting to the possibility, a fact that makes us practically unique in the world of audiophile reviewers.

The glorious sound I hear on the best London pressings is simply not the kind of thing I hear on 180 gram records by Speakers Corner, or anybody else for that matter.

They do a good job some of the time, but none of their records can compete with a vintage pressing when that vintage pressing is mastered and pressed properly. 

The best pressings of this UK London Stereo Treasury from the Seventies will beat the pants off of it. That ought to tell you something, right?

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Letter of the Week – “…you have absolutely no idea how much fun and how spiritual this hobby can be!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Boston Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased a while back. My notes are interspersed with his.

Hey Tom,

Had a chance to do a shootout over this past weekend. My focus was Boston’s S/T album. I have 4 copies to play with:

1.) Vintage domestic pressing.
2.) Remastered heavy pressing.
3.) Mofi gatefold pressing.
4.) Better Records WH stamper 2.5+/3+ pressing.

Started with a vintage domestic pressing. This copy was doing nothing right and very painful to listen to. No energy! No low end or high end transparency and the midrange was smeared really bad. The vox sounded flat, 2 dimensional and distant. F- grading!

There are a lot of bad sounding vintage pressings of the album, as you no doubt know firsthand. We sell only the vintage pressings that have been mastered and pressed properly, which is what makes them Hot Stamper pressings.

Remastered heavy pressing was next. The sonic quality was very similar to the vintage domestic pressing and again, very painful to listen to. I will give this copy one thing, it had just a smidge more life to the soundfield than the vintage domestic copy and that’s not saying much. F grading!

Not sure which Heavy Vinyl pressing you played, but the fact that is had bad sound comes as no surprise.

Mofi gatefold pressing next. Again, NO energy coming from the grooves. Although the overall sonic quality was a bit better than the first 2 copies, there still is no low or high end extension. No 3D to the vox or midrange area. No space or separation between instruments. This pressing sounded flat, lifeless, dull and boring and time to take off the turntable. My ears can not take these crappy sounding pressing for very long. D grading!

Agreed. In our review, we described their remastered pressing this way:

The MoFi Anadisc of Boston’s first album has the same problems that seem to have plagued the whole of the Anadisq 200 series. The sound was: thick, opaque, blurry, and murky.

A real slogfest. Audiophile trash of the worst kind. If this isn’t the worst version of the album ever made, I cannot imagine what would be.

Better Records WH stamper 2.5+/3+ pressing next.

This copy blew my mind and socks off as I listened to the whole album.

Talk about Energy!

Until one listens to the sonic quality of this hot stamper on a high quality system, you have absolutely no idea how much fun and how spiritual this hobby can be! This copy is doing just about everything right. A+ grading!

Thx
Mike p.

Mike,

I know exactly what you mean, good records are the only records worth listening to, because they are the most engaging, the most fun and provoke the most powerful emotional — even spiritual — responses. I could not agree with you more.

There is one other important thing to remember. The only way you can be sure that the recording in question is not exactly the way you described the first three pressings of it is to have a pressing that shows you just how good it can really be.

How else would you know?

The fact that audiophiles find the sound of so many Heavy Vinyl reissues acceptable has to be chalked up to the fact that they have nothing better to compare them to.

They may even tell you that their newly remastered pressing is dramatically superior to the vintage domestic vinyl pressings they’ve played.

Of course, all that tells us is that, like you, they had a bad domestic original. We sympathize with their situation. We’ve played plenty of those too.

But once you hear just how good the album can sound — as you now have — those other pressings actually become an insult to Tom Scholz and the work he did (with help from Warren Dewey) on his one and only good album, Boston’s first.

Thanks for having enough faith in us to spend the big bucks it took to acquire our White Hot Stamper.

It’s clear you had the experience playing it that we did — what a record! — and that is money well spent.

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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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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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The Nightfly on Heavy Vinyl – Rhino Plays Us All for Suckers Once Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now

We just finished a big shootout for The Nightfly, our first in nearly three years. There is a Hot Stamper pressing on the site as I write these words.

Since we do shootouts throughout the day on four out of the five days of the work week (the fifth is devoted to shopping for records locally by our main listening guy, Riley), there is nothing special about any of that.

It takes us about three years to find enough clean copies of an album like The Nightfly to get a shootout going these days, a marked depature from earlier in the 21st century when common domestic pressings were everywhere, and usually for cheap. Those days are gone and we will never see their like again.

These days we find a lot of Heavy Vinyl pressings mixed in with the vintage stuff we buy, and if the price is right, sometimes we pick up a copy of whatever album we plan to shootout down the road.

In this case it turned out to be the 2021 Rhino remaster on Heavy German vinyl, mastered by Chris Bellman. Or was it?

We of course found it to be awful, as we so often do with Mr. Bellman’s records. It’s lean and recessed. Over the 42 years I have been playing the original Robert Ludwig pressings of the album, I have heard some that sounded that way. I wrote about it many years ago, trying to make the point that when you hear a copy that sounds lean and bright like a CD, what you are hearing is a bad pressing.

The good ones are not like that. They are rich and smooth and even, gulp, kind of analog sounding.

Glossy and artificial, sure, and much too heavily-processed for my taste, but I can live with that sound, even though it’s hardly my idea of hi-fidelity.

Hold Your Horses

Somebody pulled a fast one it appears, as the pressings without the initials CB in the dead wax are not cut by him, even though he is credited on discogs and one assumes on the jacket or inner sleeve as well. The copy we played had no CB in the dead wax.

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Doesn’t Anyone Know What Love Is (Supposed to Sound Like)?

Click Here to See Our Most Recent Review for a Real Gold Label Stereo Pressing of Forever Changes 

The one person we can say for sure who must have absolutely no idea what a vintage pressing of the album is supposed to sound like is Chris Bellman. Allow us to make the case.

Below you can see our notes for the Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing of Forever Changes cut by Chris for Bernie Grundman Mastering in 2012.

We recently got hold of a copy locally and figured why not give it a spin and see how one of the most respected mastering engineers of the day, CB, fared with this apparently difficult to master title. (Others have tried and failed. See here and here.)

The Gold Label pressings are the only ones we buy these days. The Big Red E Elektras are passable at best, and everything after them is terrible, including imports and all the Heavy Vinyl reissues that we’ve had the misfortune to play over the years. We hope to be posting some of the stampers to avoid (we call them bad stamps) before too long.

Let’s get right into the sound of this 2012 remaster. We played the two tracks on each side that we’re most familiar with from doing shootouts for the title.

As the record played, to the best of our ability we made notes of the sound we were hearing:

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The Fantasy Film World of… “Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bernard Herrmann Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Obviously our customers know by now that a Hot Stamper London or Decca pressing is going to be far better than the Anadisq that MoFi cut in the mid-90s.

How much better?

Words fail me.

Their record was a complete disaster. Perhaps some of the MoFi collectors didn’t notice because they had nothing to compare it to. 

God forbid they would ever lower themselves to buy as common a pressing as a London. Had they done so, what they would have heard is huge amounts of musical information that is simply nowhere to be found on the MoFi.

There is a place on this album, I failed to note exactly where, in which a group of tubas play a descending scale that is somewhat buried in the mix. On the London, they can clearly be heard and recognized as tubas. On the MoFi, I don’t think they can be heard except as some general group of low notes, and anyone thinking that they were tubas would be guessing, the sound is that murky, muddy, and ill-defined.

Robert Pincus once left a Post-It note stuck to the MoFi jacket of a copy he was playgrading for me that summed up our thoughts on the quality of their mastering to a “t”:

“Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”

It’s positively shameful. This music is so good. On top of that, it’s custom made for audiophiles. Audiophiles are the ones who can appreciate the new colors Herrmann created, using what a wise man once called the single greatest instrument ever invented: the symphony orchestra.

If this Mobile Fidelity LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be. To find a more poorly remastered record, you would really have to work at it.

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Letter of the Week – “…I am surprised at how muddy the bass sounds on the new one.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sting and The Police Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a record he read about on the blog, the Nautilus pressing of Ghost in the Machine.

Hey Tom,   

Did you write something about the Nautilus record… I thought so, but I couldn’t find it.

[This Ghost in the Machine link will take you to it.]

This is one of my favorites from my teenage years and so I decided to do my own little test… Sterling vs. Nautilus vs. Half Speed Abbey Road reissue… it feels pretty clear the Sterling is tops with Nautilus close but I am surprised at how muddy the bass sounds on the new one. And just how tamped down the record sounds. Which is I guess your point.

Geoff

Geoff,

You now know a great deal more about this album than most of the audiophiles expressing their opinions on audiophile forums.

You conducted a shootout, something most of them can’t be bothered to do.

You should not be surprised about muddy bass on Half-Speed mastered records, they all have it.

And tamped down? Tell me about it.

Compressed and lifeless are two qualities the audiophile record can be guaranteed to deliver. How these companies get away with producing one shitty remaster after another is beyond me. They’ve been making this junk for more than forty years and they apparently haven’t learned anything about records in all that time.

Welcome to the upside-down world of the modern audiophile record. The worse they sound, the more audiophiles seem to like them.

Your shootout provided you with a good lesson to learn right from the start. It has set you on a better path.

Try this experiment: Take four or five UK pressings, clean them up and then compare them to any of the ones you played — the sound should be night and day better. And, after doing that shootout, one of the four or five would be a truly Hot Stamper pressing.

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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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An Insult to Aaron Copland on Reference Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

Yet another Reference Record we’ve reviewed and found wanting.

In all the years I was selling audiophile records, one of the labels whose appeal made no sense to me whatsoever (along with their long-forgotten TAS list brethren, American Gramaphone and Telarc) was Reference Records.

Back then, when I would hear one of their orchestral or classical recordings, I was always left thinking, “Why do audiophiles like these records?”

I was confused, because at that time, back in the 80s, I had simply not developed the listening skills that today make it so easy to recognize the faults of their recordings.

I made the mistake of thinking that other audiophiles with more advanced equipment and more refined listening skills must be hearing something I was not.

I had trouble putting my finger on what I didn’t like about them, but now, having worked full time (and then some!) for more than twenty years to develop better critical listening skills, the shortcomings of their records, or, to be more accurate, the shortcomings of this particular copy of this particular title, took no time at all to work out.

My transcribed notes for RR-22:

  • Lean tonality
  • No real weight
  • No Tubey Magic
  • Blurry imaging when loud
  • No real depth
  • Bright tonal balance

Is this the sound you are looking for in an audiophile record?

Shouldn’t you be looking for audiophile quality sound?

Well, you sure won’t find it here.

On our current playback system, this Reference Record is nothing but a joke, a joke played on a much-too-credulous audiophile public by the ridiculously inept and misguided engineers and producers who worked for Reference Records.

This is a reference for something? For what?

As I wrote about another one of their awful releases, if this is your idea of a reference record, you are in real trouble.

It would be hard to imagine that anyone who has ever heard a good vintage classical recording — here are some of our favorites — could ever confuse this piece of audiophile trash with actual hi-fidelity orchestral sound.

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