Here are some of the more recent entries for the Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve auditioned.
The worst titles we auditioned in 2024 and 2025 can be found here. Why records of such poor quality are still being made these days is a mystery to us. If your stereo is doing its job right, these records’ significant shortcomings should be obvious.
Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment
Can’t Buy a Thrill – Maybe Not Much of a Thrill, But Not Terrible Either
And that’s actually a big step up for this label when you consider how awful sounding most of their records are.
Steppenwolf – Gold: Their Great (But Awful Sounding) Hits
A good example, a record that is so bad it defies understanding. This is the way you think analog should sound?
Neil Young’s Greatest Hits – Oh, So That’s Who Cut It
A Simple Listening Test Makes It Easy to Judge Pressings of Scheherazade
The Electric Recording Company Does My Favorite Things No Favors
Unfortunately for those of you who have bought into the idea that the Electric Recording Company produces records with audiophile quality sound, you will find an utterly alien My Favorite Things, one nobody has ever heard before and one that no audiophile should want anything to do with.
Turning Master Tapes into Mud Pies – The Magic of the Electric Recording Company
Thriller Is Proof that Mobile Fidelity Is Cutting Some Real Crap These Days
Our Filmed Tapestry Shootout Was a Real Shocker
Tizzy Cymbals and a Bright Snare Drum, That’s Your Idea of Audiophile Sound?
I knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record. Five minutes was all it took, but I probably wasted another ten making sure the sound was as hopeless as it initially seemed.
We would never sell any record that sounds this bad.If this record sounds right to you, one thing I can say without fear of contradiction: you have a lot of work to do on your stereo system.
The Cars on Rhino High Fidelity – Man, Is This Record Bad
I mean, really bad. Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.
Neil Young / After the Gold Rush – Because Sound Matters?
Moondance on Heavy Vinyl Is a Disgrace to Audiophiles and Record Lovers All Over the World
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Can you take the sonic guesswork out of buying brand new high quality records?
The answer is no and it must forever remain so.
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Grading Heavy Vinyl
Heavy Vinyl Disasters
The worst of these that we’ve reviewed in 2024/2025 can be found here. This is the kind of garbage they want audiophiles to buy? Shameful.
Heavy Vinyl Mediocrities
Heavy Vinyl Winners
The UHQR
Who on earth thinks that any of these records are of ultra high quality other than the people that manufacture them?
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Heavy Vinyl By Label
Analogue Productions
A label that consistently produces some of the worst sounding records we’ve ever played.
Athena & Chesky
Cisco/Boxstar
Records Like This Make Audiophiles the Laughing Stocks of the Music World
This album has some of the worst sound I have ever heard in my life, worse than The Hunter even, and that’s saying something. If this kind of crap is what audiophiles choose to play, then they deserve all the derision heaped upon them.
Classic Records
Led Zeppelin II on Classic Records – Seriously, What Could Be Sadder?
DCC / S&P / Audio Fidelity
The Electric Recording Company
Four Men with Beards
Klavier
Seriously, This is Your Idea of Analog?
Whether made by Klavier or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-90s, many Heavy Vinyl pressings started to have a shortcoming that nowadays we find insufferable: they are just too damn smooth.
Mobile Fidelity
Music Matters
Rhino / Warners
Simply Vinyl
Speakers Corner
Sundazed
Blonde on Blonde – A Joke on Sundazed in Mono
Flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, sounding like most of the Sundazed records we used to play all those years ago (and, shamefully, back in the day we even sold a few of their titles, too).