bloated-bottom

The records on this list tend to be boosted in the middle and the top of the bass range, causing their low end to be bloated and unnatural.

Note that it is the rare Half-Speed mastered record that does not suffer from bass bloat.

Analogue Productions Fails Spectacularly Right Out of the Gate with Jazz Giant

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Albums Available Now

You may remember what a disaster the Analogue Productions version of Jazz Giant from the 90s was.

Or maybe you agree with a certain writer that they were god’s gift to the record lovers of the world in need of higher quality pressings. We thought they were crap right from the get-go and were not the least bit shy about saying so,

I haven’t heard the new 45 RPM version and don’t intend to play one, but I seriously doubt that it sounds like our good Hot Stamper pressings. We have yet to hear a single Heavy Vinyl 45 that sounds any good to us, judged by the standards we set in our shootouts.

Actually, to run the risk of sounding even more pedantic than usual, the records themselves set the standards.

We simply grade them on the curve they establish for themselves.

We guarantee that none of their LPs can hold a candle to our vintage records or your money back. If you have one of the new pressings and don’t know what’s wrong with it, or don’t think that anything is wrong with it, try one of ours.

It will show you just how much better a real record can sound, with more space, more transparency, more energy, more presence, more drive, more ambience — more of everything that’s good about the sound of music on vinyl.

It is our contention that no one alive today makes records that sound as good as the vintage LPs we sell. Once you hear one of our Hot Stamper pressings, those Heavy Vinyl records you bought might not ever sound right to you again.

They sure don’t sound right to us, but we have the good fortune of being able to play the best older pressings (vintage reissues included) side by side with the new ones, where the faults of the current reissues become much more audible — in fact, exceedingly obvious. When you can hear them that way, head to head, there really is no comparison. 

What to Listen For

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas:

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Acoustic Sounds Hired Doug Sax to Ruin a Classic Chet Baker Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

The less said about this awful mid-90s Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions the better. What a murky piece of crap it was.

Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing was very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, twenty-five thirty-one years later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day.

Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out for decades.

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The Nautilus Half-Speed of Harvest Is Not Bad!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

We haven’t played a copy of this record in more than a decade [make that two], but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to see things differently now. 

In the early 2000s we wrote the following (please excuse the all-caps, I could barely type back then):

This is a SURPRISINGLY good sounding Nautilus Half-Speed mastered LP with AMAZING transparency.

The sound here is DRAMATICALLY more natural than your average audiophile pressing. Just listen to the phony top end found on most MoFis to see what we mean.

On this record you’ll hear none of the hyped-up highs that are MoFi’s claim to fame.

This Nautilus is sure to destroy the typical domestic pressing, which (before cleaning) will tend to sound opaque, thick and dull.

This Half-Speed wouldn’t really match up to our Hottest Stampers, but you could sure do a lot worse.

Although it’s a tad fat at the bottom, it still retains much of the warmth and richness found on the best copies.

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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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The MHS Recording of Chopin’s First Piano Concerto Had the Most Natural Piano of Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frederic Chopin Available Now

There are some wonderful Musical Heritage Society records sitting in the bins of your local record store or Goodwill, and this one is worth picking up just to hear how well recorded the piano is.

We described it this way:

Beautiful piano. The most natural and realistic mix with the piano not in the foreground.

But there is more to the recording than the sound of the piano.

Smeary, bloated and dry orchestra holds it back.

Well, at least we tried. (Note that side two was deemed not worth grading.)

Our favorite recording for performance and sound is the Living Stereo from 1961, LSC 2575, with Rubinstein at the piano and Skrowaczewski conducting the New Symphony Orchestra of London.

This is what we had to say about the sound of our Shootout Winner:

We love the huge, solid and powerful sound of the piano on this recording. This piano has weight and heft. As a result, it sounds like a real piano.

For some reason, a great many Rubinstein recordings are not capable of reproducing those seemingly all-important qualities in the sound of the piano.

Those are, as I hope everyone understands by now, the ones we don’t sell. If the piano in a piano concerto recording doesn’t sound solid and powerful, what is the point of playing such a record?

Or, to be more accurate, what is the point of an audiophile playing such a record? (Those of you who would like to avoid bad sounding vintage classical and orchestral records have come to the right place. We’ve compiled a very long list of them for precisely that purpose, and we add to it regularly.)

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Listening for a Bit Too Much Tubey Magic Down Low on Buffalo Springfield

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young playing on them are about the best we can do these days. We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this seminal band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites of mine and have been since they were first released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around) Thank god my older stepbrother had good taste in music. I doubt that many 14-year-olds were playing Buffalo Springfield albums, but I was, even though most of the time it was on 8-track tape.

On even the best copies I regret to say there’s a bit too much Tubey Magic in the bass. Tubbiness and bloat were par for the course. This may explain why so many copies have rolled off bass; the engineer cut the bass because he heard how tubby it was and figured no bass is better than bad bass. 

Which is just not true. Cutting the bass leans out and “modernizes” the sound, making the voices sound thinner and dryer. Less rich. This pretty much ruins everything on this album, just the way it ruins everything in many of the modern recordings I hear.

Having your bass under control on the playback side isn’t easy — in fact it’s probably the hardest thing to achieve in audio — but it can be done, and with good bass control the slightly wooly bass is just a part of the sound you learn to accept.

It doesn’t actually interfere much with your enjoyment of the music, mostly because all the other instruments and voices sounds so magical.


The post-it notes you see are very old, probably from the early 2000s.

Until we got our cleaning system sorted in 2007, shootouts for any of this band’s first three albums were going to be tough sledding, if not downright impossible.

In this commentary we describe what needed to change in order to make Buffalo Springfield shootouts a reality.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. This album sounds its best:

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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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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 inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding audiophile record than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. 

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 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.

Presence? Gone!

Transients? Who needs ’em!

Ambience, openness, three-dimensionality?

Uh, will you consider settling for murk, bloat and smear? There’s a special on them today at Acoustic Sounds.

And yet no one seems to have noticed, except us of course.

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Analogue Productions and Sterling Produce a Disastrous Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Wikipedia has a nice entry for some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ideas behind the final movement of the piece:

These [later] works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups. The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.

Wikipedia

Could not have said it better myself!

We’ve written at length about the thrills to be had when playing the last movement of Scheherazade — not brilliantly, to be sure, as the writer for Wikipedia has done, but serviceably I hope. Unfortunately, not every pressing of Reiner’s performance is able to communicate the musical values of the work the way the best pressings can.

As you can see from our notes for the this Heavy Vinyl Analogue Productions pressing, the thrill was barely there on the first side, and by the second side it was completely gone.

The notes from our 2024 shootout read:

  • Not dry or squawky
  • Really lacking depth and dynamics.
  • Big, thick bass gets annoying.
  • Big brass not too bright but it is over-textured and flat.

Plenty of modern records suffer from these as well as lots of other shortcomings. For some reason, the writers for The Absolute Sound who put this crappy LP on their Super Disc list didn’t seem bothered by them the way we were.

If you own this pressing, here are the kinds of things you might want to listen for in order to recognize its many, and quite serious, failings.

When played head to head against any properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP, this pressing will fall short in a number of important areas. Linked below are titles we’ve found to be good for testing these same qualities in a recording.

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What to Think When a New Version of Graceland Is Completely Unrecognizable?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd come from?

Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version (maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened).

Can that possibly be a good thing?

Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.

On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.

We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.

Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.

The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.

Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!

Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.

But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.

VTA

You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.

The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.

You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?

The Bright Side

Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.

The CD already exists. It has a sound.

The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.

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