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.