bad-45

Sonny Rollins Plus 4 – Defending the Indefensible

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this album in 2014 or thereabouts. It came out in 2007, proving that Chad had learned nothing about the sound of jazz during the previous 13 years after having made his first foray into bad Heavy Vinyl.

Almost twenty years later has anything changed? Not to our ears it hasn’t.

In point of fact, the releases of his records and plenty of others’ we’ve auditioned over the last few years are every bit as bad or worse.

When you’re making a lot of money doing it the way you’ve always done it, why would you ever want to change?

To make a better sounding product? Yeah, that’s a good one. How do you improve on perfection?

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding pair of audiophile records than this 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl release, and I’ve heard a ton of them. 

Surely someone must have noticed how awful these records sound.

So, being an enterprising sort, with a few idle moments to spare, I did a google search. To my surprise it came up pretty much empty. Sure, dealers are selling it, every last one of the bigger mail-order types.

But how is it that no reviewer has taken it to task for its oh-so-obvious shortcomings?

And no one on any forum seems to have anything bad to say about it either. How could that be?

We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think that for the most part they are awful and want nothing to do with them.

But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.

Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?

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So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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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?

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Do Pressings Remastered at 45 RPM Have Better Sound?

More Reviews and Commentaries for 45 RPM Pressings

No doubt some do, but based on our admittedly limited experience, we rather doubt any of the titles shown here, or from this series, are likely to be very good sounding.

I was going to write about the awful Holst The Planets with Previn from this series that I had played a few years back, but never got around to it.

Lots of punchy, powerful and deep bass — yes, 45 RPM mastering is known for that — but the dry, overly clean, clear, modern sound and the screechy strings made me take it off the turntable halfway through the first side. (We write more about EMI and Angel pressings here.)

If you want a good sounding pressing of The Planets, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

As usual, our advice is to accept no substitutes. There are a lot of bad sounding, poorly performed Planets out there.

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Julie Is Her Name – A Boxstar Bomb from Bernie

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

One question: Where’s the Tubey Magic?

We would never have pointed you in the direction of this awful Boxstar 45 of Julie Is Her Name, cut by Bernie Grundman in 2009, supposedly on tube equipment. I regret to say that we actually sold some copies, but in my defense I can honestly and truthfully claim that we never wrote a single nice thing about the sound of the record. That has to count for something, right?

We found the Tubey Magic on his pressing to be non-existent, as non-existent as it is on practically every Classic Record release he cut. If you have his version you are in for quite a treat when you finally get this one home and on your table. There is a world of difference between the sound of the two versions and we would be very surprised if it takes you more than ten seconds to hear it.

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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.

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Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus Is a Bloated Mess at 45 RPM from Hoffman, Gray and Kassem

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

We played an amazing Hot stamper copy that got the bottom end on this album as right as we’ve ever heard. The contribution of the bass player was clear and correctly balanced in the mix, which we soon learned to appreciate was fundamentally important to the rhythmic drive of the music.

The bass was so tight and note-like you could see right into the soundstage and practically picture Monte Budwig plucking and bowing away.

This is precisely where the 45 RPM pressing goes off the rails.

The bloated, much-too-heavy and poorly-defined bass of the Heavy Vinyl remaster makes a mess of the Brazilian and African rhythms inherent in the music. If you own that $50 waste of money, believe me, you will not be tapping your foot to Cast Your Fate to the Wind or Manha de Carnival.

Our rule of thumb: he better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered records will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

Is this the worst version of the album ever made? That’s hard to say.

But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment like the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, these remastered records have your name all over them.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

If you want to know what a properly-mastered, properly-pressed copy sounds like, we put the last one up in 2023.

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Our Take on the MoFi 45 Brothers In Arms

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

We have never bothered to play their remaster, along with some other Heavy Vinyl reissues we think have very little chance of actually sounding good to us.

I found out recently that the MoFi is now on the TAS Super Disc list. You can find it along with the domestic — yes, you read that right — domestic pressing of the first album.

Now just how hard of hearing do you have to be to think that the domestic pressing of Dire Straits’ first album is a Super Disc? A nice record, sure, but nice records aren’t really Super Discs, are they?

Not when there are UK pressings that trounce it. We should know, we’ve played them by the dozens. How the writers for The Absolute Sound can be this far off the mark is a question we cannot begin to answer.

The most obvious answer — and therefore the most likely one — is reviewer malpractice.

What else could it be?

What We Think We Know

We have written quite a number of reviews and commentaries for the first album and we encourage you to read some of them.

Speaking of Super Discs, the good British pressings are so good we put them on our Top Ten Most Tubey Magical Rock and Pop Recordings List. No domestic pressing we have ever played would qualify as anything other than a minimally-acceptable Hot Stamper.

We would never bother to put such a pressing in a shootout, when even the average run-of-the-mill UK copy is better.

We Get Letters

A few years ago we received this email from a customer.

“How would you compare the Brothers in Arms SHS to the Mobile Fidelity 45 rpm copy?”

Dear Sir,

We have never bothered to play their remaster, and why would we? Every MoFi pressing made by the current regime has had major sound problems when compared head to head with the “real” records we sell, and it’s simply not worth our time to find out exactly what is wrong with the sound of any of these new reissues, theirs included.

[I will be reviewing their unbelievably awful Dire Straits first album on 45 one of these days. Rarely have I heard such a good recording, a brilliant recording, turned into such a piece of crap. Robert Brook didn’t like it either.]

However, we have been known to make an exception to that rule from time to time. Recently we did so in the case of the Tea for the Tillerman George Marino cut at 45 RPM for Analogue Productions.

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The Four Seasons Direct to Disc at 45 RPM

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Antonio Vivaldi Available Now

This RCA Direct-to-Disc 45 RPM Double LP has awful sound, with exceptionally hard and shrill string tone.

This is precisely why we dislike Japanese pressings as a rule — they sound like this audiophile trash.

If you own this album, it should make a good one for testing string tone and texture. The strings on this record are awful, and they should sound awful on your stereo too.

The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile

You may have seen this text in another listing, but it bears repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.

There has been one big change from the days when I self-identified as a freshly minted audiophile in the ’70s.

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

The title reviewed above is a good example of the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to put up with back in the old days, long before we had anything resembling a clue.

This one clearly belongs on our list of bad audiophile records.

You might be asking: What kind of audio fool was I? to buy a dumbass record like this.

It’s a fair question. Yes, I admit I was foolish enough to buy records like this and expect it to have good music, or at least good sound. Of course it had neither. Practically none of these kinds of records ever did. Sheffield and a few others made some good ones, but most Direct to Disc recordings were crap.

As clueless as I was, even back in the day I could tell that I had just thrown my money away on this lipsticked-pig in a poke.

But I was an audiophile, and like a certain Mr. Mulder, I wanted to believe. These special super-hi-fidelity records were being made for me, for special people like me, because I had expensive equipment and regular records are never going to be good enough to play on my special equipment, right?

To say I was wrong to think about audio that way is obviously an understatement. Over the course of the last forty years, I (and to be fair, my friends and my staff) have been wrong about a lots of things in the worlds of records and audio.

You can read more about many of the things we got wrong under the heading: live and learn.

The good news? Audio progress is real and anyone who goes about doing audio the right way can achieve a great deal.

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