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.

Beethoven Symphony No. 7 – This London with Solti Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

In our survey for the work, we played a number of the better known recordings from the top conductors and orchestras around the world.

Here is what we heard when we dropped the needle on an early pressing of CS 6093, released in 1959.

Our notes read:

  • Awful,
  • so dry,
  • steely,
  • crude,
  • bad

In other words, it just sounded like an old record. The world is full of records that don’t sound very good. As a matter of fact they undoubtedly make up the bulk of large record collections.

And if you just happen to be the proud owner of a big record collection, how can you possibly find the time to play more than a small fraction of it in any given year. Or even over the course of a decade for that matter.

The fact is that you can’t. Which, on the upside, means that, as far as you know, all your records sound great!

No need to buy another copy of whatever title you care to name. What for? You haven’t played it in twenty years and probably won’t get around to pulling it off the shelf for a spin for at least another twenty.

Here’s hoping your kids like old records because they are going to end up with an awful lot of them.

Back to the Beethoven 7th. What a beautiful cover!

But what good is a beautiful cover when the record sounds as bad as this one does?

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Verve Released this Awful Sounding Mel Torme Album in 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings Available Now

Smeary and dry. As far as we can tell, based on the sound of this copy, Swingin’ on the Moon is not an album worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout. If we hear a better one down the road, we would certainly be open to the possibility.

If you want a better sounding moon-themed album, Sinatra made a very good one.

This particular Mel Torme album came out in 1960, along with a great many wonderful titles from the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording. Although we love the cover, this unfortunately doesn’t happen to be one of the better releases from that year.

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 others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of the records on the list 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.

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We Was Wrong About The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (Circa 1985-90)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is a very old and somewhat embarrassing commentary about how ridiculously wrong we were about which are the best sounding German pressings of the Magical Mystery Tour.

Today we would never consider selling a record that sounds as phony as this version of the album does, but we did back in the 90s and probably as late as the 2000s.

Bad sounding records I once liked are common enough on the blog to have their own category, with 76 entries to date. If we had the time to make listings for them, there would surely be hundreds of others. If you’ve been in the audio game for as long as we have, you should have plenty of records that fit that bill. All those old records sitting on the shelves that you haven’t played in years might not sound they way you remember them, but the only way to know that is to pull them out and play them. If you’ve been making regular audio progress, most of them should sound better than ever, but there have to be plenty that won’t. You just don’t know which are which as long as they sit on the shelf.

This German pressing has sound that is dramatically different from that found on other Hot Stamper pressings of MMT we’ve had on the site. I used to be convinced that its sound was clearly superior to the regular German MMT LPs.

Back in the late 80s and into the 90s this was the pressing that I was certain blew them all out of the water.

We know better now. We call this version the “Too Hot” Stamper pressing — the upper mids and top end are much too boosted to be enjoyable on top quality equipment.

It does have some positive qualities though. It has substantially deeper bass than any other version; in fact, it has some of the deepest bass you will ever hear on a pop recording. It can literally rattle the room when Paul goes down deep on Baby You’re A Rich Man.

It also uses a slightly different mix on some tracks and is mastered differently in terms of levels. The level change is most obvious at the beginning of Strawberry Fields, where it starts out very quietly and gets louder after a short while, unlike all other versions which start out pretty much at the same level.

The effect is pleasing, you might even say powerful, but probably not what The Beatles intended, as no other copy I’ve ever heard makes use of the same quiet opening. An unknown mastering engineer made the choice, he created a new sound for the song, probably because he didn’t like all the tape hiss at the opening, during which few instruments were playing loud enough to mask it.

With this mix the record is now more of a Hi-Fi spectacular — great for waking up sleepy stereo systems but not the last word in natural sound.

Records that are boosted on the top and bottom suffer from what we like to call the smile curve. This pressing, as well as lots of records remastered to appeal to audiophiles, have a bad case of it.

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The Curtis Counce Group – Carl’s Blues

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

 

  • Both sides of this vintage Contemporary recording pressed on exceptionally quiet OJC vinyl boast solid Double Plus (A++) grades
  • This pressing has the studio space, presence, driving energy, and Midrange Magic that’s almost always missing from whatever 180g reissue (at 33 or 45, don’t fall for that BS) has been made from the 65 year old tapes
  • Out of the five pressings we could find in audiophile playing condition, only two had Super Hot or better sides, and no copy earned a White Hot grade for side two
  • Which simply means that finding good sound on this title is tough — for those of you who like to do your own shootouts, we wish you good luck, you’re going to need it
  • 4 stars: “Although the Curtis Counce Quintet was not a commercial success, their four Contemporary albums were all timeless in their own way, undated examples of high-quality hard bop from the late 50s. Excellent music that still sounds fresh four [now six] decades later.”

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How Do You Make a Vintage Jazz Recording Sound Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now

How do you make a vintage jazz recording sound wrong?

Easy. Just take out all the Tubey Magic that was captured on the master tape all those years ago by Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.

You know the kind of Tubey Magic I’m talking about. It’s the trademark sound of every vintage Contemporary pressing ever made. It’s the defining sound of the best jazz recordings from the era. It’s the reason that jazz lovers and record collectors the world over pay big bucks for vintage pressings — because they have the sound of tubes.

When you take away that one quality — just the one, leaving everything else as it should be: the bass, the mids, the highs, the energy, the space, the size, you name it — what you are left with doesn’t sound right.

It no longer sounds the way a jazz record from 1958 would sound.

If you don’t know that sound, it’s possible that this cheap reissue pressing from 1984 might not be as bothersome for you as it was for us. But we’ve played vintage jazz records from the 50s by the hundreds. They never sound like this. The reissues might, but the best early pressings sure don’t.

Maybe This Is Your Sound?

However, if you happen to like the sound of CDs for some reason, something that is frankly hard to imagine but nevertheless seems to be true, this OJC might just be the ticket.

We’ve never liked that sound, and we sure don’t like this pressing.

Other records we’ve played that sounded like CDs to us can be found here.

We’ve only played three releases on the Music Matters label, but all three of them sounded like CDs to us — Green Street, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and Tina Brooks’ True Blue (review coming someday!).

Much of Kevin Gray‘s work has the kind of sound we associate with the compact disc. We don’t understand why everyone doesn’t hear how badly mastered his records are, but we have no trouble recognizing their many faults. They are, to one degree or another:

The OJC pressings of Harold in the Land of Jazz we played were thinner and brighter than even the worst of the 70s LPs we auditioned.

They did not make the cut for our shootout, a shootout we abandoned years ago because the early pressings we liked were just too rare, too noisy and too expensive to justify the cost and effort that would be required to make a shootout a reality.

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Gabor Szabo / Mizrab – Not Much Here for Us Audiophiles

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Guitar Recordings Available Now

A weak effort from CTI in 1972.

Neither the music nor the sound, at least on the copies we played, is worth your time. 

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.

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We Expected Better from Frühbeck De Burgos, But We Didn’t Get It

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

We love the skill De Burgos brings to orchestral showpieces such as these, but the sound is not up to par for us. We’ve heard better. A lot better.

Bolero is shrill at the climax and the whole of side two was dull and opaque.

This EMI from 1976 might be passable on an old school system, but it was much 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.

Note that there is no list of EMI’s. There are simply too many bad ones to make listings for.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

The EMI classical albums we have reviewed to date can be found here.

Label:   His Master’s Voice – ESD 7019
Released:   1976

Ravel – Bolero
Chabrier: Espana – Rhapsody For Orchestra

Prokofiev – Symphony No.1 In D Major (Classical)

Stravinsky: Fireworks, Op.4
Stravinsky: Circus Polka (1942) (Composed For A Young Elephant)

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The Weavers At Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2 Is Bad News in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of Live Recordings Available Now

We recently did a shootout for this famous Weavers album. These are just a few of the things we had to say about our shootout winner in the notes:

“Tubey and 3D and weighty”…”very full and detailed vox”…”sweet and tubey and present”…”so much space and bass.” Both of these sides are rich and full, Tubey Magical, and tonally correct from top to bottom. The sound is big and open, with the performers front and center (as well as left and right).

Our notes for the early red label mono pressing we played noted that it was “crude, congested and awful.” There are plenty of mono pressings on Vanguard with excellent sound, but this is not one of them.

Here is an extract from the stamper sheet showing the sonic notes and the stamper numbers of the mono pressing we played.

Crude and congested vocals? On a Weavers record? What could be worse?

We didn’t even bother to play side two. Why waste any more time on such an awful sounding record?

When the voice is wrong, you my friend have yourself a completely worthless piece of vinyl.  (Other titles that get the voice wrong and therefore should be avoided by audiophiles of all stripes can be found here.)

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands. (Yes, you read that right. We play thousands of records every year, and we’ve been doing it for more than two decades . They add up!)

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that were stamped out with little regard for sound quality for more than seven decades.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless the average record will show itself to be.

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Hungarian Rhapsodies 1, 4, 5 & 6 – Wait a Minute

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

1963 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings, but this is not one of the better records produced that year. Far from it.

The sound of our vintage Mercury here, SR 90371, was awful. The overall sound was crude and the strings were shrill.

It has been our experience that many Mercury recordings suffer from these shortcomings.

But wait a minute.

Dorati recorded Hungarian Rhapsodies 2 and 3 with the London Symphony for Mercury, and those can sound amazing when you get hold of a good one.

How did they get this one so wrong?

We don’t know, and we doubt anyone else does either.

Like so many realities of the world of records, it’s a mystery, one that is very unlikely to be solved.

One of the best reasons mysteries such as this have little chance of being solved is that no one with any real expertise, using methodologies that are reliable and reproducible in any serious way, is taking on this kind of work — besides us.

We actually like testing records, and we refined* a method for doing it that is as reliable and reproducible as any method can be in the world of audio: the record shootout.

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Yet Another Art Pepper Record that Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Pepper’s New York Album from 1985 left us unimpressed. If you’re a die-hard fan and you see it for cheap, by all means, pick it up.

Those of you looking for top quality vintage vinyl should stick to the man’s better albums, of which there are plenty. We’ve done shootouts for a great many of them. Our reviews can be found here.

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.

You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.

We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, 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, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.