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We often criticize Kevin Gray’s mastering skills on this blog, and for good reason: his records rarely sound any better than passable, and most of them are just plain awful. We encourage the reader to read about his substandard work in the many commentaries we’ve linked to below.

Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus Is a Bloated Mess at 45 RPM from Hoffman, Gray and Kassem

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

We played an amazing Hot stamper copy that got the bottom end on this album as right as we’ve ever heard. The contribution of the bass player was clear and correctly balanced in the mix, which we soon learned to appreciate was fundamentally important to the rhythmic drive of the music.

The bass was so tight and note-like you could see right into the soundstage and practically picture Monte Budwig plucking and bowing away.

This is precisely where the 45 RPM pressing goes off the rails.

The bloated, much-too-heavy and poorly-defined bass of the Heavy Vinyl remaster makes a mess of the Brazilian and African rhythms inherent in the music. If you own that $50 waste of money, believe me, you will not be tapping your foot to Cast Your Fate to the Wind or Manha de Carnival.

Our rule of thumb: he better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered records will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

Is this 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 kind of trash. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment like the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, these remastered records have your name all over them.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

If you want to know what a properly-mastered, properly-pressed copy sounds like, we put the last one up in 2023.

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Music Matters – Tizzy Cymbals and a Bright Snare Drum, That’s Your Idea of Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in 2021.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, the audiophile world is practically drowning in them).

After discovering Hot Stampers and the mind-blowing sound they deliver, a new customer generously sent me a few of his favorite Heavy Vinyl pressings to audition, records that he considered the best of the modern reissues that he owns.

He admitted that most of what he has on Heavy Vinyl is not very good, and now that he can clearly hear what he has been missing, having heard some of our best Hot Stamper jazz pressings, he is going to be putting them up on Ebay and selling them to anyone foolish enough to throw their money away on this kind of junk.

We say more power to him.  That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just supposedly good sounding because they were custom manufactured with the utmost care and marketed at high prices to soi-disant audiophiles.

Audiophile records are a scam. They always have been and they always will be.

I haven’t listened to a copy of this album in a very long time, but I know a good sounding jazz record when I hear one, having critically auditioned more than a thousand over the course of the 33 38 years I have been in business. (To be clear, we only sold verified good sounding records starting in 2004.)

I knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.  Five minutes was all it took, but I probably wasted another ten making sure the sound was as hopeless as it initially seemed.

For those of you who might have trouble reading my handwriting, my notes say:

  • Bass is sloppy and fat.

The bass is boosted and badly lacks definition. It constantly calls attention to itself. It is the kind of sloppy bass that cannot be found on any RVG recording, none that I have ever heard anyway, and I’ve heard them by the hundreds.

You no doubt know about the boosted bass on the remastered Beatles albums. It’s that sound. Irritating in the extreme, and just plain wrong.

  • Reserved. Playing through a curtain.

Very few Heavy Vinyl records these days do not sound veiled and reserved in the midrange.

To get a better sense of the effect, throw a medium weight blanket over your speakers. Voila! Your thin vinyl now weighs 180 grams!

  • No space.

Typical of Heavy Vinyl. The studio space and ambience found on the better vintage pressings, the kind we play all day long, is GONE.

RTI pressings are serial offenders in this regard.  We find them uniformly insufferable.

  • No transients.

Not the sound of the instruments that RVG is famous for.  No leading edges to any instrument anywhere.

Somebody screwed them up in the mastering. Bad cutting equipment? Bad EQ? Both? What else could it be?

  • Boring.

Of course it is. Nothing sounds right and it’s all just so dead.

I would be very surprised if the CD was not dramatically better sounding in practically every way, and far more fun to listen to.

  • Snare is hot when played loud like a bad OJC

We’ve auditioned close to a hundred OJC titles over the years. We sell quite a few of them, but of course we only sell the ones that sound good. We are in the good sounding records business. And some of them are hard to beat.

But lots of them have a phony, boosted top end, easily heard as tizzy, sizzly, gritty, phony cymbals and too-hot snare drums.

This record has that phony sound.

We would never sell any record that sounds this phony and wrong. It is an utter disgrace and an affront to vinyl loving audiophiles around the world.

If this record sounds right to you, one thing I can say without fear of contradiction: no matter how much money and time you may have spent on it, you still have a great deal of work to do on your stereo system if you want it to sound right.

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Letter of the Week – “Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a John Coltrane record he purchased not long ago.

Hi Tom,

Even a 2+ [Super Hot] was enough to eliminate the 2021 Concord/AP [Analogue Productions] 33 RPM KPG [Kevin Gray] LP on 180 gram which was my copy until this Hot Stamper.

I listened to side 1 first. Well shit … it sounds clean, it sounds nice, a bit flat but that’s how I thought it was supposed to be, and sounds quite audiophile.

Simply put, the BR copy truly brings the music to life.

Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.

All I know is the BR LP destroyed the above to smithereens.

As always, many thanks!

Michel

Dear Michel,

You are more than welcome.  When you mention that you thought the album sounded clean, nice, a bit flat, you were in the same boat as all the other audiophiles who own these modern remasterings who have been putting up with their mediocre sound. Why?

Because they thought the recordings were at fault.

After all, Chad must know what he’s doing, he’s the biggest guy in the business.

And Kevin Gray must know what he’s doing, he can’t keep up with all the work these reissue labels are sending his way.

They’re the pro’s pros, right?

No, not right. Not even close to right. The opposite of right.

They are incompetent frauds that have the bulk of the audiophile community utterly bamboozled.

Even the worst of the Hot Stamper pressings we sell are worlds better sounding, and the way you can find this out for yourself, dear reader, is simply to try one.

UPDATE 2025

Our review for the 2021 Bernie Grundman-mastered Craft pressing of Lush Life will be coming to the blog before long, only two years (!) after Geoff Edgers brought one to the studio for me to audition.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t like it then — I told Geoff at the time that I bet it sounded worse than whatever CD might currently be in print — and my main listening guy, Riley, having played it in a recent shootout, didn’t like it any better.

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Moondance on Heavy Vinyl Is a Disgrace to Audiophiles and Record Lovers All Over the World

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

The original grade I gave out in 2015 when I last played this remastered version as part of a shootout was “D.” I explained at the time:

Just listen to how strange Van’s voice sounds, so lean, hard and sour. That alone qualifies it for an “F,” but considering how bad most pressings of this album are, let’s be fair, if not downright generous, and call it a “D.”

I just revisited the record in a current shootout, and after giving it some thought I have decided that the right grade is in fact “F.” It cannot be any other, for reasons I discuss below.

In 2014 I had written:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we debunked Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

Having just played a marvelous shootout-winning early pressing, this time around I found the reproduction of Van’s voice on the reissue to be so leaned-out, artificial and unpleasant that I could hardly stand to listen to it.

We had reset the VTA correctly; the overall tonal balance of the recording from top to bottom was correct. It was only the voice that sounded so off. All the other shortcomings I had mentioned before were still true of course, but none of that mattered. The singer on this record just sounded awful.

As you know, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system. The real Moondance we had just played sounded better than ever. The fake Moondance, however, was sounding worse than ever. That’s what higher quality playback can do for you. It makes your good records sound better than they’ve ever sounded, and shows you just how bad your bad records really are.

Do I have a bad copy of the Heavy Vinyl pressing? Maybe, can’t say I don’t. If any of you out there in the real world have a copy of this pressing that you like, and would be willing to send it to me to hear for myself, I would be more than happy to give it a listen and report my findings on this blog.

Short of that I’m not sure what more I can do. I certainly do not feel the least bit inclined to waste a nickel of my hard-earned money on another copy of this ridiculously badly-mastered crap vinyl.

If you want to read about other records that have these same shortcomings, there are links below to the ones we’ve auditioned and identified to date. Our advice would be to avoid them, and if you own some of these pressings, perhaps now is the time to give them another listen and see if you don’t hear the same faults we did.

And, of course, the Hot Stamper pressings we offer, when played side by side with any of these Heavy Vinyl remasters, can help you to see more clearly just where these new records are going wrong, or, in the case of Moondance, completely off the rails.

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Music From Peer Gynt – Another Cisco Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

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

Pretty bad, on a par with the transistory, shrill crap Classic Records had been dishing out for years, but in the opposite direction tonally: it’s dull and dead as a doornail.

I often mention on this blog that Cisco’s releases (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.

Our favorite recording of Peer Gynt is the one by Otto Gruner-hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic from 1959.

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Letter of the Week – “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 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, unable as he was 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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It’s Official – The Audiophile World Has Lost Its Mind

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

  • Nasal, upper midrange boost
  • No real space
  • Hard and smeary
  • Sizzly rain intro
  • Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

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Listening to Aja (with Free Cisco Debunking Tool)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

This commentary references a shootout we did in 2007 or thereabouts, shortly after the release of Cisco’s misbegotten remaster.

Another in our series of Home Audio Exercises with specific advice on What to Listen For (WTLF) as you critically evaluate your copy of Aja.

Our track commentary for the song Home at Last makes it easy to spot an obvious problem with Cisco’s remastered Aja: This is the toughest song to get right on side two.

Nine out of ten copies have grainy, irritating vocals; the deep bass is often missing too. Home at Last can sometimes be just plain unpleasant, which is why it’s such a great test track.

Get this one right and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there on out.

If you own the Cisco pressing, focus on Victor Feldman’s piano at the beginning of the song. It lacks body, weight and ambience on the new pressing, but any of our better Hot Stamper copies will show you a piano with those qualities in spades on every track. It’s some of my favorite work by the Steely Dan vibesman.

The thin piano on the Cisco release must be recognized for what it is: a major error on the part of the mastering engineers.

Bonus Listening Test for Side Two

The truly amazing side twos — and they are pretty darn rare — have an extended top end and breathy vocals on the first track, Peg, a track that is dull on nine out of ten copies. (The ridiculously bright MoFi actually kind of works on Peg because of the fact that the mix is somewhat lacking in top end. This is faint praise though: MoFi managed to fix that problem and ruin practically everything else on the album.)

If you play Peg against the tracks that follow it on side two, most of the time the highs come back. On the best of the best the highs are there all the way through.

Listening Tests for Side One

Generally what you try to get on side one is a copy with ambience. Most copies are flat, lifeless and dry as a bone. You also want a copy with good punchy bass — many are lean, and the first two tracks simply don’t work at all without good bass. And then you want a copy that has a natural top end, where the cymbals ring sweetly and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone isn’t hard or honky or dull, which it often is on the bad domestic copies.

Also listen for GRAIN and HONK in the vocals on Black Cow. The better your copy is, the less grainy and honky the vocals will be.

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Can Anybody Tell Me What’s Wrong with Sweet Baby James on Warners-Rhino?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

There is one obvious and somewhat bothersome fault with this new pressing of Sweet Baby James, an EQ issue. Anybody care to guess what it is? Send us an email if you think you know.

Hint: it’s the kind of thing that sticks out like a sore thumb, the kind of obvious EQ error I can’t ever recall hearing on an original pressing, as bad as many of those tend to be.

Our review for the Steve Hoffman remastered pressing follows.

This Warner Brothers 180g LP is the BEST SOUNDING Heavy Vinyl reissue to come our way in a long long time. Those of you who’ve been with us for a while know that that’s really not saying much, but it doesn’t make it any less true either, now does it? Let’s look at what it doesn’t do wrong first.

It doesn’t sound opaque, compressed, dry and just plain dead as a doornail like so many new reissues do. It doesn’t have the phony modern mastering sound we hate about the sound of the new Blue. (We seem to be pretty much alone in not liking that one, and we’re proud to say we still don’t like it.)

The new Sweet Baby James actually sounds like a — gulp — fairly decent original.

The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equalled by an audiophile pressing like this. (It hasn’t happened yet and we remain skeptical of the possibility.) Considering that this pressing is sure to beat most reissues, imports and such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.

Hoffman and Gray can take pride in this Sweet Baby James.

It’s some of the best work I’ve heard from them to date. If more DCC and Heavy Vinyl reissues sounded like this, we wouldn’t be so critical of them. Unfortunately they don’t, and there are scores of pages of commentary on the site to back up that statement for those of you interested in the subject.

The real thing can’t be beat, but this gets you a lot closer to the sound of the real thing than most of the Heavy Vinyl we’ve heard. I would say it easily qualifies for a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten ranking. We don’t actually have a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten List, but if we ever make one up, expect to see this record on it.

What to Listen For

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

Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

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The Audiophile Roundtable Returns with Port’s Picks

Steve Westman invited me to appear again on his youtube channel chat with the Audiophile Roundtable.

At about the 39 minute mark, we discuss my picks for what I would rate as the Five Best Sounding Records I know of.

I wanted to go with more variety, so I picked two rock records, two jazz records and one classical album.

A rough transcription with corrections and additions follows:

Before I did my top five, I wanted to say something along the lines of, if you want to know where somebody’s coming from in audio, you don’t ask them what their stereo is, you don’t ask them what their room is like, and how their electricity is done, and what their history with audio is, because they’re not going to tell you, and they just don’t want to go down that road.

But you can ask them about music, and that will tell you a lot about where they’re coming from, so here are my questions for people if I wanted to know more about their understanding of records (and, by implication, audio):

    • One: what are the five best sounding records you’ve ever heard?
    • Two: what are your five favorite records of all time?
    • Three: what five famous recordings never sounded good to you?
    • Four: name five recordings that are much better than most of your friends or audiophiles in general think?

In my world, you would have to tell me what pressing you’re listening to. If you said “I love the new Rhino Cars album,” I think we would be done, but if you told me that you love the original, then I would say yes, I love that record too. I bought it in 1978 and I’ve played it about 5000 times. Never tired of hearing it.

At about the 48 minute mark I reveal the best stampers for Ry Cooder’s Jazz album.

At about the 50 minute mark someone asks about my system. This would be my answer:

All that information is on the blog., I actually do a thing about my stereo where I take it all the way from 1976 to the present, which I’m sure bores people to death, but you know, there was a lot to talk about there.

There were a lot of changes that I went through and I even talk about how my old stereo from the 90s, which I had put together after having been an audiophile for 25 years, was dark and unrevealing compared to the one I have now, so all my opinions from 25 years ago are suspect, and rightly so.

I feel the same thing is going on in the world of audiophiles when you have systems that aren’t very revealing and aren’t tonally accurate, yet are very musical and enjoyable the way Geoff would like, but they’re not good for really knowing what your records sound like because your system is doing all sorts of things to the record that you’re playing in order to keep the bad stuff from bothering you.

That’s the opposite of what we have.

All the bad stuff just jumps out of the speakers, and that’s why these heavy vinyl records don’t appeal to us anymore, because we hear all the bad stuff and we don’t like it.

At 1:03 I’m asked if I like any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I can think of is Chris Bellman, because he masterered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressing I know of that sounds any good, Brothers in Arms, released in 2021. I played it when Edgers brought it by the studio when he first visited me in preparation for his article.

My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s mostly sounds right, and that surprised me because most of these modern records sound funny and weird and rarely do they sound right.

(Geoff brought over three records that day: Brothers in Arms, the remastered Zep II, and a ridiculously bad sounding Craft pressing of Lush Life, which was mastered by Bernie Grundman, and one which I have not had time to review yet. It was my introduction to the Craft series (in this case the small batch, limited to 1000), and let’s just say we got off on the wrong foot. I told Geoff it sounded like a bad CD, and that’s pretty much all I remember of it. The average price for that pressing on Discogs is roughly $210 these days. The CD is cheaper and there is very little doubt in my mind that it would be better sounding to boot.)

At 1:04 I mention the biggest snake oil salesman in the history of vinyl, the man behind The Electric Recording Company.

Patrick mentions an ERC Love record which he likes, but we played one that sounded about as bad as a bad record could sound. That Love record will never get any love from us. He says he’ll never buy another ERC pressing, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing someone who really likes a record would say, does it? I suppose you can ask him in the comments section why that would be.

At some point I talk about the studio we play records in, not exactly spouse-friendly but good for hearing what’s really in the grooves of the records we play:

The reason the sound room is the way it is is because you’re not there to be reading magazines and looking at your phone. You’re just in there to sit in a single chair in front of two speakers, not talking. Nobody else is in there. They have no business being in there. It’s just you and the music and that’s the way I like it.

This next section has been fleshed out quite a bit. I took the question posed and ran with it:

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