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Remain In Light on Ridiculously Bad Sounding Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this awful pressing shortly after its release in 2006. More proof, as if more were needed, that Heavy Vinyl collectors have lost their minds.

A more accurate formulation might be that such collectors can’t tell a good record from a bad one. If they could, the number owning this pressing would be a fraction of that seen below, as would the number who want it. Let’s take a deeper dive into the actual evidence for its desirability:

More than 10,000 Discogs members have this album, almost two thousand would like to own it, and the consensus is that it is an outstanding reissue, having earned a grade of 4.66 out of 5 from 735 members. (Don’t worry, I won’t show you what they had to say about it, but you are welcome to go to Discogs and read it yourself.)

With an average price of 25 bucks, what is keeping those 1948 potential buyers from pulling the trigger? Seems affordable to me. Inflation has gone up 62+% since 2006, making the album cheaper now than if you had bought it when it came out.

Our 2006 Review

The Rhino Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album was deemed dead on arrival the minute it hit my turntable.

No top, way too much bottom, dramatically less ambience than the average copy — this one is a disaster on every level.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being 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. 

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Prokofiev / Piano Concerto No. 3 / Graffman

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Not sure if we would still agree with anything we said in the 2008 review you see below.

Back then we only had the one copy to play, and we certainly hadn’t learned how to clean it the way we do now, so who can say what any random copy of the record would sound like?

If you see it for cheap in the bins, pick it up, give it a spin and see.

This Plum Label Original pressing is one of the TOP Victrola titles! The sound is excellent, with real weight to the orchestra, powerful dynamics, deep bass, and solid piano tone.

Add to that a wonderful performance by Gary Graffman and the San Francisco Symphony, and you have one truly OUTSTANDING record. (If you can add 1 or 2 db to the top end, it’s even better.) 

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The Byrds in Mono – How Do The Original Pressings Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could put up with that kind of sound on a modern audiophile system?

Can the apologists for mono really be taking this ridiculously crappy sound seriously?

I hope not, but I suspect that is exactly what they are doing. The question is: why?

They seem to like the congested, distorted, top-end-lacking Beatles records in mono, so why not The Byrds?

To these ears, the monos for both bands have a lot in common.

And what they have in common is sound we want nothing to do with.

Now, to be fair, we’ve stopped buying these monos, so there may actually be a good copy or two out there in the used record bins that does have good sound.

In our defense, who really has the time to play records with so little potential for good sound?

What about the Sundazed mono pressings?

The best Columbia stereo copies on the original label are rich, sweet and Tubey Magical — three areas in which the Sundazed reissues are seriously lacking.

Does anyone still care? We simply cannot be bothered with these bad Heavy Vinyl pressings. If you’re looking for mediocre sound just play the CD. I’m sure it’s every bit as bad.

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Pros and Cons of this Copy of Swings in High Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

Side One

Big and spacious, yet clear, dynamic and energetic. The brass is never “blary” the way it can be on so many Big Band or Dance Band records from the 50s and 60s. (Basie’s Roulette records tend to have a bad case of blary brass as a rule.)

Sharp transients and mostly correct tonality and timbres, powerful brass — practically everything you want in a Hot Stamper is here!

The stage is exceptionally wide on this copy.

Listen to the top end on track two — man, that is some natural sound!

This side could use a bit more weight so we feel a grade of Super Hot (A++) gets it right.

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The “Not-So-Golden-Age” of RCA, Mercury, London and Others

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

We ran into a number of copies of this title that had what we like to call “old record sound,” which is surprisingly common on even the most revered Golden Age labels, RCA included.

No top, no real bottom, congested climaxes and a general shrillness to the sound — we’ve played Living Stereos by the dozens that have these shortcomings and many more.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works.

Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start. It does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten, you’re probably setting the bar too low, if our experience is any guide.

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Beethoven / Symphony No. 7 / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review of a White Dog pressing with decent sound.

We did a massive shootout for the work in 2025 and determined that the best combination of sound and performance could be found on the best pressings of Karajan’s 1959 recording for RCA.

However, although the Soria originals, LDS 2348, have the best sound, their vinyl on side two is consistently defective.

The later Shaded Dog pressing, LSC 2536, was good sounding, but not as good as we hoped, with a side two that was rich but bright. The best copy earned a grade of 2+/1.5+.

Of the seven copies we cleaned and played, only two made the cut for sound and vinyl, none earning even 2+/2+ grades.

This was an expensive shootout to get off the ground when you consider the seven we bought and the other pressings we auditioned in order to find the best of the best for performance and sound.

We proably lost more than a thousand dollars after all was said and done.

It may be unfortunate, but there are times when it will be unavoidable. These are the costs we must be willing to bear if we are to bring our customers top quality pressings of the most important works by the greatest composers who ever lived.

Finding good sounding records is a crap shoot. We get paid to dig deeper than other vintage record dealers — that’s the job we have chosen for ourselves, and not only do we not have any regrets, we much prefer doing things the way we do them, mostly because we actually enjoy testing records — but success is never assured.

You win some and you lose some, and if we’re not fine with results that don’t go our way, we should do what our competitors do and sell records based on, e.g., the established skills of the mastering engineers, supposedly superior production methods, original tape sources, higher quality vinyl, and who knows what else — in other words, everything but their actual sound quality.

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Kevin Gray Sacrifices Another Blue Note to the Lo-Fi Crowd

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

We did a shootout for Cornbread in 2023 and again in 2025. For our latest one, we were fortunate to be able to include both the Tone Poets pressing that came out in 2019 as well as the 75th Anniversary Blue Note pressing from 2014.

Here is the way we described a Hot Stamper that ended up being the best sounding pressing we played on one of its sides, and coming in second on the other side.

  • The sound is everything that’s good about Rudy Van Gelder‘s recordings – it’s present, spacious, full-bodied, Tubey Magical, dynamic and, most importantly, alive in that way that modern pressings never are
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over nearly all other copies we played

After hearing a copy of the album that sounded as good as that one, the Tone Poets pressing would have had to be at least a bit of a letdown, right?

To be fair, all it really has to be is good sounding. For $30, the price of the average copy that sells on Discogs, can you really expect great?

I don’t know what any of the purchasers of these Tone Poets records — of this or any other title — are expecting for their thirty bucks, but I can tell you what they are getting. We took notes while their remastered pressing played, and here’s what we heard.

Side One

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What Can You Learn from a Mercury Shootout Like This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

The short answer is that you can’t learn much from this shootout, because we’re not telling you which title the stampers you see below belong to.

Be that as it may, in the case of this mystery title the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — the earlier numbered pressings did better than the later numbered pressings, and the early labels did better than the later labels.

That happens a lot, and we are happy to admit that it does. Why? Because the experimental evidence — the data — say that is what happened.

As usual for posts in which the stamper sheet from a shootout is reproduced in its entirety, the stamper numbers shown below will belong to a different album than the one you see pictured.

These can be found under the heading of Mystery Stampers. Most of these posts will illustrate something to be learned from a Hot Stamper shootout, but because the information reveals the shootout winning stampers, the actual title of the record is rarely revealed.

Much more useful stamper information can be found using this link, which includes plenty of stamper numbers for specific titles that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound. In addition, we post the winning and losing stampers for some titles that are an unreliable guide to good sound. Unreliable stampers are also quite common.

The right stampers are only one of the many reasons some copies win our shootouts and others don’t, but in the case of this rare Mercury, a record that we only had four copies of, the RFR-2/2 stampers were clearly the best, with no other set of stampers coming close. The best of the others earned grades no better than 2+/2+.

One lesson that was clear was that the best stampers were, to quote our reviewer, “a step up!”

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More Evidence of Ron McMaster’s Flat Out Incompetence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Reasonably good bass, we’ll give it that, but no top end and no Tubey Magic.

More of Ron McMaster’s handiwork. The result is a record that simply has no reason to exist.

The AVERAGE original pressing sitting in your local record store bin right now for probably all of ten bucks will MURDER this piece of crap. 

UPDATE 2025

It’s been a long time since anybody could buy a clean original of Gaucho for ten bucks! Fifty is the going price at our local stores these days. Worth every penny too.

As we noted for Ron’s remastered Band album:

When you see that little RM in the dead wax of one of these new Heavy Vinyl reissues, you know you’ve just flushed your money down the toilet. There should be a warning label on the jacket: Mastered by Ron McMaster.

It’s only a warning to those of us familiar with his work of course; the general public, and that includes the general audiophile public, probably won’t have much of a problem with the sound of this record, or anything else he does.

He still has the job, doesn’t he? What does that tell you?

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This London from 1961 Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

1961 just happens to be one of the greatest years for high quality analog recordings. Just check out this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.

This London LP was released in 1961, right in the heart of the Golden Age, so we figured it had a good chance of displaying the kind of relaxed, immersive, smooth, rich, Tubey Magical Decca sound we absolutely cannot get enough of here at Better Records.

As we were preparing to do the shootout with the six copies of CS 6202 we had amassed over the years, we suddenly ran into a big problem.

(Cue sound effect of record being scratched here.)

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