10-2021

The Fantasy Film World of… “Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bernard Herrmann Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Obviously our customers know by now that a Hot Stamper London or Decca pressing is going to be far better than the Anadisq that MoFi cut in the mid-90s.

How much better?

Words fail me.

Their record was a complete disaster. Perhaps some of the MoFi collectors didn’t notice because they had nothing to compare it to. 

God forbid they would ever lower themselves to buy as common a pressing as a London. Had they done so, what they would have heard is huge amounts of musical information that is simply nowhere to be found on the MoFi.

There is a place on this album, I failed to note exactly where, in which a group of tubas play a descending scale that is somewhat buried in the mix. On the London, they can clearly be heard and recognized as tubas. On the MoFi, I don’t think they can be heard except as some general group of low notes, and anyone thinking that they were tubas would be guessing, the sound is that murky, muddy, and ill-defined.

Robert Pincus once left a Post-It note stuck to the MoFi jacket of a copy he was playgrading for me that summed up our thoughts on the quality of their mastering to a “t”:

“Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”

It’s positively shameful. This music is so good. On top of that, it’s custom made for audiophiles. Audiophiles are the ones who can appreciate the new colors Herrmann created, using what a wise man once called the single greatest instrument ever invented: the symphony orchestra.

If this Mobile Fidelity LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be. To find a more poorly remastered record, you would really have to work at it.

(more…)

Three Labels, But Only One Ever Wins Shootouts

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better on the Right Reissue

There are three Epic labels for this record.

The originals are yellow, the first reissue is orange, and the last reissue is bluish black.

I can tell you that only one of those labels produced the best sounding copies in our shootout.

Beyond that you will have to buy a sample of each and do your own shootout. Finding clean copies was quite difficult; it took us a long time to get enough to play, and, as we said, most pressings are dreadful.

Those of you who like to read our commentaries and play along at home are going to have a rough time with this title. We sure did.

But the results are worth it, because we LOVE this music! Music just doesn’t get any better. If this album doesn’t lift your spirits, I can’t imagine what would. And note that many of the best songs here are exclusive to this greatest hits and cannot be found on any other album. That makes it a Must Own in our book.

(more…)

We Get Letters – “Have never seen such ridiculous pricing…!!”

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

Click here to see more letters from fans and detractors alike.

This one comes from a fellow who, judging by the number of exclamation marks he saw fit to use, seems more than a little upset with us.

WHERE DO YOU GET THESE PRICES.!!!!!!!! Talk about overcharging customers…..
I’ve been collecting vinyl for over 35 years… Have Never seen such ridiculous pricing…!!
Even from Elusive Disc.!!!
What a joke.!!!!

Yes, we readily admit it, we are quite a bit more expensive than Elusive Disc.

But their records don’t sound good.

Shouldn’t that count for something?

To be fair, some of them might, but nobody that works there could tell you which ones do and which ones don’t, not even if you put a gun to their head.

If you would like to write us a letter, about our pricing or anything else, you may use as many exclamation marks as you deem sufficient to express the outrage you’re feeling. The more the merrier! (We’ll just go with one here.)

People ask us: How can your records possibly be worth these prices?, and we think we have a good answer.

(more…)

Extreme Record Collecting – There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records

What You Can Learn from Experimenting with Records

A while back, Richard Metzger posted on the Dangerous Minds website a story recounting his lifelong search for better sounding pressings of his favorite albums.

By the third paragraph, it was clear that Richard had the right perspective on this hobby of ours, as he understood all too well how few people are interested in finding great records:

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you. Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

The story of my life! You could say the same about this blog. Why should anyone care about any of this stuff?

Just because I’m obsessed with records and their sound — even a record as completely forgotten as this one — doesn’t mean that anyone else in his right mind, dangerous or otherwise, should be.

On this subject, it’s best to let Richard speak for himself. Part One of his record obsession can be found here.

Gadzooks – Now there’s a Part Two!

After reading Richard’s post, I contacted him and offered to send him a Hot Stamper pressing of a record of his choosing, about which he was of course free to say anything he liked.

That record turned out to be Aja. It seems he was pretty pleased with the copy we sent him.

Speaking of Aja, I’ve been playing the band’s fifth album since the day it came out in 1977. (I’d been a huge fan for years by then.)

We started doing shootouts for it around 2006, and in the ensuing years a great deal has been written about the album, by us as well as our customers.

(more…)

Fandango! – Another Warners Heavy Vinyl Mediocrity

More of the Music of ZZ Top

Sonic Grade: C

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play it against?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring. Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)

Compromised Recordings Versus Purist Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different then. A few dozen had been done since 2004, and probably not nearly as well as we thought at the time, truth be told.

A while back one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few really amazing sounding direct discs that contains music actually worth listening to. Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. 

Hot Stamper pressings are almost always going to be studio multi-track recordings, not direct to discs of live performances.

They will invariably suffer many compromises compared to the purist approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate sources of distortion in the pursuit of the highest fidelity.

But when they do that, they almost always fail. How many Direct Discs sound like that Glenn Miller? A dozen at most. The vast majority are just plain awful. I know, I’ve played practically every one ever made. For more than a decade I made a living selling them.

Thankfully that is no longer the case, although we do have a handful of direct discs that we still do shootouts for, such as The Three, Glenn Miller, Straight from the Heart and the odd Sheffield.

Compromised Recordings

What we do play is those very special, albeit compromised, mass-produced pressings. The right Londons and Shaded Dogs. Columbia and Contemporary jazz. Brewer and Shipley. Sergio Mendes. The Beatles. The Doobie Brothers for Pete’s sake!

Why? Because those pressings actually communicate the music. They allow you to forget about the recording and just listen. You can’t do that very often with the CD of the album. You can’t even do it with most of the vinyl pressings you run into. You certainly can’t do it with the vast majority of 180 gram LPs being made today, not in our experience anyway.

You have to have the right pressing. That’s what a Hot Stamper is: more than anything else, it’s the right pressing.

It’s the one that really lets the music come through, regardless of whatever compromises were made along the way.

(more…)