Dubious Sound I Used to Like

Here is a sampling of the questionable records and/or pressings I used to like a whole lot more than I do now.

Through trial and error I learned that they were clearly inferior to other pressings, although at the time I couldn’t have known they were inferior because I hadn’t yet heard anything better.

Looking back, it’s often embarrassing that I used to think highly of these records, but it would be foolish to deny it.

Making mistakes and learning from them is an important aspect of this hobby. Every audiophile on the journey to better sound should have a sizable group of records they left behind.

As our stereos and critical listening skills improve, it becomes clear that plenty of records just aren’t as good as we thought. These are some of mine.

Leftoverture – CBS Half-Speed Debunked

More of the Music of Kansas

Sonic Grade: F

Way too bright and thin. What were they thinking?

It’s the sound that most audiophiles are fooled by to this day! Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many half-speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did. Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson, expensive and painful as it may have been. 

If your speakers are dull, dull, deadly dull, the way Old School speakers tend to be, this record has the juice to bring them to life in a hurry.

Unmusicality

The best real-time mastered copies get rid of a problem that quickly becomes irritating as you play track after track: a certain “squawky, pinched” sound to the guitars. Bad copies of the album have that sound through and through, along with excessive amounts of grain and grunge. The guitars are very prominent in the mix on practically every song here, so when the guitars sound sour, the track as a whole does too.

These mastering and pressing problems make the overall sound simply UNMUSICAL. The way we found that out was simple. We cleaned and played lots of copies, and every once in a while we heard one that allowed the music to breathe, open up, sound balanced, make sense even.

Those copies showed us a Leftoverture we didn’t know existed and gave us a goal to shoot for with all the other copies we played. After hearing such a truly killer copy we often go back and downgrade the ratings for the copies we thought were the best. Such is the way with these shootouts. (more…)

Rhapsody! – The Story of an Old Fave We Were Wrong About

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

A great example of an album We Was Wrong about.

As you can see by the commentary below, I used to think this was a wonderful sounding London “Sleeper” classical recording.

That was many years ago – five, six, seven, I cannot be sure. I ended up acquiring a half dozen copies of the album or so over the course of those years, had them cleaned up and proceeded to do a shootout.

It did not go well. Immediately I noticed that the pressings I was playing were sounding clean, clear and lively, but much too modern, too much like a good CD and not enough like the good Golden Age classical recordings we audition regularly.

Those recordings, on the right pressings, will take your breath away.  Rhapsody! was leaving me asking myself what was wrong. The more I listened the more obvious the faults of the recording became.

The pressings I played lacked warmth, richness, sweetness, space, and a number of other analog qualities I won’t belabor here. Too much of what makes listening to vintage vinyl so involving was just not on these records no matter how much I may have wanted them to be.

The extreme top and bottom were also lacking, giving the sound a “boxy” quality. The presentation was wide but not tall. Of the five levels of sound we discuss on the site in various listings, levels one and five were not as evident as they should have been.

This is, again, what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.

We cannot rely on our previous judgments. With all the changes we’ve made over the years, we can now clean our records better and play our records better than ever before.

That means that some will rise and some will fall. This one fell, pretty hard in fact. Not a bad record, but not a good one either, and far from as good as I once thought.

Below is our previous commentary.  All of this was true for my old stereo and room, my critical listening skills at the time, my old cleaning regimen. And by old I mean my approach from only about five or six years ago!

Things have changed, dramatically, and nothing in all of audio could make me happier.

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is one of the greatest SLEEPER albums of all time.

This London reissue from 1979 of recordings from 1978 in Detroit, the year in which Dorati became director of the Detroit Symphony has the kind of orchestral sound we drool over here at Better Records. Dark and rich strings — the basses growl just like the real thing. Dynamic. Deep solid bass. Fluffy tape hiss, which sounds exactly the way it should. This tells you that the top end is untweaked. (Almost all Classic Records have funny sounding tape hiss as you may or may not know. It”s a dead give away that the top end is boosted. Tape hiss is like pink noise: it always sounds the same, unless somebody has fooled with it. Steve Hoffman taught me to listen for this quality and it was a lesson important to my growth as a critical listener.) (more…)

Colors of the Day – DCC Discussed

A classic case of live and learn, maybe. Previously we had written:

Superb sonics. Judy has never sounded better. Not a big seller for DCC but it should have been. Those sweet acoustic guitars are hard to beat. No modern recording has sounded like this for over twenty years, so if you’ve forgotten what a real acoustic guitar sounds like, buy this record and get reacquainted with that sound. Tons of breath of life, superb production and mastering so you can clearly hear her hitting those flat notes (!), and some of the best sounding echo ever recorded.

UPDATE 2007

Addendum to the above comments, posted 11/07

I wrote the above review many many years ago. As you may have read countless times on the site by now, it is my opinion that all such dated judgments are suspect. The major revolutions in vinyl playback that have occurred over the last dozen years have turned many of these old comments on their heads.

Hot Stamper pressings again and again have revealed magic in the mass-produced copies that is simply nowhere to be found in their audiophile counterparts.

Whether this is true for this particular title I can honestly say I don’t know.  We are going to play some copies of the album and will report our findings down the road, so Judy Collins fans, stay tuned.

Nirvana / Nevermind – A Perfect Record? But Was It Really?

Reviews and Commentaries for Nirvana

DEMO DISC QUALITY SOUND on side two! It’s got the big, uber-punchy, hard rockin’ attitude we demand from a Nevermind Hot Stamper. Side one is no slouch either folks, with A++ sound! Only one other copy had better sound for side one — THIS ONE ROCKS!

Side two on this Nevermind has MASTER TAPE SOUND. We found the most amazing clarity and transparency on this copy. You will find the sound so rich and full-bodied that at times you’d swear it was tube mastered! Check out the presence of the vocals on side one. The WHOMP factor is out of control all over this pressing. 

Now don’t get me wrong: the average copy is still a pretty darn good sounding record. I might even go so far as to say it’s better than practically anything recorded during the entire decade of the ’90s.

But man, when you’ve heard this record at its best, there is NOTHING like it. For the true Rock and Roll Audiophile Connoisseur, the man who will settle for nothing but the very best, we humbly offer this Nevermind Verified Hot Stamper, the ultimate head-banging experience.

This is our old commentary, which obviously now applies to only the best copies.

A PERFECT recording, the best of its kind, ever. The drums are perfect. The bass is perfect. The guitars are perfect. The vocals are perfect. Now how in the world could that be, you ask?!

Allow me to explain. (more…)

Ghost in the Machine on Nautilus Vinyl

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

And to think we used to actually like the sound of the Nautilus pressings! They suffer from all the same shortcomings other Nautilus and similar half-speeds suffer from: the kind of pretty but lifeless and oh-so-boring sound that we describe in listing after listing. 

Three of the Best, Or So We Thought

I just did shootouts with three of the best Nautilus Half-Speeds: Heart, The Police’s Ghost in the Machine, and Little Feat. None of them sound like the real thing, and especially disappointing was one of my former favorites, the Little Feat album.

On the title track the Nautilus is amazingly transparent and sweet sounding. There are no real dynamics or bass on that track, so the “pretty” half-speed does what it does best and shines. But all the other tracks suck in exactly the same way Night and Day does. Cutting the balls off Little Feat is not my idea of hi-fidelity.

We put audiophile beaters up for sale every week. Each and every one of them is a lesson on what makes one record sound better than another. If you want a wall full of good sounding records, we can help you make it happen. In fact it will be our pleasure. Down with audiophile junk and up with Better Records.

These kinds of records used to sound good on the systems of their day, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.

Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.

(more…)

City To City – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Gerry Rafferty Available Now

A hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found seriously wanting.

The MoFi pressing of this album is a complete disaster — it’s fat, muddy and compressed.

It was mastered by Jack Hunt, a man we know to be responsible for some of the thickest, dullest, deadest MoFi recuts from their shameful catalog.

(more…)

Minute By Minute – Nautilus Reviewed

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Doobie Brothers

Sonic Grade: D

You may remember reading on the site that we used to like the Nautilus Half-Speed of this title. Playing our Nautilus copy against the better domestic pressings made us wonder what the hell we must have been smoking.

The Nautilus was awful — veiled and compressed, with a lightweight bottom end. (The Nautilus of Threshold of a Dream is another one we used to like and boy does that record sound awful these days.)

Maybe we had played a better copy years ago, or maybe we had played some really bad domestics back then, who can say? A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

All we can say for now is that our Hot Stampers are going to blow that audiophile piece of junk — and any other pressing of the album that might exist — right out of the water. (Or your money back.)

And the gold CD too of course. I have never in my life heard a CD sound like this record does, and I don’t think anyone else has either. CDs do some things reasonably well, but few of them have the kind of richness, sweetness and Tubey Magic that the best vinyl copies of this album do, cleaned right and played on a proper stereo of course. (more…)

The Planets – Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

This listing from 2008 has not aged well. We no longer recommend this performance of The Planets.

If you want to give one a try, make sure to get one on the Large Tulips label. The reissues tend to be thin and harsh.

Our current favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.

Notes from an Old Shootout

Side one here is AGAIG, as good as it gets. It shows the listener more of everything that’s wonderful about this wondrous work.

Side two is very nearly as good, and was only beaten slightly by one other copy in our shootout. This pressing gives you the complete work in the best sound we can find. 

This was one long shootout, two and a half years in the making.

And I spent at least ten years before that collecting enough copies to be able to find some pattern in the stampers that clued me in as to what to look for.

It was a long time coming but we expect you will find it was all worth it in the end. This music is so important and moving; it belongs in every audiophile’s collection.

To get Steinberg’s version into your collection has not been easy, until now. This is the one.

UPDATE

As it turns out, as our stereo improved, we realized this recording, even on the best pressings, was not the one.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. “Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community.

Blind Faith – MoFi Reviewed

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

Hey, you could do worse!

UPDATE 2026

By the time we got around to doing a shootout for this album in 2009, it was already clear to us that even the Half-Speeds we used to consider good — like this one — were a joke next to the real thing, in this case the right UK pressing.

Our latest shootout this time around (07/09) left us with a fairly large serving of egg on our face concerning the commentary we had written for the MoFi pressing of Blind Faith, a textbook example of We Was Wrong.

It’s rich and sweet with SHOCKINGLY GOOD SOUND. MFSL did a masterful job with this one, I’d put it in the top 10 MoFi’s of all-time!

I regret to say that none of that is true.

Blind Faith has many of the same problems as the later Japanese-pressed MoFis like Thick As A Brick and Meddle, which we discuss below.

About Thick As A Brick we wrote:

As we noted last time we listed the MoFi LP:

“This MoFi is super TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end should sound lush and extended. If you prize clarity, this is the one!”

But if you prize clarity at the expense of everything else, you are seriously missing the boat on Thick As A Brick. The MoFi is all mids and highs with almost nothing going on below. This is a rock record, but without bass and dynamics the MoFi can’t rock, so what exactly is it good for?

Like Meddle, one of the last of the MoFi titles to be pressed in Japan, it’s a pale shadow of the real thing. It has no business in the collection of any audiophile worth his salt. If you want to hear this music right, let us get you a Hot Stamper pressing. It’s guaranteed to blow your mind. We’ll even take your MoFi in trade and sell it to some unsuspecting audiophile who still buys into that Half-Speed Mastered nonsense. [This offer expired in about 2007.]

Further Reading

We Was Wrong About this Prestige Two-Fer in 2008

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE

We used to like this record a whole lot more than we do now. Based on what we heard last time we played it, we cannot recommend it.

A classic case of live and learn.

Our previous commentary:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP boasts EXCELLENT SOUND, right up there with some the best sounding copies we’ve played.

Three sides out of four sounded surprisingly good, which is three good sides more than the average copy can claim.

Oddly enough, the stampers are identical. Sample to sample variation? Fresh off the stamper transparency? Who’s to say?

I can’t explain it, but I know a better record when I play one. This copy is clearly more transparent, no pun intended.

It’s also been through our extensive cleaning process, which as you can imagine helps the sound immeasurably. 

For more reviews of Two-Fer pressings, click here.

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