lacks-transparency

These 20+ vintage records lack transparency. They are difficult to “hear into.”

The best properly-cleaned vintage pressings are usually quite transparent.

Which means that the records listed here are not particularly good pressings, or the recordings themselves lack this important quality.

Either way, they are best avoided by those looking for top quality sound.

Boy, Was We Ever Wrong About Solti’s Rite of Spring

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is an old and somewhat embarrassing commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Solti’s 1974 recording for Decca.

Here is what we had to say about the album in 2008:

This is an amazing recording, DEMO QUALITY SOUND, far better than the Decca heavy vinyl reissue that came out in the 2000s. [That part is no doubt true.]

This record is extremely dynamic; full of ambience; tonally correct; with tons of deep bass. Because it’s a more modern recording, it doesn’t have the Tubey Magic of some Golden Age originals, but it compensates for that shortcoming by being less distorted and “clean.” Some people may consider that more accurate. To be honest with you, I don’t know if that is in fact the case.

However, this record should not disappoint sonically and the performance is every bit as exciting and powerful as any you will find. The Chicago Symphony has the orchestral chops to make a work of this complexity sound effortless.

Skip forward to the present, roughly ten years later. We had three or four copies on hand to audition when we surveyed the work a couple of years ago in preparation for a big shootout.

The Solti did not make the cut. It was not even in the ballpark.

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Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection.

As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how badly MoFi had ruined the sound, I was mortified.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. Thrilled to it even. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

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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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LSC 2429 – Grieg & Liszt with Rubinstein – You Can Do Better

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Grieg Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old review of LSC 2429, which we ourselves may no longer agree with.

If you see this record in the bins for cheap, give it a try, but don’t pay a lot on our say-so.

Our two favorite recordings of the Grieg Piano Concerto are the Decca with Lupu and Previn from 1973 and Rubinstein’s for RCA in 1962. Either one should be superior to the Living Stereo Shaded Dog we review here.

The strings are RICH in the best Living Stereo tradition, but unlike so many classical pressings we play, the tubey magical string tone comes with virtually no tube smear. The textures and overtones are fully intact.

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“KEV” Didn’t Have a Clue How to Master Teaser and the Firecat

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

In 2025, in preparation for a new shootout, we ordered a copy of Teaser from overseas that supposedly had the right stampers — we know what they are and we are only interested in copies with the right ones — and were sent this “KEV” pressing by accident.

Accident is right — whoever KEV is, he sure has no business mastering records if the one we played is anything to go by.

Discogs has an entry for it, current price around $10. (Apparently the word got out about the sound of this miserable pressing.)

  • This release is the pink ring Island Label. No Sterling etchings. (KEV) in matrix.
  • Side 1 has 9514 hashed out and 9154 etched above
  • Matrix / Runout (A-side runout. etched): ILPS 9154A-1K 1 KEV B
  • Matrix / Runout (B-side runout. etched): ILPS 9154B-1K 1 KEV B

Our notes read:

  • Loud, congested and hot.
  • Big, wonky bass.
  • Opaque and so compressed that it pumps.

And the best line of all:

  • Not too different sounding from the 2021 remaster that’s on Spotify. (!)

I looked up that 2021 release, mastered at Abbey Road Studios, and it appears they remixed it for some reason, as those who work at Abbey Road are wont to do, the result of which seems to be one disaster after another.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Famous and Pricey RCA from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The most recent copy we’ve played of LSC 2405 left us feeling underwhelmed. We expected more from such a famous (and pricey!) TAS-Listed Living Stereo record.

In the past we’ve auditioned the Victrola and the Decca SPA reissue, and both seemed to be reasonably good but not quite good enough to offer our customers. We were still looking for a better Fifth Symphony, and paid top dollar for this copy hoping it would be the one to make a shootout possible.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The sound of this copy was rich but opaque. We would call it no better than passable. It might be a good sounding record on a different pressing, but we doubt it could be a great one, and we really don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to prove ourselves wrong on that account.

As the best of the RCA pressings demonstrate beyond all doubt, 1960 was a great year for classical and orchestral recordings.

What the modern mastering engineers of today do to such wonderful recordings is another thing altogether. Bernie Grundman remastered this one in the 90s for Classic Records, and we can describe the work he did for them in just four words.

To sum it all up, LSC 2405 is unlikely to sound very good on high quality modern equipment. If your system leans more towards the old school approach — vintage tubes, vintage tables, horn speakers, that sort of thing — then the lack of transparency won’t be nearly as bothersome as it is to us.

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The Mono Recut of Revolver from 1981 Is a Ripoff

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

A great sounding record in stereo, potentially anyway, but this later reissue in mono is so awful it deserves a special place in our hall of shame.

My notes for side one: hard, sour, no bass.

Side two: dumbass small mono, so unclear.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? That’s hard to say. There is no shortage of competition, that’s for sure.

But it may be 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 rubbish.

We love the mono mix of For No One, but not when it sounds like this.

The only Beatles vinyl we offer on our site are stereo pressings. Our reasons for doing this are straightforward enough.

The Beatles records in mono, contrary to the opinion of audiophiles and music lovers alike, virtually never have the presence, energy and resolution found on the best stereo copies. If your stereo cannot resolve all the information on the tape, sure, Twin Track Stereo (used on the first two albums, hard-panned multi-track afterwards) ends up sounding like some of the instruments are stuck in the speakers, hard left and hard right, with nothing but a hole in the middle.

But there is a great deal of information spreading into the middle when we play those records here, and nothing feels stuck in the speakers that doesn’t sound like it was supposed to be heard coming directly from one of the speakers.

It is our contention that the best audio equipment, properly tweaked, can show you a world of musical information that exists only on the stereo pressings, information that the mono mixes mostly obscure.

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Another Substandard Pressing of Coltrane’s Music — What Is Going On?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

We played an early Blue Label Prestige mono pressing of Standard Coltrane that was thankfully not as awful as the original Yellow Label mono we played, but it wasn’t very good either.

We characterize a record that earns one plus on both sides as having passable sound.

Which means you could listen to it, maybe even enjoy it for the most part, but you would have no idea just how well Rudy Van Gelder recorded the sessions in 1958 that went into the making of the album, which as you know was not compiled for release until 1962.

As you can see from the notes above, it was crude, smeary and thick. We try to avoid selling records with those faults, but sometimes you do the best you can and you still end up with records that have those shortcomings to some degree.

But if you know what to look for, and you know how to clean records and do shootouts, you know that there are great sounding pressings of this album. You just have to do the work it takes to find them.

I can’t say that most modern remastered records are crude, although some of them are, but a great many we’ve played are smeary, and almost all of them are thick — that is, lacking in transparency.

That last quality — a lack of transparency — may be the most irritating of all, a subject we discuss here.

(A great many records we’ve auditioned over the years are good for testing transparency. Those wanting to improve this aspect of their playback should consider making use of them.)

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This Blueback Was Somewhat Opaque and Crude – Does that Surprise You?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Felix Mendelssohn Available Now

Presenting our latest findings from 2023:

For our most recent shootout, the original we played earned grades of 1.5+ on both sides, a grade that is the absolute minimum for a Hot Stamper pressing to be listed on the site now.

Our best reissues killed it.

The 3D/3E stampers of our early Blueback copy can probably be beaten by others — assuming there are others — but this is just not a good bet for us when it comes to Mendelssohn’s famous Third Symphony, not when there are so many other pressings with superior sound.

Our favorite performance with top quality sound is made from the same recording you see here, but on a certain budget reissue that has much better sound.

It’s very possible that the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl pressing from 2003 pictured below would beat the original we describe. We make no claims that it doesn’t, or wouldn’t.

Our claim would be that a properly-mastered, properly-pressed version of the album is very unlikely to be bested by something from Speakers Corner, or any other label making records during the last thirty years.

What I would have played against the Speakers Corner pressing in 2003 would have been an original London Blueback, and maybe a Stereo Treasury or two. Both of them would have been obvious choices, and I was stuck making obvious choices because I simply did not understand enough about classical records at the time to do otherwise.

I confess I knew very little about the recording of the 3rd symphony back in those days, and I certainly didn’t know how good some of the right reissues could sound.

Obviously we needed to do a great deal more research and development, which we began to undertake over the course of the next twenty years in a much more serious way, making one discovery after another.

And that all happened out of the love for great sounding music on vinyl, and, every bit as importantly, because we get paid to do it.

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We Expected Better from Frühbeck De Burgos, But We Didn’t Get It

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

We love the skill De Burgos brings to orchestral showpieces such as these, but the sound is not up to par for us. We’ve heard better. A lot better.

Bolero is shrill at the climax and the whole of side two was dull and opaque.

This EMI from 1976 might be passable on an old school system, but it was much too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.

Note that there is no list of EMI’s. There are simply too many bad ones to make listings for.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

The EMI classical albums we have reviewed to date can be found here.

Label:   His Master’s Voice – ESD 7019
Released:   1976

Ravel – Bolero
Chabrier: Espana – Rhapsody For Orchestra

Prokofiev – Symphony No.1 In D Major (Classical)

Stravinsky: Fireworks, Op.4
Stravinsky: Circus Polka (1942) (Composed For A Young Elephant)

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