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.

The Original Jazz Classics Series Got Off to a Bad Start with Concorde

Here Are Some Potentially Good Sounding OJC Pressings

OJC-002! Fantasy’s second release in the series, but not a very good one.

The copy (or copies; who can remember?) we’ve auditioned in the past did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.

The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is not likely to be of audiophile quality.

There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed — but we’re pretty sure the OJC pictured here will always fall short of the mark.

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FM Radio Sound on Blue Vinyl, Courtesy of a Mr. Gene Thompson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Here is how we described a recent Shootout Winning copy of 1967-1970:

This vintage import 2-LP compilation set boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides. These pressings are rich, smooth and sweet, with plenty of Tubey Magic and little of the grain and grunge of most Brits (and don’t get us started on the domestics).

You get clean, clear, full-bodied, lively and musical ANALOG sound from first note to last. Like most compilations, some songs sound better than others, but “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Come Together” are two that really stand out here. For those of you out there who have never tried one of our Hot Stamper Beatles records, this may be the best sound you’ve ever heard from them. The CDs — even the new ones — sure don’t sound like this!

We are on record as finding the British pressings of 1967-1970 too bright; certainly most of them are anyway. The original domestic pressings, as anyone who has ever played one can attest, mastered at Sterling no less, are absolutely godawful.

Allow us to add one more to that group of pressings to avoid, the blue vinyl domestic pressings mastered by Gene Thompson. Based on how awful this pressings sounds, it would probably be wise to avoid his work in general.

The only artists who have earned the honor (ahem) of having their very own page on this blog are The Beatles. For those of you interested in learning more about their often amazing recordings, feel free to dig in to your heart’s delight.

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These Two Return to Forever Albums Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

Pictured are two Return to Forever albums we auditioned at some point — who knows when? — and found wanting (especially at the prices we charge).

Without going into specifics — our notes are long gone at this point — we’ll just say these two albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both, and therefore do not deserve a place in most audiophile collections — unless that audiophile happens to be a huge fan of the band.

My guess is that if these two records are sitting in your collection, they have not been played in many years, if ever. If you own either of these two albums, pull them out and play them. You may find that making more room on your shelves for records you actually enjoy is easier than you thought.

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.

Having the wherewithal to audition so many records puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for higher quality sound. (Or, more accurately, that small subset of audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings who also have a great deal of disposable income to devote to them.)

Yes, we have the obvious resources that would be needed, the staff and the budget.

More important than either of those, we came up with a new (sort of) and much more successful (definitely) approach.

We’ve learned through years of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of pressings is something that we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I was quick to embrace.

The more time I spend in this hobby, the more I realize it is beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there are apparently a goodly number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it is the undeniable reality underlying the nature of vinyl pressings.

Our Seven Step Program

With that in mind, finding better sounding pressings of any given recording can be achieved by following these seven steps:

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Take Our Advice and Skip the Original of The Stone Poneys

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

The originals from 1967 have never impressed us much.

Click on the links below for more records that sound best to us on the right reissue pressing

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound their best on the right reissue (the ones we sell, obviously; there are plenty of reissues that don’t have good sound, but the ones we offer handily beat the originals we’ve — and no doubt you’ve — heard).

Here are all the titles we’ve reviewed to date that have the potential to sound their best on the right reissue

On this album the sound varies quite a bit from track to track.

The best tracks are rich, tubey and clear; the worst thin, bright and hard.

The first track on side one rarely stayed clean when loud, but here for the most part it does. It’s a good test for whether or not you have a copy with high quality, low distortion mastering.

Listen for the least amount of smear and congestion and the most resolution.

The second track is richer and tubier – it proves that side one is mastered correctly.

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Why Are the Earliest Stampers on 461 Ocean Boulevard So Bad Sounding on Side Two?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

The UK pressings with the side two stampers shown below have not done well in our shootouts for a number of years now. If you own a copy with B-1 stampers on side two, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of 461 Ocean Boulevard than you have ever heard.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, a subject we discuss below, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and substandard sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and avoid copies with the B-1 marking on side two.

Bilbo cut the A-3 side one and did a great job; his side one won our most recent shootout.

Whoever cut side two really screwed it up, as you can see from our notes for our last two shootouts.

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing very little of this information on the site, for a number of good reasons we discuss here.

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken one, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers.

In the world of records, there aren’t many, but B-1 for side two of this album is a clear exception to the rule that the stamper numbers are one part of a multi-faceted puzzle. In this case, B-1 is awful and is best avoided at all costs.

The Biz

Being in the shootout business means we have no way to avoid such realities, which is why it is so easy for us to accept them.

The amateurs and professionals alike who review records for audiophiles want there to be clear-cut answers for every album they write about. Uncertainty and trade-offs upset them no end.

We recognized twenty years ago that the empirical pursuit of record knowledge, practiced scientifically, must be understood as incomplete, imperfect, and provisional.

That is not going to change no matter how upsetting anyone may find it.

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Soultrane Sucks on the Early OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The early OJC reissues from 1982 of this title are awful.

And whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad, but — I’m guessing, never played one so don’t hold me to it — in the opposite way.

The OJC is thin and bright, and the modern reissue (I’m assuming, based on playing scores of them) is probably thick, veiled, overly smooth, lacking in space and boosted in the bass — because that’s the sound that ~~audiophiles~~ record buyers seem to like these days.

Without the excellent sounding 60s and 70s reissues that we are still able to find in audiophile playing condition, all that we would have available to buy for our shootouts would be the originals.

At the big bucks those records go for nowadays, shootouts would be impossibly expensive.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job on these later pressings!

UPDATE 2025

We were surprised to find that the right stampers on the new OJC pressings can have very good sound. Click on the link below to that Soultrane has joined the group of good sounding modern OJC pressings.

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Helpful Stamper Information You Can Use – Episode 108

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

British Pressing? Check.

Pink Label? Check.

Sound Quality? Side One:: 1+ (dubby). Side One of another copy: NFG (no good).

Apparently something went wrong, but exactly what, nobody really knows.

And if for some reason somebody actually believes they know what went wrong, we tell them that that kind of thinking is detrimental to whatever success they hope to achieve in finding better sounding records, if our experience over the last fifty years has any bearing.

We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended to. All our knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.

If somehow we did know it all, there would be no need for the two hundred entries in our live and learn section about all the mistakes we’ve made over the years trying to understand record pressings at the sonic level.

We take a different approach to searching out better sounding pressings. Instead of reading about them — who made them, how they were made, where they were made, all that sort of thing — we instead devoted our efforts to cleaning and playing them, so that we could make our own judgments about the sound and the music we heard.

Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed over the course of the last twenty years, produce all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the rankings for all the records in-between.

Free Stamper Info

By my count this is the 108th stamper sheet we have posted on The Skeptical Audiophile.

In the case of this title, these are what we would call bad stampers for Genesis’s 1973 prog album Selling England by the Pound (a record we rarely have in stock because the best stampers are just too hard to find, at least they are on copies in audiophile playing condition).

If you are looking for top quality sound — and seriously, what else would you be looking for if you are reading this blog? — then make sure not to buy just any old early Pink Label UK pressing of the album. You may end up with one that sounds as bad as this one did.

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These Two Recordings of Michel LeGrand Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Pictured are two Michel Legrand albums we auditioned at some point in the past and found less than impressive.

My guess is that if these two records are sitting in a record collection, they have not been played in many years, if ever.

Here’s an idea: If you own either of these two albums, pull them out and play them.

You may find that making more room on your shelves for records you may actually enjoy playing is easier than you think.

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.

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Tchaikovsky / Symphony No. 6 on Shaded Dog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We’ve played at least three Shaded Dogs of LSC 1901 since we started doing shootouts for this recording and all three were awful.

The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, one of the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.

Years ago we described a Hot Stamper pressing this way:

The size and scope of this recording is enormous, with the orchestral sections clearly staged wide and deep. Where is the old tube smear and compression and opacity? It must not be on the tape, because I hear no trace of it.

This copy is cut clean, its dynamics intact, which just goes to show how much better the master tape must be than we’ve been led to believe by the original Shady Dogs and the hacks at Classic Records (note: their Heavy Vinyl reissue is awful).

RCA managed to cut this record amazingly well decades after the tape was first recorded, not for audiophiles, but for music lovers. Maybe that’s the secret.

When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is. Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

UPDATE 2025

Some of our newer commentary for the Gold Seal pressing we like goes like this:

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The ’83 & ’89 Reissues of Music From Big Pink Are Just Awful

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Band Available Now

Both the pressings of Music from Big Pink mastered by Capitol with the help of the Specialty Record Corporation (SRC) are just awful sounding. They released one in 1983 and another 1989. The notes you see below are for the 1989 pressing.

The overall sound was bright and forced, with edgy vocals. Who wants a Band record that sounds like that? The MoFi CD (from 1989) is better than the MoFi record, but that’s not saying much. I wouldn’t have either one in my collection.

Earlier this year we raved about our amazing sounding Shootout Winner:

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about an incredible copy in our notes: “huge and breathy and weighty”…”very rich vox and toms”…”huge and rich and jumping out of the speakers”…”big and rich and spacious”
Forget all those vague, veiled, lifeless, ambience-free Heavy Vinyl pressings – this is the Big Pink that The Band recorded!
Remember when you used to play the same record over and over, never taking it off the turntable for days at a time?
Well here it is – this pressing captures the music in a way that will make repeated plays the joy they are meant to be

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