Testing Midrange Hardness

The Concert Sinatra and The Big Sound We Love

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Sinatra Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary about what to listen for on Sinatra’s 1963 album The Concert Sinatra was originally posted in 2015.

There may be a touch of smear (you can most easily hear it in the strings) but the sound is so RICH and Tubey Magical that you will barely be aware of it. Your attention should be focused on the superb feel the man has for this music.

One thing to pay special attention to, especially if you have other copies of the album, is that Sinatra’s voice on both sides of this pressing always sounds natural even at its loudest.

There is no strain or hardness.

That, among many other things, is what separates the best copies from the also-rans (and, of course, all the reissues, which tend to have gritty, harsh vocals which quickly get unbearably edgy in the louder parts).

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Another Fine Entry for Our Heavy Vinyl Hall of Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It just so happens that I had the time to listen to this work from start to finish twice just last night, 2/11/2026. Saw it performed live just a few months back at Atlanta Symphony Hall.

This wonderful work never gets old.  Next time we do a shootout for the performance we like with Muti on EMI I hope you will see your way to picking up a copy. You won’t regret it.

The Classic Records repressings of Pictures at an Exhibition — whether at 33, 45, or any other speed, on one disc or four –are all godawful sounding.

(Yes, we have auditioned both versions, for as long as we could stand them, which wasn’t long as the sound was painfully bad. The details can be found below.)

Everything that was bad about the worst original Shaded Dog pressings not only hasn’t been fixed, it’s been made even worse!

Yes, we admit to having played a good pressing of LSC 2201 in 2024, but there are just too many bad pressings of the album to bother doing a shootout for it. It’s hard to justify the cost when so few have the sound we are looking for.

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my head hurt and my skin crawl. After a minute or two of listening to sound this bad I’ve had it.

And can you believe that HP put this miserable remastered pressing on his TAS Super Disc List? Sad but true.

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So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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Listening in Depth to Crosby Stills & Nash

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

Now with bonus CD Advice.

Although millions of copies of CSN’s first album were sold, so few were mastered and pressed well, and so many mastered and pressed poorly, that only a ridiculously small number of Hot Stamper copies have ever actually made it to the site. A couple dozen would be my guess, compared to, for example, the Beatles albums, many of which have sold by the hundreds. To this day they are difficult to keep in stock, I assume because our customers seem to really like them.)

We wish that were not the case — we love the album — but the copies we know to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound are just not sitting around in the record bins waiting for us to scoop them up.

But of course that was never the really the case even back in the good old days, as the reissue we like was simply not produced in significantly large numbers the way the originals were. Finding the right reissues was always a matter of luck, with the odds stacked very much against us. I don’t remember ever finding more than one copy with the killer stampers in a single year.

Warning

Whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Joe Gastwirt-mastered CD.

It couldn’t be any more awful. (His Deja Vu is just as bad.)

In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young?

Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with substandard midrange reproduction — like most of them — is a worthless record.

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Time Out Is a Classic Case of Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

When we did a shootout for this album way back in October of 2007, we took the opportunity to play the Classic Records 200 gram pressing. Maybe we got a bad one, who knows, but that record did not sound remotely as good as the real thing. (6 eye or 360, both can be quite good. Skip the Red Label ’70s reissues.)

The piano sounded thin and hard, which was quite unexpected given the fact that we used to consider the Classic LP one of their few winners and actually recommended it. Another example of we was wrong.

As we said in our shootout: “We dropped the needle on the Classic reissue to see how it stacked up against a serious pressing. Suffice it to say, the real Time Out magic isn’t going to be found on any heavy vinyl reissue!”

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, I would not have put this record on it.

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Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection.

As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how badly MoFi had ruined the sound, I was mortified.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. Thrilled to it even. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

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Balalaika Favorites on Classic Records Is Unpleasantly Hard and Sour

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of SR 90310, Balalaika Favorites, but I remember it as unpleasantly hard and sour.

Many of the later Mercury reissues pressed by Columbia had some of that sound, so I was already familiar with it when Classic’s pressing came out in 1998 as part of the just-plain-awful-sounding Mercury series they released.

I suspect I would hear it that way today. Bernie Grundman could cut the bass, the dynamics, and the energy onto the record. Everything else was worse — not just worse, but wrong — 99% of the time.

The fast transients of the plucked strings of the Balalaikas was just way beyond the capabilities of his colored and crude cutting system.

Harmonic extension and midrange delicacy were qualities that practically no Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing could claim to have.

Or, to be precise, they claimed to have them, and whether they really believed they did or not, they sure fooled a lot of audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them.

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The Mono Recut of Revolver from 1981 Is a Ripoff

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

A great sounding record in stereo, potentially anyway, but this later reissue in mono is so awful it deserves a special place in our hall of shame.

My notes for side one: hard, sour, no bass.

Side two: dumbass small mono, so unclear.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? That’s hard to say. There is no shortage of competition, that’s for sure.

But it may be the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of rubbish.

We love the mono mix of For No One, but not when it sounds like this.

The only Beatles vinyl we offer on our site are stereo pressings. Our reasons for doing this are straightforward enough.

The Beatles records in mono, contrary to the opinion of audiophiles and music lovers alike, virtually never have the presence, energy and resolution found on the best stereo copies. If your stereo cannot resolve all the information on the tape, sure, Twin Track Stereo (used on the first two albums, hard-panned multi-track afterwards) ends up sounding like some of the instruments are stuck in the speakers, hard left and hard right, with nothing but a hole in the middle.

But there is a great deal of information spreading into the middle when we play those records here, and nothing feels stuck in the speakers that doesn’t sound like it was supposed to be heard coming directly from one of the speakers.

It is our contention that the best audio equipment, properly tweaked, can show you a world of musical information that exists only on the stereo pressings, information that the mono mixes mostly obscure.

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What the Shootout Winning Copies of A Hard Day’s Night Really Get Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

I wrote this bit of commentary about twenty years ago:

When comparing pressings of this record, the copies that get their voices to sound both present and warm, smooth, and sweet, especially during the harmonies, are always the best.  All the other instruments seem to fall in line when the vocals are correct. This is an old truism — it’s all about the midrange — but in the case of A Hard Day’s Night, it really is true.

Now that we are putting our unredacted (!) shootout notes on the blog for everyone to see, here are the actual notes for the shootout winning pressing we just played (6/2025), notes that back up what we said so many years ago 100%.

What’s does this amazing side one sound like?

  • Very full guitars and vocals for this
  • Less glare
  • More midrange energy
  • Breathy and full vocals
  • Pretty rich and focussed
  • The fullest, most present and breathy vocals

And this amazing side two?

  • Much fuller vocals and drums
  • Great energy
  • Most “tubey” yet
  • Gets very big
  • Fullest and warmest yet
  • Not edgy

Both sides had qualities that did much to set them apart, coupled with fewer of the shortcomings we found in practically all the other pressings we played.

Less glary and less edgy are critical to the better pressings, simply because few copies are not glary and edgy in the midrange to some degree.

But the real keys to the shootout winners are vocals that are full, present, warm and breathy.

For The Beatles in 1964, nothing else about the sound of their recordings could possibly compete with those four qualities.

We could add two more. Energy would probably be the next most important one, followed by Tubey Magic.

That brings the total of most important qualities to a grand total six.

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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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