Hot Stamper Pressings Only Offered on Import Available Now
Sonic Grade: F (DD Labs) / D (MoFi)
If you have the Direct Disc Labs Half-Speed of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road you have one truly awful record in your collection, so sucked out in the midrange, so compressed everywhere, what the hell were they thinking making this rockin’ album sound like that? It’s positively disgraceful.
It makes MoFi look like they knew what they doing, and we know that sure isn’t true.
To be honest we did not actually have a copy of the MoFi handy for this shootout, but in our defense let us just say that we’ve heard their pressing many times over the course of the last twenty years. It’s better than the DD Labs version but not good enough for me to want to play it — compressed and sucked-out like practically every record they ever made, just not as badly as the DD Labs version.
The most obvious problems with the sound of this album are ones common to many if not most rock records of the era: lack of presence, too much compression, smear, lack of weight from the lower mids on down — we hear lots of Classic Rock records with this litany of shortcomings.
But it’s not the fault of the master tape, it’s probably not even the fault of the mastering engineer most of the time.
It’s just plain bad pressing quality. The sound simply doesn’t get stamped onto the vinyl right and the result is one or more of the problems above.
And if you don’t know how to clean your records properly, forget it, you have virtually no chance of hearing good sound on GYBR. Our last shootout was 2022 if that tells you anything, and it’s rare for us to have any Hot Stamper pressings of any of his albums in stock on any given day.
