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Is Mud Slide Slim in a Booth or Isn’t He?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

One thing we noticed this time around was that for some tracks James’ vocals are recorded in a booth and for others they are not. Listen to the first track — there is no ambience, no room around his voice whatsoever. He’s in a padded booth, and they sure padded the hell out of it. Now play Long Ago and Far Away on side two. No booth! Lots of studio space around the vocal. MUCH more natural acoustic.

We don’t have the luxury of playing every track on both sides for these shootouts. We pick two or three songs that have specific qualities we know to look for and play them on every copy. (Shootouts like this almost always involve at least a dozen pressings, sometimes more, and it’s impossible to keep them all straight with more copies than that.)

So here’s a potentially fun exercise — assuming you find this sort of thing fun — that we thought about doing but just don’t have the time to devote to at present, with so many other shootouts waiting in the wings. Take your own copy, assuming you have at least a decent one, and play each track listening for only one thing: does James sound like he is in a booth, or does he sound like he is in an open space in the studio? If you have the typical original WB pressing you will probably not be able to get very far and will be quickly tempted to give up, the frustration of a murky midrange being more than most of us audiophiles can bear.

But maybe you have a good copy; the possibility certainly exists. And if you find much success with this exercise we encourage you to drop us a line, we will be more than happy to print it.

Gaite Parisienne Is Just More Smeary Dreck from Classic Records

More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach

Sonic Grade: F

The last time I played the Classic I thought it was nothing but a smeary mess, as awful as their awful Scheherazade. If I were to play it today, I’m guessing it would join the other Classic Records entries in our audiophile hall of shame.

Here are some other records we played and found had smeary strings. Orchestral recordings with smeary strings do not last long on our turntable.

I love Arthur Fiedler‘s performance with the Boston Pops and the 1954 two track RCA Living Stereo sound, but finding an original Shaded Dog pressing in clean condition under $500 with the right stampers is all but impossible nowadays.

If you want to go that way, more power to you. 

This 1954 2-track recording is RCA’s first stereo recording of the work. 1954. Can you believe it? A few mics and two channels and it blows away most of the classical recordings ever done! Some old record collectors and tube lovers say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be. This record proves it.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

Another Dirty Little Secret of the Record Biz

More of the Music of Traffic

For our current take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy and The Best of Traffic, please click here.

Let’s talk about hits that are made from dubbed tapes.

The sound of some songs on some greatest hits albums can be better than the sound of those very same songs on the original pressings.

How can that be you ask, dumbfounded by the sheer ridiculousness of such a statement?

Well, dear reader, I’ll tell you. It’s a dirty little secret in the record biz that sometimes the master for the presumptive Hit Single (or singles) is pulled from the album’s final two track master mix tape and used to make the 45 single, the idea being that the single is what people are going to hear on the radio and want to buy. Or, having heard it sound so good on the radio, go out and buy the album.

One way or another, it’s the single that will do the selling of the band’s music. This is clearly the case with Mr. Fantasy on the original Island Pink Label pressing. (Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)

A dub is then made of the tape that was used to cut the 45 and spliced back into the album master, so that the single (or singles) is one generation down from the master for the other songs on the side.

This explains why the hit single from so many albums is often the worst sounding song on the album — it’s the one most likely to suffer from bad radio EQ and distorted, smeary, sub-generation sound.

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Are the Strauss Waltzes on the TAS List Any Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The original, favorable review for this album you see further down is from at least ten years ago and probably more like fifteen.

When we revisited the copies we had of this title more recently, we felt the sound was badly lacking in many ways, with no real extension up top nor much weight to the bottom, the very definition of boxy sound.

Many of the vintage classical records we audition these days have sound that we liked well enough in the past but now no longer meet our standards.

Those pressings might sound fine on an old school stereo (or its modern equivalent), but we have something very different to play our records on, courtesy of the many revolutionary changes in audio that have dramatically altered the quality of analog playback over the last twenty five years.

We much prefer Boskovsky’s performances for Decca for waltzes and the like, by Strauss or anyone else.

TAS List Thoughts

We wanted to like the record, it’s on the TAS List for cryin’ out loud, shouldn’t it at least be pretty good?

It very well may be amazingly good, we can’t say it is or it isn’t. In order to be more sure of our opinion, we would need a great deal more data to back it up. We would need to have a large number of copies on hand, clean them all and play them in order to make it possible to find the killer stamper that may be hiding in the pile, assuming one might be.

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Three Copies of Harold in Italy and Still No Luck

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

For a Living Stereo record from the Golden Age of All Tube recording, especially one from the late-50s, you might expect that the better Shaded Dog pressings would have exceptionally rich, natural sound.

After all, 1958 is clearly one of the great years for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.

Unfortunately, the pressings we played of the Berlioz album you see pictured were quite a letdown. We dropped the needle on three different early copies of LSC 2228 with three different sets of stampers and found that none of them were all that impressive, as can be seen from our notes:

  • First: tubey but pretty hot, just okay. (6s/3s)
  • Second: smeary and congested, not great. (4s/4s)
  • Third: tubey but smeary (3s/1s)

We guessed that their final grades after a shootout would probably fall into the range of 1+ or so, just below the cutoff for a minimal Hot Stamper grade (1.5+).

If we’d half a dozen or more to play, some copies would probably be a bit better, some would be a bit worse, but the bulk of them would end up having sound that was merely passable, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning some might not even earn that single plus.)

For now we’re throwing in the towel and moving on to Golden Age records with better prospects.

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David Turner Was Taking Care Of Business in 1978

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

The complete Tenor Madness album is found here, with big, full-bodied, MONO jazz sound at its best, courtesy of the great one, Rudy Van Gelder.

This is what classic 50s jazz is supposed to sound like – they knew how to do these kinds of records forty years ago. Those mastering skills are in short supply nowadays, if not downright extinct.

The transfers from 1978 by David Turner are in tune with the sound of these recordings – there’s not a trace of phony EQ on this entire record.

This Two-Fer includes all of Tenor Madness and most of Work Time and Tour De Force.

Top jazz players such as Ray Bryant, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Kenny Drew, Max Roach and Paul Chambers can be heard on the album.

If you want all the Tubey Magic of the earlier pressings, a top quality pressing of the real Tenor Madness album on Prestige might give you more of that sound.

David Turner’s mastering setup in the 70s has a healthy dose of Tubey Magic, but it can’t compete in that area with the All Tube cutting chains that were making records in the ’50s and ’60s.  Without one of those early pressings around to compare, we don’t think you’re going to feel you are missing out on anything in the sound with best copies.

And where can you find an early Prestige pressing with audiophile playing surfaces like these?   (more…)

Making More Progress in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The story of our recent shootout is what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.

Courtesy of countless revolutions in audio. (In other words, this list is far from complete.)

In our previous listings we noted:

This is one of those odd records in which the variation in sound quality from track to track is dramatic. Take the first two tracks on side one — they suck. They sound like your average LSP Mancini album, the kind I have suffered through far too many times. And that means bad bad bad. 

But track three boasts DEMO DISC QUALITY SOUND and the next one is nearly as good. Listen to that wonderful glockenspiel. It sound every bit as magical as anything on Bang, Baa-room and Harp, and that’s some pretty magical sound in my book!

Same thing happens on side two. Bad sound for the first tracks, then track four sounds great, followed by a pretty good five and a lovely six with a chorus of voices to die for. Go figure.

Is there a copy that sounds good from start to finish? Doubtful.

We’ve made a dozen or more improvements to the system since we last did this shootout, and I’m happy to report that most of the tracks we had trouble with in the past are now sounding very good indeed. Of course the better tracks we noted from years ago are even better, making this a consistently good sounding Mancini record.

One obvious change from the old days is that we now spend a fair amount of time honing in the VTA for every title. That may account for the fact that the first track on side one, which used to be problematical, now sounds wonderful. The value of getting the correct VTA setting — by ear, for every record — cannot be overestimated in our opinion.

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Just How Good Is a Second Tier Neil Young Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

AMG raves about this album, giving it 5 big stars. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s half a star MORE than they gave Harvest.) We like the album just fine, but I doubt we would want to go quite that far. Sure, these are great songs, but give us After The Gold Rush, Zuma or Harvest (all Top 100 titles, Hot Stampers of which are sometimes in stock) over this one any day.

Still, a second tier Neil Young album (by our standards) usually will beat a first tier album from just about anybody else making records in 1979.

And if you’re a fan this record absolutely belongs in your collection, along with about ten others by the man. Now what other solo artist can you name that has ten or more records to his name worth owning? I’m hard pressed to think of one. The Beatles and The Stones don’t count, obviously. Elvis Costello comes pretty close, but ten? I can’t get there, with him or anybody else. Neil’s body of work stands alone.

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Upper Midrange on The Nightfly

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now

We just finished a big shootout for Donald Fagen’s first solo effort, released just two years after Gaucho and the end of Steely Dan and we gotta tell you, there are a lot of weak sounding copies out there. We should know — we played them. 

Robert Ludwig cut all the originals we played. Are you going to tell me that every copy with RL in the dead wax sounds the same as every other copy with those initials? The question answers itself.

What to Listen For

The upper mids on certain tracks of both sides have a tendency to be brighter than we would have liked.

Ruby Baby on side one can be that way, and the title track on side two has some of the wannabe hit single radio EQ that makes it less likely to please, so to speak.

Other records with a tendency to have boosted upper mids can be found here.

On a good copy the first track of each side should be all you need to hear.

Here are hundreds other titles with specific advice on what to listen for on some of the albums we’ve played in shootouts.

If you know how to do shootouts, you know how to find good sounding records.

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Latin ala Lee! The Record of the Year for 2003?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miss Peggy Lee Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It’s highly unlikely we would still agree with all the good things we had to say back in 2003 about Latin ala Lee! on Heavy Vinyl, but here it is anyway.

Plenty of records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore, for the simple reason that, in this case, since 2003 we’ve managed to make a huge number of changes to the system.

These changes resulted in more accurate and revealing playback, derived mostly from the testing we did with this group of records and others like them. (Here is a personal favorite.)

Unfortunately for all concerned, S&P’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discuss in more depth here.

As for the difficult remix, the more remixes I hear, the less I like them. The ones Hoffmann did for Nat King Cole (see here) drive me up a wall.

Our Old Review

The Record of the Year for 2003.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s true! If you don’t have a smile on your face fifteen seconds after playing track one, you better check your pulse, cuz, as the famous song has it: Jack, You Dead. Amazingly good sound, courtesy of a fabulous and painstakingly difficult remix by the mastering guru himself, Steve Hoffman. This is popular music for the previous generation — but why should we be denied these long forgotten treasures?

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