crude-sound

Casino Royale Is Really a Mess on Classic Records Vinyl

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Burt Bacharach

More Stamper and Pressing Information (You’re Welcome!)

Sonic Grade: F

Casino Royale under the sway of Bernie’s penchant for bright, gritty, sour, ambience-challenged sound? Not a good match. There is no reissue, and there will never be a reissue, that will sound as good as a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned 2s or 3s original.

Skip 1s, 4s and 5s. We’ve played them and we’ve never heard one we liked with those stampers.

And I hope it would go without saying that most copies cannot begin to do what a real Hot Stamper original can.

As is often the case, the Classic Heavy Vinyl Reissue is simply a disgrace. 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 good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this Heavy Vinyl trash. Our advice: don’t do it.

Labels With Shortcomings – Classic Records – Classical (more…)

David Crosby – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

More of the Music of David Crosby

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Crosby

What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?

On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:

  • Dramatically more warmth,
  • Dramatically more sweetness,
  • Dramatically more delicacy,
  • Dramatically more transparency,
  • Dramatically more ambience,
  • Dramatically more energy,
  • Dramatically more size (width and height),
  • Dramatically more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).

in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.

The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.

A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.

By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.

Here are some records we’ve reviewed that are lacking in the same qualities as this pressing of David Crosby’s first album. If you own any of the titles that we’ve linked to below, listen for their shortcomings and see if your copy doesn’t sound the way we’ve described the copies we’ve played.

Further Reading

New to the Blog? Start Here

There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are awful. (Some, of course, are good, and we don’t mind saying so.)

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Today’s Heavy Vinyl Disaster from Classic Records… Zep IV

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Letters and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin IV

A classic case of Live and Learn

Back in the day I thought the Classic 180 and then 200 gram pressing was the king on this title. In late 2006 I wrote:

“You can hear how much cleaner and more correct the mastering is right away…”

Folks, I must have been out of my mind.

No, that’s not quite fair. I wasn’t out of my mind. I just hadn’t gotten my system to the place where it needed to be to allow the right original pressings to show me how much better they can sound.

Our EAR 324 phono stage and constantly evolving tweaks to both the system and room are entirely responsible for our ability to reproduce this album correctly. If your equipment, cleaning regimen, room treatments and the like are mostly “old school” in any way, getting the album to sound right will be all but impossible. Without the myriad audio advances of the last decade or so you are just plain out of luck with a Nearly Impossible to Reproduce album such as this.

All of the above are courtesy of the phenomenal Revolutions in Audio that have come about over the last twenty years or so. It’s what progress in audio in all about.

The exact same 200 gram review copy now [this was written about ten years ago] sounds every bit as tonally correct as it used to, and fairly clean too, as described above, but where is the magic?

You can adjust your VTA until you’re blue in the face, nothing will bring this dead-as-a-doornail Classic LP to life.

Relatively speaking, of course. For twenty eight bucks (when it was in print) could you buy something better? Probably not. (Now it’s $100 to $400 on ebay and at that price you are definitely not getting your money’s worth.)

The average IV is really a piece of junk. And if you don’t have at least $10k in your front end (with phono), forget it. It takes top quality equipment to bring this album to life, and you better be prepared to go through a large number of copies to find a good one.

New to the Blog? Start Here

More Led Zeppelin on Classic Records Reviewed

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Delibes / Coppelia & Sylvia – London Vs. Decca

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Once again, the right Decca reissue blows the doors off the original London we played. This has lately become a pattern, but keep in mind it’s a pattern that’s reliable less than half the time, if memory is any guide. Many of the Decca reissues we’ve played over the last few years have failed badly in a head to head with their earlier-mastered and -pressed counterparts.

But the ones that beat all comers are the ones that stick in our minds and show up on our site.

Clearly a case of confirmation bias, but at least we know something about our own biases, and that puts us well ahead of the audiophile pack.

Record collectors and record collecting audiophiles will tell you it shouldn’t happen, but fools like us, who refuse to accept the prognostications of those supposedly “in the know,” have done the work and come up with the experimental data that’s proven them wrong again and again.

Sort of. We had one, and only one, pressing of the original London (CS 6185), and boy was it a mess — crude as crude can be. It sounded like an “old London record” — we’ve played them by the hundreds, if not thousands, so we know that sound fairly well by now — not the Decca engineered and mastered vintage collectible we know it to be.

Are there copies that sound better? Surely there are, but how are you going to find them? Are you going to shell out the going rate of $25-50 on ebay for one (or more) clean copies, only to find that it/they sound every bit as bad as the one we auditioned? The question answers itself.

If, however, you are one of the lucky few who has a nice London or Decca original of this recording, please let us send you this copy so that you can do the shootout for yourself. You may be shocked at how good this music can sound on the right pressing. And if your copy sounds better than ours we will be very shocked indeed. [This offer was only good while we had the record, and it is long gone at this point. We still remember the sound though!]

Production and Engineering

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from April of 1959 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

The hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, possibly of all time. More amazing sounding recordings were made there than in any other hall we know of. There is a solidity and richness to the sound beyond all others, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

It’s as wide, deep and three-dimensional as any, which is of course all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the weight and power of the brass, combined with unerring timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section of the orchestra.

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Mendelssohn / Scotch Symphony – Opaque and Crude?

More of the Music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

More Music Conducted by Peter Maag

This is a very old listing, probably from more than ten years ago. With the improved cleaning technologies we currently use, many of these old records sound a whole lot better than they used to.

Still, there are some Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played recently that were disappointing, and they can be found here.

Both sides of this record have that classic Decca chocolatey, rich, sweet sound. It’s not for everybody, it’s probably not the sound one would hear in a concert hall, but we love it and so do many audiophiles. 

The performance here by Maag is legendary and definitive. The sound is perfectly suited for this music, with massed strings to die for. This is classic Tubey Magical Decca orchestral sound. If you want immediacy, buy a Mercury. If you want luscious, rich string tone, this London should be right up your alley.

Side One Versus Side Two

With a grade of A+ we felt that the sound was a bit opaque and crude, with some smear to the strings (which in many ways is the classic Decca sound from the era).

For more on the subject of opacity on record, click here and here.

Side two improves on the sound in all these areas.

Side two had less smear and less distortion and congestion than we heard on side one. It’s also even RICHER sounding, if such a thing is possible. More transparent too. A good balance of clarity and richness. 

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Elvis Costello – More Heavy Vinyl Trash from Rhino

Hot Stampers of My Aim Is True

Letters and Commentaries for My Aim Is True

Sonic Grade: D

I’m embarrassed to say we used to like the Rhino Heavy Vinyl version, and in our defense let me tell you why: it was (for the most part) tonally correct, fairly low distortion, and had tight punchy bass.

Boy, Was We Ever Wrong. Now it sounds positively CRUDE and UNPLEASANT next to the real thing — if by “the real thing” you mean an honest to goodness properly mastered, properly pressed copy (also known as a Hot Stamper). Kevin Gray’s crude cutting system did this album no favors.

The average copy of this record is aggressive and unpleasant.  The British pressings are mud.

You either have to work very hard to find a good domestic pressing (which means buying, cleaning and playing lots and lots of them), or you have to luck into a good one by accident. (more…)

Bernie Grundman’s Work for Classic Records in Four Words: Hard, Sour, Colored and Crude

More Mercury Living Presence Records

Oh, and airless. Make that five words.

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as unpleasantly hard and sour. Many of the later Mercury reissues pressed by Columbia had some of that sound, so I was already familiar with it when their pressing came out in 1998 as part of the just-plain-awful Mercury series they released.

I suspect I would hear it that way today. Bernie Grundman could cut the bass, the dynamics, and the energy onto the record.

Everything else was worse 99% of the time.

The fast transients of the plucked strings of the Balalaikas were way beyond the ability of his colored and crude cutting system.

In addition, harmonic extension and midrange delicacy were qualities that practically no Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing could claim to have.

Or, to be precise, they claimed to have them, and whether audiophiles really believed they did or not, Classic Records sure fooled a lot of them and the reviewers that pour out the facile and reductive superficialities that pass these days for audio journalism.

The better your stereo gets, the worse those records sound, and they continue to fall further and further behind with each passing year.

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Led Zeppelin II on Classic Records – Seriously, What Could Be Sadder?

Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin II

More Led Zeppelin on Classic Records Reviewed

An absolute DISASTER — ridiculously bright and ridiculously crude.

In short, a completely unlistenable piece of garbage, and, along with the MoFi pressing from 1982, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl Pressings as a “reference.” After all, the Classic pressings are considered by many — if not most — audiophiles as superior to other pressings.

What could be sadder?

In fact, you will find very few critics of the Classic Zep LPs outside of those of us (me and the rat in my pocket) who write for this very website, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence.

Wrong on all counts.

Since then we’ve made it a point to review most of the Classic Zeps, a public service of Better Records. We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

Further Reading

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years. Feel free to pick your poison.

Heavy Vinyl Commentaries

Heavy Vinyl Disasters

Heavy Vinyl Mediocrities

Heavy Vinyl Winners

And finally,

A Confession

Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.