audiophile-bs

Linked here are two dozen of the most shameful examples of audiophile BS vinyl we’ve auditioned in the 37 years we’ve been in the business of selling records to audiophiles.

Heavy Vinyl records, Half-Speed mastered records and regular records all have their own halls of shame which can be found by scrolling through the categories on the right side of the page.

Straight Up Trash from Ron Furmanek on 2 LPs

More of the Music of Badfinger

This British 2 LP reissue from 1993 was (badly) digitally remastered by a Mr. Ron Furmanek. May his name live in infamy.

It contains alternate mixes of 6 songs at 45 RPM on the second record, with sound every bit as bad as the sound of the first record.

The whole Apple series of remastered releases — at least the ones we played — was awful sounding and should be avoided completely. These records are nothing but audiophile bullshit.

If you are a record collector and must have those alternate mixes, just buy the CD. The vinyl is terrible, the CD probably sounds every bit as bad, but at least the CD is cheap and plays all the songs straight through.

If you own this record, my guess is it is pristine.

If you played it at all, you played it once and put it away on a shelf where it probably sits to this very day. Good records get played and bad records get shelved. If you have lots of pristine records filed away, ask yourself: Why aren’t you playing them?

(more…)

Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection.

As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how badly MoFi had ruined the sound, I was mortified.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. Thrilled to it even. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

(more…)

We Drop the Needle on Another Sad Excuse for an Audiophile Pressing

More on the Subject of Half-Speed Mastering

This is an A&M Audiophile Sampler, made in Canada and pressed on Japanese vinyl .

There is a bit of a story behind this title. It’s not the kind of record we normally would buy, or even bother to play truth be told.

A customer had emailed us saying it sounded great. It was cheap so we grabbed one for fun. Our notes read:

  • Sucked out middle
  • Clean and hard (maybe like a CD?)
  • This sucks

Hard to imagine one of our customers liked the sound of this pressing, but I assure you that one of them did, so make of that what you will.

(more…)

Breakfast in America – An A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This title is yet another Half-Speed we think belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I should know — my system in 1976 was one-tenth as revealing as the one we use now.

But this pressing is so awful even my old system could not be fooled by this kind of audiophile BS sound. The console you see pictured might be the ideal system to play it. Hard to say, I haven’t heard one of those since the 60s.

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

So washed out, brittle, thin and lifeless, it practically defies understanding that anyone with two working ears ever considered calling this piece of crap an “audiophile” record.

But are today’s remastered records marketed to those looking for superior sound any better? Not the ones we’ve played recently. (If you know of any good ones, please drop us a line.)

Is this A&M pressing the worst version of the album ever made? It’s hard to imagine it would have much competition.

(more…)

An RCA Direct Disc with Bad Music & Bad Sound, Like Most Audiophile Albums from the ’70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

The records being marketed to audiophiles these days may have second- and third-rate sound, but at least they now have good music. That’s progress, right?

It is progress, because this RCA direct to disc recording is the kind of crap that used to qualify as an “audiophile record” when I was starting out in the mid-70s. These records were displayed on the walls of all the hi-fi stores I used to frequent back in the day.

They cost a lot more than regular records did too. Many were pressed in Japan, and I vaguely recall that the retail prices were in the range of $15 to $18. That’s $77 to $92 in today’s money. Can you imagine paying that for a record with such poor sound and music?

The Beatles Medley is particularly misguided. These guys have no idea what to do with the music of The Beatles.

A record such as this clearly belongs in our audiophile hall of shame, which is a general catchall section for the many bad sounding records that have been marketed to audiophiles over the last fifty years. We’ve played and reviewed more than 300 to date, which of course is but a mere fraction of the many thousands of questionable pressings that have been produced since the 70s. There has always been a mid-fi collector market, and no shortage of enterprising types to take advantage of it.

It turns out that many of the most shameful offenders for sound are more recent releases that have only come our way in the last few years. Here are some of their stories.

(more…)

Steely Dan ‎on MCA Audiophile Vinyl – Sounds Like a Good CD to Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Clean and clear and tonally correct, just like a good CD should sound.

If this is what you are after, why not just buy the CD? It’s bound to be a lot cheaper.

Some songs sound better than others, but I can’t for the life of me remember which ones. I auditioned copies of this record more than twenty thirty years ago. Once I got rid of them I never bought another. Why would I?

No doubt there are still audiophiles extolling the virtues of this record on various internet threads.

One thing you can be sure of: these are people who are not serious about making progress in audio.

Some of the pressings these audiophiles like can be found in our stone age audio record section.

If you have top quality, highly-tweaked modern equipment, a good room, and the myriad other things that make exceptionally good vinyl playback possible these days — in a way that was not possible even ten or fifteen years ago — you would have no reason to keep a record of such mediocrity in your collection.

(more…)

Led Zeppelin on Prestigious Japanese Limited Edition Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. In 2006 I finally woke up to how ridiculously bad these Japanese pressings I was selling back in the 90s actually were.

It’s what real progress in audio is all about, in this case about ten years’ worth. Those are ten years that really shook my world, and by 2007 we had discovered much better cleaning technologies and given up on Heavy Vinyl and audiophile bullshit pressings such as these, whew!

Our story from 2006:

I used to sell the German Import reissues of the Zep catalog in the 90s. At the time I thought they we’re pretty good, but then the Japanese AMJY Series came out and I thought they were clearly better.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I now realize those Japanese pressings are bright as bright can be. Now, not-too-surprisingly, the German pressings sound more or less right (on some of their titles).

They tend to be tonally correct, which is more than you can say for most Zep pressings, especially some of the Classics [linked here], which have the same brightness issue (as well as many other problems).

UPDATE 2024

Only one of the German-pressed Zeppelin records is good enough to win shootouts, the only title of theirs on German vinyl that we buy these days. Of course we tried them all, at no small expense I might add, because there were a great many pressings cut by many different engineers over the course of decades that were pressed in Germany, and the only way we could judge them was to buy them and have them shipped over. In the end only one had the big, bold, dynamic sound we were after.

(more…)

The Wall Sounds Terrible on these “Audiophile” Rip-offs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

This Japanese import is one of the dullest, muddiest, worst sounding copies of The Wall we have ever played. It is clearly made from a second generation tape (or worse!).

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

And somehow this pressing, or one very much like it, ended up as on the TAS Super Disc List. I would hope that the copy Harry played sounded a whole lot better than this one.

The version on the TAS Super Disc list is EMI 4814, which I believe is the British original. Conventional wisdom? Is The Absolute Sound capable of any other?

And the CBS Half-Speed is every bit the mudfest that the Half-Speed is.

How is it that the worst sounding pressings are so often marketed to audiophiles as superior to their mass-produced counterparts? In our experience, more often than not they are just plain awful, inferior in every way but one: surface quality.

And the knock on these CBS Half-Speeds is that they are made from the same vinyl CBS used to press all their other records.

I remember buying them back in the late-70s at Tower Records. They were only $12.99 when Mobile Fidelity pressings were $17.99, garnering a premium price because they were pressed in Japan. Fool that I was, I bought plenty of both, not to mention those made by Nautilus, Direct Disk Labs and plenty of others too painful to think about.

Dear audiophiles, stop collecting crappy audiophile pressings with quiet vinyl and just switch to CD already. You’ll be getting better sound and saving yourself a lot of money to boot. You simply cannot defend analog with this kind of junk.

(more…)

Venerable or Execrable? If It’s Athena the Chances Are Good It’s the Latter

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

I spied an interesting quote on the Acoustic Sounds site many years ago:

“…Analogue Productions’ 45rpm remastering improves upon the venerable Athena LP release from the late 80s, with better dynamics and a fuller ‘middle’ to the orchestral sonority.” – Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound, October 2010

For some reason Andrew uses the word “venerable” when a better, certainly more accurate term would have been “execrable.” Having played the record in question this strikes us as the kind of mistake that would not be easy to make.

Athena was a godawful audiophile label that managed to put out all of five records before going under, only one of which was any good, and it’s definitely not this one.

It was in fact the Debussy piano recording with Moravec, mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig himself, a man who knows his classical music, having cut scores if not hundreds of records for Nonesuch and other labels in the 60s and 70s.

From the jacket:

Analogue Master Recording™

Unlike other remastering companies, Athena Records always uses the ORIGINAL ANALOG MASTER SESSION TAPES. In this case, The Master Lacquers were cut directly by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab so you know it will sound superb.

Our Hot Stamper listing for the Vox pressing:

This famously good sounding Vox pressing os Symphonic Dances has been remastered a number of times, but you can be sure that the Hot Stamper we are offering here will beat any of those modern pressings by a wide margin in any area that has to do with sound (surfaces being another matter and one we won’t go into here).

The sound of this recording on the best pressings is dynamic, lively and BIG. The music just jumps out of the speakers, bringing the power and vibrant colors of a symphony orchestra right into your listening room. Guaranteed to put to shame 95% or more of all the classical records you own, even if you own lots of our Hot Stampers. [Can’t say I would agree with that in 2023.]

The bass is phenomenal on this recording, assuming you have a copy that has the bass cut and pressed right. This one sure does! Few Golden Age classical recordings from the 50s will have the kind of bass that’s found on this record.

(more…)

An Insult to Aaron Copland on Reference Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

Yet another Reference Record we’ve reviewed and found wanting.

In all the years I was selling audiophile records, one of the labels whose appeal made no sense to me whatsoever (along with their long-forgotten TAS list brethren, American Gramaphone and Telarc) was Reference Records.

Back then, when I would hear one of their orchestral or classical recordings, I was always left thinking, “Why do audiophiles like these records?”

I was confused, because at that time, back in the 80s, I had simply not developed the listening skills that today make it so easy to recognize the faults of their recordings.

I made the mistake of thinking that other audiophiles with more advanced equipment and more refined listening skills must be hearing something I was not.

I had trouble putting my finger on what I didn’t like about them, but now, having worked full time (and then some!) for more than twenty years to develop better critical listening skills, the shortcomings of their records, or, to be more accurate, the shortcomings of this particular copy of this particular title, took no time at all to work out.

My transcribed notes for RR-22:

  • Lean tonality
  • No real weight
  • No Tubey Magic
  • Blurry imaging when loud
  • No real depth
  • Bright tonal balance

Is this the sound you are looking for in an audiophile record?

Shouldn’t you be looking for audiophile quality sound?

Well, you sure won’t find it here.

On our current playback system, this Reference Record is nothing but a joke, a joke played on a much-too-credulous audiophile public by the ridiculously inept and misguided engineers and producers who worked for Reference Records.

This is a reference for something? For what?

As I wrote about another one of their awful releases, if this is your idea of a reference record, you are in real trouble.

It would be hard to imagine that anyone who has ever heard a good vintage classical recording — here are some of our favorites — could ever confuse this piece of audiophile trash with actual hi-fidelity orchestral sound.

(more…)