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.

What the Hell Happened to Bernie Grundman and Doug Sax?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

The best Contemporary pressings of George Cables’s 1980 release, Cables’ Vision, have truly wonderful sound. (Our complete review can be found here.)

This should not be too surprising as it was recorded by one of our favorite engineers, Allen Sides, working out of his Oceanway studios. (Supposedly he is a big fan of vintage mics and the like, with many superb and valuable examples.)

In addition, the album was mastered by Bernie Grundman, who was at the time still cutting very good sounding records, this being 1980. Since then he has gone precipitously downhill, as we have noted on the site to the dismay of his many supporters.

Bernie is the man who cut some of the best sounding records I have ever played, including many of the best Contemporary recordings, but his work in recent decades has left much to be desired.

And he sure has fooled a lot of audiophile record reviewers.

Not us, of course. We never jumped on the Classic Records bandwagon, and to this day we cannot understand how any critical listener could be fooled by the countless Heavy Vinyl mediocrities and failures that awful label put out.

You can say the same thing for Doug Sax, a man whose work took a turn for the worse long ago. The sad reality is that the dull, thick, lifeless, recessed, veiled, ambience-free records he cut for Acoustic Sounds and Klavier in the 90s were no worse than the dreck being made today.

The more things change…

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Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues Implore You to Turn Up Your Volume

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

S9 is hands down one of the best examples of a recording that only really comes to life when you have your volume up good and loud.

One obvious reason that our turn up your volume test makes a good test is that the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

There’s not much ambience to be found in their somewhat dead sounding studio, and very little high frequency boost to any instrument in the mix, which means at moderate levels this record sounds flat and lifeless.

(You could say it has that in common with most Heavy Vinyl pressings these days, assuming you wanted to take a cheap shot at those records, which, to be honest, I don’t mind doing. They suck; why pretend otherwise?)

But turn it up and man, the sound really starts jumpin’ out of the speakers, without becoming phony or hyped-up. In fact, it actually sounds more NATURAL and REAL at louder levels.  

A Quick and Easy Test

Play the record at normal levels and pick out any instrument — snare, toms, sax, bass — anything you like.

Now turn it up a notch and see if the timbre of that instrument isn’t more correct.

Add another click of volume and listen again.

I think you will see that with each increase in volume, the tonality of each instrument you hear becomes more accurate. The insturments are sounding more real than they did at lower levels.

This record would sound right at something very close to, if not actual, LIVE levels, assuming you have the system and the room that can manage it. (more…)

Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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Letter of the Week – “So dynamic and real it’s scary.”

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

Tom

So dynamic and real it’s scary. An extraordinary recording. This copy is a bit long in the tooth and worn, but the sound is overwhelming. 

Phil

Phil,

That copy won a shootout, that’s why it was so good. They don’t all sound like that.

In fact, only that one sounded like that in our last shootout, if memory serves.

Here is more on Sheffield’s first direct to disc.

Doug Sax Is The Man

The Mastering Lab was one of the greatest cutting houses to ever master records.

Doug Sax knew how to keep his lathes and amplifiers working at state-of-the-art levels. The sound quality is unsurpassed.

And he did it all with tubes.

He was very proud of his custom-made tube-driven cutting amps, designed by none other than his brother, Sherwood. His amps cut many of my favorite records of all time, including this one, an album that I have been using to test and improve the playback quality of my system for more than forty years.

To this day we get taken to task by some regrettably misguided individuals for criticizing his work on the awful audiophile records he made in the 90s, many of them for Analogue Productions. We stand firmly behind the criticism we made of those albums decades ago. Their sound has not improved with age, nor is it likely to.

Those records from the 90s sound nothing like the records Doug and his crew were making in the 70s.

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The Pareto Effect in Audio – The 80/20 Rule Is All Too Real

 

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

Even thought this commentary was written close to twenty years ago, we proudly stand behind every word.

Ambrosia’s first album does exactly what a good Test Disc should do. It shows you what your system is doing wrong, or poorly, and once you’ve fixed it, or made it better, it shows you that it actually is better, maybe even right, or at least more right than it was before.

We audiophiles need records like this. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become better audio tweakers. Because the amount of tweaking you do with your setup, components, room, electricity and the like is the only thing that can take you to the highest levels of audio.

The unfortunate reality audiophiles must eventually come to grips with in their journey to higher quality sound is that you cannot simply buy equipment that will get you there.

You can only teach yourself, painstakingly, over the course of many, many years, how to tweak and tune your equipment — regardless of its cost or purported quality — in order to reach the highest levels of audio fidelity.

And learning how to tweak and tune your equipment has other, fundamentally more important benefits in addition to its original purpose.

It helps you become a better listener. To notice aspects of the sound — the nuances and subtleties — you’ve been missing in your favorite recordings.

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Waiting For Columbus – We Broke Through in 2017

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

Way back in 2009 we had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing we listed:

This German import pressing of Waiting for Columbus is much better sounding than the typical Mastering Lab-mastered copy.

This German pressing is similar to one that came from my own personal collection, accidentally discovered way back in the early ’80s as I recall. It KILLED my domestic original, and got some things right that even my treasured Mobile Fidelity pressing couldn’t. We have been meaning to do a shootout for this album for at least the last five years, but kept running into the fact that in a head to head shootout the right MoFi pressing — sloppy bass and all — was hard to beat.

This is no longer the case, courtesy of that same old laundry list you have no doubt seen on the site countless times: better equipment, tweaks, record cleaning, room treatments, et cetera, et cetera. Now the shortcomings of the MoFi are clear for all to see, and the strengths of the best non-Half-Speed mastered pressings are too, which simply means that playing the MoFi now is an excruciating experience.

All I can hear is what it does wrong.

I was so much happier with it when I didn’t know better.

That same laundry list of improvements continued to pay big dividends, and right around 2017 or so the best original domestic Mastering Lab copies started to sound much more right to us than the German ones. 

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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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Lincoln Mayorga Volume 1 and Obvious Pressing Variations

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

After doing our first shootout many years ago for the record that single-handedly introduced the audiophile community to Direct to Disc recording, Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues, Volume One, I have to confess I was taken aback by the significant pressing variations we heard among the copies we played, 

These LPs are all over the map sonically.

Some Sheffield pressings are aggressive, many of them are dull and lack the spark of live music, some of them have wonky bass or are lacking in the lowest octave — they are prey to every fault that befalls other pressings, direct to disc and otherwise.

Which should not be too surprising. Records are records. Pressing variations exist for every album ever made. If you haven’t noticed that yet, start playing multiple copies of the same album while listening carefully and critically. If your stereo is any good at all, it should not take you long to notice how different one record sounds from another in practically every case.

Biggest problems on S9?

I would have to say smear is Number One.

When the brass loses its bite and the bells don’t have the percussive quality of metal being struck, this is not a good thing. The band also seems to lose energy when the pressing suffers from smear.

Number Two would be a lack of top end extension.

The harmonics of the sax and trumpet are muted on some copies, and the harpsichord really suffers when the top end isn’t all there. This lack of extension is most noticeable on all the lovely bells and percussion instruments that pepper the soundstage, but you can actually hear it on practically every instrument once you recognize the problem. It’s there on guitar harmonics, cymbals and snares, and on down the list.

Linked here are other records that are good for testing these same shortcomings:

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Side One Is Actually In Phase (Usually) and You Read It Here First (Probably)

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

Discovered Again is a well recorded jazz album that should be able to find a home in any audiophile’s jazz collection.

It is also one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity

According to the liner notes, this Dave Grusin album has reversed absolute phase. They tell you to switch the positive and negative at the speaker for the best transient response and spatial clarity. But get this: most side ones are NOT in reversed phase.

That out of phase quality is as plain as the nose on your face when you know what to listen for.

There’s an unpleasant hardness and hollowness to the midrange, a lack of depth, and an off-putting opaque quality to the overall sound.

With our EAR 324p phono stage, the click of a button reverses phase, also known as polarity. I can’t tell you how handy it is to have such a tool at your disposal. Checking the phase for Discovered Again couldn’t have been easier.

An Amazing Discovery

But get this: most side ones are NOT reversed phase. (All the side twos we played were however.) How about them apples! We could not have been more shocked. Here is the most famous out of phase audiophile recording in the history of the world, and it turns out most copies are not out of phase at all!

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Relax, Stare into the Middle Distance and Listen to the Players as a Group

Hot Stamper Direct-to-Discs Available Now

Many years ago we had discussed the polarity issues associated with this record:

According to the liner notes, this album has its polarity reversed. They tell you straight out to reverse the positive and negative at the speaker terminals for the best “transient response and spatial clarity.”

That out of phase quality is as plain as the nose on your face when you know what to listen for. There’s an unpleasant hardness and hollowness to the midrange, a lack of depth, and an off-putting opaque quality to the sound. The top gets dull and the bass gets weird and wonky.

With our EAR 324p phono stage, the click of a button reverses the polarity. I can’t tell you how handy it is to have such a tool at your disposal. Checking the polarity for Discovered Again couldn’t have been easier.

But get this: most side ones are NOT out of polarity. How about them apples! We could not have been more shocked. Here is the most famous reversed polarity audiophile recording in the history of the world — or maybe just the history of our world — and it turns out most copies are not reversed on side one at all.

Findings from a Few Years Back

I did not do the shootout for the album, but I wanted to check on the polarity just to hear it for myself. I must admit I had to go back and forth a number of times, using my favorite song on the album and an old Demo track from back in my earliest days in audio, the mid- to late-70s: Keep Your Eye On The Sparrow.

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