lacks-life

The audiophile and other pressings listed here are as dead as the proverbial doornail.

The life of the music was sucked out of them by poor mastering, bad tapes, or the use of audibly inferior cutting equipment. In most cases it was some combination of the three.

Any properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LP — the kind we offer by the hundreds — will expose what con-jobs these so-called audiophile pressings are when played on a dynamic system at good loud levels.

Audiophiles Should Skip Swingin’ the ’20s on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from 1988, but more recently we’ve found the sound of the OJC pressings we’ve played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that plays right into the prejudices of record collectors and audiophiles alike, the kind for whom nothing but an original will do.

They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played. (We tend to like those, by the way.)

The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.

You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.

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Thick As a Brick on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

Here you will find the same problems as the MoFi Meddle, released the previous year, 1984. Here is what we had to say about it back in the day when we were selling this kind of crap.

The MoFi is TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end will be lush and extended. If you prize clarity, this is the one.

But if you prize clarity at the expense of everything else, you are seriously missing the boat on Meddle (and of course Thick As A Brick too).

The MoFi is all mids and highs with almost nothing going on below.

This is a rock record, but without bass and dynamics the MoFi pressing doesn’t rock, so why would anyone want to own it or play it?

The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.

It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. That’s how they get those audiophile records to sound the way they do.

For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with blurry bass.

The whomp factor on this pressing is Zero. Since whomp is critical to the sound of this album, it’s Game Over for us.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with shortcomings like these and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with records that sound the way this one does.

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Breakfast in America – An A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This title is yet another Half-Speed we think belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I should know — my system in 1976 was one-tenth as revealing as the one we use now.

But this pressing is so awful even my old system could not be fooled by this kind of audiophile BS sound. The console you see pictured might be the ideal system to play it. Hard to say, I haven’t heard one of those since the 60s.

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

So washed out, brittle, thin and lifeless, it practically defies understanding that anyone with two working ears ever considered calling this piece of crap an “audiophile” record.

But are today’s remastered records marketed to those looking for superior sound any better? Not the ones we’ve played recently. (If you know of any good ones, please drop us a line.)

Is this A&M pressing the worst version of the album ever made? It’s hard to imagine it would have much competition.

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You’ll Be Crying When You Get This Record on Your Turntable

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was most likely written when the record came out, circa 2008 I’m guessing. The intro is of course new for 2026.

You’re looking at one of the worst sounding audiophile releases in recent memory, a remastering disaster that has no reason to exist other than to satisfy the needs of the mid-fi collector market for numbered, limited editions on premium vinyl, perhaps so that they can be sold at a later date for a profit (discogs average price today: $62.50.)

This is a label that should have gone under decades ago but, with a nod to Frank Zappa channeling Edgar Varese, refuses to die.

Like this guy, this guy and far too many others, they are making money hand over fist at the expense of audiophiles who have yet to get very far — anywhere, really — in audio. (I know whereof I speak. I was one of those guys and you couldn’t tell me anything back then.)

We go to great pains to lay out the problems with these records in detail, but what good does reading about their problems do if the systems playing these records iare not only hiding their flaws, but making up for some of their weaknesses. The junk pressings these collectors are buying practically guarantee they will never manage to put together a system that can show them what is really on their records.

Regardless of what kind of equipment they own, if this crap is sounding good to them, which it seems to be based on the comments section I make the mistake of reading on Discogs from time to time, nothing we say can possibly interfere with them buying more of it.

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If Only I Could Remember My Name – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

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:

  • Noticeably more warmth,
  • Noticeably more sweetness,
  • Noticeably more delicacy,
  • Noticeably more transparency,
  • Noticeably more ambience,
  • Noticeably more energy,
  • Noticeably more size (width and height),
  • Noticeably 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.

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DCC + RTI = Audio Enervation

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was the first one I wrote criticizing the sound of DCC vinyl, probably around 2008 or so. There would be many to follow.

A well-known Joni Mitchell album we played the year before didn’t exactly set us on a different path, but it did have the effect of kicking us up into a higher gear, and Bonnie’s album was one of the early fruits of that change.

During our shootout for Bonnie’s first Capitol album, we found that the DCC pressing was lacking in so many ways that I felt compelled to spell out for our customers what its shortcomings were.

I had enthusiastically recommended the album in 1996 when it came out, but our first big shootout had shown me how wrong that judgment would turn out to be. Our complete commentary from 2008 is reproduced below.

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Nick Of Time is how completely they MURDER the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest.

Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound very good, but it can’t compete with the best original pressings. It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better original pressings. 

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music? You can try turning up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her a disservice.

The DCC Approach

The DCC, like a lot of modern remastered titles we”ve played, is too damn smooth.

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I Was Wrong about a Half-Speed Mastered Record – Not for the First Time, But I Hope for the Last

dixiedregsdd

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

A classic case of live and learn.

I’d always preferred the famously rare Half-Speed to the domestic copies I had auditioned back in the day, the day being the 80s and 90s. That’s all changed now of course.

Now, with changes to the stereo and better cleaning techniques and all the rest, that Half-Speed’s weaknesses are hard to ignore.

Where is the rock ’em, sock ’em bottom end that the best originals have?

Gone without a trace.

Yes, the smeary, veiled quality of the typical original pressing is gone too, which is why I used to like the DD Labs version better. It’s simply another case of a reasonably good Half-Speed beating a bad domestic pressing, and in turn being beaten (soundly) by The Real Thing, the kind of record we like to call a Hot Stamper.

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Kevin Gray Sacrifices Another Blue Note to the Lo-Fi Crowd

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

We did a shootout for Cornbread in 2023 and again in 2025. For our latest one, we were fortunate to be able to include both the Tone Poets pressing that came out in 2019 as well as the 75th Anniversary Blue Note pressing from 2014.

Here is the way we described a Hot Stamper that ended up being the best sounding pressing we played on one of its sides, and coming in second on the other side.

  • The sound is everything that’s good about Rudy Van Gelder‘s recordings – it’s present, spacious, full-bodied, Tubey Magical, dynamic and, most importantly, alive in that way that modern pressings never are
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over nearly all other copies we played

After hearing a copy of the album that sounded as good as that one, the Tone Poets pressing would have had to be at least a bit of a letdown, right?

To be fair, all it really has to be is good sounding. For $30, the price of the average copy that sells on Discogs, can you really expect great?

I don’t know what any of the purchasers of these Tone Poets records — of this or any other title — are expecting for their thirty bucks, but I can tell you what they are getting. We took notes while their remastered pressing played, and here’s what we heard.

Side One

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Gaucho According to MCA Masterphile

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

The Masterphile Half-Speed is a pathetic shadow of the real thing, the real thing being an early Masterdisk pressing cut by Robert Ludwig.

We’ve played at least a hundred of the original pressings, and I would be surprised if every one of them did not sound better than this compressed, desiccated audiophile piece of trash.

With sound like that, the MCA Masterphile gets our vote for the worst version of the album ever made.

Of all the great albums Steely Dan released, and that means their seven original albums and nothing that came after, there are only three in our opinion that actually support their reputation as studio wizards and recording geniuses. Chronologically they are Pretzel Logic, Aja, and Gaucho.

Every sound captured on these albums is so carefully crafted and considered that it practically brings one to tears to contemplate what the defective DBX noise reduction system did to the work of genius that is Katy Lied, their best album and the worst sounding. (Those cymbal crashes can really mess with your mind if you let them. To get a better picture of the DBX sound just bang two trash can lids together as close to your head as possible.)

The first two albums can sound very good, as can Royal Scam, but none of those can compete with The Big Three mentioned above for sonics. A Hot Stamper copy of any of them would be a serious DEMO DISC on anyone’s system system.

Mistakes Were Made

If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered LPs.

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Nursery Cryme on Classic Records – What System Can Make It Sound Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Genesis Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing from 2000 is a smeary, lifeless mess next to the best early tan label British pressings. No Classic pressing of any of the Genesis albums that we’ve played sounded right to us.

The Peter Gabriel albums they remastered were just as bad. All of them earned a grade of F. We made no effort to do listings for most of them because they all were bad sounding, and bad sounding in the same way.

If I were to try to “reverse engineer” the sound of a system that could play this record and compensate for its many faults, I would look for a system that was thick, dark and fat, with added richness and a heaping portion of euphonic tube colorations.

I know that sound. I had a stereo in the 90s with many of those same shortcomings, but of course I hadn’t a clue about any of that. Back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I needed to put together a system with a lot more “Hi-fi” and a lot less “My-fi,” a process that took many years and a great deal of effort.

I’m glad to say things are different now.

What to Listen For

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

Further Reading

The sonic signature of the modern Heavy Vinyl Classical reissue in five words: diffuse, washed out, veiled, and vague.

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