Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now
Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1960 Living Stereo are impressive.
LSC 2287 might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.
There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now
Pictured to the left are a couple of the Antonio Carlos Jobim albums we’ve auditioned over the years.
Without going into specifics, we’ll just say these albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both. They may have some appeal to fans of Mr. Jobim, but audiophiles looking for top quality sound and music — our stock in trade — are best advised to look elsewhere.
Neither of these records is worth owning. The sound is at best mediocre, as is the music.
Bud Shank recorded a large number of “white bread” jazz albums as a leader. The music on these albums is worthless.
He of course played on many of our favorite albums as a sideman.
More of the Music of Tony Bennett
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find these two in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.
We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now
This is a Limited Edition Black Label Island Numbered Import 2 LP set.
The sound is passable at best. Unfortunately, like many of the compilations done over the years, this is a very dubby sounding album. It’s smeary, veiled, and lacks space.
The good vintage pressings of the original albums just kill it.
Not all compilation albums are bad. Here are some with the potential for very good sound.
More of the Music of Carly Simon
This album from 1990 contains lovely music, for the most part, but the CD-like sound is just not going to cut it. I had played the album ten or twenty years and liked it just fine, but the last time we dropped the needle on it we realized the sound was unacceptably processed, especially the vocal.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of heavily-processed recordings we like.
But for this album, covers of some of Sinatra’s most iconic songs, we felt the sound was completely wrong for the material.
Our advice: If you like the album, you might as well just buy the CD.
More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
This lovely Mercury boasts one of the greatest performances of the piece ever recorded.
Dorati is surely The Man when it comes to energy, drive and dynamic excitement with this venerable warhorse. He and his Minneapolis Symphony play the hell out of this boisterous music, and luckily for us audiophiles, the Mercury engineers give us Demonstration Quality Sound to go with it.
But not on the original pressing.
The original Mercury release of this record (90016) is a shrill piece of trash, as is the Mercury Wing pressing. So many of the early Mercurys were poorly mastered it seems.
We used to really like the Golden Import reissue, but that was years ago. Not sure how we would feel about it now.
Our current favorite performance of The Gay Parisian is this one on, gulp, Readers Digest.
More of the Music of Thelonious Monk
Every copy of this record we have ever played sounded terrible. The early pressings sounded bad and the OJC sounded bad. We gave up on the album a long time ago. Why throw good money after bad?
Some audiophile reviewers prefer to review only the records that sound good to them and ignore the rest. We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.
Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things. They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.
They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.
We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.
It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.
No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a small fraction of the records that we’ve played. We’ve been looking for the best sounding records for a very long time. Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.
That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.
Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.
We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now
This review is from well over ten years ago.
This album is more common in mono than stereo, but we found the sound of the mono pressing we played seriously wanting. It’s dramatically smaller and more squawky and crude than even the worst of the stereo pressings we played.
We had a copy we liked years ago, but that was years ago.
We don’t have that copy anymore and we don’t have a stereo that sounds the way our old one did either.
More on the subject of mono versus stereo.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Available Now
Pictured to the left are a couple of the Milt Jackson albums we’ve auditioned over the years, both on CTI, a label we like very much.
Without going into specifics, we’ll just say these albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both. They may have some appeal to fans of the man, but audiophiles looking for top quality sound and music — our stock in trade — are best advised to look elsewhere.
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find these two in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
Does the term still have any meaning?