TAS List Not-So-Good

These records have no business being on anything called a list of “Super Discs.”

Khachaturian – Spartacus & Gayneh

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This is a very old review. The last time we sat down to play a number of copies of this recording, we were underwhelmed by all of them There may be some great sounding pressings out there, but we did not have any on hand and don’t want to commit the resources that would be needed to find them.

Our favorite recording that we stock, for both sound and performance, is the Mercury with Dorati from 1961.

It is guaranteed to give your system a real workout, especially if you can play it something approaching live levels in order to get the tympani and bass drum sounding right.

Our Old Review

This is a Decca In The Box British Import LP featuring Spartacus on side one and Gayaneh on side two with the Vienna Phil.

Side Two is the BEST EVER! Just play the Sabre Dance! This famous TAS List LP has a very good side one as well, 90 to 95% the best. This is a record that deserves its Super Disc ranking. It IS a Super Disc! 

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Cat Stevens Part 2 – Is This the Truest Tillerman of Them All?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this story, please click here.

Back to our real story. I listened to my good original pressing. I call it White Hot at least!

Then I put the new pressing on the table, set the SDS for 45 RPM, and got the volume just right. I proceeded to carefully adjust the VTA by ear, going up and down with the arm until the sound was right, which is simply standard operating procedure for every record we audition.

These are my actual notes for But I Might Die Tonight.

This is what I heard as the song worked its way through the various sections, in real time.  The first thing I heard at the start was Zero Tubey Magic for the first verse. One of the last things I heard at the end was No Real Space. Space is what you hear at the end for the big piano and drums finish.

Let’s take it line by line. First up:

Zero Tubey Magic

I didn’t hear much Tubey Magic on the new pressing. The best early pressings — domestic A&M Browns, Pink or Sunray UK Islands — often have simply phenomenal amounts of the stuff. It’s a hallmark of the recording.

If a new pressing comes along without it, that’s a problem. I guess that George Marino‘s cutting system at Sterling could probably do some things well, but it sure doesn’t seem to be able get the sound of tubes right. His 33 RPM cutting had no Tubey Magic, and this one has no Tubey Magic.

If I had hired him to cut a record for me and it came out sounding like this, I would find somebody else to cut records for me.

He’s dead now, rest in peace. I would doubt that anyone at Sterling has a better cutting system, and therefore no one should expect any records that have been mastered there to sound very good.

Vocal Is Clear, Clean and Dry

This is the sound you sometimes get with modern, super-clean transistor cutting equipment. It’s low distortion, like a CD is low distortion. We don’t think we should have to put up with dry vocals on records when the good pressings we have been playing all our lives have noticeably richer vocals.

Not rich like Dream With Dean, nothing is that rich, but rich and full-bodied the way the good pressings of this album always make them sound.

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If It’s Made from the Real Master Tape, Shouldn’t Blue Sound Better than This?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I wrote the commentary you see below way back in 2006. I wanted to give our customers an incentive to critically listen to the new Rhino pressing of Blue, a Heavy Vinyl reissue we actually gave out for free with every Hot Stamper of the album we sold.

We wanted our customers to try and answer the question I had posed in my review as to what aspect of the sound was improved in the new pressing, relative to the vintage copy they would have just purchased from us.

For those of you who have been reading our commentaries about modern remasterings, you know that rarely do we find any area of their sound that could be considered in any way “improved.”

As you will see from our commentary below, no less a personage than Michael Fremer had said at the time that the Rhino pressing “has far greater presence and physicality and is more immediate, dynamic, detailed and especially transparent.”

As hard as it may be to believe, I actually agreed with him about one of those qualities.

I’ve broken down his list below. If you have one of our Hot Stampers and the Rhino reissue, play them back to back and try to hear what is better about the reissue. Which of the following does it have more of compared to even the best vintage pressings?

  • More presence,
  • More physicality (whatever that is),
  • More immediacy,
  • More dynamics.
  • More detail,
  • More transparency

I had posed this question on the blog over the course of many years and never got anything approaching a serious answer.

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Diamonds and Rust – Another TAS Listed Anadisq Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Mobile Fidelity released their version of Diamonds and Rust on Anadisq in 1995, and if you want to hear a pressing that’s not murky, compressed and opaque, you would be wise to avoid their Heavy Vinyl Half-Speed.

Somehow it ended up on the TAS Super Disc List, but we could find nothing “super” about it. We felt it more properly belonged on our list of records that have no business being called Super Discs.

It was a real muckfest, as was to be expected from a record mastered by this awful label during the Anadisq era, the darkest chapter in the disgraceful history of Mobile Fidelity, which, considering the consistently dismal quality of their output, is really saying something.

Ken Lee Strikes Again

Many of the worst of them were mastered by a Mr. Ken Lee. If you happen to come across a record in a store with his name in the credits, or his initials in the deadwax, you are best advised to drop it back in the bin and keep moving. Anything else is just asking for trouble.

To be fair, MoFi made some reasonably good sounding records too. For those of you whose budget is on the limited side, if you find an affordable copy of any of these MoFis, you are probably not wasting your money.

Although I had a long way to go in this hobby in the early days of my audiophile record business, even then I could tell how bad the Anadisq series that Mobile Fidelity released in the 90s was. They produced one awful sounding record after another, with not a single winner that I knew of. I sold them — my bad, an ethical lapse for which I must apologize — but I sure never recommended them or had anything good to say about them.

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The Fox Touch Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

The review reproduced below was written in 2010. More recently (2015 or so) I have played copies of these Crystal Clear organ recordings and been much less impressed.

The ambience is a fraction of what it should be, and the reason I know that is that the vintage organ recordings we play these days have dramatically more size and space than these audiophile pressings do. (We wrote about it here.)

A classic case of live and learn.

As we like to say, all these audiophile records sound great sitting on the shelf. When you finally pull one out to play it, you may find that it doesn’t sound the nearly as good as you remember, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a sign you are making progress in this hobby.

Ten years from now, if during that time you’ve worked hard on your stereo system, room, electricity and all the rest, your Heavy Vinyl pressings will also have plenty of flaws you never knew were there.

Our customers know what I am talking about. Some have even written us letters about it.

Linked here are some other records that are good for testing orchestral depth, size and space.

Our old review — way off the mark it seems!

White Hot on both sides, a DEMO DISC quality organ Direct to Disc recording.

Full, rich, spacious, big and transparent, with no smear.

The size and power of a huge church organ captured in glorious direct to disc analog.

We’ve never been fans of Crystal Clear, but even we must admit this recording is Hard To Fault.

Are we changing our tune about Audiophile records? Not in the least; we love the ones that sound right.

The fact that so few of them do is not our fault. 

The methods used to make a given record are of no interest whatsoever to us. We clean and play the pressings that we have on hand and judge the sound and music according to a single standard that we set for all such recordings. Organ records, in this case, get judged against other organ records. If you’ve been an audiophile for forty years as I have, you’ve heard plenty of organ records.

Practically every audiophile label on the planet produced at least one, and most made more than one. Some of the major labels made them by the dozen in the ’50s and ’60s, and many of those can sound quite wonderful.

Who made this one, how they made it or why they made it the way they did is none of our concern, nor in our mind should it be of any concern to you. The music, the sound and the surfaces are what are important in a record, nothing else.

Richter was making recordings of this caliber for London in the ’50s. Clearly the direct to disc process is not revelatory when it comes to organ records (or any other records for that matter), but finding vintage Londons with quiet vinyl that sound as good as this disc does is neither easy nor cheap these days, so we are happy to offer our Bach loving customers a chance to hear these classic works sounding as good as they can outside of a church or concert hall.

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Records Like This Make Audiophiles the Laughing Stocks of the Music World

More Reviews and Commentaries for Heavily Processed Recordings

This album has some of the worst sound I have ever heard in my life, worse than The Hunter even, and that’s saying something.

If this kind of crap is what audiophiles choose to play, then they deserve all the derision heaped upon them.

We’re glad we no longer offer embarrassments such as The Well, although we used to, many years ago. In our defense we would simply offer up this old maxim: de gustibus non est disputandum.

Our old slogan was Records for Audiophiles, Not Audiophile Records, but we also followed this business rule: Give the Customer What He Wants.

Now we give the customer what he wants, as long as he wants one of the best sounding pressings of the album ever made. (In this case obviously there is no good sounding pressing.)

How Bad Is It?

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings (although there is no acceptable pressing of this record, vintage or otherwise) — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records pass/not-yet, implying that the admirers of these kinds of phony-sounding records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope, and if they devote enough time and money to the effort, they can get where they need to be, the same way we did.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Famous and Pricey RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The most recent copy we’ve played of LSC 2405 left us feeling underwhelmed. We expected more from such a famous (and pricey!) TAS-Listed Living Stereo record.

In the past we’ve auditioned the Victrola and the Decca SPA reissue, and both seemed to be reasonably good but not quite good enough to offer our customers. We were still looking for a better Fifth Symphony, and paid top dollar for this copy hoping it would be the one to make a shootout possible.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The sound of this copy was rich but opaque. We would call it no better than passable. It might be a good sounding record on a different pressing, but we doubt it could be a great one, and we really don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to prove ourselves wrong on that account.

As the best of the RCA pressings demonstrate beyond all doubt, 1960 was a great year for classical and orchestral recordings.

What the modern mastering engineers of today do to such wonderful recordings is another thing altogether. Bernie Grundman remastered this one in the 90s for Classic Records, and we can describe the work he did for them in just four words.

To sum it all up, LSC 2405 is unlikely to sound very good on high quality modern equipment. If your system leans more towards the old school approach — vintage tubes, vintage tables, horn speakers, that sort of thing — then the lack of transparency won’t be nearly as bothersome as it is to us.

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Carnival of the Animals on Klavier Is Another Doug Sax-Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Saint-Saens Available Now

Yet another murky, smeary audiophile piece of vinyl trash from the mastering lathe of the formerly brilliant Doug Sax. He used to cut the best sounding records in the world. (Exhibit A: this one.)

Then he started working for perhaps the worst record label of all time and to my knowledge never cut a good sounding record again.

This record may be on the TAS Super Disc list, but we don’t think it belongs there. Instead, it belongs on the bad TAS list that we created specifically for these far-from-super records.

To be fair, the real EMI is on there as well, ASD 2753. However, including the Klavier on the list brings into doubt the compentence of whoever is curating it these days.

This Klavier pressing, along with all the Classic Records titles, as well as other modern reissues, renders the advice found there all but useless. Is anyone calling attention to all the bad sounding records that have lately been recommended by The Absolute Sound? I think we might just be the only ones. If you know of any others, please email me at tom@better-records.com.

Doug Sax

For those of us who remember the consistently superb work Doug Sax was doing in the 70s, we sadly note that he passed away in 2015. I was honored to have met him a few years before then at a Chopin concert with Lincoln Mayorga performing on the piano. (Impressively performing, I might add. He played the complete Chopin Preludes from memory, all 24 of them.)

Both he and Lincoln were gentlemen and artists of the highest caliber. Needless to say, I hope this awful sounding Klavier is not the kind of record that he would want to be remembered by.

On this record, in Doug’s defense it should be noted that he had only second generation tapes to work with, which is neither here nor there as these pressings are not worth the dime’s worth of vinyl used to make them and should never have seen the light of day.

Can this dubby, smeary sound possibly be what EMI engineer Stuart Eltham was after?

Hard to believe. We’ve played plenty of his recordings and we cannot ever remember any of the non-audiophile pressings having this kind of sound.

But isn’t that just the way? The mainstream labels mass produce the good sounding pressings and the audiophile labels produce the limited edition junk.

Now there’s a rule of thumb you might want to keep in mind, especially if you’ve made the mistake of buying any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we reviewed in 2024 and 2025, a parade of horribles that defy understanding.

Actually, if we understand that there is a need for vinyl product for the lo- to mid-fi record collector market, it makes perfect sense. That’s what Klavier was in the business of producing, and now everybody wants in on the action, hence the proliferation of crap Heavy Vinyl pressings coming to market, practically every one even worse sounding than the last.

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The Wall Sounds Terrible on these “Audiophile” Rip-offs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

This Japanese import is one of the dullest, muddiest, worst sounding copies of The Wall we have ever played. It is clearly made from a second generation tape (or worse!).

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

And somehow this pressing, or one very much like it, ended up as on the TAS Super Disc List. I would hope that the copy Harry played sounded a whole lot better than this one.

The version on the TAS Super Disc list is EMI 4814, which I believe is the British original. Conventional wisdom? Is The Absolute Sound capable of any other?

And the CBS Half-Speed is every bit the mudfest that the Half-Speed is.

How is it that the worst sounding pressings are so often marketed to audiophiles as superior to their mass-produced counterparts? In our experience, more often than not they are just plain awful, inferior in every way but one: surface quality.

And the knock on these CBS Half-Speeds is that they are made from the same vinyl CBS used to press all their other records.

I remember buying them back in the late-70s at Tower Records. They were only $12.99 when Mobile Fidelity pressings were $17.99, garnering a premium price because they were pressed in Japan. Fool that I was, I bought plenty of both, not to mention those made by Nautilus, Direct Disk Labs and plenty of others too painful to think about.

Dear audiophiles, stop collecting crappy audiophile pressings with quiet vinyl and just switch to CD already. You’ll be getting better sound and saving yourself a lot of money to boot. You simply cannot defend analog with this kind of junk.

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Venerable or Execrable? If It’s Athena the Chances Are Good It’s the Latter

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

I spied an interesting quote on the Acoustic Sounds site many years ago:

“…Analogue Productions’ 45rpm remastering improves upon the venerable Athena LP release from the late 80s, with better dynamics and a fuller ‘middle’ to the orchestral sonority.” – Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound, October 2010

For some reason Andrew uses the word “venerable” when a better, certainly more accurate term would have been “execrable.” Having played the record in question this strikes us as the kind of mistake that would not be easy to make.

Athena was a godawful audiophile label that managed to put out all of five records before going under, only one of which was any good, and it’s definitely not this one.

It was in fact the Debussy piano recording with Moravec, mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig himself, a man who knows his classical music, having cut scores if not hundreds of records for Nonesuch and other labels in the 60s and 70s.

From the jacket:

Analogue Master Recording™

Unlike other remastering companies, Athena Records always uses the ORIGINAL ANALOG MASTER SESSION TAPES. In this case, The Master Lacquers were cut directly by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab so you know it will sound superb.

Our Hot Stamper listing for the Vox pressing:

This famously good sounding Vox pressing os Symphonic Dances has been remastered a number of times, but you can be sure that the Hot Stamper we are offering here will beat any of those modern pressings by a wide margin in any area that has to do with sound (surfaces being another matter and one we won’t go into here).

The sound of this recording on the best pressings is dynamic, lively and BIG. The music just jumps out of the speakers, bringing the power and vibrant colors of a symphony orchestra right into your listening room. Guaranteed to put to shame 95% or more of all the classical records you own, even if you own lots of our Hot Stampers. [Can’t say I would agree with that in 2023.]

The bass is phenomenal on this recording, assuming you have a copy that has the bass cut and pressed right. This one sure does! Few Golden Age classical recordings from the 50s will have the kind of bass that’s found on this record.

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