euphonic-colorations

Euphonic colorations are antithetical to good sound.

Sonny Rollins Plus 4 – Defending the Indefensible

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this album in 2014 or thereabouts. It came out in 2007, proving that Chad had learned nothing about the sound of jazz during the previous 13 years after having made his first foray into bad Heavy Vinyl.

Almost twenty years later has anything changed? Not to our ears it hasn’t.

In point of fact, the releases of his records and plenty of others’ we’ve auditioned over the last few years are every bit as bad or worse.

When you’re making a lot of money doing it the way you’ve always done it, why would you ever want to change?

To make a better sounding product? Yeah, that’s a good one. How do you improve on perfection?

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding pair of audiophile records than this 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl release, and I’ve heard a ton of them. 

Surely someone must have noticed how awful these records sound.

So, being an enterprising sort, with a few idle moments to spare, I did a google search. To my surprise it came up pretty much empty. Sure, dealers are selling it, every last one of the bigger mail-order types.

But how is it that no reviewer has taken it to task for its oh-so-obvious shortcomings?

And no one on any forum seems to have anything bad to say about it either. How could that be?

We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think that for the most part they are awful and want nothing to do with them.

But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.

Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?

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How to Make All Your Records Sound Like MoFi’s – For Free!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

The Doors debut album is yet another obvious example of MoFi’s predilection for a sucked-out midrange.

Scooping out the middle of the midrange has the effect of creating an artificial sense of depth where none had ever been.

Play any original Bruce Botnick engineered album by Love or The Doors and you will notice immediately that the vocals are front and center.

When the DCC Doors first album was released on vinyl, we noted that the vocals were finally back where they belonged. After having lived with the MoFi for so many years, we’d almost forgotten.

And now of course we can’t tolerate the smear and opacity of the DCC. We like to think we’re simply setting higher standards these days.

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room.

Pull your speakers farther out into the room, and also farther apart, and you can get that MoFi sound on every record you play. I’ve been hearing it in the systems that audiophiles — who made the mistake of inviting me into their homes — we’re proud of for decades.

Once you know what that effect sounds like, and have done the work to fix it in your own system, it takes mere moments to recognize it in any other system.

Fixing a problem is practically the only way to hear what actually is a problem.

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Side One Had Tubey Colorations Missing from Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

An undiscovered gem from 1967 on the 360 Columbia label.

Side two of this record blew our minds with its White Hot Stamper sound.

Musically and sonically this record is nothing short of wonderful.

Who knew? You could play fifty vintage piano recordings and not find one as good as this.

Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart — these shorter pieces and excerpts were composed by those with the greatest gift for melody, men who’ve produced works that have stood the test of time, enchanting audiences over the centuries with works of such beauty and charm.

Here at Better Records we have never been fans of Columbia classical LPs. To be clear, the fault more often than not has to be in the mastering, not the recording. We’ve raved about so many great copies of titles in the past, only to find that the next three or four LPs we pick up of the very same titles sound godawful.

There are some amazing Bernstein recordings out there, but the amount of work it takes to find the one that sounds good is overwhelming — how can such great recordings be mastered so poorly so often?

Side One

A++, with a huge, rich, sweet, natural sounding piano. The more you listen, the more apparent it becomes that, as natural as it may seem at first blush, there are still some old school tubey colorations that make the sound not quite as lifelike as one might wish.

And the confirmation of that finding comes as soon as you flip the record over.

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The Absolute Sound Thinks this Is Some Kind of Super Disc?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Is there something “super” about it?

If there is we sure as hell missed it!

We described one of the better OJC copies from our second-ever shootout for Dolphy’s Out There album this way:

This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, yet still super open and spacious.

Admittedly somewhat generic, but good records tend to do pretty much all the same things well in our experience, so why complicate things unnecessarily?

Note that the best OJC pressings were dramatically better sounding than any of the earlier pressings we played, the ones mastered by Rudy Van Gelder.

At best the earlier stereo pressing was passable, and the mono original with the blue cover was just plain awful on side one (NFG) and passable on side two. Do you think the old school mono jazz collectors even noticed there was a world of difference between the two sides? I sure don’t.

But the 2016 remastered pressing (according to Discogs, we thought it was 2015 as you can see) puts them all to shame with ridiculously bad sound on side one, sound so bad we didn’t even bother to play side two. What would be the point? Whoever mastered this record was as clueless as they come, and then some.

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London Records Takes You on A Journey Into (Potentially Very Good) Stereo Sound

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This was written a very long time ago!

1958 just happens to be one of the All Time Great Years for Analog Recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.

INSANELY GOOD vintage Decca sound from 1958 — bigger, richer and more Tubey Magical than 9 out of 10 (or more!) records we’ve ever played from the pre-’60s early stereo Golden Age. How they got this one so right is beyond me.

We were sorely tempted to grade it White Hot, but chose instead to err on the side of modesty and call it A++ to A+++ or better (which is practically White Hot when you think about it).

Can it be that THIS was the first stereophonic sound music lovers of the world were exposed to on LP? (Stereo tapes may have existed in 1954, but they had to wait until 1958 to be transferred to vinyl.)

Could we possibly have fallen so far in only fifty years?

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The Dreadful Sound of the Heavy Vinyl Reissues Doug Sax Mastered in the 90s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Longstanding customers know that we have been relentlessly critical of so-called “audiophile” LPs for years, especially in the case of these Analogue Productions releases from back in the early-90s. A well-known reviewer loved them, I hated them, and he and I haven’t seen eye to eye on much since.

(Old) Newflash!

Just dug up part of my old commentary discussing the faults with the original series that Doug Sax cut for Acoustic Sounds. Check it out.

In the listing for the OJC pressing of Way Out West we wrote:

Guaranteed better than any 33 rpm 180 gram version ever made, or your money back! (Of course I’m referring to a certain pressing from the early 90s mastered by Doug Sax, which is a textbook example of murky, tubby, flabby sound. Too many bad tubes in the chain? Who knows?

This OJC version also has its problems, but at least the shortcomings of the OJC are tolerable. Who can sit through a pressing that’s so thick and lifeless it communicates none of the player’s love for the music they’re making?

If you have midrangy transistor equipment, go with the 180 gram version (at twice the price).

If you have good equipment, go with this one.

UPDATE 2015

We are no longer fans of the OJC of Way Out West, and would never sell a record that sounds the way even the best copies do as a Hot Stamper. It’s not hopeless the way the Heavy Vinyl pressing is, but it’s not very good either. It’s yet another example of a record we was wrong about.

Live and learn, right?

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Venerable or Execrable? If It’s Athena the Chances Are Good It’s the Latter

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

I spied an interesting quote on the Acoustic Sounds site many years ago:

“…Analogue Productions’ 45rpm remastering improves upon the venerable Athena LP release from the late 80s, with better dynamics and a fuller ‘middle’ to the orchestral sonority.” – Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound, October 2010

For some reason Andrew uses the word “venerable” when a better, certainly more accurate term would have been “execrable.” Having played the record in question this strikes us as the kind of mistake that would not be easy to make.

Athena was a godawful audiophile label that managed to put out all of five records before going under, only one of which was any good, and it’s definitely not this one.

It was in fact the Debussy piano recording with Moravec, mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig himself, a man who knows his classical music, having cut scores if not hundreds of records for Nonesuch and other labels in the 60s and 70s.

From the jacket:

Analogue Master Recording™

Unlike other remastering companies, Athena Records always uses the ORIGINAL ANALOG MASTER SESSION TAPES. In this case, The Master Lacquers were cut directly by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab so you know it will sound superb.

Our Hot Stamper listing for the Vox pressing:

This famously good sounding Vox pressing os Symphonic Dances has been remastered a number of times, but you can be sure that the Hot Stamper we are offering here will beat any of those modern pressings by a wide margin in any area that has to do with sound (surfaces being another matter and one we won’t go into here).

The sound of this recording on the best pressings is dynamic, lively and BIG. The music just jumps out of the speakers, bringing the power and vibrant colors of a symphony orchestra right into your listening room. Guaranteed to put to shame 95% or more of all the classical records you own, even if you own lots of our Hot Stampers. [Can’t say I would agree with that in 2023.]

The bass is phenomenal on this recording, assuming you have a copy that has the bass cut and pressed right. This one sure does! Few Golden Age classical recordings from the 50s will have the kind of bass that’s found on this record.

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Fighting The Dreaded J Curve

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). 

Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could sound.

In these posts he shares some of the things he’s learned since he started buying records at the age of ten roughly sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in his collection, although it cracked a long time ago and hasn’t seen a turntable in forever.)

Perhaps you suspect the electronics of your system are not as neutral as you thought they were.

So let’s say you get rid of your euphonic tube equipment (vintage or modern, makes no difference, colorations are colorations) and switch over to something that’s less colored.

The sound is now cleaner, cleaner, more present, more alive, more “right there” the way live music is “right there,” not veiled or vague or recessed the way so many stereos (at least in my experience) tend to sound. (Hard to believe, but some audiophiles seem to like that sound.)

But perhaps the sound now lacks richness, because you no longer have the richness your tubes were adding.

Perhaps now the sound is not as smooth as you would like, because it’s not being smoothed over by the smooth-sounding tube equipment you were using.

It’s very possible that the change has caused you to be less less happy with the sound.

Welcome to the J Curve.

You started at one point on the J, you made some changes, and now you find yourself with inferior sound compared to the sound you had before.

You may decide to turn back, to restore the sound you had so that you can enjoy your records the way you did when you had euphonic equipment, tube or transistor.

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“Big, warm, mushy and limp”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some records he played recently:

Hey Tom, 

I just had to drop you a brief note, to say THANK YOU, for your writings regarding DCC pressings many years back.

I was just going back through them on your site, after I unearthed my DCC pressings this afternoon and gave a couple of them (i.e., Elton’s Madman; Joni’s Court and Spark) a spin – as I recall y’all being the first to speak truth in the face of overwhelming adoration regarding these (when they first were released).

OMG. They are COMPLETELY lifeless, with ZERO energy!

Big, warm, mushy and limp, yes.

Probably sound comforting (at some level) on a low-budget lean solid state system. [High-budget ones too I would venture to guess.]

But on a system with any level of transparency and truth-to-pressing, YIKES. It just made me sad.

THEN, I went online, and checked the current PRICES for these pressings (of which I own several sealed), and I got SUPER HAPPY! People are paying some serious coin for these turkeys – so I can be well rid of them, and take that cash and buy some more of YOUR awesome pressings! Win-win! 👍😊

Warmest regards,

Steve

Steve,

I should say right off the bat that I think the DCC of Court and Spark is not a bad sounding record, at least the copy I had wasn’t bad sounding last time I played it. Your mileage apparently varied.

Madman I hope to write about before too long. I found my DCC copy to be lean in the lower midrange, and missing much of the Tubey Magic that makes that recording so special (along with many others by Elton from that era).

A few more thoughts:

The sound I think you are hearing that you refer to as lifeless and lacking in energy is really the result of Kevin Gray’s lousy cutting chain. The sound you hear on your DCC albums is precisely the sound I had heard on this DCC album many years ago.

Played back-to-back with the properly-mastered, properly-pressed originals, the DCC was shockingly lacking in many of the most important qualities a record should have. Eventually Paul and Judy were the couple that showed me what a fool I had been.

Low resolution cutters like the ones used to cut the DCC discs sound dead and boring, even when the mastering choices are good ones and no obvious compression is being used.

Kevin Gray famously does not have a way to put compressors into his chain, as my friend Robert Pincus at Cisco found out when he cut 52nd Street and could not get some aspects of it to sound right, due to the fact that he was unable to add compression in the mastering the way Sterling had.

That’s what it needed and that’s what it didn’t get. Kevin don’t play dat.

I have been beating this long-dead horse for about fifteen twenty years now. Any time I actually do play one of the DCC records these days, it usually sounds worse than I remember it.

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Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, resulting in an overall thinning of the sound and lower strings that get washed out.

On some sides of some copies of some titles the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage tube equipment, or modern equipment that is trying to mimic the sound of vintage tubes, you never have to worry that the strings on your London orchestral recordings will sound too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is, from our point of view, a dead end.

If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the much more common second- and third-rate pressings that often look identical to them.

If you have this kind of audio firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get from the electronic overkill you see.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but create a barrier between you and the music you love.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life (and was perfectly happy with myself before the early 2000s.)

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