hv-dis-class

Here you will find the worst of the Heavy Vinyl classical pressings we’ve reviewed over the last thirty or more years.

Gaite Parisienne Is Just More Smeary Dreck from Classic Records

More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach

Sonic Grade: F

The last time I played the Classic I thought it was nothing but a smeary mess, as awful as their awful Scheherazade. If I were to play it today, I’m guessing it would join the other Classic Records entries in our audiophile hall of shame.

Here are some other records we played and found had smeary strings. Orchestral recordings with smeary strings do not last long on our turntable.

I love Arthur Fiedler‘s performance with the Boston Pops and the 1954 two track RCA Living Stereo sound, but finding an original Shaded Dog pressing in clean condition under $500 with the right stampers is all but impossible nowadays.

If you want to go that way, more power to you. 

This 1954 2-track recording is RCA’s first stereo recording of the work. 1954. Can you believe it? A few mics and two channels and it blows away most of the classical recordings ever done! Some old record collectors and tube lovers say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be. This record proves it.

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

How Good Is the Sibelius Violin Concerto on Classic Records?

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

Classic remastered this title in the 90s — of course they did, it’s clearly one of the better Heifetz recordings.

As expected, Classic’s remastered pressing of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (LSC 2435) was awful, as bad as LSC 1903, 1992, 2129 and others too numerous to list. 

(There is one Classic violin concerto record that is actually better than every RCA Living Stereo we have ever played — which amounts to scores of them since we have done shootouts for them all — and one of these days you will be able to read about it right here on this very blog!)

The Classic is both aggressive and lacking in texture at the same time, the worst of both worlds.

Bernie’s cutting system is what I would call Low Resolution — the harmonics and subtleties you would expect to hear are simply not there. He brightens the tonal balance, causing screechy strings whenever they get loud.

The world is full of these kinds of third-rate records. They make up the bulk record collectors’ collections as well as the ones audiophiles have sitting on their shelves.

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This Tsar Saltan Is Diffuse, Washed Out, Veiled, and Vague

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

Sonic Grade: C (at most)

Year ago we cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare in a head to head comparison with a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out at the time. Here are the differences we heard.

The soundstage, rarely much of a concern to us at here at Better Records but nevertheless instructive in this case, shrinks roughly 25% with the new pressing. Depth and ambience are reduced by about the same amount.

But what really bothered me was this:

The sound was just so vague.

There was a cloud of musical instruments, some here, some there, but they were very hard to SEE. On the Londons we played they were clear. You could point to each and every one. On this pressing that kind of pinpoint imaging was simply nowhere to be found. (Here are some other records that are good for testing vague imaging.)

Case in point: the snare drum, which on this recording is located toward the back of the stage, roughly halfway between dead center and the far left of the hall. As soon as I heard it on the reissue I recognized how blurry and smeary it was relative to the clarity and immediacy it had on the earlier London pressings we’d played. I’m not sure how else to describe it — diffuse, washed out, veiled — just vague.

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

This particular Heavy Vinyl reissue is more or less tonally correct, which is not something you can say about many reissues these days. In that respect it’s tolerable and even enjoyable. I guess for thirty bucks it’s not a bad deal.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocre sound?

Yes, the cutting systems being used nowadays to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.

Are the tapes too old and worn?

Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?

Could the real master tape not be found, and a safety copy used to master the album instead?

To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.

We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them. If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue, we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot. (Someone did, which proves it can be done!)

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and most other audiophile LPs of all kinds. (These we like.)

So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this kind of sound bores us to tears.

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Paganini on Heavy Vinyl – Where Is the Outrage?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paganini Available Now

Years ago we managed to get hold of the Heavy Vinyl pressing put out by Fenn Music in Germany, about which a well known record dealer on the web (you may recognize the style) had this to say:

“Stunning Reissue Of EMI ASD 440 Recorded In Stereo In 1961. This Recording Featuring The Royal Philharmonic Conducted By Alberto Erede Provides Convincing Proof, If Any Were Needed, That Menuhin Was One Of The Great Violinists Of The 20th Century.”

The “convincing proof” provided by this record is that those responsible for it are Rank Incompetents of the Worst Kind (see what I did there?).

Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound than this piece of Heavy Vinyl trash delivers.

Had I paid good money to buy this pressing from 2004 in the hopes of hearing the supremely talented Yehudi Menuhin of 1961 tear it up on Paganini’s legendary first two concertos, I can tell you one thing: I would be pissed.

Where is the outrage in the audiophile community over this kind of trash?

I have yet to see it. I suspect I will grow quite a bit older and quite a bit grayer before anyone from the audiophile commentariat notices just how bad this record sounds. I hope I’m proven wrong.

Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound from this piece of Heavy Vinyl garbage.

In other words, no trace of the original’s (or the early reissue’s) analog sound. At most I may own one or two classical CDs that sound this bad, and I own quite a few. When audiophiles of an analog bent tell you they don’t like the sound of CDs, this is why they don’t like them: they sound like this junky Heavy Vinyl record.

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Skip the Classic Records Pressing of Ballet Music From The Opera

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played some of their classical reissues would have expected.

Their version is dramatically more aggressive, shrill and harsh than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

In fact their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. 

Apparently, most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a top quality classical recording. If they had, Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and labeled as such by us way back in 1994. I’m not sure why the rest of the audiophile community was so easily fooled, but I can say that we weren’t, at least when it came to their classical releases. 

We admit to having made plenty of mistaken judgments about their jazz and rock, and we have the we was wrong entries to prove it.

The last review we wrote for the remastered Scheherazade, which fittingly ended up in our Hall of Shame, with an equally fitting sonic grade of F.

TAS Super Disc list to this day? Of course it is!

With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, their records have managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop buying them in 2007.) That ought to tell you something.

Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of bad records.

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The Cisco Pressing of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings with Heifetz Performing

An audiophile hall of shame pressing from Cisco / Impex / Boxstar / whatever.

The Cisco pressing of LSC 2577 should not have sound that is acceptable to any person who considers himself an audiophile.

There is no violinist in front of you when you play their pressing.

There is someone back behind your speakers under a thick blanket, and his violin sure doesn’t sound very much like a real violin — no rosiny texture, no extended harmonics, no real body.

In short, the sound of this reissue is much too smeary, veiled, and lacking in presence to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately for those of us who love good music with good sound, Cisco’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject in more depth here.

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Venice on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical and Orchestral Music

Classic Records remastered the tapes for LSC 2313 and even the people who like the sound of Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings used to complain about it, so you can imagine what we think of it.

What a piece of garbage. With smeary, shrill, screechy strings, it gives no indication of the beauty that is on the tape. 

The Victrola reissue, VICS 1119, is dramatically better sounding than any other reissue of the album we have played, including of course the Classic, and may even be better sounding that the Shaded Dog original itself.

This Heavy Vinyl reissue is noticeably lacking in a number of areas that are important to the proper presentation of orchestral music. If you own a copy of this title, listen for the qualities we identified above in the sound that came up short.

Below you will find links to other records that have the same shortcomings we heard when playing the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2313.

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Carnival of the Animals on Klavier Is Another Doug Sax-Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Saint-Saens Available Now

Yet another murky, smeary audiophile piece of vinyl trash from the mastering lathe of the formerly brilliant Doug Sax. He used to cut the best sounding records in the world. (Exhibit A: this one.)

Then he started working for perhaps the worst record label of all time and to my knowledge never cut a good sounding record again.

This record may be on the TAS Super Disc list, but we don’t think it belongs there. Instead, it belongs on the bad TAS list that we created specifically for these far-from-super records.

To be fair, the real EMI is on there as well, ASD 2753. However, including the Klavier on the list brings into doubt the compentence of whoever is curating it these days.

This Klavier pressing, along with all the Classic Records titles, as well as other modern reissues, renders the advice found there all but useless. Is anyone calling attention to all the bad sounding records that have lately been recommended by The Absolute Sound? I think we might just be the only ones. If you know of any others, please email me at tom@better-records.com.

Doug Sax

For those of us who remember the consistently superb work Doug Sax was doing in the 70s, we sadly note that he passed away in 2015. I was honored to have met him a few years before then at a Chopin concert with Lincoln Mayorga performing on the piano. (Impressively performing, I might add. He played the complete Chopin Preludes from memory, all 24 of them.)

Both he and Lincoln were gentlemen and artists of the highest caliber. Needless to say, I hope this awful sounding Klavier is not the kind of record that he would want to be remembered by.

On this record, in Doug’s defense it should be noted that he had only second generation tapes to work with, which is neither here nor there as these pressings are not worth the dime’s worth of vinyl used to make them and should never have seen the light of day.

Can this dubby, smeary sound possibly be what EMI engineer Stuart Eltham was after?

Hard to believe. We’ve played plenty of his recordings and we cannot ever remember any of the non-audiophile pressings having this kind of sound.

But isn’t that just the way? The mainstream labels mass produce the good sounding pressings and the audiophile labels produce the limited edition junk.

Now there’s a rule of thumb you might want to keep in mind, especially if you’ve made the mistake of buying any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we reviewed in 2024 and 2025, a parade of horribles that defy understanding.

Actually, if we understand that there is a need for vinyl product for the lo- to mid-fi record collector market, it makes perfect sense. That’s what Klavier was in the business of producing, and now everybody wants in on the action, hence the proliferation of crap Heavy Vinyl pressings coming to market, practically every one even worse sounding than the last.

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Tchaikovsky’s None-Too-Impressive 6th Symphony on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, twenty years or more, but I remember it as none-too-impressive, playing into my natural prejudice against the earliest Living Stereo recordings and Classic Records themselves.

UPDATE 2025

Having heard some amazingly good sounding ones since this review was written many years ago, we are no longer prejudiced against the “earliest Living Stereo releases.” Many of them have superb sound.

The original is not good either in our experience. The only version of this wonderful performance from 1955, the best we know of, is this very late reissue that we discovered more than twenty years ago, a sleeper of a record if ever there was one.

When you hear how good it sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1976, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

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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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