Bernie Grundman, Engineer (Vintage) – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “To think I spent all those years playing a record that was bright and edgy, none the wiser to matrix numbers and pressing variations.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

Our good customer who goes by the handle ab_ba on the web wrote to us about his experience with the White Hot Stamper pressing of Michael Jackson’s Thriller he recently acquired.

Part one of his letter can be found here.

Here he tells us about the shootout he conducted, which included a “pricey Japanese pressing” and a pressing that the forums recommended as the “holy grail.”

A few weeks later, on the eve of the closing of the return window, I shot it out against the best of my other copies. They range from the copy I grew up with, one of the few records from childhood that I held onto, to a pricey Japanese pressing in great shape (purchased long ago, when I thought Japanese pressing were where it’s at), to some copies I’ve picked up over the years because they looked to be in good shape and they were just five bucks, and a pressing that the forums told me was the “holy grail.”

None stacked up to the white hot stamper. In fact, they really weren’t even close. Here’s what I found:

The copy I grew up with is bright and edgy. To think, I spent all those years playing and re-playing a record that was bright and edgy, none the wiser to matrix numbers and pressing variations.

Some other lucky kid back then was surely listening to the copy I now own. I wonder if he ever said to himself, “wow, there’s something about this record. It sounds really special.”

The pressing with a sought-after matrix code had phenomenal bass, but the vocals were recessed. I’d so easy to be impressed with those huge drums on Billie Jean, but that alone is not enough to tell you it’s a great pressing. A lot of pressings seem to get that right.

My Japanese pressing was clear and full. But too smooth. The guitars don’t bite. Also, it fatigued me by about halfway through the side. This is energetic music. It might exhaust you, but it doesn’t have to fatigue you. This is an example of where if you don’t have a white hot stamper to compare it to, you’ll just assume your version sounds as good as it can get.

Dear ab_ba,

Most Japanese pressings cater to the sound a mid-fi system would need to sound good and a hi-fi system would find disastrous. They are almost always made from dubbed tapes, which are then brightened up in the mastering phase since that is the sound that appeals to the Japanese market for some reason unknown to me. (Old school audio equipment — horn speakers and vintage tube electronics — would be my guess.)

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Letter of the Week – “I never thought I’d spend $600 on ‘it’s only a record.’ But it is worth every goosebump.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Aja he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

You bastard! You did it again. GREAT pressing of AJA Steely Dan – promo album.

This is by far the best recording I’ve heard. I am a freak listener. Everything has to sound perfect, I hear everything.

I savor every note, every instrument, every vocal. The separation and presence of each sound is amazing.

Well done. I wish you continued success. I never thought I’d spend $600 and more on “it’s only a record.” But it is worth every goosebump.

Rocco

Rocco,

By far the best recording you’ve heard? That is high praise indeed!

So glad you liked the record as much as we did. We heard 600 bucks worth of sound and apparently so did you.

Goosebumps are indeed expensive, but you could spend $1,000 or $10,000 on Heavy Vinyl and not even get a single one, so, money well spent.

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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.

I was going to reveal what quality I thought it was at some point, but I have since decided that it is better left for the reader to figure out for himself rather than have me tell him. What do you learn from being given an answer? Nothing, or next to nothing, so why do it?

Similarly, the Heavy Vinyl Led Zeppelin II and Brothers in Arms reissues are very good sounding records, with obvious shortcomings which I had hoped my readers would be able to spot and write to me about. None have to date, or at least none have told me what they are, which works out to be more or less the same thing.

I will have a great deal more to say on this subject down the road, one that is critically important for audiophiles regardless of their experience. For now let me leave you with what Steve Hoffman had to say about the work he did on Blue. (You can find the quote on Joni Mitchell’s website.)

This is a really wonderful album; Joni just laid it all out there for the world to hear. Brave, especially back in the day & I feel that this new version is the true giant killer.

Unlike the original 1970’s pressings, this new version was mastered without ANY added compression whatsoever, making it a true problem child in cutting (of our own making) but I wouldn’t have it any other way. After many spoiled lacquer masters and one too many Altoids, it was finished to everybody’s satisfaction.

The effort was worth it. The ebb and flow of the music is totally intact. Parts were cut, plated and pressed at Record Tech (RTI) and the actual 1971 Reprise master tape (as recorded and mixed at A&M Recording Studios) was used in disk cutting, bypassing the usual/”EQ’d and Compressed Cutting Master” completely.

Unlike the DCC, most of the songs on this vinyl version were cut without ANY equalization at all so this will be the closest you will ever be able to get to the sound of the true master tape of Blue. It was exciting to work on and I’m sure it will please y’all.

Steve Hoffman, mastering engineer

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Letter of the Week – “The Hot Stamper copy went WAY beyond what I expected in terms of the sonic shortcomings I could hear on the other pressings.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

I got the shipment today and it was meticulously packed. It all got here in perfect shape.

I could not resist doing a little side-by-side comparison of Aja tonight, as I have several copies. When I realized that different pressings sounded different (before I found your site) I began accumulating multiple copies, but I find it quite difficult to get loads of mint minus copies of anything. [It’s not as easy as it used to be, that’s for sure.]

Anyway, I was totally blown away. The Hot Stamper copy went WAY beyond what I expected in terms of the sonic shortcomings I could hear on the other pressings. Just… amazing… music.

The good news is my record collection should shrink by at least 75% in size as I sell off all the old multiple copies!

Adrian B.

Adrian,

You TOTALLY get it.

You do your own shootouts.

That way, you have no trouble recognizing how much better our pressing sounds than the ones you own. (This is not a foregone conclusion. You could have told us that you liked one of your copies better, and we would have refunded your money. We can be right a lot, but we can’t be right all the time, nor should we expect to be.)

And you then got rid of the stuff that is not worth keeping because it’s not worth playing.

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Thoughts on Hearing an Amazing Copy of Thriller in the 80s

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

The killer copy of Thriller that we discovered in our 2006 shootout gave us a whole new appreciation for just how good the album could sound. It was a real breakthrough, and proof that significant progress in audio is just a matter of time and effort, the more the better.

Our review from 2006

I remember twenty years ago (that would be 1986) playing Thriller and thinking the sound was transistory, spitty, and aggressive.

Well, I didn’t have a Triplanar tonearm, a beautiful VPI table and everything that goes along with them back then. (More here.)

Now I can play the record.

I couldn’t back then.

All that spit was simply my table, arm, cartridge and setup not being good enough, along with all the garbage downstream from them feeding the speakers.

The record is no different, it just sounds different now. Which is what makes the record a great test. If you can play this record, you can probably play practically any pop and rock record. (Orchestral music is quite another matter.)

This Pressing Changes Everything

This pressing has a side two that’s so amazing sounding that it completely changed my understanding and appreciation of this album. The average copy is a nice pop record. This copy is a Masterpiece of production and engineering.

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Thriller Is Proof that Bernie Grundman Was Cutting Great Records in 1982

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

This commentary was written many years ago, probably in 2007, right around the time that our system really started to get Thriller to sound good, owing to advances we had made in cleaning and playback. We went into a great deal more detail about those changes in this commentary, which compares the sound of Thriller from the 80s and the sound of Thriller today.

Our old friend Bernie Grundman handled the mastering for Thriller and managed to do a really nice job. Unfortunately, most copies of this mass-produced classic don’t give you as much of the magic as other copies, including the ones BG mastered.

The sound on this copy is huge — big, wide, deep, and open, with the kind of three-dimensional soundstaging that lets the music unfold in front of you and around you as well. You get the bottom-end punch that’s so crucial to this music and tons of energy. The bass is meaty and well-defined, showing you the rhythmic foundation that the music needs. The sound is transparent with amazing texture to practically every element.

Michael’s voice is marvelous on this copy — breathy, textured, and positively dripping with emotion (just listen to him break down on The Lady in My Life).

Thanks to constant improvements in our stereo, we’re now getting this album to sound better than it ever has. Extended highs appeared where none had been before. We were hearing synthesizers buried deep in the mix we’d never heard. All of a sudden, these ’80s pop records had amazing analog magic.

If your system is up to the task, you won’t believe how big and lively this album sounds. Who woulda thunk it?

In a more recent commentary we went into some detail about Bernie Grundman’s shortcomings as a mastering engineer.

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Listening in Depth to Blue

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with specific track by track advice to help you evaluate your copy of Blue.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

Our Overview

The better pressings (which tend to be the ones mastered by Bernie Grundman in his glory days) bring out the breathy quality to Joni’s voice, and she never sounds strained either. They are sweet and open, with good bass foundation and transparency throughout the frequency range.

The best pressings (and today’s better playback equipment) have revealed nuances in this recording — and of course the performances of all the players along with it — that made us fall in love with her music all over again. Of all the tough nuts to crack, this was the toughest, yet somehow copies emerged from our shootouts that made it easy to focus on the sonic merits of Blue and ignore its shortcomings.

Hot Stampers have a way of doing that. You forget it’s a record; it’s now just music. The right record and the right playback will bring Joni’s music to life in a way that you cannot imagine until you hear it.

That is our guarantee on Blue — better than you ever thought possible or your money back.

Side One

All I Want

This is a do-or-die song for side one. When Joni sings “traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling,” she really pushes on the last couple of them, and even the best copies have a hard time dealing with it. When a copy of this record comes in, that first line often tells me that there is no hope for side one.

If an LP can get through that first line properly, it’s at least a ‘B’ and more often than not a truly Hot Stamper.

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Not that Long Ago Blue Was a Nut We Just Could Not Crack

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

Allow me to tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

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Letter of the Week – “For me it is like the difference between 2-D and 3-D”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom, 

As a newcomer to your business, and to the entire concept of “Hot Stamper” records, I was naturally skeptical. Many of us have invested in a wide variety of vinyl that simple failed to live up to expectations. Initially I was going to order one and only one record from you, and test your bold promises. Instead, I ended up ordering a nice variety to truly put it to the test… investing a couple thousand dollars on faith. In short, I am now your customer for life.

As a point of reference, my system includes a pair of Wilson Audio Alexia powered by 2 monoblock McIntosh tube Amps and a Mc-tube preamp. Most importantly, a Brinkmann mag drive turntable with a Sumiko low output moving coil cartridge. So, not the world’s best system, but enough to discern what is to follow.

I ordered the following:
* Carole King Tapestry, ((White Hot Pressing)
* The Doobie Brothers, What Were Once Vices (White Hot Pressing)
* James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (White Hot Pressing)
* Paul McCartney, McCartney (Super Hot Pressing)
* Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Donald Fagen, The Nightfly (White Hot Pressing)

I warmed up my amps with the tuner for an hour or so and then sat and listened to some of my other records and reacquainted myself with the music from my system. First up was “What Were Once Vices…”. It was immediately apparent that I was getting a range as wide, if not wider than anything I had ever heard from my stereo. Then when I got to the last song on side one, “Road Angel” the guitar and drum interplay in the instrumental jam completely blew me away. Midway through I took the volume from loud to louder, and it exposed nothing but pure, sweet rock and roll. Literally gave me goose bumps.

I then listened to “Countdown to Ecstasy” and in this instance I owe a clean original copy, so I put it to the test. Back to back. I did not have to go past “Bodhisattva” to know it was no contest. If I had to apply a percentage, something like 20% more music comes from the Hot Stamper, and this (like all of my orders) is one of my all time favorite albums.

I won’t go on and on, suffice to say that the experience repeated itself on all of the above.

Even the Fagen copy was WAY better than the 1982 MoFi copy I paid an arm and a leg for. I have always thought that record had a true analog quality, was surprised the first time I learned it was laid down on a digital track. The Hot Stamper even adds to this great sounding record.

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Bernie Finds the Right Sound for The Genius After Hours

charlgeniusHot Stamper Pressings of Titles that Sound Better in Mono Available Now

This commentary was written about ten years ago has been updated with the latest information from the shootout we did in 2025.

Proof positive that there is nothing wrong with remastering vintage recordings if you know what you’re doing. These sessions from 1956 (left off of an album that Allmusic liked a whole lot less than this one) were remastered in 1985 and the sound — on the better copies mind you — is correct from top to bottom.

The highest compliment I can pay a pressing such as this is that it doesn’t sound like a modern remastered record.

It sounds like a very high quality mono jazz record from the 50s or 60s.

Unlike modern recuts, it doesn’t sound EQ’d in any way.

It doesn’t lack ambience the way modern records do.

It sounds musical and natural the way modern records rarely do.

If not for the fairly quiet vinyl, you would never know it’s not a vintage record. The only originals we had to play against it were too noisy and worn to evaluate critically. They sounded full, but dark and dull and somewhat opaque.

UPDATE 2025

The originals on the Atlantic Plum and Red Label are not the way to go on this album. Our shootout notes below make that clear. Take our friendly and helpful advice and steer clear of them.

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