opaque-sound

The audiophile pressings listed here tend to be opaque, lacking clarity and especially transparency.

Even on highly resolving equipment, they make it difficult to “see” all the players and hear “into” the recording.

With these pressings you can’t relax and get lost in the music. Instead you are fighting to break through the barriers created by the substandard quality of the the mastering and/or pressing.

Transparency is one of the key qualities that the best vintage pressings have, often in abundance, and one that modern pressings lack, sometimes badly.

Transparency is especially important to the sound of orchestral recordings, a subject we often discuss on the blog often. Live orchestral music is uncannily transparent.

Records lack transparency to one degree or another, but live, unamplified music never does.

I’m Starting to Get a Bad Feeling About Record Store Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

For some reason, don’t ask me why, they keep hiring Chris Bellman to make Heavy Vinyl reissues of Neil Young’s albums, even though he has shown again and again that he has no idea what these recordings are supposed to sould like.

So far he’s ruined After the Gold Rush and Neil Young’s Greatest Hits, and there may be others he’s remastered to death, but no copies of those have come our way so we really don’t know, or care to know, to be honest.

If this is your idea of analog, you are most likely in the wrong hobby and should consider finding a different one. At the very least you are wasting your time and money on worthless crap vinyl pressings put out by the legion of Heavy Vinyl Grifters who emerge from the bowels of the earth on Record Store Day, targeting their rip-off LPs at the low- to mid-fi vinyl collector types who have yet to figure out what a giant scam the whole thing is.

These records have virtually no redeeming features, none that we could find anyway. Allow us to catalog the shortcomings of the three sides that comprise the 2017 Record Store Day release of Harvest Moon.

For the first time in five years we had finally been able to do a shootout for the imports we like, so we knew exactly how good the best pressings could sound. Long story short, they sure don’t sound like this!

Side One

Track Two (From Hank to Hendrix)

  • Blary harmonica
  • Much more treble
  • Still flat and dry
  • Just louder with less bottom
  • Edgy vocals in the chorus

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The 2013 OJC of Brilliant Corners Has a Problem Many of Them Do

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

Brilliant corners on the 2013 OJC pressing is not a bad record. At $20, roughly the price they sell for on Discogs, you are getting a decent LP for your money, which is not the case with a lot of what’s produced these days, the worst of which can be found here.

The sound is nice and meaty, which is all to the good, but where this pressing falls apart is in the area of transparency, as in, it doesn’t have much.

In simple language, it is opaque. (Other pressings with a opacity problem can be found here.)

This is a very common shortcoming of the new OJC pressings. When they manage to get the tonality right — which is about  half the time — they still come across as crude and underwhelming. They require too much effort from the listener to become involved and stay that way.

If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, and you don’t have a good CD player (a dirty little secret: the standard CD is likely to be better sounding). buy it for cheap, but don’t pay much money for it. You may find that, after a spin or two, playing it is more trouble than it’s worth.

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Kevin Gray’s Version of Waltz for Debby Is Really Something

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby we took the opportunity to play the 2023 Craft pressing cut by Kevin Gray.

It seems to have a nice list of features, among them AAA mastering using the Original Master Tape.

What could go wrong?

  • Craft Original Jazz Classics Series
  • 180g Vinyl LP
  • (AAA) Lacquers Cut from the Original Tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio
  • Pressed at RTI
  • Tip-On Jacket with OBI

Plenty could go wrong, and did, especially on side two.

Nice features apparently are not enough to make a good sounding record.

Below are our listening notes cataloging the problems with this remastered pressing. If you own this version of the album, listen for the shortcomings we describe. The better your stereo and room, the more obvious they will be.

And of course the opposite is true for those of you who have trouble hearing them.

Now, if you already bought this sorry excuse for an audiophile pressing and just like collecting records, and don’t really care what they sound like, you can stop reading right here, put the record on and just enjoy the music.

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Bernie Grundman’s Modern Standard Operating Procedure Strikes Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bruce Springsteen Available Now

If you own the Classic Records reissue of this album from the early 2000s, hearing a Hot Stamper pressing is almost sure to be a revelation.

The Classic pressing was dead as a doornail.

It was more thick, it was more opaque, and it was more compressed than most of the originals we played, originals which we noted often had problems in all three areas to start with.

Bernie did the album no favors, that I can tell you.

Head to head in a shootout, our Hot Stampers will be dramatically more lively, solid, punchy, transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short.

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Moondance on Heavy Vinyl Is a Disgrace to Audiophiles and Record Lovers All Over the World

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

The original grade I gave out in 2015 when I last played this remastered version as part of a shootout was “D.” I explained at the time:

Just listen to how strange Van’s voice sounds, so lean, hard and sour. That alone qualifies it for an “F,” but considering how bad most pressings of this album are, let’s be fair, if not downright generous, and call it a “D.”

I just revisited the record in a current shootout, and after giving it some thought I have decided that the right grade is in fact “F.” It cannot be any other, for reasons I discuss below.

In 2014 I had written:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we debunked Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

Having just played a marvelous shootout-winning early pressing, this time around I found the reproduction of Van’s voice on the reissue to be so leaned-out, artificial and unpleasant that I could hardly stand to listen to it.

We had reset the VTA correctly; the overall tonal balance of the recording from top to bottom was correct. It was only the voice that sounded so off. All the other shortcomings I had mentioned before were still true of course, but none of that mattered. The singer on this record just sounded awful.

As you know, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system. The real Moondance we had just played sounded better than ever. The fake Moondance, however, was sounding worse than ever. That’s what higher quality playback can do for you. It makes your good records sound better than they’ve ever sounded, and shows you just how bad your bad records really are.

Do I have a bad copy of the Heavy Vinyl pressing? Maybe, can’t say I don’t. If any of you out there in the real world have a copy of this pressing that you like, and would be willing to send it to me to hear for myself, I would be more than happy to give it a listen and report my findings on this blog.

Short of that I’m not sure what more I can do. I certainly do not feel the least bit inclined to waste a nickel of my hard-earned money on another copy of this ridiculously badly-mastered crap vinyl.

If you want to read about other records that have these same shortcomings, there are links below to the ones we’ve auditioned and identified to date. Our advice would be to avoid them, and if you own some of these pressings, perhaps now is the time to give them another listen and see if you don’t hear the same faults we did.

And, of course, the Hot Stamper pressings we offer, when played side by side with any of these Heavy Vinyl remasters, can help you to see more clearly just where these new records are going wrong, or, in the case of Moondance, completely off the rails.

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Music From Peer Gynt – Another Cisco Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing from Cisco / Impex /  Boxstar / Whatever.

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.

Our favorite recording of Peer Gynt is the one by Otto Gruner-hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic from 1959.

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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How Can Sound This Bad Possibly Earn a 10?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Maybe if the scale goes from 1 to 100, sure, I could see it. Yeah, 10 out of 100 sounds about right.

But the scale goes to 11, which makes a grade of 10 risible to anyone who has played this seriously flawed pressing. Here is how we described its sound many years ago:

We found this mono reissue to be flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, like most of the Sundazed records we’ve played, starting way back in the early 2000s. No, they never got any better.

In our experience, Sundazed is one of the worst record labels of all time. This pressing is just more evidence to back up our low opinion of them.

Obviously we may have a low opinion of them, but a famous audiophile reviewer seemed to find the sound to his liking. He wrote:

Sundazed’s reissue gives the original a run for the money and remains true to the original, though it suffers in the bass, which while deep and reasonably well defined, is not as tightly drawn or focused. The upper mids on the original also bloom in a way that the reissue’s don’t, giving the reissue a slightly darker, recessed sound, but there’s still sufficient energy up there since Dylan’s close-miked vocals pack an upper midrange punch. If the vocals or harmonica sound spitty and unpleasantly harsh, it’s your system, not the record [!] – though there’s plenty of grit up there. On the plus side, the overall clarity and transparency of the reissue beats the original. [!] A really fine remastering job.

Of course we find every word of this review arrant nonsense, except the discussion of the qualities he praises in the original relative to the reissue. It’s been twenty years since this remastered pressing came out, does anybody still like the sound of it? Anybody? Let’s hope not.

The intro to his review boldly declares a respect for Sundazed (and Classic Records and Analogue Productions) that we find puzzling after playing so many of their rarely-better-than-awful-sounding records. (Here is a commentary from 2007 that puts our antipathy in perspective. And no, modern records have no improved since then, if the releases from 2024 are any indication.)

Sundazed’s decision to issue Blonde on Blonde using the much sought after mono mix is indicative both of the company’s dedication to doing what’s musically correct, and of the vinyl marketplace’s newfound maturity. There was a time a few years ago when no “audiophile” vinyl label would dare issue a mono recording; audiophiles wouldn’t stand for it was the conventional wisdom. Perhaps back then it was even true. Today, with Sundazed, Classic, Analogue Productions and others issuing monophonic LPs on a regular basis (and one has to assume selling them as well) listeners are appreciating the music for music’s sake, and equally importantly, for the wonderful qualities of monophonic sound reproduction.

My grade might be 2 out of 11. No audiophile should be fooled by the crap sound of this pressing, and no audiophile should believe a word of this review.

Reviewer incompetence? We’ve been writing about it for more than 25 years. From the start we knew we could never begin to do much more than scratch the surface of preposterous record reviews in need of rebuttal. The audiophile world is drowning in this sh*t.

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Tea for the Tillerman – This Is Your Idea of Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Dear Record Loving Audiophiles of Earth,

I’m afraid we have some bad news. [This was written back in 2011 when the record came out so it’s hard to imagine that what I am about to say is news to anyone after all these years.]

Regrettably we must inform you that the 2011 edition of Tea for the Tillerman pressed by Analogue Productions on Heavy Vinyl doesn’t sound very good. We know you were all hoping for the best. We also know that you must be very disappointed to hear this unwelcome news.

But the record is what it is, and what it is is not very good. Its specific shortcomings are many and will be considered at length in our review below.

Yes, we know, the folks over at Acoustic Sounds, in consultation with the late George Marino at Sterling Sound, supposedly with the real master tape in hand, and supposedly with access to the best mastering equipment money can buy, labored mightily, doing their level best to master and press the Definitive Audiophile Tea for the Tillerman on Vinyl of All Time.

It just didn’t come out very good, no matter what the reviewers say. And what do they say? Allow me to quote one.

…superbly dynamic, spacious and detailed…The attack of the pick on the guitar strings is astonishingly clean and detailed.

Depth is pronounced…

…the resolution of low level detail reveals a host of details that are either buried or glossed over on the other versions I’ve heard…

Uh-oh, wait a minute, here’s a blindingly red flag:

If you have the edition, you’ll find this similar in one way: there’s nothing “mellow” about the overall production and when the music gets loud (and Marino lets it get so) it can get a bit hard, but better that than to soften it and lose the clarity, focus and detail of this superb recording, especially in the quieter passages where the resolution of low level detail is astonishing.

More about that later.

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Add Made in Japan to the List of Ridiculously Bad DCC Titles

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Deep Purple Available Now

What a murky mess. The sound is dead as a doornail.

It’s yet another audiophile record hall of shame pressing, a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one.

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 good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment such as the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, DCC is the label for you.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

What a Fool Believes

I used to like some of the DCC vinyl titles just fine too. Didn’t play them very often, but I liked what I heard when I did.

Then my stereo got a lot better. Eventually it became obvious to me what was wrong with practically all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings put out by that label. (That story from 1998 gets told in some detail here.)

Heavy Vinyl

The good Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.

The bad Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group. And those in the middle end up in this group.

Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.

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