Stone Age

These records are better suited to the stereos of the 60s and 70s. Any high quality modern system will reveal their manifest shortcomings, and if yours doesn’t, these are the records that are telling you that there’s plenty of work still left to do.

They should sound as wrong to you as they do to us.

Skip the Classic Records Pressing of Ballet Music From The Opera

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played some of their classical reissues would have expected.

Their version is dramatically more aggressive, shrill and harsh than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. 

Apparently, most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a top quality classical recording. If they had, Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us way back in 1994. I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled, but I can say that we weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. 

We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the we was wrong entries to prove it.

The last review we wrote for the remastered Scheherazade, which fittingly ended up in our Hall of Shame, with an equally fitting sonic grade of F.

TAS Super Disc list to this day? Of course it is!

With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, their records have managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop buying them in 2007.) That ought to tell you something.

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

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Venice on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical and Orchestral Music

Classic Records remastered the tapes for LSC 2313 and even the people who like the sound of Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings used to complain about it, so you can imagine what we think of it.

What a piece of garbage. With smeary, shrill, screechy strings, it gives no indication of the beauty that is on the tape. 

The Victrola reissue, VICS 1119, is dramatically better sounding than any other reissue of the album we have played, including of course the Classic, and may even be better sounding that the Shaded Dog original itself.

This Heavy Vinyl reissue is noticeably lacking in a number of areas that are important to the proper presentation of orchestral music. If you own a copy of this title, listen for the qualities we identified above in the sound that came up short.

Below you will find links to other records that have the same shortcomings we heard when playing the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2313.

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Classic Records Had an Epiphany in 2007 – UHQRs Actually DO Sound Good

More Records Perfectly Suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past

Don’t believe your ears!

Listen to Mike Hobson. After all, he’s the expert, right?

This commentary was written in 2007 and we admit it may be a bit long in the tooth for the brave new world of Heavy Vinyl we currently find ourselves in. Classic Records has been gone for a while now and when that blessed day came we were finally able to say good riddance to their bad records.

Mike Hobson thinks he knows why his pressings often don’t sound good and/or are noisy. We’ll let him explain it. If you want the whole story (which goes on for days) you can find it on the Classic Records website, assuming it’s still active. While you’re there, remember the sound.

One day, while out for a run, I had an epiphany and rushed home to dig out a JVC pressing from the 1980’s pressed for Herb Belkin’s Mobile Fidelity. The Mobile Fidelity UHQR pressings were always revered as sounding better than the standard weight pressings from JVC [citation needed, big time] – but why I thought? To find out, I cut a UHQR pressing in half and guess what I found? First, it weighed 195 grams and IT WAS A FLAT PROFILE! I cut a 120g JVC pressing in half and found that it had the conventional profile that, with small variations, seems to be a record industry standard and is convex in it’s [sic] profile – NOT FLAT.

So, that is why the UHQR JVC pressings sounded better than their standard profile pressings and further confirmation of why our Flat Profile pressings sound better than 180g conversional pressings! [italics added]

This is a classic (no pun intended) case of begging the question, asserting the very thing that Mr. Hobson is trying to prove.

There was no need to saw up a record. Mofi actually explained in the booklet for every UHQR how its shape differed from a conventional disc.

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Led Zeppelin on Prestigious Japanese Limited Edition Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. In 2006 I finally woke up to how ridiculously bad these Japanese pressings I was selling back in the 90s actually were.

It’s what real progress in audio is all about, in this case about ten years’ worth. Those are ten years that really shook my world, and by 2007 we had discovered much better cleaning technologies and given up on Heavy Vinyl and audiophile bullshit pressings such as these, whew!

Our story from 2006:

I used to sell the German Import reissues of the Zep catalog in the 90s. At the time I thought they we’re pretty good, but then the Japanese AMJY Series came out and I thought they were clearly better.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I now realize those Japanese pressings are bright as bright can be. Now, not-too-surprisingly, the German pressings sound more or less right (on some of their titles).

They tend to be tonally correct, which is more than you can say for most Zep pressings, especially some of the Classics [linked here], which have the same brightness issue (as well as many other problems).

UPDATE 2024

Only one of the German-pressed Zeppelin records is good enough to win shootouts, the only title of theirs on German vinyl that we buy these days. Of course we tried them all, at no small expense I might add, because there were a great many pressings cut by many different engineers over the course of decades that were pressed in Germany, and the only way we could judge them was to buy them and have them shipped over. In the end only one had the big, bold, dynamic sound we were after.

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The Alan Parsons Project – A MoFi Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons Available Now

MoFi Regular LP: F / UHQR: D 

Two — count ’em, two — hall of shame pressings and two more MoFi Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile LPs reviewed and found wanting.

The MoFi is a textbook example of their ridiculous affinity for boosting the top end, not to mention the extra kick they like to put in the kick drum, great for mid-fi (sometimes known around these parts as stone age audio systems) but a serious distraction on a high end stereo with good low end reproduction.

If you like the album –and that’s a big if, I myself have never been able to take it seriously — try the Simply Vinyl or the Classic LP.

Even the UHQR sucks. Don’t kid yourself. They’re still mastered by Stan Ricker, and he likes plenty of top end.

Like the old saying goes, if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing.

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Houses of the Holy on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We can describe the sound of this miserable Bernie Grundman remaster in two words: ridiculously bright.

Honestly, what more do you need to know? It’s almost as bad as the Zep II he cut, and that record is an abomination.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

(Oh but it does – this misbegotten series out of Japan will do nicely to illustrate how brighter is not necessarily better, it’s just brighter.)

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressings for comparison purposes. After all, these Classic LPs are what many — perhaps most — audiophiles consider superior to other pressings.

We sure don’t, but everybody else seems to. You will find very few critics of the Classic Zeps LPs outside of those who write for this blog, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence.

Wrong on all counts.

We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

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A Trick Of The Tail – A MoFi Disaster to Beat Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

This review is fairly old, probably from 2005-2010.

Not long ago I played the MoFi pressing of Trick of the Tail and could not believe how ridiculously compressed it was.  Rarely have I heard sound as squashed as that which is heard on this LP.

On top of that, the midrange is badly sucked out (as is the case with most Mobile Fidelity pressings) making the sound as dead, dull and distant as can be.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition. I have the CD and it’s fine. It sounds like a digital version of the British pressings we favor (the domestic pressings having been made from dubs of course).  The MoFi is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

You think Modern Heavy Vinyl pressings are lifeless? Play this piece of crap and see just how bad an audiophile record can sound.

And to think I used to like this version! I hope I had a better copy back in the 80s than the one I played a few years ago. I’ll never know of course. If you have one in your collection give it a spin. See if it sounds as bad as we say. If you haven’t played it in a while (can’t imagine why, maybe because it’s just plain awful), you may be in for quite a shock.

If you are still buying these audiophile pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered records.

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Remain In Light on Ridiculously Bad Sounding Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

The Rhino Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album was dead on arrival the minute it hit my turntable.

No top, way too much bottom, dramatically less ambience than the average copy — this one is a disaster on every level.

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 quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins. 

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the analog qualities the better originals have plenty of.

In other words, it sounds like a CD.

Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles are looking for on vinyl? Back in 2007 we put the question this way: why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?

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This Beethoven Ninth Started Out with Two Strikes Against It

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

MoFi took the shortcomings of a mediocre-at-best Decca recording from 1972 and made them even worse by means of their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system.

They should not have chosen this performance of the Ninth Symphony in the first place, and they certainly should not have added the treble they chose to add, which they did to this title and to every classical recording they remastered without regard to whether or not the recording needed brightening. None that I know of did. Try telling that to the brain trust running MoFi.

(They hired this guy to do their one-step digitally remastered pressings and from the get-go he’s been giving audiophiles the most ridiculously phony sounding records that collectors with way too much money can buy.)

The Decca recording of the Ninth from 1972 is opaque, lacks size and space, and comes off as a bit flat and dry.

Like practically every later Decca pressing we play, it’s passable at best.

Londons and Deccas from this era (1972 in this case) rarely sound very good to us.

Here is what we specifically don’t like about their sound.

If you want to know what’s wrong with the Mobile Fidelity pressing, take the above faults and add some others to them.

Start with an overall brighter EQ, add a 10k boost for extra sparkly strings, the kind that MoFi has always been smitten with, and finish with the tubby bass caused by the half-speed mastering process itself.

Voila! You are now in the presence of the kind of mid-fi trash that may have fooled some audiophiles way back when but now sounds as wrong as the records this ridiculous label is still making today.

Here are some other pressings with bright string tone that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound.

1981 Was a Long Time Ago

Old school audio systems are notorious for being dark, dull and lacking in transparency. They might need bright records in order to sound good, but high quality modern systems do not.

If these two MoFi pressings sounds right to you, you are very likely living with one of those old school systems and it is long past time to get rid of it.

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These Are the Kinds of Things You Say When You Haven’t Actually Played the Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

From the brain trust at Music Direct.

[Italics added by yours truly.]

Van Morrison’s Moondance is that rare rock album where the band has buffed the arrangements to pure perfection.

And now, you can experience it on the finest-sounding pressing that’s ever been made courtesy of this 180g LP, remastered at Acoustech from the original analog tapes by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman.

Practically every audiophile press outlet in the world has sung its praises. Moondance has never had such power.

The power to make me wonder how anyone in his right mind would release a record that sounds this bad, that power?

Then there’s this guy, 51nocaster:

As for Moondance, the reissue is very good, but I still prefer the original. Steve Hoffman was involved in mastering the Moondance reissue and like some of the DCC reissues, he seems to favor the lower mids over the upper mids.

As a rule that’s true about DCC records, his awful Creedence records being the best examples, but boy, that’s not what I heard on my copy. Just the opposite. Morrison’s voice on the new reissue has no lower mids. It’s all mids and upper mids.

I suspect a download on ITunes would be more tonally correct in the midrange.

In summary, please count us as one of the outlets not singing this record’s praises, which is why you can find it in our audiophile hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made.

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