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Here you will a small sampling (two dozen or so) of Bernie Grundman’s worst mastering jobs.

Most of the Classic Record classical releases would qualify, but even his work since they went under (Craft, for example) is very spotty.

Capriccio Italien on Classic Records and How Badly I Missed the Boat

More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

I thought it was better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned, was unexpected to say the least.

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout.

(Some inside baseball: most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.)

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

Finding the time to do the serious investigation of LSC 2323 that would be necessary to get to the bottom of it was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years.

The title would have to wait until 2024 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records. Every record gets the chance to show us what it can do, to be evaluated fairly without the listener having any way to know which pressing is playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had probably never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings.

Side One, Second Movement (Tchaikovsky)

  • Big, but bright and compressed
  • Gets loud but opaque and hot
  • Good weight

Side One, First Movement

  • Bright and blurry bells
  • Sort of tubey but a mess
  • Grade: 1+ (passable, but no Hot Stamper)

Side Two (Rimsky-Korsakov)

  • Big but boomy and smeary
  • Brass is edgy and opaque
  • No top end or space
  • Peaks are hot and congested
  • Grade: NFG

To recap: In 2005 I was impressed with Classic’s pressing of LSC 2323. That was only twenty years ago, yet I could not have been more wrong. I thought my stereo was great — I’d owned top quality equipment since 1975 by then — thirty sodding years — so my audiophile credentials would surely dwarf those of the vast majority of forum posters who write about audiophile pressings today. How reliable should we expect their reviews to be?

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Waiting For Columbus Gets the Bernie Treatment Care of Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

A Hot Stamper pressing of this amazing sounding album, a title we regret to say we have in stock only rarely, might be described this way:

Some of the best sounding live rock and roll sound you will ever hear outside of a concert venue. If you want to understand the unique appeal of the band, there’s no better place to start than right here.

It’s one of our all-time favorite live recordings and their single best release – a true Masterpiece.

I have lately been listening to this album in its entirety at the gym (playing the standard cassette over headphones) and enjoying the hell out of it. As good as their best studio albums are, and I count myself as big a fan of the band as there is, Waiting for Columbus is surely the pinnacle of their recorded output. It is as close to perfect as any live album I know.

(The Last Record Album is my personal favorite of their studio albums, but since nobody seems to want to buy it at the prices we charge, I regret to say we had to stop doing shootouts for it years ago. We were losing too much money that way.)

But Bernie Grundman’s version is just another one in a very long line of disastrous recuts, the kind of crap he has been churning out for the last thirty years. It’s all but unplayable on modern high quality equipment. (If it’s not on your system, you might consideer the idea that you still have plenty of work left to do, audio-wise.)

As you can see from the notes below, record one may be passable, but record two is NFG. How is it possible to turn such a wonderful recording into such a ridiculously bad sounding pressing? Even Mobile Fidelity did a better job with the album, and they’re one of the most incompetent remastering outfits that the audiophile world has even known.

We’re frankly at a loss to understand any of it.Bernie Grundman used to make good sounding records. We know that for a fact, having played them by the hundreds. Apparently those days are gone, and, based on this album and plenty of others, there is very little chance of them returning.

Notes on the Sound

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Houses of the Holy on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We can describe the sound of this miserable Bernie Grundman remaster in two words: ridiculously bright.

Honestly, what more do you need to know? It’s almost as bad as the Zep II he cut, and that record is an abomination.

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

(Oh but it does – this misbegotten series out of Japan will do nicely to illustrate how brighter is not necessarily better, it’s just brighter.)

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressings for comparison purposes. After all, these Classic LPs are what many — perhaps most — audiophiles consider superior to other pressings.

We sure don’t, but everybody else seems to. You will find very few critics of the Classic Zeps LPs outside of those who write for this blog, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence.

Wrong on all counts.

We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

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Is Hate an Appropriate Emotion for Sound As Bad As This?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

We recently found ourselves with an unexpected opportunity — we were given the chance to hear the mono pressing of Saucerful of Secrets, the one that Bernie Grundman mastered for Record Store Day back in 2019.

We had ordered a vintage stereo pressing from a dealer, and instead of sending us what we ordered, we got the RSD mono instead.

Knowing the record well, we figured why not give it a listen. Maybe the mono mix is the way to go! Who can say until they’ve heard it.

Well, we’ve now heard it, and if there is a worse sounding version of the album, whether in stereo or in mono, we would find even the possibility of such a thing very hard to believe. You’re going to have to prove it to us, because this record is as bad as it gets.

I can’t say we hate a lot of records — most of the time we’re just disgusted and disappointed with all the crap Heavy Vinyl being produced these days — but we sure hated this one.

If you had played it, I can only hope you would have hated it too.

Side One

Track Four

  • Very flat and veiled and clean
  • This mix sucks compared to stereo

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Bernie Grundman’s Modern Standard Operating Procedure Strikes Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bruce Springsteen Available Now

If you own the Classic Records reissue of this album from the early 2000s, hearing a Hot Stamper pressing is almost sure to be a revelation.

The Classic pressing was dead as a doornail.

It was more thick, it was more opaque, and it was more compressed than most of the originals we played, originals which we noted often had problems in all three areas to start with.

Bernie did the album no favors, that I can tell you.

Head to head in a shootout, our Hot Stampers will be dramatically more lively, solid, punchy, transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short.

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Peter Gabriel on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

Sonic Grade: D (or worse!)

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock album badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

We have a special section for bad sounding records that are marketed to audiophiles, and you can find that section here.

It currently has 281 entries, but if someone wanted to audition more of them — that person is definitely not me, although I cannot imagine anyone more qualified — the number could easily hit 500.

If one were to do just the Music Matters and Analogue Productions albums released to date, a thousand would be no problem.

And if one were simply to include vintage Japanese pressings, the kind many audiophiles regularly bought in the 80s and 90s for their quieter vinyl and supposedly higher quality mastering, our bad audiophile record section would contain multitudes. Multitudes I tell you!

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Classic Records 45 RPM Recut – This Is Your Idea of a Great Firebird?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

Many years ago, a customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him:

Steve, after starting to read Wayne’s take on the platters, I came across this:

That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn’t quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the “Infernal Dance” episode of Stravinsky’s Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording).

That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times.

This is why I have so little faith in reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago (04/2010) against a good original and the recut was at best passable in comparison. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say?

The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably mediocre and even just plain awful records. It’s the only real evidence we have for their credibility, and the evidence is almost always damning.

I want a reviewer who knows better than to play such an underwhelming pressing and then waste my time telling me about it. He should tell us what a good record sounds like with this equipment mod. Then I might give more credence to what he has to say.

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years.

P.S.

This is one of the Classic Records titles on Harry Pearson’s TAS List of Super Discs(!)

P.P.S.

Allow me to quote a writer with his own website devoted to explaining and judging classical recordings of all kinds. His initials are A.S. for those of you who have been to his site.

Classic Records Reissues (both 33 and 45 RPM) – These are, by far, the best sounding Mercury pressings. Unfortunately, only six records were ever released by Classic. Three of them (Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky) are among the very finest sounding records ever made by anyone. Every audiophile (with a turntable) should have these “big three”.

Obviously we could not disagree more. I’ve played all six of the Classic Mercury’s. The Chabrier, Ravel and Prokofiev titles are actually even worse than the Stravinsky we reviewed.

This same reviewer raved about a record we thought had godawful sound, Romantic Russia on MoFi, a label that never met an orchestral string section it didn’t think needed brightening.

Find me a Mobile Fidelity classical record with that little SR/2 in the dead wax that does not have bright string tone. I have yet to hear one.

What is it with audiophile record reviewers? They seem to be taken in by the most unnatural sounding pressings. The world is full of wonderful vintage pressings that have no such problems. If you are an audiophile who feels himself qualified to write about records, shouldn’t you at least be able to hear the difference between a phony audiophile pressing and the vintage pressings it supposedly improved?

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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Michael Fremer Says You Should Own the Classic 45 of Time Out

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

Michael Fremer spends two hours and ten minutes on his site going through a list of 100 All Analog In Print Reissued Records You Should Own.

On this list is the 45 RPM Bernie Grundman cutting of Time Out. Fremer apparently liked it a whole lot more than we did. We think it is just plain awful.

The MoFi Kind of Blue is on this same list, another pressing that is astonishingly bad, or, at the very least, really, really wrong.

If you’re the kind of person who might want to give Michael Fremer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to All Analog records he thinks sound good, ones he thinks you should own, try either one of them. If you think they sound just fine, you sure don’t need me to tell you that they’re completely and utterly awful.

There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across in the five minutes I spent watching the video — I have very little tolerance for the sort of amateurishness he displays — I would suspect the winners are few and the losers many.

As a practical rule, if you want good sounding vinyl, you should avoid anything on his list.

And if you do try some and do like them, let me know which ones you think sound good and I will try to get hold of some copies and listen to them for myself.

Here is what we had to say about the Brubeck that Mikey recommends. We called it:

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records jazz LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes. Sonic Grade: F.

Our story:

Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of a shootout. My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:

  • Big but hard
  • Zero (0) warmth
  • A bit thin and definitely boring
  • Unnatural
  • No fun
  • No F***ing Good (NFG)

Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.

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Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment Good and Hard

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s take stock. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustible supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

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