murky-sound

Dark, cloudy and opaque.

This kind of sound is not limited to the modern remastered LP, although few of them do not suffer from this problem. Plenty of vintage pressings are murky.

Just to cite one example, many green label Warner Bros. pressings are some combination of dark, murky, recessed, compressed, thick, veiled, opaque and congested.

Speakers Corner Ruins a Classic Mercury, Part One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2004.  We carried Heavy Vinyl back then, and for that, knowing what I know now, I can only apologize.

Back then, I thought I knew a great deal more about records and  how to reproduce them than I actually did.  Yes, I have to admit it: I suffered from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

On the bright side, there is one very powerful benefit that I gained from being so mistaken. Having failed to recognize my own shortcomings, the signs that someone thinks they know more than they do are easy for me to spot. Here is one of my favorite examples. I link to it a lot.

If you want to see the effect played out in the cyber world, go to any audiophile forum and start reading any thread about records you find there. The D-K effect is hard to miss. Some of the experts on these forums have even convinced themselves that they know things that cannot be known, which is always a sure sign they know a great deal less than they think they do.  

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A Night at the Opera Is a DCC Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The DCC pressing of Night at the Opera is a hopeless mess, one of the worst titles that Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman ever ruined.

Murky, opaque and compressed: yes, we can agree it has never been an especially good sounding record on anything but the most difficult to find UK pressings [and we know exactly which ones those are now, which only makes this record sound even worse in comparison], but does it deserve this kind of mastering disrespect?

Isn’t the idea to try and FIX what is wrong, rather than to make it worse?

At collector prices no less. Don’t waste your money like the folks on Discogs did.

It’s true that our Shootout Winning pressings sell for much more than the $811.63 someone paid, but keep in mind that we are selling you an amazing sounding record for that kind of dough, not a copy made for the mid-fi collector market, one that will spend very little of its time sitting on a turntable platter or having a needle tracing its grooves. (That would hurt the collector value, don’t you know.)

Instead it will no doubt get filed away on a shelf next to others of its kin, perhaps even in a special DCC section, organized in numerical order!

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

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Sonny Rollins Plus 4 – Defending the Indefensible

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this album in 2014 or thereabouts. It came out in 2007, proving that Chad had learned nothing about the sound of jazz during the previous 13 years after having made his first foray into bad Heavy Vinyl.

Almost twenty years later has anything changed? Not to our ears it hasn’t.

In point of fact, the releases of his records and plenty of others’ we’ve auditioned over the last few years are every bit as bad or worse.

When you’re making a lot of money doing it the way you’ve always done it, why would you ever want to change?

To make a better sounding product? Yeah, that’s a good one. How do you improve on perfection?

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding pair of audiophile records than this 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl release, and I’ve heard a ton of them. 

Surely someone must have noticed how awful these records sound.

So, being an enterprising sort, with a few idle moments to spare, I did a google search. To my surprise it came up pretty much empty. Sure, dealers are selling it, every last one of the bigger mail-order types.

But how is it that no reviewer has taken it to task for its oh-so-obvious shortcomings?

And no one on any forum seems to have anything bad to say about it either. How could that be?

We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think that for the most part they are awful and want nothing to do with them.

But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.

Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?

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Sorry, This Is Just Not Our Sound and Never Will Be

coltranegiant45x

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The sound of the 45 RPM 2 disc version of Giant Steps cut by Bernie Grundman did not exactly tickle our fancy.

It sounded thick, dull, and entirely too smooth.

It reminded us of the awful Deja Vu Bernie remastered years ago for Classic Records.

As is the case with so many of the Heavy Vinyl reissues released these days, the studio ambience you hear on these pressings is a pitiful fraction of the ambience the real pressings have encoded in their grooves.

Real pressings like, you know, the ones mass-produced by Atlantic, original and reissue alike. What’s Bernie’s excuse?

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Breezin’ – “Hot Stamper” MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Benson Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Having heard so many good sounding copies of this album, it is unlikely we would find much to like on the MoFi. But we can’t deny that we did, a long time ago, after cleaning and playing three MoFi copies, two of which were awful.

Sonic Grade: B-

Another MoFi reviewed, and surprisingly this one isn’t awful.

It has an excellent side two backed with a pretty good side one.

Side two has excellent bass — for a MoFi — and lots of energy — for a MoFi.

It’s slightly smooth, but overall it’s very musical. The best domestic copies are going to eat its lunch, but try to find one that sounds good. Most of them are awful. 

This MoFi copy, though lacking in many ways, is much better sounding than the other MoFi copies we played it against, which were muddy and compressed.

Side one of this copy has some of that sound. Side one lacks the transients we found on other copies and it’s a tad recessed and compressed. However, it does have relatively good bass definition and the strings are nicely textured.

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On this MoFi Anadisc, We Can Save You a Hundred Bucks, Maybe More!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This awful sounding MoFi record from 1995 typically sells in used condition for about a hundred dollars.

A hundred bucks! For this piece of trash?

Yes, it’s true, record collectors are paying those prices for some of the murkiest, muddiest analog we have ever heard. A subset of these record collectors consider themselves audiophiles, but we cannot understand how any “lover of sound” could find this sound lovable. (We admit we gave up trying to understand it long ago.)

Take our word for it — you are getting nothing for your money, regardless of how little or how much you pay for it.

If you scroll to the bottom of this post you can find the Discogs stats for this pressing — how many have it, how many want it, what they pay for it on average –as of March, 2026.

We were shocked at the poor quality of MoFi’s Anadisq series right from the get-go. Our original review from the 90s follows:

Pure Anadisc murky mud, like all the Moody Blues records MoFi remastered and ruined in the 90s with their misbegotten foray back into the world of vinyl. By 1999 they were bankrupt and deservedly so.

Their records were completely worthless to those of us who play LPs and want to hear them sound good but, unsurprisingly, a quick search on ebay or Discogs indicates that they’re still worth money to those who collect the kind of audiophile trash this label has been putting out for decades. We don’t understand it.

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You’ll Be Crying When You Get This Record on Your Turntable

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was most likely written when the record came out, circa 2008 I’m guessing. The intro is of course new for 2026.

You’re looking at one of the worst sounding audiophile releases in recent memory, a remastering disaster that has no reason to exist other than to satisfy the needs of the mid-fi collector market for numbered, limited editions on premium vinyl, perhaps so that they can be sold at a later date for a profit (discogs average price today: $62.50.)

This is a label that should have gone under decades ago but, with a nod to Frank Zappa channeling Edgar Varese, refuses to die.

Like this guy, this guy and far too many others, they are making money hand over fist at the expense of audiophiles who have yet to get very far — anywhere, really — in audio. (I know whereof I speak. I was one of those guys and you couldn’t tell me anything back then.)

We go to great pains to lay out the problems with these records in detail, but what good does reading about their problems do if the systems playing these records iare not only hiding their flaws, but making up for some of their weaknesses. The junk pressings these collectors are buying practically guarantee they will never manage to put together a system that can show them what is really on their records.

Regardless of what kind of equipment they own, if this crap is sounding good to them, which it seems to be based on the comments section I make the mistake of reading on Discogs from time to time, nothing we say can possibly interfere with them buying more of it.

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Diamonds and Rust – Another TAS Listed Anadisq Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Mobile Fidelity released their version of Diamonds and Rust on Anadisq in 1995, and if you want to hear a pressing that’s not murky, compressed and opaque, you would be wise to avoid their Heavy Vinyl Half-Speed.

Somehow it ended up on the TAS Super Disc List, but we could find nothing “super” about it. We felt it more properly belonged on our list of records that have no business being called Super Discs.

It was a real muckfest, as was to be expected from a record mastered by this awful label during the Anadisq era, the darkest chapter in the disgraceful history of Mobile Fidelity, which, considering the consistently dismal quality of their output, is really saying something.

Ken Lee Strikes Again

Many of the worst of them were mastered by a Mr. Ken Lee. If you happen to come across a record in a store with his name in the credits, or his initials in the deadwax, you are best advised to drop it back in the bin and keep moving. Anything else is just asking for trouble.

To be fair, MoFi made some reasonably good sounding records too. For those of you whose budget is on the limited side, if you find an affordable copy of any of these MoFis, you are probably not wasting your money.

Although I had a long way to go in this hobby in the early days of my audiophile record business, even then I could tell how bad the Anadisq series that Mobile Fidelity released in the 90s was. They produced one awful sounding record after another, with not a single winner that I knew of. I sold them — my bad, an ethical lapse for which I must apologize — but I sure never recommended them or had anything good to say about them.

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Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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Acoustic Sounds Hired Doug Sax to Ruin a Classic Chet Baker Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

The less said about this awful mid-90s Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions the better. What a murky piece of crap it was.

Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing was very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, twenty-five thirty-one years later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day.

Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out for decades.

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