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.