Live and Learn

Here we discuss the records we think we got, uh, wrong.

It’s not really a problem for us though. We feel no need to cover up our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting previous errors is how we’ve managed to learn so much about records that no one else seems to know.

Gaining knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is always slow, incremental and riddled with errors and bad judgments.

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

By playing the records grouped here, under rigorously controlled conditions, on top quality equipment, we found out just how much better or worse they are than are we thought.

Straight Shooter’s Punchy Drums

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bad Company Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The bulk of this commentary was written in 2009 and then amended a number of time since.

In late 2009 we had just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ album, our first since January of ’08, and what we were hearing this time around BLEW OUR MINDS. This record got a whole lot better over the course of the last twenty months or so. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the drum sound on this record is right up there with the most present, punchy and realistic I have ever heard on record. 

I saw a friend’s band play recently in a small club and remember thinking how amazingly punchy the snare sounded (the sound coming from the live instrument itself and the club’s speakers) and this record has that kind of drum sound!

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

There’s nothing like live music — everybody knows that — but good copies of this album get you a whole lot closer than I ever expected to get.

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Mobile Fidelity’s Approach to Mastering – I Have a Theory

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

I have a theory about why MoFi’s mastering approach tended to work for the Waiting for Columbus album when it failed so miserably for so many others. It goes a little something like this. 

Back in their early days, MoFi tended to add bass and treble to practically every record they mastered, regardless of whether or not the master tape they were using needed a boost.

A little extra sparkle up top and a little extra kick down low was what the audiophile public seemed to want.  We call this the smile curve and lots of audiophile records have a case of it.

Truth be told, I was a member of that group and I know I did.

Fortunately for them, Waiting for Columbus is an album that can ofteny use a little at both ends. Rarely did The Mastering Lab supply it, making the original domestic pressings somewhat bass-shy and dull on the extreme top. The MoFi clearly corrected the poor EQ choices The Mastering Lab had often made. 

UPDATE 2024: Poor EQ Choices?

Or perhaps it could have been one or more of the following:

  • Perhaps the band liked it better that way.
  • Perhaps The Mastering Lab found it easier to cut that way.
  • Perhaps the cause of the records lacking extension on both ends comes from some other factors that cannot be known.

Or, if you don’t like those three, just make up some other reasons that sound plausible, or ones that fit in with other ideas you may have, even though there is probably not an iota of evidence to support any of it.

This is the way of the audiophile record collector — theories galore, but not much experimental evidence to back them up (or falsify them as the case may be). We are more inclined to the No Theory approach to finding good records, which you can read about here. We believe it has served us well and can do the same for you.

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Tchaikovsky on Classic Records and the TAS List

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now, a case of live and learn.

Our tube system from the 90s was very different from the one we are using now.

That system was noticeably darker and by all accounts far less revealing when we had auditioned the Classic sometime in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

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L.A. Woman Is a Disaster on German Heavy Vinyl, Part One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

There was a German 180 gram pressing of L.A. Woman that was so bad, I called this commentary from 2005 The Audiophile Apocalypse. [Minor edits have been made since then.]

The fact that some audiophiles and audiophile reviewers appeared to like this pressing was a sign that, to me at least, The End Is Near, or May Be. There is no hope for audiophiles if they can’t tell a good record from a bad one, and this is clearly a bad one.

If this isn’t a good example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

As noted at the top, this commentary was written a long time ago. Much of our thinking about the recordings of The Doors has evolved since then, having played scores of their records in shootouts and learned something new from practically each one. Click here to read more.

Dateline: January, 2005

When I first played it I thought there must be something wrong with my stereo. There was no deep bass. (This recording has amazing deep bass.) The sound was upper midrangey and distorted. There was no extreme top at all.

This surprised me, as I had heard that this was supposed to be a good record.

What I heard coming off the copy that I was playing was pure garbage. I was confused.

So I grabbed a couple of DCC Doors pressings. The first one I played was Waiting For The Sun, my favorite on DCC. Ahh, that’s more like it. Sweet, open, plenty of bass, extended highs, Steve Hoffman’s beautifully liquid midrange — everything I expected to hear on his version was there just exactly the way it should be.

So I knew it wasn’t my stereo. Then I pulled out the DCC LA Woman. What’s the difference you ask? Well, the DCC has a top end. Listen to the cymbals. They ring sweetly and correctly. You can hear that the tape hiss sounds correct, a sure sign that the top end is accurate.

The midrange is a bit recessed compared to the German pressing. Steve says he took out a half DB in the upper mids. There’s distortion on the vocals and he was trying to soften the effect. It might have been better to leave it flat, but either way is preferable to the boosted, aggressive, edgy upper midrange to be found on the German pressing.

The German LP sounds like something playing over the radio. AM, not FM. Part of the problem is that there’s no lower midrange on the German pressing to properly balance out the vocals. Perhaps it’s not on the tape they used. I’m guessing it probably isn’t.

But any mastering engineer worthy of the name should know how to fix a problem like that. Steve did. Apparently this German fellow did not.

And worst of all, there is no deep bass on this record AT ALL. The whole lower octave is missing. Now to be fair, the DCC LP has the same problem. There’s no lower bass on it either. That’s why I don’t recommend that you listen to LA Woman on vinyl. I don’t know of any copy that sounds right.

UPDATE 2025

This was true in 2005 because we had yet to do the work it takes to find the right copies, the ones with plenty of bass and everything else too. I think it took us another ten years to find the pressings with the right stampers. Scroll to the bottom of this listing to see our notes for the copy that won our last shootout in 2024.

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The Early London Pressings Of Schubert’s 9th Are Awful

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

There are plenty of Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played over the years that were disappointing, and some of them can be found here.

What was most striking about this shootout was how poorly the original London Bluebacks (CS 6061) fared when going head to head with the best vintage reissues. In fact, they were so obviously inferior I doubt we would have even needed another pressing to know that they could not possibly be considered Hot Stampers.

The two we had were crude, flat, full of harmonic distortion, and both had clearly restricted frequency extremes.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

But I remember liking the Blueback pressings I played ten or twenty years ago.

Did I have better copies, or was my system not capable of showing me the shortcomings I so clearly heard this time around? Since this is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty, we’ll have to leave it there.

Our favorite performance of the work is this one with Krips and the LSO, but on a much later reissue pressing produced by Decca in the 70s. Imagine that!

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Powerful People on MoFi – What Was I Thinking?

More Entries in the Mobile Fidelity Hall of Shame

UPDATE 2024:

I just found my old review notes from 2014! They can be seen below. Please to enjoy.

At the time of our last shootout in 2014, I still had the MoFi pressing of Powerful People in my personal, very small (at that point) record collection.

Almost all the best sounding records from my collection had been sold off long before, going to good homes that I can only assume would play them more than I had in the last ten years.

If it’s a record you see on our site, chances are good I’d have listened to it until I’d practically turned blue in the face.

But I had kept my Powerful People Half-Speed these 30+ years because the domestic pressings I’d played were just too damn midrangy to enjoy.

At least the MoFi had bass, top end and didn’t sound squawky or hard on the vocals.

Well, let me tell you, played against the best domestic pressings, the MoFi is laughable. (In that respect it shares much with the current crop of audiophile reissues.)

It’s unbelievably compressed, a problem that is easily heard on the biggest, most exciting parts of the tracks. They never get remotely as big or as loud on the MoFi as they do on the lowly A&M originals.

It’s also sucked out in the midrange, like most MoFis, and, like most MoFis and Half-Speeds in general, the bass is not well-defined, punchy, and it never goes very deep.

There is also the issue of the MoFi 10k boost on the top end — it’s clearly audible and as bothersome as ever.

In summation, like most of the better audiophile records — from long ago as well as those being produced today — the most you can hope for from these reissues is that they can fix a few problems you might be saddled with on the particular pressing you own.

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Years Ago We Badly Misjudged the Recording Quality of Tull’s Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

A clear case of live and learn.

We listed a White Hot copy of This Was in 2008 on the Island pink label and noted at the time:

Be forewarned: this ain’t Stand Up or Aqualung. I don’t think you’ll be using any copy of This Was to demo your stereo, because the recording has its share of problems. That said, this record sounds wonderful from start to finish and will make any fan of this music a VERY happy person. We guarantee you’ve never heard this album sound better, or your money back.

Now we know a couple of things that we didn’t back in 2008.

1). This album is a lot better sounding than we gave it credit for years ago. It’s not perfect by any means but it is much better than the above comments might lead you to believe.

We chanced upon an exceptional sounding copy of the album in 2017 or so, and that taught us something new about the record:

2). The Pink Label pressings are not the best way to go on this album.

Once we heard the exceptional copy alluded to above, we played it against our best Pink Label copies and it was simply no contest.

In 2008 we still had a lot to learn. We needed to do more research and development, which of course we are doing regularly with Classic Rock records, our bread and butter and the heart of our business.

We do them as often as is practical, considering how difficult it is to find copies with audiophile quality playing surfaces.

Nine years later, we felt we finally had a proper understanding on the various pressings of This Was. It goes like this:

The Pink Label original British pressings can be good, but they will never win a shootout up against copies with these stampers (assuming you have more than one copy — any record can have the right stampers and the wrong sound, we hear it all the time. Beware of small sample sizes).

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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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Song For My Father – Our First Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2019

This commentary was written way back in 2008.

Since then we’ve learned a great deal about Blue Note and the work Rudy Van Gelder did for them.

Needless to say, we are now very big fans.

Most of the sonic complaints you see in our review from 2008 originated from our inability to clean the records properly, play them back properly, and to know which pressings and labels tended to have good stampers and which ones did not.

In 2008 we had a lot more research and development ahead of us, probably ten years’ worth. I thought I knew what I was talking about in 2008 with Song for My Father, but I clearly had a lot more to learn.

When we finally did hear some killer copies, we were knocked out by the quality of the sound.

Our Understanding in 2008

This is our first Hot Stamper listing for the album, and believe me, it’s not for want of trying. The best sounding original copies I had picked up over the years were far too noisy and scratched to be acceptable to audiophiles, not to mention the fact that the originals were (and are) replete with mastering issues that often exacerbate problems in the recording itself.

Trade-Offs

Having said all that, every Hot Stamper copy we found had its own mastering strengths and weaknesses — the tubey magic and fullness in the best originals isn’t really heard on the later pressings, but the later pressings have a clarity and freedom from obvious compressor and cutter-head distortion that makes them appealing in their own right, not to mention much better brass sound: more dynamic and less smeared.

Rudy, Nice Piano For a Change

One surprising finding was how good the piano sounds on the better copies. It has good weight, real solidity, and lacks that irritating “boxy” hard sound that you find on so many RVG recordings.

Pinched horns and boxy pianos are the hallmarks of most Van Gelder recordings; how on earth this guy is considered one of the greats is beyond me.

[Now of course we know better.]

We did this shootout after having played a few Contemporaries the day before, and the difference in the quality of the sound is nothing less than shocking. The Contemporary sound is so relaxed and musical, the RVG Blue Note sound so forced and artificial.

[Speaking of the piano sound Contemporary is famous for.]

But Contemporary never had the likes of Horace Silver in their stable of artists, and we love this music, so there was no alternative, we just had to dive in and hope for the best. And the best was pretty good.

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Grieg / Peer Gynt Suites – Were We Wrong? Probably

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Below are the notes for a later pressing we played many years ago. I doubt if we would like this Red Seal pressing much now. The later RCA pressings we’ve played lately left much to be desired.

I get the feeling it lacks Tubey Magic, as well as weight in the lower registers, and we are much less tolerant of those two shortcomings now than we were then.

Our review from 2008

Fiedler is wonderful here, which is to be expected. What’s unusual about this Red Seal is how good the sound is. It’s extremely transparent and tonally correct.

It sounds to me like a flat transfer.

Some tubey colorations would be nice, especially in the louder passages.

The sound also lacks a bit of weight in the bottom end.

But these faults are mostly made up for by the tremendous clarity and freedom from distortion that this pressing has. I doubt if the Shaded Dog has those qualities.

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