rev-x

This reviewer — it won’t take you long to figure out who it is — comes in for a lot of criticism on this blog, and for good reason: he’s been leading audiophiles astray for more than thirty years.

Our best advice is simply this: whatever record he recommends, don’t waste your money. It is practically guaranteed to be awful.

The Dreadful Sound of the Heavy Vinyl Reissues Doug Sax Mastered in the 90s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Longstanding customers know that we have been relentlessly critical of so-called “audiophile” LPs for years, especially in the case of these Analogue Productions releases from back in the early-90s. A well-known reviewer loved them, I hated them, and he and I haven’t seen eye to eye on much since.

(Old) Newflash!

Just dug up part of my old commentary discussing the faults with the original series that Doug Sax cut for Acoustic Sounds. Check it out.

In the listing for the OJC pressing of Way Out West we wrote:

Guaranteed better than any 33 rpm 180 gram version ever made, or your money back! (Of course I’m referring to a certain pressing from the early 90s mastered by Doug Sax, which is a textbook example of murky, tubby, flabby sound. Too many bad tubes in the chain? Who knows?

This OJC version also has its problems, but at least the shortcomings of the OJC are tolerable. Who can sit through a pressing that’s so thick and lifeless it communicates none of the player’s love for the music they’re making?

If you have midrangy transistor equipment, go with the 180 gram version (at twice the price).

If you have good equipment, go with this one.

UPDATE 2015

We are no longer fans of the OJC of Way Out West, and would never sell a record that sounds the way even the best copies do as a Hot Stamper. It’s not hopeless the way the Heavy Vinyl pressing is, but it’s not very good either. It’s yet another example of a record we was wrong about.

Live and learn, right?

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How Does the Heavy Vinyl Rubber Soul Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

This review was originally written in 2015.

We are so excited to tell you about the first of the Heavy Vinyl Beatles remasters we’ve played! As we cycle through our regular Hot Stamper shootouts for The Beatles’ albums we will be of course be reviewing more of them*. I specifically chose this one to start with, having spent a great deal of time over the last year testing the best vinyl pressings against three different CD versions of Rubber Soul.

The short version of our review of the new Rubber Soul vinyl would simply point out that it’s awful, and, unsurprisingly, it’s awful in most of the ways that practically all modern Heavy Vinyl records are: it’s opaque, airless, energy-less and just a drag.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to take Michael Fremer, the foremost champion of thicky vinyl, to task in expectation of his usual rave review, when to my surprise I found the rug had been pulled out from under me — he didn’t like it either. Damn!

MF could hear how bad it was. True to form, he thinks he knows why it doesn’t sound good:

As expected, Rubber Soul, sourced from George Martin’s 1987 16 bit, 44.1k remix sounds like a CD. Why should it sound like anything else? That’s from what it was essentially mastered. The sound is flattened against the speakers, hard, two-dimensional and generally hash on top, yet it does have a few good qualities as CDs often do: there’s good clarity and detail on some instruments. The strings are dreadful and the voices not far behind. The overall sound is dry and decay is unnaturally fast and falls into dead zone.

It strikes me as odd that the new vinyl should sound like a CD. I have listened to the newly remastered 2009 CD of Rubber Soul in stereo extensively and think it sounds quite good, clearly better than the Heavy Vinyl pressing that’s made from the very same 16 bit, 44.1k remixed digital source.

If the source makes the new vinyl sound bad, why doesn’t it make the new CD sound bad? I can tell you that the new CD sounds dramatically better than the 1987 CD I’ve owned for twenty years. They’re not even close. How could that be if, as MF seems to believe, the compromised digital source is the problem?

Lucky for me I didn’t know what the source for the new CD was when I was listening to it. I assumed it came from the carefully remastered hi-rez tapes that were being used to make the new series in its entirety, digital sources that are supposed to result in sound with more analog qualities.

Well, based on what I’ve heard, they do, and those more analog qualities obviously extend to the new Rubber Soul compact disc. At least to these ears they do.

It’s possible my ignorance of the source tape allowed me to avoid the kind of confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — that is surely one of the biggest pitfalls in all of audio and a pit that Fremer falls into regularly.

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How to Avoid Making this Rookie Record Collecting Mistake

Record Shopping Day Video!

Not sure how much of this video you can stand — nothing could interest me less than watching a couple of vinyl enthusiasts spouting off on what they think about some random records sitting in a local store’s bins.

But one or two bits caught my eye. I thought I might take the opportunity to share my take on them with you.

Is there any value to the comments of these two collectors? If you care about what music they like, perhaps.  Anything about what to look for on the label or jacket that might correspond to better sound?  If it’s there I sure didn’t see it, but I admit to speeding through most of it, so I can’t say for sure.

The first bit I refer to above is at 18:42.  The album in question is the legendary Kind of Blue. At this point the unseen helmet-cammed audiophile picks up the record, recognizes the cover, and proceeds to pull the record out to see what era the pressing is from.

Drat! The disappointment in this audiophile’s voice is palpable as he drops the record back in the bin with his dismissive comment that  “it’s a later pressing.”

But we here at Better Records would be falling all over ourselves to get our hands on that later pressing.

Those late pressings can and often do win shootouts. We would never look down our noses at a Red Label Columbia jazz LP, and neither should you.

UPDATE 2025

As good as the best pressings on the Red Label can sound, it has been years since one won a shootout. Here is our commentary for a recent 70s copy that went up on the site, one that earned a Super Hot grade on both sides.

They tend to sell for four or five hundred dollars these days. Why so much you ask? Because they beat the pants off of every so-called audiophile pressing of the album ever made. The testimony of one of our customers does a good job of describing the differences.

In addition, it turns out that at least nine out of ten of the copies with the red label are not remotely as good as the ones that earn Super Hot grades. The good ones are so rare that we only pick them up locally since practically none of the ones we find on the web have the right stampers. Trying to find the right red label needle in the haystack is more trouble than it’s worth, so don’t expect to see many coming to the site.

Our intrepid audiophile explorer does much the same thing about 23 minutes in. It seems pretty clear to us that he has no respect for such reissues, another example of one of the most common myths in record collecting land, the myth that the  original pressing is always, or to be fair, usually better.

This is simply not true, and those of our customers who have purchased White Hot Stamper pressings from us that turned out to be reissues know exactly what I am talking about. This is especially true for the records we sell by The Beatles. No original pressing has every won a shootout. [With one exception.]

Let’s get back to Kind of Blue.

Is the 50s original always better, is the 70s reissue always better, is the 60s 360 pressing always better?

No to one, two and three.

Why? Because no pressing is always better. All pressings are unique and should only be judged on their merits, and you do that by playing them, not by looking at their labels. For us this truth is practically axiomatic. It is in fact the premise of our entire business. Over the course of the 28 years we have been selling records we have never found any compelling evidence to invalidate it.

The day that someone can accurately predict the sound quality of a specific record by looking at the label or cover is a day I do not expect to come, ever.

UPDATE 2025

The above is somewhat misleading. With enough clean 6-Eye pressings on hand to play in a shooout, one of them will win.

That being the case, we have created two lists for those who would like to know which Columbia labels win shootouts — one for 6-Eye winners and one for 360 Label winners.

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How Not to Conduct a Proper Shootout for Aqualung

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

UPDATE 2023

This commentary was probably written circa 2010 since that’s the date on Fremer’s Aqualung review, which, for those with much more tolerance for audiophile BS than I am able to muster can be found here. I’ve made a few changes to the commentary below, but most of the original text is intact.

We recently put up a Hot Stamper Aqualung that just BLEW THE DOORS OFF the CLASSIC 200g pressing. Michael Fremer may think the new reissue is the ultimate pressing, but we sure don’t. 

The Aqualung shootout on his site is priceless. He has so many silly things to say about it, let’s not waste any more time and get right to them.

His Shootout Begins

He says he “… compared Classic’s new 200g reissue with: 1) an original UK Chrysalis 2) an original American Chrysalis/Warner Brothers, 3) an original French Pink Label Island, 4) The Mobile Fidelity ½ speed mastered edition and 5) DCC’s 180g issue mastered by the team of Hoffman and Gray.”

How many of each? One, right? (All the articles in front of the nouns are singular. Assuming MF is using good grammar, how many could there be?)

Mikey, that’s your first mistake.

When it comes to the domestic release, one is a wholly inadequate sample size for pressings that were pumped out by the millions and therefore mastered multiple times. Go to Discogs if you want to see just how many different stamper numbers can be found in the original Reprise pressings. Hint: it’s a lot. Some of them are known to us to be awful, some fall into the middle of the pack, and some we like. Figuring out which are which has taken us a lifetime of work and is well beyond the ability of any single person to decode for more than a few dozen records.

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Midrange Suckout? I Have a Theory

These Titles Are Good for Testing Presence in the Midrange

Many audiophile records suffer from a bad case of midrange suckout.

Vocals and other instruments seem to be so far back in the soundfield that they might as well be coming from another room.

Yet somehow there are still audiophiles who defend the records put out by the ridiculous label that single-handedly created and produced that sound. What is wrong with these people?

(On a side note, yes, I was one of the audiophiles who fell for their phony EQ trickery in the 70s and 80s. In my defense, that was a long time ago.)

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing it.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall the way you should, you instead have your speakers shoved flat up against that wall.

This arrangement has the effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce the three-dimensional space of the recordings you play.

Kind of Blue on MoFi

I hinted back in 2022 I was going to discuss their pressing down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The short version of that future commentary will note that the drums in the right channel of All Blues are about five feet further back in the soundfield than they are on our reference too-noisy-to-sell Six-Eye pressing, or any other pressing of the album we’ve played for that matter.

At the time I could not wrap my head around how Mobile Fidelity could have gotten hold of the multi-tracks in order to remix the album and place the drums further back in the mix.

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Our Guide to Legrand Jazz on Impex

Hot Stamper Pressings of 30th St. Recordings Available Now

Years ago I wrote about how important the Legrand Jazz album was in my growth as a critical listener.

It’s yet another example of an album that helped make me a better audiophile by showing me the error of my tweaking and tuning ways.

Now there is a new pressing of it. Well, new to us anyway. (We readily admit to being behind the times and make no apologies for it. With records like these, we often find ourselves wondering why we bother.) Two new pressings in fact. One on a single disc at 33 RPM as of 2017, and one mastered at 45 RPM on 2 LPs as of 2019, still in print and available for $59.99.

Production details can be found at the end of this review, along with some favorable comments, some from none other than Steve Hoffman himself.

But first let’s hear from the personification of the well-meaning audiophile reviewer, Michael Fremer. He gives the Impex pressings an 11 for sound. He writes (emphasis added):

“This IMPEX reissue is sourced from an “analog mix-down transfer of the original 1958 work tape by Mark Wilder at Battery Studios” and cut by Chris Bellman and Bob Donnelly at Bernie Grundman Mastering on Grundman’s all-tube mastering system. I have a clean, original 6-Eye pressing that this superbly pressed reissue betters in every way. This will make both your stereo and your heart sing. Some of the greatest jazz musicians of that or any era wailing and clearly having a Legrand time. Limited to 3000 copies. Don’t miss it!”

Our notes (for those who have trouble reading our scratch)

  • So bright and thin and dry.
  • Crazy bad!
  • Unnatural, ugly.
  • Worst reissue ever?
  • Void of tubes and body.
  • So far off the mark.
  • Awful.

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Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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The Timekeepers Is Probably Bad on Heavy Vinyl, But Who Can Be Bothered to Find Out?

More of the Music of Count Basie

Analogue Productions remastered this longtime favorite of ours, The Timekeepers, on 45 RPM vinyl. Considering their dismal track record — an unbroken string of failures, scoring not a single winner that I am aware of — I’m guessing the Hot Stamper we offered here would have blown the doors off their version, as well as any other Basie album they have done or ever will do on vinyl.

A good customer emailed us back in 2012 with the quote below, authenticating our rather negative disposition at the time concerning the AP releases from the ’90s:

Recently I unearthed a pile of “The Tracking Angle” magazines, MF’s short-lived venture in publishing, that I’d kept all these years (this may damn me in your eyes, but at the time he was one of the more animated [animated but consistently wrong, not a good tradeoff] writers on audio). I dutifully reread the very first issue (Jan. 1995) for the first time in many years, even a review of “Tea for the Tillerman,”… I was flabbergasted to come across this:

So what does Mr. “Better Records” think? In a newsletter where he says a digital remastered OJC vinyl title sounds better than Acoustic Sounds’ all analogue version and says the whole lot of them “suck” and “simply cannot sound good on a good stereo,” he calls this Cat Stevens reissue “Fabulous. Very dynamic with plenty of presence in the midrange, unlike the ‘audiophile’ records of today.”

We proudly stand behind every word. If the comparable OJC title sounds better than the remastered one Acoustic Sounds is peddling, then it sounds better, digital remastering or no digital remastering.

We don’t pay any attention to who makes the records, how they make them or why they make them.

We just play them and let the chips fall will they may. Mr. Fremer thinks that making records the “right” way should result in better sounding records, but we have found precious little evidence to back up that theory, and volumes of evidence which utterly refute it.

Yes, those Analogue Productions records sucked, they continue to suck, and they will always suck. The “audiophile” records of that day did lack presence, and the passage of time is not going to change that fact.

Play practically any Reference, Chesky or Classic title from 1995 to the present day and listen for the veiled midrange, the opacity, the smeary transients, and the generally constricted, compressed, lifeless quality of its sound, a sound that has been boring us to tears for decades as well as fundamentally undermining the very rationale for the expense and hassle of analog itself in the modern digital age, a much more serious charge.

Ask yourself, where are those records now?

Piled on the ash heap of analog history, that’s where (apologies to Leon Trotsky). Nobody writes about them anymore, and it’s not because they were so good, no matter what any audiophile-type reviewer thought or may think about them.

As long as Analogue Productions is around, at least no one can say that Mobile Fidelity makes the worst sounding audiophile records in the world. They are certainly some of the worst, but not so hopeless that they have never made a single good sounding record, which is the title that Chad Kassem holds.

To the best of our knowledge. Obviously we have only played a small fraction of the records released on his godawful label. In our defense let me say that a small fraction was all we could take.

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How Can Sound This Bad Possibly Earn a 10?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Maybe if the scale goes from 1 to 100, sure, I could see it. Yeah, 10 out of 100 sounds about right.

But the scale goes to 11, which makes a grade of 10 risible to anyone who has played this seriously flawed pressing. Here is how we described its sound many years ago:

We found this mono reissue to be flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, like most of the Sundazed records we’ve played, starting way back in the early 2000s. No, they never got any better.

In our experience, Sundazed is one of the worst record labels of all time. This pressing is simply more evidence that backs up our low opinion of them.

Obviously we may have a low opinion of them, but a famous audiophile reviewer seemed to find the sound to his liking. He wrote:

Sundazed’s reissue gives the original a run for the money and remains true to the original, though it suffers in the bass, which while deep and reasonably well defined, is not as tightly drawn or focused. The upper mids on the original also bloom in a way that the reissue’s don’t, giving the reissue a slightly darker, recessed sound, but there’s still sufficient energy up there since Dylan’s close-miked vocals pack an upper midrange punch. If the vocals or harmonica sound spitty and unpleasantly harsh, it’s your system, not the record [!] – though there’s plenty of grit up there. On the plus side, the overall clarity and transparency of the reissue beats the original. [!] A really fine remastering job.

Of course we find every word of this review arrant nonsense, except the discussion of the qualities he praises in the original relative to the reissue. It’s been twenty years since this remastered pressing came out, does anybody still like the sound of it? Anybody? Let’s hope not.

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Tea for the Tillerman – This Is Your Idea of Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Dear Record Loving Audiophiles of Earth,

I’m afraid we have some bad news. [This was written back in 2011 when the record came out so it’s hard to imagine that what I am about to say is news to anyone after all these years.]

Regrettably we must inform you that the 2011 edition of Tea for the Tillerman pressed by Analogue Productions on Heavy Vinyl doesn’t sound very good. We know you were all hoping for the best. We also know that you must be very disappointed to hear this unwelcome news.

But the record is what it is, and what it is is not very good. Its specific shortcomings are many and will be considered at length in our review below.

Yes, we know, the folks over at Acoustic Sounds, in consultation with the late George Marino at Sterling Sound, supposedly with the real master tape in hand, and supposedly with access to the best mastering equipment money can buy, labored mightily, doing their level best to master and press the Definitive Audiophile Tea for the Tillerman on Vinyl of All Time.

It just didn’t come out very good, no matter what the reviewers say. And what do they say? Allow me to quote one.

…superbly dynamic, spacious and detailed…The attack of the pick on the guitar strings is astonishingly clean and detailed.

Depth is pronounced…

…the resolution of low level detail reveals a host of details that are either buried or glossed over on the other versions I’ve heard…

Uh-oh, wait a minute, here’s a blindingly red flag:

If you have the edition, you’ll find this similar in one way: there’s nothing “mellow” about the overall production and when the music gets loud (and Marino lets it get so) it can get a bit hard, but better that than to soften it and lose the clarity, focus and detail of this superb recording, especially in the quieter passages where the resolution of low level detail is astonishing.

More about that later.

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