More of the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
Stick with stereo on this album.
The Mono pressings — at least the ones we’ve played — aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time).
Weak Sound or Music
Records Like This Give Decca’s Reissues a Bad Reputation
Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Johannes Brahms Available Now
Apparently mastered with no regard to sound quality, this Decca SPA reissue is muddy, dull, congested and full of harmonic distortion in the louder passages.
How do we know that? We go out of our way to play every pressing we can get our hands on, even cheap reissues such as this. That’s our job. We play everything to find the best sounding records so you don’t have to.
And some of these cheap reissues win shootouts!
But you can’t guess which ones will. You have to play them to find out.
And that’s how we know that some of them are good, some of them are mediocre, and some, like this one, are just awful.
Want to be assured of getting good sounding pressings of the greatest classical recordings of all time?
Step right up and order anything classical or orchestral you see here, Every one of them is guaranteed to please.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
This Lousy Gershwin Set Is on the TAS List?
More of the Music of George Gershwin
A Hall of Shame 3 Record set that had us asking: Why would anyone want to own these awful records? Isn’t the music of George Gershwin better than this?
TAS List or no TAS List, the performances of the works listed below are much too slow to be taken seriously.
This is one of those records that make you wonder what the hell some audiophile reviewers, including Harry Pearson himself, must have been smoking back in the day.
I get that The TAS Super Disc List is about sound, not music, but the sound is not that great here either, and the bargain vinyl is the typical gritty, grainy, noisy crap that VOX records tend to be made with.
Every Label Made Bad Sounding Records – Capitol Made This One in 1958
Hot Stamper Pressings with Billy May’s Arrangements
Drowning in reverb and squawky as hell, a major misfire from Billy and the brass (ahem) at Capitol.
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.
It’s yet another public service from Better Records, the home of the best sounding records ever pressed. Our records sound better than any others you’ve ever heard or you get your money back.
Dream With Dean – Watch Out for Hard and Honky Vocals
Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums
Dream with Dean is great for finding any traces of “honk” in your midrange. Getting Deano’s baritone to sound tubey and rich, to get the sound that Bing Crosby could get just by opening his mouth, is not all that easy on some systems, mine included.
Correctly set VTA is critical in this regard, but pretty much everything must be working at its best for Dean to sound as intimate and natural as we know he can on the best pressings.
Balancing the lower mids with the upper mids is the goal, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. This album is great for testing, and guaranteed to bring practically any high-dollar system at a stereo showroom, a convention, or your very own home to its knees.
This is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet behind him (featuring Contemporary favorites Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell!) doing standards. On the best copies, the immediacy is absolutely mind-blowing. It’s a shame that there aren’t more Frank Sinatra records that sound like this.
These Two Sarah Vaughan Pablos Didn’t Make the Grade
Here are a couple of the Sarah Vaughan albums we’ve auditioned over the years and found unimpressive.
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, 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 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.”
Breakaway Is Generally Grainy, Harsh and Shrill
Reviews and Commentaries for TAS Super Disc Recordings
The problem with this album is that, for whatever reason, practically every copy you find is, to some degree, grainy, harsh and shrill in the loudest passages of the music. When the music gets loud, the sound often becomes strained and unpleasant. A copy like this one that doesn’t do that is the exception, not the rule.
Listen to the song ‘Disney Girls’ on side one. If you own the average pressing – odds are your copy is in fact quite average unless you went through a pile of copies and played them in order to find a good one – parts of that song will sound painfully hard and shrill, assuming your playing the record at the kinds of levels we do.
Which is the main reason I’ve never understand what qualified this record to be on the TAS Super Disc list. Now, having heard the best of the best copies sounding so big, rich and tubey, I can certainly say I hear what impressed HP (he likes that sound, as do we). It may indeed be a very well recorded album, but we feel it falls a bit short for our own Rock and Pop Top 100 List. (To be fair, as you know we play a lot of amazing albums around here.)
The Best Songs
The late Harry Pearson knew little about popular music and may have been more impressed by this album than those of us who play pop and rock albums by the boatload.
Most of the pop albums on his Super Disc TAS list are a joke. Only the people who listen almost exclusively to classical or jazz seem to take them seriously, in my experience anyway. (Check out the 12″ pop singles for a good laugh.)
The Hunter Is Awful on Import Vinyl (and Any Other Way)
More of the Music of Jennifer Warnes
More Records I Could Happily Live Without
Sonic Grade: F
A hall of shame pressing on import vinyl from 1992. Many years ago we wrote:
This is a SUPER RARE Private Music German Import LP. The last two copies of this record listed on eBay went for over $600!
All of which was true. We left out, however, what an awful record The Hunter is in every way.
If you like your heavily processed big production pop to sound as unnatural as possible, this is the album for you.
Not one instrument sounds remotely like it should, and that is surely an insult to audiophiles of every stripe.
The problem was that so many self-identified audiophiles did not seem bothered by the execrable sound, certainly not to the extent that we were.
Oh, but it’s on vinyl! That should solve all the problems with the recording.
Yes, the CD was bad, but the vinyl was no better. I had them both and couldn’t stand either.
But FBR Is Killer on the Right Pressings
The only album we like of Ms Warnes is Famous Blue Raincoat.
It is her masterpiece, a core collection record, and a clear case of one and done.
When you have a good copy of Famous Blue Raincoat, you have all the Jennifer Warnes we think you will ever need.
Further Reading
This Tchaikovsky 4th Turned Out to Be Not as Good as We’d Hoped
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now
About ten years ago we dropped the needle on this Mehta recording and thought it had potential, so we went about acquiring more copies for an eventual shootout.
A few years back we gave them another listen and found the sound not to our liking.
We have not done a shootout for any of the major Tchaikovsky symphonies (4, 5 and 6) in a very long time, but we hope to do them in the future, although that future could be many years from now. Nothing we have dropped the needle on has knocked us out, and that’s usually what it takes to get the ball rolling.
UPDATE 2024
Actually we quite like this RCA reissue with Monteux, and there are some other recordings we know to be good, but they are turning out to be very hard to find.
These Mehta Londons have revealed themselves to be much more artificial sounding than we thought they were, or, more accurately, could tell they were back in 2011.
Like every Royce Hall recording we’ve ever played, including the one everybody knows, there is too much multi-miking and spotlighting going on for us to suspend our disbelief and feel like we are in the living presence of the musicians, to borrow a phrase. The orchestra in this recording is not presented with anything resembling the experience one would have in the concert hall.
James Lock is a brilliant recording engineer, but his work here in the states leaves a lot to be desired.
Dvorak / Cello Concerto – Hard to Recommend on Living Stereo
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
I have never heard a copy of this record sound better than decent. This title is very unlikely to have the wonderful sound of the best Living Stereo pressings that you can find on our site, each of which has been carefully evaluated to the highest standards.
If you can get one for cheap, go for it. Otherwise I recommend you pass if what you are looking for is audiophile quality sound.
Perhaps the poor recording quality (I’m guessing; obviously I’ve never heard the master tape) explains the poor sound of the Classic Records remastered version from 1994.
Not that that stopped anybody from buying those awful 180 gram pressings! They may have been mastered by one of the greats, Bernie Grundman, but he was well past his prime when he was working for that awful label, as we explain here.
Have You Noticed?
If you are a fan of Living Stereo pressings, have you noticed that many of them – this one for example – don’t sound all that good?
If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have. But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare LSC pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?
There is an abundance of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and most of them are downright awful.
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.
It seems as if the audiophile public has completely fallen for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings.
Audiophiles have made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.
Maybe not this guy, or this guy, but there has to be at least some group of audiophiles, however small their number might be, with decent equipment and two working ears out there, right? (Excluding our customers of course, they have to know what is going on to spend the kind of money they spend on our records. And then write us all those letters.)
I would say RCA’s track record during the ’50s and ’60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.
But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one of them.