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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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:
This is a very old commentary describing a shootout we had done more than a decade ago. Some of what you see below would probably still be true. The cutting system used to make the AP pressing no doubt lacked Tubey Magic. It’s also true that many of the records mastered on it were as lifeless and boring as we describe.
The only way to be clear about what is going on with the audiophile pressings in this group is to do another shootout with them, and we just can’t see taking the time to do that when there are so many good vintage pressings we don’t have time to play as it is.
There are only so many hours in the day, why waste them playing this crap?
We do occasionally throw the modern remastered pressings we manage to get hold of into our shootouts when time permits. You can read all about the half-speeds we’ve reviewed here and some of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played here.
Our latest thinking about this Analogue Productions repress can be found here.
Now, on to our old shootout.
Years ago a customer sent me his copy of the Analogue Productions LP (mastered by Hoffman and Gray) in order to carry out a little shootout I had planned among the five copies I could pull together: two MoFi’s, the Fantasy ORC reissue, a blue label original, the AP, and another reissue.
Let’s just say there were no real winners, but there sure were some losers.
My take on the Hoffman version is simply this: it has virtually no trace of Tubey Analog Magic. None that I can find anyway.
It sounds like a clean, tonally correct but fairly bass-shy CD.
No pressing I played managed to be so tonally correct and so boring at the same time.
The MoFi has plenty of weird EQ colorations, the kind that bug the hell out of me on 98% of their crappy catalog, but at least it sounds like analog. It’s warm, rich and sweet.
The AP copy has none of those qualities.
More pointless 180 gram vinyl sound, to my ear anyway. I couldn’t sit through it with a gun to my head.
You would need a lot of vintage tubes in your system to get the AP record to sound right, and then every properly-mastered record in your collection would sound worse.
There is an interesting story behind how I got my mitts on this particular Heavy Vinyl pressing.
Months ago [now years], a fellow contacted us to buy some of our Hot Stamper pressings. We sent him one or two, and he soon wrote back to say he was not happy with the sound. We exchanged emails with him for a while, trying to rectify the situation in the hopes that we could get him some records that he would be happy with.
In the middle of all this back and forth, we thought it would be worthwhile knowing what this gentleman thought was a good sounding record, seeing as how ours were not meeting his standards. Our discussion soon crossed over into Heavy Vinyl territory. We asked, “Were there any that he liked the sound of?” Why yes, there were.
You guessed it. The above-pictured album from Analogue Productions is one he recommended. (There was another he also said we should try, but after playing this one we decided against buying any more records he recommended, for reasons that will soon be evident.)
So we bought a copy. Soon enough we found ourselves playing our newly remastered Heavy Vinyl LP.
Right from the get-go, thick, murky, compressed, lifeless, ambience-free, dead-as-a-doornail sound was now coming out of my speakers. Like sludge from a sewer you might say. The stereo had sounded fine moments before. What the hell was happening?
I quickly grabbed a Super Hot copy of the album off the shelf and put it on the table.
Here was the energy, clarity, presence, space and more that had been missing mere moments ago while the Heavy Vinyl pressing played. Now, coming out my speakers was everything that makes a good vintage pressing such a joy to listen to.
I felt like turning it up and rocking out. The first song is Born to Be Wild. Who doesn’t love to blast Born to Be Wild?
What a difference. Night and Day. Maybe more!
If this Steppenwolf LP isn’t the perfect example of a Pass/Not-Yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.
As I was thinking about the turgid, compressed, veiled, overly smooth but not tonally incorrect sound coming out of my speakers, I thought back about the kinds of stereo systems that can produce that sound on command. They often look like the one you see below.
We were fairly unimpressed with the Rickie Lee Jones on Warners that came out a few years back [2008 in fact, time flies!].
It has that same phony modern mastering we find so unappealing on the Heavy Vinyl reissue of 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. We encourage you to play The Blue Game and maybe you’ll see why we feel the way we do.)
We liked the new Sweet Baby James Hoffman and Gray cut. We note in our review that:
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.
We went on to say
The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equaled 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 other such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.
So, What’s Wrong With Rickie Lee?
Simple. They took a somewhat artificial, hi-fi-ish, close-miked, heavy-on-the-reverb recording and made it sound even more artificial, phony and hi-fi-ish (but less-heavy-on-the-reverb; there is always a noticeable loss of resolution in these modern mastering jobs).
What were they thinking?
The best copies have warmth, richness and sweetness to balance out the more unnatural elements in the recording. Copies with these qualities are not that common, but we’ve run across plenty of them in our shootouts and proudly offered them for sale, where of course they sold quickly for lots of money. Major league audiophile appeal, this one. In its day it was heavily demo’ed in every stereo store in town, and for good reason — the sound positively jumps out of the speakers.
It’s a Trap
The average copy of this album is a sonic disaster, akin to the average copy of Famous Blue Raincoat or — gulp, even worse — Graceland. If you’re a detail freak, this Rhino pressing may be just what you are looking for. It’s got detail all right.
But all that phony detail obscures what is wrong with the sound. Overly detailed sound is a trap that is all too easy to fall into.
Plenty of recordings designed to appeal to audiophiles strike us as being phony in this way. Stan Ricker cut a lot of overly-detailed records for Mobile Fidelity in the 70s and 80s, records that may have sounded fine on the lo-rez stereos of that era (like the one I owned), but are positively painful to play on the top quality equipment that is available (but rare) today. [1]
I would hope that the audiophile community would have developed their listening skills to a level sufficient to recognize what this pressing doesn’t have — warmth, richness and sweetness — but I get the feeling I will be proved wrong yet again in that regard.
This Performance Is High?
Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino bills their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.
The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they released starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.”
If this is what vinyl sounds like I would switch to CD fast enough to make your head spin.
And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them. I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine.
Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard.
The Yes Album sounds like a cassette, a mere ghost of the real thing.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now
(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.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now
There are only so many hours in the day, why waste them playing this crap?
