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Carnival of the Animals on Klavier Is Another Doug Sax-Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Saint-Saens Available Now

Yet another murky, smeary audiophile piece of vinyl trash from the mastering lathe of the formerly brilliant Doug Sax. He used to cut the best sounding records in the world. (Exhibit A: this one.)

Then he started working for perhaps the worst record label of all time and to my knowledge never cut a good sounding record again.

This record may be on the TAS Super Disc list, but we don’t think it belongs there. Instead, it belongs on the bad TAS list that we created specifically for these far-from-super records.

To be fair, the real EMI is on there as well, ASD 2753. However, including the Klavier on the list brings into doubt the compentence of whoever is curating it these days.

This Klavier pressing, along with all the Classic Records titles, as well as other modern reissues, renders the advice found there all but useless. Is anyone calling attention to all the bad sounding records that have lately been recommended by The Absolute Sound? I think we might just be the only ones. If you know of any others, please email me at tom@better-records.com.

Doug Sax

For those of us who remember the consistently superb work Doug Sax was doing in the 70s, we sadly note that he passed away in 2015. I was honored to have met him a few years before then at a Chopin concert with Lincoln Mayorga performing on the piano. (Impressively performing, I might add. He played the complete Chopin Preludes from memory, all 24 of them.)

Both he and Lincoln were gentlemen and artists of the highest caliber. Needless to say, I hope this awful sounding Klavier is not the kind of record that he would want to be remembered by.

On this record, in Doug’s defense it should be noted that he had only second generation tapes to work with, which is neither here nor there as these pressings are not worth the dime’s worth of vinyl used to make them and should never have seen the light of day.

Can this dubby, smeary sound possibly be what EMI engineer Stuart Eltham was after?

Hard to believe. We’ve played plenty of his recordings and we cannot ever remember any of the non-audiophile pressings having this kind of sound.

But isn’t that just the way? The mainstream labels mass produce the good sounding pressings and the audiophile labels produce the limited edition junk.

Now there’s a rule of thumb you might want to keep in mind, especially if you’ve made the mistake of buying any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we reviewed in 2024 and 2025, a parade of horribles that defy understanding.

Actually, if we understand that there is a need for vinyl product for the lo- to mid-fi record collector market, it makes perfect sense. That’s what Klavier was in the business of producing, and now everybody wants in on the action, hence the proliferation of crap Heavy Vinyl pressings coming to market, practically every one even worse sounding than the last.

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This Is Why We Love Pablo in the 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

For years we have been including the followinig commentary in our Hot Stamper listings for Farmers Market Barbecue:

Musically FMB is a top Basie big band title in every way. This should not be surprising: many of his recordings for Pablo in the 70s and early 80s display the talents of The Count and his band at their best.

Sonically there’s more to the story. Based on our recent shootout for this title, in comparison to the other Basie titles we’ve done lately, we would have to say that FMB is the best Basie big band title we’ve ever played.

Since so many Basie big band recordings are so good, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves; after all, we haven’t done shootouts for all of Basie’s Pablo large group recordings. To be safe we’ll just call this one first among equals.

Having recently done another shootout, our first in two and a half years, we would have to say that the album still sounds every bit as amazing as we thought it did when we wrote the above comments more than fifteen years ago.

Our notes for a shootout winning copy get right to the heart of what makes the recording so special.

For those who might have trouble reading our scratch, allow me to transcribe what Riley, our main listening guy, heard and noted as he played the two sides of this copy.

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Avoid the Tan Labels and Non-TML Pressings for Nilsson Schmilsson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Not that we would ever claim that TML in the dead wax guarantees good sound.

Side two of our tan label copy below was passable, but that’s sonically a very long way from the top copies we played, which of course were all TML, with lots of different stampers, none of which we are likely to reveal, now or in the future, for reasons we are sure you understand.

Anyone who buys one of our White Hot Stamper copies will definitely know, but we only find a couple of those every few years, as this is not a shootout that’s been easy to do for a very long time.

Make sure your equipment is tuned up and the electricity is good before you get anywhere near a pressing of this album.

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies I played this week and the scores I’ve suffered through before.

Nilsson Schmilsson is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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The Science of Hot Stampers – Incomplete, Imperfect, and (Gulp!) Provisional

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

We have a section on the blog you may have seen called live and learn.

It’s devoted to discussing the records we think we we were wrong about.

Oh yes, it’s true. But it’s not really a problem for us here at Better Records. We see no need to cover up our mistakes. The process of learning involves recognizing and correcting previous errors.

Approached scientifically, all knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is incomplete, imperfect, and must be considered provisional.

What seems true today might easily be proven false tomorrow. If you haven’t discovered that for yourself yet, one thing’s for certain, you haven’t been in this hobby for very long.

We’re so used to the conventional wisdom being wrong, and having our own previous findings overturned by new ones, that we gladly go out of our way in listing after listing to point out just how wrong we were. (And of course why we think we are correct now.)

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.

Each time we go back and play a 180 gram or Half-Speed mastered LP we used to like (or dislike), we gain a better understanding of its true nature. (The bulk of those “audiophile” pressings seem to get worse and worse over time, a subject that has been thoroughly discussed on the blog.)

Record cleaning gets better, front ends get better, electronics get better, tweaks get better, rooms get better — every aspect of your playback system should be improving on a regular basis, allowing you to more correctly identify the strengths and weaknesses of every record you play.

I almost forgot: your ears get better too, whether you like it or not. If that’s not happening, you’re probably not doing some very important things right. (Maybe some of your records are holding you back.)

What follows is a typical excerpt from a recent listing.

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Are Hot Stampers exceptionally good sounding records?

New to the Blog? Start Here

Not necessarily. What makes a Hot Stamper hot is reasonably good sound. At the very least a Hot Stamper should sound quite a bit better than any other pressing you have heard.

Not every album was well-recorded. (Here are some examples of records that you are not likely to be playing for your friends in order to show off your system, even if you have one of our White Hot Stamper pressings.)

As a result, the records made from those recordings will display most of the limitations that are baked into the master tape. A good engineer can fix an awful lot of problems in mastering, but, to mix a few metaphors, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is rarely if ever going to be in the cards.

For that reason, the records we review must be graded on a curve.

In our shootouts we compare apples to other apples. There is simply no other practical way to do it.

Out of the pile of pressings we have available, usually comprising six to twelve records, we clean them up and play them in order to find out which are the best sounding ones. If the winners of the shootout have the best sound we heard on both sides, they go into our Top Shelf section, which as of this writing has 13 members.

Any record that has one Shootout Winning side goes into our White Hot Stampers section. (There are more than ten times as many of those as of this writing. If you think a record you have cannot be beat on either side, that is very unlikely to be the case. We are happy to sell you the record that will beat it, and it will probably beat it on both sides, truth be told, and if it doesn’t, you get your money back.

We also guarantee that no Half-Speed mastered record or Heavy Vinyl LP sounds as good as even the lowest-graded Hot Stampers we offer. We’ve played too many of these so-called audiophile pressings to worry about them being competitive with the records on our site.

(One actually was competitive recently, but what a fluke that record was. Another word for fluke is outlier, and we really, really love those, but a Heavy Vinyl pressing winning a shootout? That has happened exactly once.)

It is our strongly held conviction that the better your system gets, the worse — or at the very least the more artificial, veiled, ambience-challenged, frequency-limited and uninvolving — those records will sound.

The question every audiophile who collects records for sound quality must grapple with is “how high is up?”

That’s what shootouts are for. To judge the relative merits of individual pressings, regardless of how well or how poorly the rcording is (as if we could ever know such a thing.).

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