Sonic Grade: D
A Hall of Shame Pressing
Universal Records 180 gram LP.
Flat as a pancake sound. The CD almost has to be better.
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Sammy Davis Jr. – Sings The Big Ones For Young Lovers
More Pop and Jazz Vocals
- You will find amazing sound on both sides of this original Reprise stereo pressing
- “Sammy Davis, who is widely acclaimed to be the greatest all-around-entertainment talent of our times, here swings thru an album filled with the greatest songs he’s ever tackled in his entire recording career. The result ? It has to be the greatest album Sammy’s ever recorded.”
- 4 stars: “…[a] dozen-song outing, supported by some irresistible backdrops courtesy of arrangers Jimmie Haskell and Perry Botkin Jr… Sings the Big Ones for Young Lovers primarily consists of well-known covers…”
- If you’re a fan of Sammy’s, this 1964 release belongs in your collection.
Although we liked it well enough, this title unfortunately did not get much love from our customers.
Years ago it was tagged on the blog as a never again title, which simply means we would no longer plan on doing shootouts for it. (It’s possible we could do it again, expecially if we were to get hold of an amazing sounding pressing, but at this point that does not seem to be in the cards as we have stopped buying them altogether.)
We encourage you to find a nice copy for yourself. Stick with the early label. If you don’t hear the sound we describe below, you have the option to keep buying copies until you do.
Takin’ Off – A Cisco Record We Used to Like
Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now
UPDATE
This is a very old review and it is doubtful we would be as enthusiastic now as we were in 2006 when the Cisco pressing came out.
The sound is very good, with correct tonal balance and plenty of life. I was WAY TOO HARD on this album when it first came in. It’s playing right now and really swinging!
I just learned the secret to getting this one to sound right, and I am happy to share it with you. TURN IT UP! When you get some volume going, the musicians really come to life on this album. It may sound crazy, but you need to play this one as loud as you would play your average rock record.
Billy Higgins whacks the hell out of his snare on the second track on side one. He really goes to town on that thing. Imagine you are sitting twenty feet from him in a jazz club; it would be plenty loud, right? Now find the equivalent volume setting on your preamp, drop the needle and get ready to FEEL the music, the way you would feel it if you were in that club.
Robert Pincus and Kevin Gray did a great job on this one. I put it right up there with the very best jazz records on Heavy Vinyl being made today. The first track is a tiny bit lean for my taste, but things get better after that.
Of course, how many copies do you really see of an album like this that aren’t beat to death, or minty but hundreds of dollars? Mighty few in our experience, so this has to be seen as a welcome addition to any audiophile’s jazz collection.
As a Rule, the Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 CDs Suck
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This commentary was written shortly after having done our first shootout for the album in 2007.
As for the band’s CDs, for a great introduction to their music, please consider the compilation Four Sider. Four Sider also came out on record but like most compilations it is made from copy tapes and mediocre sounding at best.
Those of you who have purchased some of this group’s CDs may have noticed that they typically do not sound very good. It seems as though precious little effort was expended in their mastering, which is no doubt the case.
Almost any good original brown label A&M pressing will be better, although few of those do not suffer from sonic problems of their own.
A Note About The Mix
Fool on the Hill may not be up there with Sergio’s best sonically (not many albums are!), but it can still sound very good when you get the right stamper. The balance of this record takes some getting used to. We weren’t sure what to make of it at first.
Letter of the Week – “The most remarkable drums I’ve ever heard, especially on side two.”
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
[The Abraxas White Hot Stamper] is a monster. Practically tore down the walls. The most remarkable drums I’ve ever heard, especially on side two. The sound is completely circumambient, completely enveloping, but always musical with lovely harmonics even when blasting in the tuttis.
The Mobile Fidelity, which I own, is an attenuated portraiture of the real thing. I will soon be dropping it off at the local Salvation Army store.
Phil
Phil,
Quick question: Did you buy your MoFi before or after I put it in my Mobile Fidelity hall of shame?
And wrote this review of it: MoFi Manages to Disgrace Itself Even Further
See what happens when you don’t read my blog?
You end up with crappy remastered records like the ones Mobile Fidelity has been spewing out for more than forty years.
Some forum posters take us to task for criticizing the old MoFi that everybody knows made lousy records, not the new MoFi, which they believe — for reasons that I cannot begin to understand — makes good sounding records.
If this is the pride of the new MoFi, and it seems to be, I will leave it to those who post on forums to defend it. I certainly am not up to the task.
Skip the OJC on You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce
Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
This album is findable on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the oens we we played seriously wanting.
They were brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings. Above all they badly lacked Tubey Magic, a sound the best pressings are swimming in. Consequently, none of them made the cut for our shootout.
Here are more than 400 other vintage albums that fell short, whether sonically or musically. Audiophiles should seriously consider avoiding them, and if any of you out there own copies of these titles, you might want to pull them off the shelf and see if the sound and/or music is as bad as we say.
Bright, thin and lacking in Tubey Magic is just not our sound. It’s not the sound Roy DuNann was famous for, so why should we like it either?
It Only Took Us Six Years to Find Another Killer Copy of Down In L.A.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2025
Our comments about our Hot Stamper winner from 2019 appear below.
Note that we could not even find White Hot sound on either side, and side two, at 1+, does not even qualify as a Hot Stamper these days, which means it would never be offered for sale on the site.
This was a tough shootout!
We had a lot more research and development to do, and six years later we had the killer copy to prove that it could be done. In 2025, we found a pressing that made it all worthwhile.
This is one of the BEST copies we’ve played in many years, close to five I would guess. Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.
To me this is a classic of Hippie Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre. It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars. The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul. (more…)
Rhapsody in Blue – We Finally Broke Through in 2015
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Gershwin Available Now
This original Six Eye LP has the rich brass and smooth strings that allow this wonderful music to astound. This is by far our favorite performance of Rhapsody in Blue, and it is unlikely that another recording will come along to take away its crown.
Smooth and solid, not brash or blary, what really impressed about the sound here was how full-bodied it was, yet it was never thick or murky the way so many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today sound.
(Audiophiles often associate these two “qualities” with analog itself, which is why the purveyors of these so-called AAA remastered records insist that they know the sound their customers want and by god they are going to give it to them.)
Instead the best copy we played was transparent in the lower mids and below, and that sound was just glorious after listening to too many thin and brash pressings. The piano is solid, rich, high-rez and very percussive — there is no tubey old school smear to be heard, and that too was a surprise.
I’ve always loved these performances, but the shrill Columbia strings and brass have been hard to get past. Most copies suffer from upper-midrangy, glary, hard sound and blary brass. I’ve come to accept that this is nothing more than the “Columbia Sound,” and as a consequence we rarely put much effort into surveying their recordings, even their more famous ones.
I won’t say all that’s changed; it really hasn’t. The vast majority of Columbia classical pressings are still going to sound as awful as they have in the past.
What has changed is that finally, with this copy (and the stereo/room we have in 2015) we’ve found the sound that we’d been looking for on the legendary MS 6091. (more…)
Love’s Debut and Forever Changes on Heavy Vinyl – Indefensible Dreck from Sundazed
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Love Available Now
Two audiophile hall of shame titles, and another two Sundazed records reviewed and found seriously wanting.
We got hold of a minty original pressing of the first Love album back around 2007, so in preparation for the commentary I pulled one of the Sundazed pressings off the shelf, (Forever Changes, the only one we ever bothered to sell), cracked it open and threw it on the turntable.
Gag, what a piece of crap. When I had auditioned them all those years ago (2002), it was — I’m not kidding — the best of the bunch.
The sound to me back then was nothing special, but not bad. Knowing how rare the originals were, we gave it a lukewarm review and put it in the catalog, the single Sundazed Love album that (just barely) made the cut.
Now I wish I hadn’t, because no one should have to suffer through sound that bad. Here’s what I wrote for the shootout:
You’d never know it from those dull Sundazed reissues, but the right pressings of Love albums are full of Tubey Magic! With Bruce Botnick at the controls you can expect a meaty bottom end and BIG rock sound, and this recording really delivers on both counts.
With Sundazed mastering engineers running the show, you can expect none of the above.
No Tubey Magic, no meaty bottom end, no big rock sound.
After the shootout, I took the two copies we had in stock right down to my local record store and traded them in.
I didn’t want them in my house, let alone on my site.
In Search Of Amazing Mona Bones
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now
UPDATED 2026
Below you will see the notes we made during our first shootout for Mona Bone Jakon back in 2007.
Until fairly recently the handful of UK imports we had played sounded subpar to us.
The UK pressings may have been the versions on the TAS Super Disc List, but none of the ones we’d played sounded all that super to us.
Out of the blue, in 2023 we found some imports that set a new standard for the recording quality of the album.
We thought we knew “How high is up?”, but the mports we played that year proved to us we didn’t.
Egg on our faces? Not really. It’s just us going about doing the work.Since no one else in the world of records seems to want to figure any of this stuff out, you don’t have a lot of other sources for reliable information. Seriously, wWho else are you going to turn to, other than Robert Brook?
Most of the reviewers we stumble upon act like it’s still 1982.
True, the imports don’t win by much — the best domestic pressings can still earn Nearly Triple Plus grades — but that extra half a plus the Shootout Winning imports merit is quite noticeable when you play the best pressings against the close-to-the-best copies.