TAS List Not-So-Good

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

Who in His Right Mind Thinks The Sheffield Track Record Is a Super Disc?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

Subtitled: Rock Instrumental Tracks For Audio Component Testing and Evaluation.

Harry Pearson calls this absolutely the best sounding rock record ever made.

If you don’t know anything about rock music, this is the kind of rock music you like.

Harry seems to have known very little about rock. Just check out the TAS List while he was still in charge and see how many real rock albums could be found there back in the day. He mistook these lame instrumentals for actual music with good sound, yet they have neither good sound, nor are they good music.

We cannot agree with HP as to the recording quality of the album either. The sound is surprisingly compressed, and the music is every bit as lifeless as the sound.

Some of the audiophile records I’ve played since I started Better Records in 1987 pissed me off so badly, what with their crappy sound and sometimes even crappier music, as is the case here, I felt they deserved to have their very own special audiophile sh*t list.

Now that I have a blog with unlimited amounts of space to review and categorize the awful records some audiophiles like, that is exactly where this hopeless release can be found.

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Acoustic Sounds Was Selling This Ridiculously Bad “TAS List” Record Back in the Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

This commentary was written circa 2001. 

I remember 15 years ago when Acoustic Sounds was selling the then in-print 25th Anniversary Island pressing (with 7U stampers as I recall) for $15, claiming that it was a TAS List record. If you’ve ever heard the pressing, you know it has no business going anywhere near a Super Disc List. It’s mediocre at best and has virtually none of the magic of the good originals.

NEWSFLASH: Just looked it up on Discogs, a site that did not exist when I wrote this commentary. My memory is apparently better than I thought it was. The 25th Anniversary Island Life Collection pressing came out in 1986.

    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 1): ILPM 9154 A-1 ILPM•9154•A1
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 1): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-1-3
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 2): ILPM 9154 A-8U-1- G10
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 2): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-

By the way, I am not aware of any of these pressings from the 80s being especially good sounding. I remember playing some of them but I don’t remember liking any of them. They were cheap reissues that satisfied those looking for import vinyl, not audiophile quality sound.

I refused to sell it back in those days, for no other reason than the fact that it’s far from a Better Sounding Record. I don’t like misrepresenting records and I don’t like ripping off my customers. It’s bad for business.

That pressing was a fraud and I was having none of it.

Chad probably didn’t even know the difference.

When you don’t know much about records, you can say all sorts of things and not get called out for them. Audiophiles are a credulous bunch and always have been. They still believe the same nonsense that I foolishly fell for back in the 80s. (And I admit that even as late as 2006 I was still a fan of certain Heavy Vinyl pressings.)

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What to Think When a New Version of Graceland Is Completely Unrecognizable?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd of a record come from?

Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version. (Maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened.)

Can that be a good thing? Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.

On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.

We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.

Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.

The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.

Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!

Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.

But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.

VTA

You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.

The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.

You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?

The Bright Side

Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.

The CD already exists. It has a sound.

The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.

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Why Is It So Hard for Mobile Fidelity to Get the Midrange Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity One-Step pressing of Blue and made the notes regarding the sound you see below.

We focussed on the quality of their pressing’s vocal reproduction, for the simple reason that a Joni Mitchell album that gets the vocals wrong is a Joni Mitchell album that no music lover and certainly no audiophile  would ever want to play.

The fact that some audiophiles do want to play this record speaks poorly of their ability to reproduce it properly. Accurate playback will reveal the problems with Joni’s voice described in detail below. The post-it for side one is on the left, for side two on the right.

We try to be very specific about the shortcomings of these records, which is why we reproduce our notes whenever they are available.

Side One

  • Tonally not far off, a bit too stringy and flat. Not awful. Congested vocals at peaks, harsh. 1+

Side Two

  • Vocal peaks like “traveling, traveling, traveling…” or “California” get squashed and harsh, lacking the real dynamics, presence and space of the vocals. No grade. (Awful in other words.)

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Witches’ Brew on Classic Records and How Crazy Wrong I Was, Part One

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

Well below the reproduction of the front page of our old catalog you will find the review I wrote in 2007 for the Classic Records’ Heavy Vinyl pressing of Witches’ Brew.

Clearly I did not care for it in the least. In fact, I thought it was one of the worst reissues I’d ever heard, so aggressive, boosted and unnatural it all but defied understanding. That anyone could play such a record and not notice how wrong it sounded did not speak well for audiophiles.

Now when I think about the Classic Records reissue of Witches’ Brew and its awful sound, it’s obviously a modern remastering I could not possibly have liked.

However, in preparing to move to Georgia in 2022, I found myself digging through some old catalogs from the early Nineties. Something I read in one of them chilled me to the bone.

There it was in black and white, lower left: my rave review for the Classic Records pressing of Witches’ Brew.

It’s actually on the front page of the catalog, along with at least one other record that I would be mortified to sell today: the OJC pressing of Saxophone Colossus.

(As soon as I find my review in the old catalog for Saxophone Colossus, I will post it. I can hardly believe I wrote it, but I did. I wrote all my catalogs back then. My lack of competence and the guilt associated with my lack of expertise at the time is undeniable. It obviously would be foolish and wrong of me to try to deny any of it, so I don’t.)

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Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment Good and Hard

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s take stock. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustible supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

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Khachaturian Conducts Spartacus – Not As Good As We Thought

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Probably more than ten years ago we had written the following about CS 6322:

The famous TAS list recording. The Decca 180 gram version is very good, but those of you who appreciate the qualities of the original mastering will want to have this one. 

Now jump ahead five years to five years ago. We played three or four copies of the album and none of them really worked for us.

The sound was a bit opaque, a bit dry, and not nearly as tubey as we would have liked. (Many Decca recordings suffer from dry strings, a shortcoming that is apparently rarely noticed by audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them.)

A good record, not a great one, and for that reason really not worth cleaning up and doing a shootout for.  The best copy would not pay for the labor to discover it.

Seems we got this one wrong. Live and learn is our motto, for precisely this reason.

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

To this day, some of the records on the TAS list seem to me better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

For a more complete list of those records, not just the ones on the TAS List, click here.

The following three things are best kept in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should:

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Another “Problematical” Classic Records Reissue

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It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of these works by Shostakovich, but I remember it as nothing special.

Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a Victrola reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D for below average.

The Classic Records pressing can currently be found on the TAS list, but we don’t think it has any business being there, along with a great many others, far more than we could ever find the time to play and review.

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If This Is Your Idea of a Reference Record, You Are in Real Trouble

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums Available Now

An astoundingly bad Sound Show!!

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Half-Speed mastered disaster if there ever was one. If this Reference LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be. It is just awful.

Mastered by none other than Stan Ricker. RR-7 also appears to still be on Harry Pearson’s TAS List.

My recent notes can be seen below. (The 1 in the upper left hand corner is my abbreviation for side one, which seems to be the worst side of the two here.)

Track two, the Red Norvo selection, is a real mess, highlighting the problems typically caused by Half Speed Mastering, especially at the hands of one of the most notorious “Audiophile” Mastering Engineers of All Time, the late Stan Ricker. Who cut as many bad sounding records as SR/2 himself? No one I can think of comes close.

His records, with few exceptions, suffer from bad bass (probably bloated and poorly defined in this case, my notes don’t say but after playing these records for thirty years I doubt I’m very off with this guess) and phony, boosted highs, which cause the striking of the mallets to be emphasized in an especially unnatural and unpleasant way.

Arthur Lyman had dramatically better sound in the 50s.

How come none of the audiophiles at Reference Records bothered to figure out how he did it?

Can anybody take sound like this seriously?

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The Classic Records Pressing of Finlandia Is Dreadful

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Sonic Grade: F

Classic Records ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than our good vintage pressings, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

[This turns out not to be true, as we discovered to our chagrin in 2014.]

In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at anything other than a nominal price.

Our current favorite pressing is this one on a budget Decca reissue. Go figure.

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