Pressings with Weak Sound or Music

These vintage records didn’t sound very good to us. Additionally, some made the list because the music or performances were not to our liking.

As to their sound quality, some of them are bad recordings, but some are no doubt just bad pressings of good recordings. Either way, audiophiles should avoid them.

Bad sounding Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered pressings can be found in their own sections.

Barabajagal – Never Played a Good One

My notes: Murky sound.

We’ve played pressings from every era and have yet to hear one sound any good.

A PUBLIC SERVICE

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 this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some Hall of Shame records the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good pressing, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much less excusable.

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Boy, Was We Ever Wrong About Solti’s Rite of Spring

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

This is a VERY old and somewhat embarrassing commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Solti’s 1974 recording for Decca.

Here is what we had to say about the album in 2008:

This is an amazing recording, DEMO QUALITY SOUND, far better than the Decca heavy vinyl reissue that came out in the 2000s. [That part is no doubt true.]

This record is extremely dynamic; full of ambience; tonally correct; with tons of deep bass. Because it’s a more modern recording, it doesn’t have the Tubey Magic of some Golden Age originals, but it compensates for that shortcoming by being less distorted and “clean.” Some people may consider that more accurate. To be honest with you, I don’t know if that is in fact the case.

However, this record should not disappoint sonically and the performance is every bit as exciting and powerful as any you will find. The Chicago Symphony has the orchestral chops to make a work of this complexity sound effortless.

Skip forward to the present, roughly ten years later. We had three or four copies on hand to audition when we surveyed the work a couple of years ago in preparation for a big shootout.

The Solti did not make the cut. It was not even in the ballpark.

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Peter Frampton – Somethin’s Happening (and It’s Not Very Good)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Chris Kimsey Engineered Albums Available Now

This is Frampton’s third album, released in 1974.

A year later he would put out the wonderful Frampton album, tour it, and record the tour, which became Frampton Comes Alive.

Finally the world would have the opportunity to hear what a talented songwriter, singer, guitarist and all around performer the man had always been, starting with Humble Pie and reaching his zenith with his first solo album, Wind of Change, his Magnum Opus and a Desert Island Disc for your truly.

All the songs from this album that he played live are dramatically better in live performance than they are in the studio on this album.

Frampton produced Somethin’s Happening and unfortunately for all concerned the production is piss-poor, as is the sound.

I’ve never heard this record sound better than passable, whether on domestic or British vinyl. I gave up finding something better decades ago. The album is just not worth it.

As far as Peter Frampton’s body of work through the 70s is concerned, it is clearly his worst sounding album. 

The records he released in the 80s are even worse — no surprise there — and the music is every bit as bad.

This Blueback of Le Cid Was Just Awful

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

Don’t buy into that record collector/audiophile canard that the originals are always the best sounding pressings.

This original Blueback pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a complete disaster: shrill, with no top or bottom to speak of, the very definition of boxy sound.

Our current favorite for sound and performance is the one Fremaux conducted for EMI in 1971.

It had been on the TAS List for some time, but we confess we didn’t bother finding out how good it was until about five years ago when it became clear to us what a wonderful conductor Louis Fremaux could be.

Here are some other Hot Stamper pressings of TAS list titles that we like.

Back to London

The sound of the London original you see above was much too unpleasant to be played on high quality modern equipment. There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings.

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Avoid the Early Pressings of the 1812 Overture with Alwyn

More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

More than ten years ago, 2010 or thereabouts I’m guessing, we felt we were ready to do a shootout for Tchaikovsky’s famous 1812 Overture, music that surely belongs in any serious audiophile record collection.

On a well-known work such as this, we started by pulling out every performance on every label we had in our backroom and playing them one after the other. Most never made it to the half-minute mark. Compressor distortion or inner groove overcutting at the huge climax of the work? Forget it. On the trade-in pile you go.

A few days went by while we were cleaning and listening to the hopefuls. We then proceeded to track down more of the pressings we had liked in our preliminary round of listening. At the end we had a good-sized pile of LPs that we thought shootout-worthy, pressings that included various RCA, Decca and London LPs.

The London you see above did not impress us. It sounded too much like an old record.

There are a number of other Deccas and Londons that we’ve played over the years that were disappointing, and they can be found here.

We much preferred the Decca budget reissue, cut from the same tapes, shown here.

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Ryko Released This Disgraceful Bowie Set in 1989

More of the Music of David Bowie

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Bowie

This is the sound of digital mastering at its worst. Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile quality sound.

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 this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.

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Past Masters – Digital Remastering at its Worst

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles Available Now

A hall of shame pressing and another album reviewed and found to be better suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

The late-’80s import pressings of this album are bright (the tambourine on Hey Jude will tear your head off, just to cite one example) and aggressive and very digital sounding.

Unfortunately, if you want better sounding versions of these songs, you’re gonna have to buy lots of pressings of the band’s albums and singles and EPs in order to find good sounding versions of them, which is exactly what I did back in the ’80s. It took me years to do it.

In the ’90s, when I was actually selling this awful record (because my system was just too dark and unrevealing to show me how awful it was), I wrote:

These are all the songs that aren’t on the original 13 British albums, so for those of you with the MoFi Beatles box, these 2 LPs give you all the tracks you don’t have.  

This was written so long ago that we actually refer to the MoFi Beatles Box as something an audiophile would own (!)

To be clear, in this day and age, no serious audiophile who loves The Beatles should have the MoFi Box Set or Past Masters in his collection.

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Columbia Released This Awful Johnny Winter 2 Disc Set in 1971

More of the Music of Johnny Winter

Hot Stamper Pressings of Electric Blues Albums Available Now

The sound of pure cardboard. Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile sound.

For 33 years we’ve been helping music loving audiophiles the world over avoid bad sounding records.

To see the records with bad sound or bad music we’ve reviewed, click here.

Mostly we write about good sounding records, and there are thousands that can be found here.

If you are in the market for better sounding records, we have hundreds of them for sale here.

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Another Dubious Recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

1S/1S Shaded Dog original pressing.

Ooh, let the drooling begin. 

Here is our admittedly very old review for exactly the one copy we had on hand to play, although, to be fair, we have played more than one copy of the album over the years, and it never sounded especially good to us on any of the copies we auditioned.

The violin is very immediate sounding on this recording, maybe too much so.

Either way, the sound of the orchestra is where this record falls short.

It’s congested, thin and shrill in places. The right copy of Heifetz’s performance on LSC 1992 is a much better record overall. Some may prefer Szeryng’s way with this famous piece, which, as a matter of taste, is fine by us.

If you’re listening for just the performance and the sound of the violin, you may find this record to be more acceptable than we did.

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Straight Up Trash from Ron Furmanek on 2 LPs

More of the Music of Badfinger

This British 2 LP reissue from 1993 was (badly) digitally remastered by a Mr. Ron Furmanek. May his name live in infamy.

It contains alternate mixes of 6 songs at 45 RPM on the second record, with equally bad sound.

The whole Apple series of remastered releases — at least the ones we played — was awful sounding and should be avoided completely. These records are nothing but audiophile bullshit.

If you are a record collector and must have those alternate mixes, just buy the CD. The vinyl is terrible, the CD probably sounds every bit as bad, but at least the CD is cheap and plays all the songs straight through.

If you own this record, my guess is it is pristine.

If you played it at all, you played it once and put it away on a shelf where it probably sits to this very day. Good records get played and bad records don’t. If you have lots of pristine records on your shelves, ask yourself: Why aren’t you playing them?

You may not like the implications of the answer: Because they aren’t any good.

And that means you should never have bought them in the first place.

But we all make mistakes. Owning up to them may be hard, but it is the only way to make any real progress in this hobby.

Record collecting for the sake of record collecting is a bad idea.

We like to play records, not just collect them, and we like to play records with the best sound we can find. We call those kinds of records Hot Stamper pressings, and finding them, and making them available to other audiophiles, has been my life’s work.

All the collecting we leave to other people who apparently enjoy that sort of thing.