compressed-sound

These albums tend to suffer from exceptionally compressed sound.

They are often Half-Speed mastered and/or pressed on Heavy Vinyl. Many of them are orchestral recordings from the Golden Age.

Our Hot Stamper pressings of these same albums will be dramatically more lively and dynamic than any of the records on this list.

Ride The Lightning at 45 RPM – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This review is for the 2008 Warner Brothers 45 RPM 180g Double LP Half-Speed Mastered by Mobile Fidelity from the original analog master tapes.

Compressed, sucked-out mids, no deep bass and muddy mid-bass, the mastering of this album is an absolute disaster on every level.

If you want to know how lost the average audiophile is, a quick Google search will bring up plenty of positive comments from listeners and reviewers alike. 

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The Original A Hard Day’s Night on CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

The Old CD – You Know, the Original Mono One that the General Public Used to Say Was So Great…

(That is of course the stereo record you see pictured to the left.)

I have the early generation mono CD of this album. Although my car has a very good stereo system, you would never know there was any magic to the sound of these recordings by playing that CD. The whole thing is hopelessly flat and gray.

It starts to perk up by the song Things We Said Today, the 10th (!) track.

Before that it just sounds compressed, with all the voices and instruments mashed together. There’s no transparency to the sound. It reminds me of listening to this music on the radio. If that’s the effect George Martin was going for with the old mono mix, he succeeded brilliantly. I prefer the twin-track unapproved stereo mixes found on the LPs.

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The Cars on Nautilus – Ouch!

More of the Music of The Cars

Sonic Grade: F

This Nautilus Half-Speed Mastered LP is pure mud — compressed, thick and congested, a disaster on every level, much like their atrocious remastering of Candy-O.

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

If you own this Audiophile BS pressing (NR-14) and you can’t hear what’s wrong with it, you seriously need to consider ditching your current playback system and getting another one.  It is doing you no favors.

Our Nautilus pressing here is yet another one of those Jack Hunt turgid muckfests (check out City to City #058 for the ultimate in murky sound), is incapable of conveying anything resembling the kind of clean, clear, oh-so-radio-friendly pop rock sound that producer Roy Thomas Baker, engineer Geoff Workman and the band were aiming for.

The recording has copious amounts of Analog Richness and Fullness to start with. Adding more is not an improvement; in fact it’s positively ruinous.

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Peter Gabriel – Direct Disk Labs Half-Speed Reviewed

More of the Music of Peter Gabriel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Peter Gabriel

Sonic Grade: D

The Direct Disk Labs half-speed here is thick, compressed and lifeless, though fairly rich tonally, a key quality the best UK pressings always have. The good UK pressings — on the original tan label, avoid the blue label reissues, they suck — are full of luscious Tubey Magic.

This is in fact the only Peter Gabriel recording that has that vintage Tubey Magical Analog sound. The worst recording of his first five, So, has the least amount. It is digital, and it sounds like it’s digital, but that is not the kiss of death if you can find a good domestic pressing of it and clean it right.

You could do worse I suppose, but too much of the life of the music will be lost when playing this poorly remastered pressing.  Did they have a good British tape to work with? It doesn’t sound like it.

Is it better than the average domestic pressing, the ones that are clearly made from dubbed sub-generation tapes? Maybe, in some ways, but both this half-speed and the domestic pressings should be avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound.

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There’s a Riot Goin’ On – From the Analog Master!

More of the Music of Sly and the Family Stone

Sonic Grade: F

Ouch this record sounds bad. Some of the worst sound I have ever heard on Heavy Vinyl. The average cassette sounds better than this piece of crap.

My notes:

Side one: track one is thin and hard. Track two is not very tubey and the sibilance is harsh.

Side two: track two is full and tubey but track three shows that the sound may be tubey but it is very compressed.

But some people think that records that were made from the analog master tapes should sound good. 

Especially when those records were pressed on virgin vinyl.

But do they?

This one sure doesn’t. What could possibly have gone wrong?

We have no idea. We just play the records and listen to them. We let them tell us if they are wrong or right.

This one told us it may have been made from good tapes — may have been, the good folks at Columbia records might be lying to us about that, it wouldn’t be the first time and I certainly would not put it past them — but it sure wasn’t made very well.

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The Captain and Me – A Nautilus Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

We actually recommended the Nautilus Half-Speed in the old days, but the last time we played one (2012 maybe?) the sound was Pure Audiophile BS — compressed to death and totally whomp-free.

The average domestic copy is terrible too, but that’s no reason to recommend this crappy remaster.

Stick to the green label originals.  They can rock with the best of them.

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The Crusaders / Chain Reaction – MoFi Reviewed

More Jazz Fusion Records with Hot Stampers

This is a Mobile Fidelity LP with relatively good sound. We did a mini-shootout many years ago and this copy apparently killed the competition. 

However…

When you play the MoFi against an actual honest-to-goodness properly mastered and pressed vintage LP – we call them Hot Stampers – the audiophile version of the album reeks of phony top end EQ, compression and sloppy bass.

Of course, what half-speed mastered record doesn’t?

Further Reading

The best place to start is here:

How come you guys don’t like Half-Speed Mastered records?

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Delibes / Coppelia Reviewed in 2008 on Golden Import

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

Not a bad Mercury Golden Import, but not a very good one either — there aren’t too many of those by the way — and certainly not in the same league with the better recordings of the work. 

Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile sound.

These days, practically all of the Golden Import reissues we play sound much too much like the bulk of the Philips pressings we’ve auditioned over the years have a tendency to sound:

  • overly smooth,
  • smeary,
  • compressed,
  • recessed and
  • veiled. 

Hot Stamper pressings of Mercury classical and orchestral recordings can be found here.

More than anything, the changes we hear in the records we play now tie into the idea of progress in audio, since without progress the records that sounded good to me in 2006 would still sound good to me now, and thank goodness they don’t.

Live and learn is our motto, onward and upward, and we have made that approach to audio the very foundation of our business.

If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.

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Dave Mason – Alone Together on MCA Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Dave Mason

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dave Mason

Sonic Grade: D

I confess I actually used to like and recommend the Heavy Vinyl MCA pressing. Rest assured that is no longer the case. Nowadays it sounds as opaque, ambience-challenged, lifeless and pointless as the rest of its 180 gram brethren.

As for other records we got wrong, you can find plenty more here, under the heading: Live and Learn.

We struggled for years with the bad vinyl and the murky sound of this album. Finally, with dozens of advances in playback quality and dramatically better cleaning techniques, we have now managed to overcome the problems which we assumed were baked into the recording. I haven’t heard the master tape, but I have heard scores of pressings made from it over the years. 

It is a surely a MASTERPIECE that belongs in any Rock Collection worthy of the name. Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s not a scrap of filler here. The recording by Bruce Botnick is hard to fault as well.

1970 was a great time in music. Tea for the Tillerman, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Moondance, Sweet Baby James, Tumbleweed Connection, After the Goldrush, The Yes Album, McCartney, Elton John, His Band And Street Choir, Deja Vu, Workingman’s Dead, Tarkio, Stillness, Let It Be — need I go on?

Even in such illustrious company — I defy anyone to name ten albums of comparable quality to come out in any year — Alone Together ranks as one of the best releases of the year. (more…)

Fresh Cream – A DCC Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

Is it 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 all any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash needs to know.

Compressed, thick, dull, opaque, and almost completely lacking in ambience, this record has all the hallmarks of the Modern Heavy Vinyl Reissue.

Whether made by DCC or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, many remastered audiophile pressings started to have a tonal shortcoming that we found insufferable from day one: they are just too damn smooth.

Almost any domestic or British original pressing of Fresh Cream will be better in almost every way. Read our Hot Stamper review below for the full story. 

UPDATE

[This is an old review. We buy very few domestic pressings of Fresh Cream. They are often noisy, and they don’t sound remotely as good as the right British imports, including some late reissues. But anything beats the DCC LP.

It is, in our experience, the worst version ever.

Our Hot Stamper Commentary from 2008

AN EXCEPTIONAL SIDE ONE BACKED WITH GREAT SIDE ONE, both on surprisingly quiet vinyl! We just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ debut album and were delighted to hear how good this music can sound on the right pressing. This copy has the kind of bottom end that this music absolutely demands but is sadly missing in action from most of the pressings we played. If your Cream record can’t rock, remind me, what exactly is the point again? (more…)