flat-sound

These records sounded flat to us. They were badly lacking in depth and three-dimensionality, two qualities that vintage vinyl pressings often have in abundance.

This Beethoven Ninth Started Out with Two Strikes Against It

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

MoFi took the shortcomings of a mediocre-at-best Decca recording from 1972 and made them even worse by means of their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system.

They should not have chosen this performance of the Ninth Symphony in the first place, and they certainly should not have added the treble they chose to add, which they did to this title and to every classical recording they remastered without regard to whether or not the recording needed brightening. None that I know of did. Try telling that to the brain trust running MoFi.

(They hired this guy to do their one-step digitally remastered pressings and from the get-go he’s been giving audiophiles the most ridiculously phony sounding records that collectors with way too much money can buy.)

The Decca recording of the Ninth from 1972 is opaque, lacks size and space, and comes off as a bit flat and dry.

Like practically every later Decca pressing we play, it’s passable at best.

Londons and Deccas from this era (1972 in this case) rarely sound very good to us.

Here is what we specifically don’t like about their sound.

If you want to know what’s wrong with the Mobile Fidelity pressing, take the above faults and add some others to them.

Start with an overall brighter EQ, add a 10k boost for extra sparkly strings, the kind that MoFi has always been smitten with, and finish with the tubby bass caused by the half-speed mastering process itself.

Voila! You are now in the presence of the kind of mid-fi trash that may have fooled some audiophiles way back when but now sounds as wrong as the records this ridiculous label is still making today.

Here are some other pressings with bright string tone that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound.

1981 Was a Long Time Ago

Old school audio systems are notorious for being dark, dull and lacking in transparency. They might need bright records in order to sound good, but high quality modern systems do not.

If these two MoFi pressings sounds right to you, you are very likely living with one of those old school systems and it is long past time to get rid of it.

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Daydream – The Best You Can Hope for from the Brain Trust at Sundazed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

The best sounding of the Lovin’ Spoonful records I’ve heard on Sundazed, which means that the others would get an F for sound. Don’t waste your money.

I’d be surprised if the CDs weren’t better sounding. Many of the Sundazed CDs I’ve played are actually quite good.

Their records, however, are almost always flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail.

The Sundazed pressing of Daydream came out in 2002, probably the year that the review above was written. Little did I know that the sound of remastered records pressed on Heavy Vinyl was not only never going to improve, but would actually get worse over the coming decades.

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Kevin Gray’s Version of Waltz for Debby Is Really Something

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby we took the opportunity to play the 2023 Craft pressing cut by Kevin Gray.

It seems to have a nice list of features, among them AAA mastering using the Original Master Tape.

What could go wrong?

  • Craft Original Jazz Classics Series
  • 180g Vinyl LP
  • (AAA) Lacquers Cut from the Original Tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio
  • Pressed at RTI
  • Tip-On Jacket with OBI

Plenty could go wrong, and did, especially on side two.

Nice features apparently are not enough to make a good sounding record.

Below are our listening notes cataloging the problems with this remastered pressing. If you own this version of the album, listen for the shortcomings we describe. The better your stereo and room, the more obvious they will be.

And of course the opposite is true for those of you who have trouble hearing them.

Now, if you already bought this sorry excuse for an audiophile pressing and just like collecting records, and don’t really care what they sound like, you can stop reading right here, put the record on and just enjoy the music.

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You Say the Budget Stereo Treasury Has Better Sound than the Speakers Corner?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Borodin Available Now

The Borodin album you see pictured is a decent enough Speakers Corner Decca repress.

The Heavy Vinyl reissue of this title is not bad, but like a number of reissues, it lacks the bottom end weight found on the early London pressings.

(Classic Records pressings rarely had that problem. Just the opposite in fact. The bass was boosted most of the time, especially the deep bass, but for some reason the lower strings are never rich the way the best vintage pressings can be.)

I remember this Speakers Corner pressing being a little flat and bright.

Since I haven’t played it in years, there is some chance that I could be wrong. I have never had trouble admitting to the possibility, a fact that makes us practically unique in the world of audiophile reviewers.

The glorious sound I hear on the best London pressings is simply not the kind of thing I hear on 180 gram records by Speakers Corner, or anybody else for that matter.

They do a good job some of the time, but none of their records can compete with a vintage pressing when that vintage pressing is mastered and pressed properly. 

The best pressings of this UK London Stereo Treasury from the Seventies will beat the pants off of it. That ought to tell you something, right?

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The Riddle of the Vastly Different Sides Has Been Solved

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings Featuring the Violin

About ten or fifteen years ago we came across a puzzling Shaded Dog pressing of the Bruch / Vieuxtemps recording from 1962 with Heifetz, LSC 2603.

We were surprised at the time how much worse one side sounded than the other. That had rarely if ever happened back in those early Living Stereo shootout days.

We sold the record as a one-sided disc with one complete performance in top quality sound, The Scottish Fantasy. Obviously the Vieuxtemps / Concerto No. 5 wasn’t worth playing; the sound was sub-par, a pale shadow of the sound of the other side of the record. You can read all about it here.

Well, we ran into those stampers again, or at the very least we ran into a copy with the same bad stampers for side one, 5s. Something sure went wrong somewhere, as you can see from our notes below.

At the time we described this curious pressing this way:

The violin is captured beautifully on side two. More importantly there is a lovely lyricism in Heifetz’s playing which suits Bruch’s Romantic work perfectly. I know of no better performance.

The performance of the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 is also wonderful, but the sound is not. Want proof that two sides of the same record can have vastly different sound? Here it is. Note how oversized the violin on side one is, how smeary the orchestra, how little texture there is to anything in the soundfield. This side one is no Hot Stamper.

All true, and now that we know that 5s etched stampers are responsible for the bad sound and not just some pressing anomaly, we can all sleep peacefully once again.

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The Early London Pressings Of Schubert’s 9th Are Awful

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

There are plenty of Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played over the years that were disappointing, and some of them can be found here.

What was most striking about this shootout was how poorly the original London Bluebacks (CS 6061) fared when going head to head with the best vintage reissues. In fact, they were so obviously inferior I doubt we would have even needed another pressing to know that they could not possibly be considered Hot Stampers.

The two we had were crude, flat, full of harmonic distortion, and both had clearly restricted frequency extremes.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

But I remember liking the Blueback pressings I played ten or twenty years ago.

Did I have better copies, or was my system not capable of showing me the shortcomings I so clearly heard this time around? Since this is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty, we’ll have to leave it there.

Our favorite performance of the work is this one with Krips and the LSO, but on a much later reissue pressing produced by Decca in the 70s. Imagine that!

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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Axis: Bold As Love Is More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix sounds just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

Further Reading

Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had 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 are enamored with these days.

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 have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.

Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.

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.

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Analogue Productions and Sterling Produce a Disastrous Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Wikipedia has a nice entry for some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ideas behind the final movement of the piece:

These [later] works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups. The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.

Wikipedia

Could not have said it better myself!

We’ve written at length about the thrills to be had when playing the last movement of Scheherazade — not brilliantly, to be sure, as the writer for Wikipedia has done, but serviceably I hope. Unfortunately, not every pressing of Reiner’s performance is able to communicate the musical values of the work the way the best pressings can.

As you can see from our notes for the this Heavy Vinyl Analogue Productions pressing, the thrill was barely there on the first side, and by the second side it was completely gone.

The notes from our 2024 shootout read:

  • Not dry or squawky
  • Really lacking depth and dynamics.
  • Big, thick bass gets annoying.
  • Big brass not too bright but it is over-textured and flat.

Plenty of modern records suffer from these as well as lots of other shortcomings. For some reason, the writers for The Absolute Sound who put this crappy LP on their Super Disc list didn’t seem bothered by them the way we were.

If you own this pressing, here are the kinds of things you might want to listen for in order to recognize its many, and quite serious, failings.

When played head to head against any properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP, this pressing will fall short in a number of important areas. Linked below are titles we’ve found to be good for testing these same qualities in a recording.

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How Can Sound This Bad Possibly Earn a 10?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Maybe if the scale goes from 1 to 100, sure, I could see it. Yeah, 10 out of 100 sounds about right.

But the scale goes to 11, which makes a grade of 10 risible to anyone who has played this seriously flawed pressing. Here is how we described its sound many years ago:

We found this mono reissue to be flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, like most of the Sundazed records we’ve played, starting way back in the early 2000s. No, they never got any better.

In our experience, Sundazed is one of the worst record labels of all time. This pressing is just more evidence to back up our low opinion of them.

Obviously we may have a low opinion of them, but a famous audiophile reviewer seemed to find the sound to his liking. He wrote:

Sundazed’s reissue gives the original a run for the money and remains true to the original, though it suffers in the bass, which while deep and reasonably well defined, is not as tightly drawn or focused. The upper mids on the original also bloom in a way that the reissue’s don’t, giving the reissue a slightly darker, recessed sound, but there’s still sufficient energy up there since Dylan’s close-miked vocals pack an upper midrange punch. If the vocals or harmonica sound spitty and unpleasantly harsh, it’s your system, not the record [!] – though there’s plenty of grit up there. On the plus side, the overall clarity and transparency of the reissue beats the original. [!] A really fine remastering job.

Of course we find every word of this review arrant nonsense, except the discussion of the qualities he praises in the original relative to the reissue. It’s been twenty years since this remastered pressing came out, does anybody still like the sound of it? Anybody? Let’s hope not.

The intro to his review boldly declares a respect for Sundazed (and Classic Records and Analogue Productions) that we find puzzling after playing so many of their rarely-better-than-awful-sounding records. (Here is a commentary from 2007 that puts our antipathy in perspective. And no, modern records have no improved since then, if the releases from 2024 are any indication.)

Sundazed’s decision to issue Blonde on Blonde using the much sought after mono mix is indicative both of the company’s dedication to doing what’s musically correct, and of the vinyl marketplace’s newfound maturity. There was a time a few years ago when no “audiophile” vinyl label would dare issue a mono recording; audiophiles wouldn’t stand for it was the conventional wisdom. Perhaps back then it was even true. Today, with Sundazed, Classic, Analogue Productions and others issuing monophonic LPs on a regular basis (and one has to assume selling them as well) listeners are appreciating the music for music’s sake, and equally importantly, for the wonderful qualities of monophonic sound reproduction.

My grade might be 2 out of 11. No audiophile should be fooled by the crap sound of this pressing, and no audiophile should believe a word of this review.

Reviewer incompetence? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years. From the start we knew we could never begin to do much more than scratch the surface of preposterous record reviews in need of rebuttal. The audiophile world is drowning in this sh*t.

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