lacks-air & ambience

Spirit – Sundazed Heavy Vinyl Mono Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

Another Sundazed record reviewed and found to be way off the mark.

As usual, the Sundazed only hints at the exceptionally good sound found on the best early pressings. We recommended it back at the day — let’s face it, we had a lot to learn.

In its defense, allow me to point out that it’s tonally correct, so for fifteen bucks you are getting your fifteen bucks worth, and probably not a dime’s more. We just cannot take this kind of sound seriously anymore.

Once you’ve heard the real thing, this pressing just won’t do.

Kevin Gray remastered this title, and we have found that the bulk of the records he’s involved with are rarely better than awful. Here is a good example of a record he mastered that falls far short of any record that would qualify to have the words “audiophile pressing” attached to it.

Look for these obvious signs that you are playing one his recuts:

The sound is opaque. It resists your efforts to hear into the recording. This is to be expected. Modern records in general tend to lack transparency, one of the most important qualities that the better vintage pressings have in abundance.

In addition, Gray’s records consistently lack ambience and air. We discuss that subject in more depth here.

If you are looking for audiophile sound on vinyl, our advice would be to avoid any record he is associated with.

Surrealistic Pillow – A Disaster on DCC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of the Jefferson Airplane Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Sour and opaque, a major disappointment.

You can do worse but you would really have to work at it.

No, I take that back. That’s really not fair. The average RCA reissue with any label other than the original is likely to be every bit as bad as this Heavy Vinyl disaster.

Years ago we thought we thought we had found a good one on the orange label, but I doubt that I would see things the same way today.

If you would like to avoid the worst sounding pressings put out on the DCC label, steer clear of this group. They’re awful.

Other records mastered by Steve Hoffman that badly missed the mark in our judgment can be found here.

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Dave Mason – Alone Together on MCA Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Dave Mason

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dave Mason

Sonic Grade: D

I confess I actually used to like and recommend the Heavy Vinyl MCA pressing. Rest assured that is no longer the case. Nowadays it sounds as opaque, ambience-challenged, lifeless and pointless as the rest of its 180 gram brethren.

As for other records we got wrong, you can find plenty more here, under the heading: Live and Learn.

We struggled for years with the bad vinyl and the murky sound of this album. Finally, with dozens of advances in playback quality and dramatically better cleaning techniques, we have now managed to overcome the problems which we assumed were baked into the recording. I haven’t heard the master tape, but I have heard scores of pressings made from it over the years. 

It is a surely a MASTERPIECE that belongs in any Rock Collection worthy of the name. Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s not a scrap of filler here. The recording by Bruce Botnick is hard to fault as well.

1970 was a great time in music. Tea for the Tillerman, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Moondance, Sweet Baby James, Tumbleweed Connection, After the Goldrush, The Yes Album, McCartney, Elton John, His Band And Street Choir, Deja Vu, Workingman’s Dead, Tarkio, Stillness, Let It Be — need I go on?

Even in such illustrious company — I defy anyone to name ten albums of comparable quality to come out in any year — Alone Together ranks as one of the best releases of the year. (more…)

Fresh Cream – A DCC Disaster

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Is it 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 all any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash needs to know.

Compressed, thick, dull, opaque, and almost completely lacking in ambience, this record has all the hallmarks of the Modern Heavy Vinyl Reissue.

Whether made by DCC or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, many remastered audiophile pressings started to have a tonal shortcoming that we found insufferable from day one: they are just too damn smooth.

Almost any domestic or British original pressing of Fresh Cream will be better in almost every way. Read our Hot Stamper review below for the full story. 

UPDATE

[This is an old review. We buy very few domestic pressings of Fresh Cream. They are often noisy, and they don’t sound remotely as good as the right British imports, including some late reissues. But anything beats the DCC LP.

It is, in our experience, the worst version ever.

Our Hot Stamper Commentary from 2008

AN EXCEPTIONAL SIDE ONE BACKED WITH GREAT SIDE ONE, both on surprisingly quiet vinyl! We just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ debut album and were delighted to hear how good this music can sound on the right pressing. This copy has the kind of bottom end that this music absolutely demands but is sadly missing in action from most of the pressings we played. If your Cream record can’t rock, remind me, what exactly is the point again? (more…)

The Not-So-Magnificent Thad Jones – More Dreck on Heavy Vinyl

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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 played 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 vinyl.

We say more power to him.  That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just the ones that are supposed to be good sounding, perhaps 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 always will be.

The three of us who do the critical listening here at Better Records dropped the needle on the first disc in this set and, once the VTA was properly adjusted, gave it a chance to show us just what expert remastering from vintage mono tapes, at 45 RPM, on two slabs of luscious, thick vinyl, could do for the sound of Thad Jones’s trumpet, circa 1956.

The reissue we are playing is the one Music Matters released in 2010. There was a single disc version released by them in 2016, recut by Kevin Gray and Ron Rambach. At the time of this writing, there is one for sale on Discogs for $235.

None of us had ever heard the album on any media, vinyl or otherwise, but we know a good sounding jazz record when we hear one, and we knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.

Two minutes was all it took, but we wasted another ten making sure it was as bad as we thought.

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Van Halen on DCC – Not My Idea of Good Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Halen Available Now

As I recall it isn’t very good — thick and dull and closed-in; in other words, boring as all get out — but, in its defense, I confess I played it quite a while ago.

If your copy sounds better, more power to you.

But I bet it doesn’t.

Any copy we sell is guaranteed to blow the doors off of it — as well as any other pressing you own — or your money back.

Here are other records, many of them on Heavy Vinyl or Half-Speed Mastered, that we found to have similar shortcomings. They are, to one degree or another:

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