Album Test Records

So Many Columbia Classical LPs Are Bad Sounding – Why Is That?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2005 or thereabouts. Still holds up though.

Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding.

The upper mids are usually nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst possible way.

If Columbia’s goal was to drive the classical music lover with high-fidelity equipment screaming from the room, more often than not they succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they failed.

Some of those pressings we call Hot Stampers, but not many.

Columbia Rock and Jazz

When I play Columbia recordings from the 50s and 60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles and other jazz giants, what strikes me is how natural, warm and sweet the sound is. I was playing an old mono Ellington record recently and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-’50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing. Those guys (the engineers and the musicians) knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how so many of the best sounding recordings in the world managed to be made without any of that stuff.

RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos.

Decca didn’t need it.

Contemporary Records managed to record the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great sounding records get made with such bad equipment?

I guess we’ll never know.

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Have You Ever Noticed that Sometimes the Highs Come Back on Some Pressings?

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

This side one is interesting., I would say that it starts out Super Hot (A++) and within a few minutes becomes White Hot (A+++). The piano is a bit veiled at the start, but within a relatively short period of time that subtle loss of transparency disappears and the piano is RIGHT THERE.

This is not unusual in our experience.

The first track on many records can sound dull, and by the second track the highs come back and the tonality is right from top to bottom. Who knows why?

We speculate that the vinyl did not have time to fully heat up the edge of the record, but that’s speculation, something that has almost no value in our (yours and mine) quest for better sounding records. 1A, 1B, first off the stamper, who gives a flying you-know-what. You have to play the record to know how it sounds.

The rest is BS, proffered mostly by those who are simply too lazy (or busy; some folks do have real jobs!) to do the work of cleaning and playing multiple copies of an album in order to have the evidence they need to support their opinions.

We much prefer real knowledge supported by real evidence, not the other kind.

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Finding the Rare Pressing of Heavy Weather with An Extended Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

It has been our experience that the copies with high frequency extension and the clarity, space and percussive energy that results from it are almost always the best sounding.

You may have read elsewhere on the site that what separates many of the best Columbia LPs from their competition is an open, extended top end.

For some reason, Columbia, more than most labels, had a habit of making slightly dull records. Dull does not work for this album. 

When the highs on the record are right, it all comes together. Unfortunately, most copies don’t have those highs. There’s more to it than that of course: some copies lack bass, some are a bit grainy and gritty sounding — the normal problems associated with vinyl records are all here to one degree or another.

But when you have good highs you are about 80 to 85% of the way toward a Hot Stamper. Complete the picture with bass, dynamics, etc. (and a big speaker system) and there’s a good chance the sound will blow your mind.

Heavy Weather is a classic case of yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

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Let It Be on Heavy Vinyl – The Gong Rings Once More

Hot Stamper Pressings of Let It Be Available Now

At the end of a shootout for Let It Be back in June of 2014, we decided to see how the 2012 Digitally Remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing would hold up against the 12 (yes, twelve!) British copies we had just critically auditioned.

Having evaluated the two best copies on side two, we felt we knew exactly what separated the killer copies (White Hot) from the next tier down (Super Hot). Armed with just how good the recording could sound fresh in our minds, we threw on the new pressing. We worked on the VTA adjustment for the thicker record for a couple of minutes to get the sound balanced and as resolving as possible, and after a few waves of the Talisman we were soon hearing the grungy guitar intro of I’ve Got a Feeling.

My scribbled first notes: not bad!

Sure, there’s only a fraction of the space and three-dimensionality of the real British pressings, but the bass seemed to be there, the energy seemed decent enough, the tonality was good if a bit smooth and dark. All in all not a bad Beatles record.

Then we played One After 909 and the sound just fell off a cliff. It was so lifeless and compressed! The parts of the song that get loud on the regular pressings never get loud on the new one. The live-in-the-studio Beatles’ rock energy had somehow disappeared.

We couldn’t take more than a minute or two of the song. It was just too frustrating and irritating. What the hell did they do to make this record sound this way? We had no idea.

Didn’t matter. It was game over. The gong from The Gong Show had rung. The record had to go.

We had played twelve British copies, all with stampers that we knew to be good on side two. Two or three of those copies did not merit a Hot Stamper sonic grade. Nothing new there, happens all the time.

Yet even the worst copy we played of the twelve had more jump factor, more life and more dynamic energy than the new Heavy Vinyl pressing.

Which means that there’s a very good chance that any copy you pick up on British vinyl will be better sounding — maybe not a 100% chance but easily a 90+% chance. Which makes buying the new Heavy Vinyl LP, not to mention playing it, pointless unless…

Unless you are more of a record collector than an audiophile or music lover. And if you are one of those guys, you are definitely on the wrong blog, unless…

Unless you are here to repent and swear off the error of your ways.

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This Pressing of Carmen Had Dry Strings on One Side, Rich Strings on the Other

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

My notes for side two on a copy we recently auditioned read:

Could use more tubes.

Strings could be a bit smoother.

Needs a bit more weight down low.

My notes for side one:

Side one had all of this and more!

Some Common Issues with Londons and Deccas

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, which thins out the sound, easily heard in the lower strings, which sound washed out.

On some sides of some copies the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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Listening in Depth to Let It Bleed

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Glyn Johns is without a doubt one of the Best Rock Engineers who ever lived. Let It Bleed is one of the many classic albums he engineered in the 60s and 70s that have stood the test of time musically and would be hard to beat by any album recorded after that era.

Ken Scott, Stephen Barncard, Alan Parsons, Geoff Emerick and others are right up there with him of course. We audiophiles are very lucky to have had guys like these around when the Stones (and The Who and The Eagles) were at their creative peak. 

What follows is some advice on what to listen for, provided by your friends at Better Records to help you separate the best pressings from those that may be merely good. (The awful ones we expect you can recognize easily enough without any help.)

Side One

Gimme Shelter
Love in Vain

One of the best sounding Rolling Stones songs of all time. In previous listings I’ve mentioned how good this song sounds — thanks to Glyn Johns, of course — but on the best Hot Stamper copies it is OUT OF THIS WORLD.

This is our favorite test track for side one. The first minute or so clues you into to everything that’s happening in the sound.

Listen for the amazing immediacy, transparency and sweetly extended harmonics of the guitar in the left channel.

Next, when Watts starts slapping that big fat snare in the right channel, it should sound so real you could reach out and touch it.

If you’re like me, that tubey magical acoustic guitar sound and the rich whomp of the snare should be all the evidence you need that Glyn Johns is one of the all time greats.

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Living Stereo Vs. Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

We described a Hot Stamper pressing of Symphonie Fantastique (LSC 2362) we put up not long ago this way:

The size and power of a large orchestra in Living Stereo sound.  The hall is huge, the brass solid and powerful, the top and bottom extends properly, the stage is wide and clear — what more can you ask for? 

So open and spacious, with gorgeous, richly textured strings — this is the VIVID sound we love from the Golden Age!

Classic Records and Their Abysmal String Tone

Of course, this was always the most obvious shortcoming of the Classic Records RCA remasterings — just not obvious to the audiophile press or the audiophiles who bought the records. None of them seemed to notice how the strings of the new pressings never sounded remotely the way they had on the originals and early reissues (reissues which were, unsurprisingly, sometimes better).

Classic’s pressings had bass and dynamics, no one could deny it, but the strings were unusually shrill and smeary, and the hall practically non-existent. (We chalked it up to the bad transistor cutting equipment Bernie was using back then, but how could anyone know for sure what was really going on? All we knew was that most of the classical titles they released did not sound good, so there was simply no need to investigate further.)

We found out some years ago that there was a new series of recuts coming from Acoustic Sounds. Based on their dismal track record, I will be very surprised if they are much better than mediocre.

UPDATE 2024

We finally got one in and put it in a shootout. The results: a passable-at-best side one and a bad sounding side two.

In other words, really not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on. Almost any White Dog or Shaded Dog will beat it (although it should be noted that there are plenty of vintage pressings of the album that don’t sound much better than mediocre. Still, on side two it should be no contest.)

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It Doesn’t Get Much More Real on Vinyl Than This

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Pentangle’s first album is an honest-to-goodness Demo Disc.

When for a (thankfully) brief time back in the 70s I was selling audio equipment, the song “Pentangling” was a favorite demo cut to play in the store. The sound of the string bass and snare drum are amazingly natural; I don’t know of any other pop album from the era that presents the vibrant timbre of those two instruments better.

The Transatlantic British originals can be quite good as well, but are very tough to come by in good condition these days, and pricey when you find them.

This record easily qualifies for our Top 100 List, it’s that good (but unfortunately too rare to make the cut).

The Best Sides

The true foundation of the music is provided by two legendary guitar heavyweights, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. With Jacqui McShee’s almost unbearably sweet vocals soaring above them, this album presents the classic lineup at its best, with superior sonics to boot.

It’s Acoustic!

The unprocessed folky sound found throughout the album has its audiophile credentials fully in order, especially in the area of guitar harmonics, as well as drums that sound like real drums actually sound. (How many of the ’70s rock albums in our Top 100 have that natural drum sound? Not many when you stop to think about it.)

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Why Did Suite No. 2 Sound Better than Suite No. 5?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:

An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.

The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.

I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)

Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

  • Present
  • Rich and sweet
  • Great texture and space all around
  • So lively too

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

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Dexter Gordon Knocked Us Out Back in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2007 we had a low opinion of both the Blue Note label and the work of Rudy Van Gelder, but that changed over the decades as we auditioned more and more of his amazing recordings, many of them reissues of one kind or another.

(Some text has been altered, mostly the overuse of capitalization.) Our latest review for One Flight Up can be found here.

Our 2007 Commentary

This Blue Note LP is without a doubt one of the best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard. We were auditioning a bunch of jazz records today (4/25/07), and when the needle hit the grooves on this one we were absolutely blown away.

I can’t think of one jazz record we’ve ever played here at Better Records with this kind of whomp. Everything here is so rich and full — nothing like a typical Blue Note album.

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