Doug Sax, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

We love his work in the 70s. However, his audiophile records from the 90s leave much to be desired and should be avoided by anyone looking for good sound.

50 Years Later and What, If Anything, Has Changed?

Audiophile Quality Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

In 1975 Klavier licensed and reissued some well-regarded EMI recordings with mastereing by one of our favorite mastering engineers, Doug Sax. They were to be produced here in the states for the domestic audiophile market.

I wrote a long piece many years ago about how ridiculously bad these records sounded. You can find it here.

I just happened to look up the album today to find out what year it had come out (1975) and discovered that back in 2015, when I first wrote about the record, I had somehow ignored the fact that not all the pressings were produced the same way. There was a special version made for a company called Eastern Pacific Sounds, no doubt serving the Asian audiophile market. It differed in ways that will be familiar to the audiophiles of today, even though it came out 50 years ago.

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 1,000 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality. Klavier records are used by many manufacturers and audio specialty shops for demonstrating their equipment.

For the Klavier release of Offenbach Overtures with Fremaux, our current favorite, they managed to produce even fewer pressings per stamper:

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 500 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality.

The problem with this way of thinking about records has always been a lack of evidence to support any of the supposed gains in sound or pressing quality. As with so much of audio and records, no doubt confirmation bias is at the heart of the problem

We did some testing ourselves years ago for the 45 RPM “Very Limited Edition” of Rumours, in which we demonstrated fairly conclusively that no two records sound the same, no matter how few you press from a stamper. (You can read all about it here.)

We discussed the conventional wisdom of buying promos so that you can get “test pressing” quality or something close to it. This also has proven to be of little value.

And now we have “one-step” pressings, some of which have been reviewed on this blog, either by me, Robert Brook or my customers. (This might be a good place to start to learn more about their sound quality, which, as far as we can tell, is consistently dismal.)

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Does It Seem to You That This Guy Knows Much About Dark Side of the Moon?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

It doesn’t to me, but I admit to some bias when it comes to Dark Side of the Moon. I must have played more than a hundred different pressings over the last forty-odd years.

Year after year I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, and again and again I was proved wrong. (To be clear, I proved myself wrong. Shootouts have a way of doing that.)

We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five or six years ago [make that ten]. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think makes for some good reading to this day.

It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality to listen for on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are some without.

Is this fellow listening for midrange tonality? If you watch the video and he says he is, then you can let me know!  And if not, you can ask him in the comments why he wasn’t. Maybe he just likes the chiming clocks and the deep bass of the heartbeat.

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Nobody Like Us Existed in the Record World of the 90s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A newer customer wrote to me years ago about the amazing sounding Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West that we’d sent him. He noted that his AP Heavy Vinyl pressing was “quite decent,” a characterization we found distressing.

Here is his original letter, along with some of what we wrote back. Newer comments and links have also been added.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

Some things have changed since I wrote that screed many years ago. For example, we don’t find the sound of the OJC pressing of the album acceptable these days, a subject I plan to address before too long [and have yet to do].

The bottom line is this:

The Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West you have now in your possession is the one that allows you to hear what that album is supposed to sound like.

Not the way Chad Kassem likes his records to sound: opaque, bloated, dull, smeary and compressed.

No, your White Hot Stamper has the brilliant sound that Roy DuNann recorded all those years ago, sounding, I believe, the way he wanted it to. This is of course only an opinion, but it is an opinion based on playing dozens of early Contemporary pressings and well as many vintage reissues that actually can beat them. Examples of both can be found here.

But Somebody Needed to Figure It Out, Right?

All that was needed was for some group to come along who could properly clean a batch of vintage pressings, original or otherwise, play them, figure out what the best copies do that the average copy doesn’t, identify that best copy, and send it your way.

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Lincoln Mayorga, Pianist – Reverse Your Polarity!

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

This Sheffield Direct-to-Disc LP is one of the top Sheffields.

Lincoln Mayorga is an accomplished classical pianist: this is arguably his best work. (I had a chance to see him perform at a recital of Chopin’s works early in 2010 and he played superbly — for close to two hours without the aid of sheet music I might add.) 

You might want to try reversing the phase when playing this LP; it definitely helps the sound, a subject we discuss below.

With the polarity reversed, this is a top quality solo piano recording in every way.

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity.

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More Bass or More Detail, Which Is Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

With Doug Sax mastering from the real tape, on the best pressings of Who By Numbers you get a rock solid bottom end like you will not believe. Talk about punchy, well-defined and deep, man, this record has bass that you sure don’t hear too often on rock records. 

And it’s not just bass that separates the men from the boys, or the real thing (a vintage pressing) from the current reissues (on Heavy Vinyl) for that matter. It’s weight, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, that area that spans roughly 150 to 600 cycles.

It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern.

It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Glyn Johns intended.

The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

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

Hot Stamper shootouts for this album should be carried out:

How else can you expect to hear the recording at its best?

Based on our experience, The Who by Numbers sounds best:

Lincoln and Doug Produced The Audiophile Sgt. Pepper of Its Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Lincoln Mayorga Available Now

When I was selling audio equipment back in the 70s (Audio Research, Fulton speakers), The Missing Linc this was a favorite Demo Disc in our store.

With a big speaker like the Fulton J, the bass drum at the end of track two would shake the walls. At the time I had never heard a record with bass that went remotely that deep. (The album came out in 1972. I’m guessing I probably first heard a copy in ’75 or ’76 when I bought my Fultons, which would have been sometime in my early twenties.)

Every bit as amazing to me was the string quartet on side 2. You could actually hear the musicians breathing and turning the pages on their music stands, just as if you were actually in their “living presence.” No recording I had ever owned allowed me to hear that level of natural detail.

This is one of the albums that made me realize how good audio in the home could be.

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Analogue Productions Fails Spectacularly Right Out of the Gate

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Albums Available Now

You may remember what a disaster the Analogue Productions version of Jazz Giant from the 90s was.

Or maybe you agree with a certain writer that they were god’s gift to the record lovers of the world in need of higher quality pressings. We thought they were crap right from the get-go and were not the least bit shy about saying so,

I haven’t heard the new 45 RPM version and don’t intend to play one, but I seriously doubt that it sounds like our good Hot Stamper pressings. We have yet to hear a single Heavy Vinyl 45 that sounds any good to us, judged by the standards we set in our shootouts.

Actually, to run the risk of sounding even more pedantic than usual, the records themselves set the standards.

We simply grade them on the curve they establish for themselves.

We guarantee that none of their LPs can hold a candle to our vintage records or your money back. If you have one of the new pressings and don’t know what’s wrong with it, or don’t think that anything is wrong with it, try one of ours.

It will show you just how much better a real record can sound, with more space, more transparency, more energy, more presence, more drive, more ambience — more of everything that’s good about the sound of music on vinyl.

It is our contention that no one alive today makes records that sound as good as the vintage LPs we sell. Once you hear one of our Hot Stamper pressings, those Heavy Vinyl records you bought might not ever sound right to you again.

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Acoustic Sounds Hired Doug Sax to Ruin a Classic Chet Baker Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

The less said about this awful mid-90s Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions the better. What a murky piece of crap it was.

Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing was very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, twenty-five thirty-one years later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day.

Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out for decades.

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How Do the The Mastering Lab Pressings of Sticky Fingers Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced like this:

If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is.

A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).

After hearing so much buzz about it, we finally broke down and ordered a German TML pressing about a year ago. Having played scores of phenomenally good sounding copies of the album over the past fifteen or so years, we were very skeptical that anyone could cut the record better than the mastering engineers who inscribed Rolling Stones Records into the dead wax on the early pressings. (I could find no mastering engineers credited.)

Well, the results were not good. As we suspected would be the case, we were not impressed in the least with what The Mastering Lab — one of the greatest independent cutting houses of all time, mind you — had wrought.

Their version is not really even good enough to charge money for. It might have earned a grade of One Plus, just under the threshold for a Hot Stamper that we would put on the site these days. Decent, but not much more than that.

Wait, There’s More

We subsequently learned that it is the British TML pressings that are supposed to be the best.

So we got one of those in, an A3/B4 copy.

Better, but good enough? Barely.

Here are the notes for the copy we played. For those who have trouble reading our writing, I have transcribed the notes as follows:

Side One

Track one:

Weighty, a bit veiled or smeary. Backing vox kinda lost.

Track three:

Very full, rockin’ but not the sparkle/space.

Kinda compressed.

Not as huge.

Side Two

Track two:

Not as rich, clear.

A bit pushy/dry vox.

No real space.

Thick drums

Track one:

This works better.

A bit hard, but full and lively.

This Sound?

Is this the sound audiophiles are raving about?

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The Who By Numbers – How Did We Know Side Two Was Slightly Veiled?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Here is how we might typically describe one of our Shootout Winning copies:

Who By Numbers returns to the site for only the second time in over three years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage Polydor import pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too.

Glyn Johns‘s magic is on display here, with open mics in a big studio space creating the 3D soundscapes we love.

Features two of their most iconic songs, “Slip Kid” and “Squeezebox,” and both sound incredible on this copy.

To back it all up, here are the notes for that very copy.

We started playing track three on side one, Squeeze Box, and returned to that track when we had two top copies to play against each other in the final round. Which one won? The one with “the most body and tubes.”

Note that side two of this copy was slightly veiled compared to the side two of the best copy we played, the one that would go on to earn 3+.

We don’t like veiled records — records where there is a curtain, no matter how transparent, in front of the musicians. Heavy Vinyl pressings are typically quite veiled and recessed in the midrange compared to their vintage vinyl counterparts, and that sound is simply not going to cut it with us. (Other folks may prefer a different sound it seems.)

Midrange presence is one of the most important qualities of any rock or pop recording we evaluate. You want Roger Daltry to be front and center, neither recessed nor behind a veil.

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