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.

This Mercury Copland Record Had Screechy, Shrill Strings

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Our notes for SR 90246 read:

Lively and clear but screechy strings. Dry and bright sound.

To help you avoid records with these sonic faults, we’ve linked below to others with similar problems.

Here are some titles we’ve found that tend to have dry sound, and here are some that tend to have bright sound.

And of course shrill strings are the kiss of death on any orchestral record. (Classic Records, I’m talking to you!)

None?

None of the copies of SR 90246 we played were any good, but the RFR3 / RFR6 was the worst of the bunch.

Are there good sounding pressings of the recording?

There may well be. We didn’t hear any, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

However, we have no intention of spending more money trying to find them. If you know of some killer stampers for the album, please shoot us an email.

We tend to like Dorati’s work with the London Symphony Orchestra, but in this case the better Dorati/Copland record was recorded in Minneapolis in 1959, SR 90172.

If You’re a Fan

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very 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 pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

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Wes Montgomery – The Alternative Wes Montgomery (Revisited)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wes Montgomery Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

Many years ago, back in our pre-shootout days, we played a copy of this album and liked what we’d heard.

We just got another copy in and thought the sound was not worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.

We judge it to have middling sound quality.

If you see one for cheap, pick it up, but don’t expect the sound to be anything special.

Our Old Review

This Milestone Two-Fer LP with EXCELLENT sound has 14 unreleased alternate versions of songs recorded in a variety of settings by guitarist Wes Montgomery during his period with Riverside. In many cases, the versions here are dramatically different from the versions that appear on his original albums. 

Producer Orrin Keepnews, who assembled this collection, notes, “With an artist who insisted on several takes, and the obvious need to eventually pick only one for release, we had to make some rather arbitrary, borderline decisions that at the time seemed to have doomed some excellent music to oblivion.”

This set helps to rescue some of that excellent music. The tracks feature Montgomery playing with notable musicians such as include Milt Jackson, Wynton Kelly, Kenny Burrell, Philly Joe Jones and Victor Feldman.

On compilations of unreleased material such as this, the master tapes are used to make the record. There’s no need for a copy tape to have ever been made.

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This Joan Baez Album Is Bad News in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Here is how we described the sound of one of the better stereo pressings we played recently:

Both sides of this early Stereo Vanguard pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in years) were doing just about everything right, earning superb grades on both sides.

You get pure, rich, sweet, Tubey Magical analog sound from first note to last, with Baez’s remarkably present and breathy vocals front and center where they should be.

The monos we played, however, just sounded like old records, and not very good ones at that.

Thin and edgy vocals? On a Joan Baez record? What could be worse?

When the voice is wrong on a Joan Baez record, you 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.)

We also noted that the sound may be weighty, but it’s not rich. That lack of richness is what is causing Joan’s voice to sound thin and edgy.

Full of Them

Most record collections are full of these kinds of records. They just sit on shelves, never getting played because the sound is not good enough to make the music interesting.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

The mono pressings of this title are hopeless. For other albums that don’t sound good in mono, click here.

If you see this album in mono at a garage sale, don’t even waste a buck on it. Not even a quarter. It’s just not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.

More on the subject of mono versus stereo.

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Skip the Living Stereo of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Cliburn

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

We recently dropped the needle on a copy of LSC 2601 — the first one we’ve played in years — and found a great deal to fault in the sound. Our copy with 3s/3s stampers was awful sounding.

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is a wonderful piano concerto, one that belongs in any serious record collection, but the sound on the pressing we played was definitely not up to our standards.

The piano was cranky, the overall sound a dry mess overall. It just sounded much too much like an old record.

A Shaded Dog pressing such as this might be passable on an old school audio system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality (mostly) modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

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Art Pepper’s Roadgame Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Roadgame is a live recording from 1981 on Galaxy Records, but nothing about it was impressive. Certainly not the sound. If you’re a die-hard fan and you see it for cheap, by all means, pick it up and see if it does more for you than it did for us.

Those of you looking for top quality vintage vinyl should stick to the man’s better albums, of which there are plenty.

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.

Our Job

Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.

That’s the reason we carry:

  • Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one was done as a fluke a few years ago and since abandoned. The original plum label VICS pressings are the ones that win shootouts, not something pressed by Classic Records.)
  • Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
  • Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
  • Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually, and another is in the works,)

If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers. But they almost never do.

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These PR Stampers Are NFG and Then Some

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of the music of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young performing are about the best we can do for the fans of this groundbreaking band at present.

We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites and have been since they were released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around).

We love the album but not when it sounds like this!

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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How Would You Ever Know This Was a Good Recording with these Crap Pressings to Play?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

You sure wouldn’t know this was a good recording by playing the crappy reissues Capitol put out on the Yellow Label in 1975.
We found that they tend to suffer from these sonic shortcomings:
They are either dark and recessed, and/or murky and smeary.

There are good Rainbow Label pressings and bad ones. We of course only sell the good ones.

Here is how we described our most recent White Hot shootout winner.
  • With two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this early Capitol pressing could not be beat.
  • This copy gets the midrange right, and since that is where The Beach Boys’ voices are, that puts it ahead of everything else we heard.
  • What’s shocking to those of us who have played The Beach Boys records by the bucketful is how rich and open the best pressings of this album are.
  • You will have an awfully hard time finding another Beach Boys album that sounds as good as this one, and you may just find that it simply can’t be done.

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The Mono Pressings of Come Dance With Me Are Just Awful

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Sinatra Available Now

We had two mono pressings, one on the first label, one on the second, and both were unacceptable, especially the reissue.

Side one of the early label pressing was big and tubey but the vocals were gritty. Side two was hot, crude and midrangy.

Which raises the question: what is the general sound of the mono pressing on the early label?

Answer: it has no sound, or more accurately, it has two very different sounds, and if we had ten of them we could probably say it has a lot more sounds than the ones we described. Our advice:Beware of small sample sizes, especially sample sizes of two.

The stereo pressings we listed recently had superb sound. The monos, however, just sounded like old records, and not very good ones at that. The typical record collection is full of them.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

The mono pressings are hopeless on today’s modern stereos, and for that reason we say stick with stereo. For other albums that don’t sound good in mono, click here.

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We Was Wrong about Saxophone Colossus and More in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

The album is a compilation of three major sessions from 1956, all with both Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Allmusic describes it this way:

“Saxophone Colossus, the album that really made the jazz public fully aware of the majestic talents of Sonny Rollins, is combined here with seven other great performances from the same highly creative period in the long career of this major artist.”

In 2010 we thought this two-fer had very good sound for the music it contained. Here is what we had to say all those years ago:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP has FOUR GREAT SIDES with each rating an A+ or better. The standout sides here are two and four, both rating an A++. Both sides are EXCELLENT and very lively with lots of energy and presence. Side one rates an A+ and has a wonderfully extended top end and side three rates an A+ – A++ with clean and clear sound and huge breathy horns.

Well, it turns out that in 2010 we had a lot to learn.

We were about to do a shootout for Saxophone Colossus about five [make that ten or more] years ago, and we decided to pull out some of the two-fer pressings we had sitting in the backroom to see how they would hold up against the early pressings we liked, which you can read about here.

It did not go well. The album sounded like a cheap reissue, which of course it is, but many cheap reissues sound great, so we never hold the price of the record against it when deciding whether or not it is worth cleaning and auditioning.

There are scores of budget jazz reissues from the 70s and 80s that sound great, some of them two-fer pressings.

Just not this one. It’s passable at best, and a very far cry from what the best pressings can sound like.

More on Saxophone Colossus

Our last White Hot Stamper Gold Label Mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for? Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a nice record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I like DCC’s CDs much better than their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discussed in some depth here.

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Unfortunately Mercury Did Not Produce a Good Record of Rossini Overtures

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

1960 just happens to be one of the truly great years for quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.

However, the sound of this Mercury recording, SR 90139, released that very year, was far from acceptable.

The loud passages are simply full of compressor distortion.

To be fair, we haven’t played this album by the dozens the way we have many of the records we review (more than a hundred in the case of most Beatles album).

Let’s just say I remember being disappointed by a copy or two back in the day — whenever that was — and the latest copy we auditioned was no better, so, as a practical matter, this is not a vein rich enough for us to be mining, not when there are literally hundreds of other recordings we are still pursuing. As always, if you believe you have a killer pressing, please let us know what it is so we can get one in ourselves.

It seems that many early Mercury recordings suffer from this shortcoming, and when they do, we put them in the trade-in pile and move on.

By the way, for those who are interested in these works, our favorite performance of Rossini’s Overtures on record is the one with Maag conducting the Paris Conservatoire.

This Mercury 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 others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

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

Have You Noticed…

If you’re a fan of Mercury Living Presence records — and what right-thinking audiophile wouldn’t be? — have you noticed that many of them, this one for example, don’t sound very 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 pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

There is plenty 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.

It seems as if the audiophile public has bought completely into the hype for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings. Audiophiles have too often 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.

I would say Mercury’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.

To see the 50+ Living Presence classical titles we’ve reviewed to date, click here.

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