phony-detail

Many audiophile recordings and remasterings are leaner and cleaner, producing a phony kind of transparency and detail at the expense of the fullness and richness of the original recording.

This is almost never a good thing.

The Dark Side of the Moon – 2003 Heavy Vinyl Reviewed

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty).

The 30th Anniversary Heavy Vinyl pressing is too bright. There is a boost in the top end, probably in the 12K region, that appears to be a poor mastering choice the late Doug Sax made, one that is surely not doing this recording any favors.

In fact, in the case of this new pressing, it’s positively ruinous, assuming you have set your VTA correctly and have the properly functioning tweeters to show you how bright this record is. If you like the phony detail a boosted top end provides, this record should be right up your alley. However, you would do well to recognize that this is a blind alley, and the best way forward is to turn around and start heading in the opposite direction.  

Some audiophiles revere a record like this (last time I checked, the average selling price on Discogs was $149.50) because they need it to wake up their sleepy stereos. My stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play this 2003 recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.

As a service to the audiophile community, please click on the link below to find other records that your system should be able to make clear are too damn bright.

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Point of Know Return – CBS Half-Speed Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Proggy Rock Albums Available Now

Both this album and Leftoverture are way too bright and thin.

What were the engineers thinking — that brighter equals better?

In the case of these two titles it most definitely does not. It’s the sound that most audiophiles are fooled by to this day.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many half-speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lessons by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons usually turn out to be. 

Waking Up a Dull Stereo

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way older systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in no time.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an old school system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We discussed the issue in this commentary:

My advice is to get better equipment and that will allow you to do a better job of recognizing bad records when you play them.

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Dreamer Tells You What You Need to Know About this MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

This commentary was written about 2000, when the Speakers Corner pressing had just come out. We liked it back then, but I doubt we would care much for it now.

Listen to the vocals at the end of Dreamer.

If they are too bright, the bells at the end of the song sound super-extended and harmonically clear and clean.

But at what price? Now the vocals are too bright. Which is more important, good vocals or good bells?

There has to be balance. This is something audiophiles — and audiophile labels, who should obviously know better — seem to have difficulty appreciating.

We used to get these MoFis in on a regular basis, and they usually sound as phony and wrong as can be. They’re the perfect example of a hyped-up audiophile record that appeals to people with lifeless stereos, the kind that need amped-up records to get them to come to life.

I’ve been telling people for years that the MoFi was junk, and that they should get rid of their copy and replace it with a tonally correct version, easily done since there is a very good sounding Speakers Corner 180g reissue currently in print which does not suffer from the ridiculously boosted top end and bloated bass that characterizes the typical MoFi COTC pressing.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many Half-Speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons so often turn out to be.

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way many of our older systems tended to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in a hurry.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

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Rickie Lee Jones on Rhino Records – Not Our Idea of Good Sound, and We Hope Not Yours

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now

We were fairly unimpressed with the Rickie Lee Jones on Warners that came out a few years back [2008 in fact, time flies!].

It has that same phony modern mastering we find so unappealing on the Heavy Vinyl reissue of Blue. (We seem to be pretty much alone in not liking that one, and we’re proud to say we still don’t like it. We encourage you to play The Blue Game and maybe you’ll see why we feel the way we do.)

We liked the new Sweet Baby James Hoffman and Gray cut. We note in our review that:

Hoffman and Gray can take pride in this Sweet Baby James. It’s some of the best work I’ve heard from them to date. If more DCC and Heavy Vinyl reissues sounded like this, we wouldn’t be so critical of them. Unfortunately they don’t, and there are scores of pages of commentary on the site to back up that statement for those of you interested in the subject.

We went on to say

The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equaled by an audiophile pressing like this. (It hasn’t happened yet and we remain skeptical of the possibility.) Considering that this pressing is sure to beat most reissues, imports and other such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.

So, What’s Wrong With Rickie Lee?

Simple. They took a somewhat artificial, hi-fi-ish, close-miked, heavy-on-the-reverb recording and made it sound even more artificial, phony and hi-fi-ish (but less-heavy-on-the-reverb; there is always a noticeable loss of resolution in these modern mastering jobs).

What were they thinking?

The best copies have warmth, richness and sweetness to balance out the more unnatural elements in the recording. Copies with these qualities are not that common, but we’ve run across plenty of them in our shootouts and proudly offered them for sale, where of course they sold quickly for lots of money. Major league audiophile appeal, this one. In its day it was heavily demo’ed in every stereo store in town, and for good reason — the sound positively jumps out of the speakers.

It’s a Trap

The average copy of this album is a sonic disaster, akin to the average copy of Famous Blue Raincoat or — gulp, even worse — Graceland. If you’re a detail freak, this Rhino pressing may be just what you are looking for. It’s got detail all right.

But all that phony detail obscures what is wrong with the sound. Overly detailed sound is a trap that is all too easy to fall into.

Plenty of recordings designed to appeal to audiophiles strike us as being phony in this way. Stan Ricker cut a lot of overly-detailed records for Mobile Fidelity in the 70s and 80s, records that may have sounded fine on the lo-rez stereos of that era (like the one I owned), but are positively painful to play on the top quality equipment that is available (but rare) today. [1]

I would hope that the audiophile community would have developed their listening skills to a level sufficient to recognize what this pressing doesn’t have — warmth, richness and sweetness — but I get the feeling I will be proved wrong yet again in that regard.

This Performance Is High?

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

The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they released starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.”

If this is what vinyl sounds like I would switch to CD fast enough to make your head spin.

And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them. I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine.

Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard.

The Yes Album sounds like a cassette, a mere ghost of the real thing.

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Chad Has Served Poor Jethro Tull Most Barbarously

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

With a nod to our old friend, John Barleycorn.

We were finally able to get our hands on Analogue Productions’ newly remastered Stand Up, an album we know well, having played the British copies from every era by the score. Our notes for the sound can be seen below.

If ever a record deserved a “no” grade, as in “not acceptable,” this new 45 RPM pressing mastered by Kevin Gray deserves such a grade, because it’s just awful. (This link will take you to a great many more records best avoided by audiophiles in search of better sound. Although we’ve only linked to about 75 pressings here on the blog, it should be noted that the world is full of bad sounding records.)

But let’s put that grade in context. The last time a good sounding version of Stand Up was released, as far as we can tell, was 1989, and that version was the Mobile Fidelity Gold CD. I bought mine soon after it came out. I wasn’t even planning on buying a CD player when the Compact Disc was first invented, but then Mobile Fidelity played a dirty trick on me. Instead of releasing Loggins and Messina’s first album on vinyl, they put it out exclusively on CD as part of their Silver MFCD series.

As a die-hard MoFi fan, that sealed the deal: now I had to buy a CD player. I picked up a cheap Magnavox player, the 1040. I think it ran me less than $100, and played my new Sittin’ In CD, which, as I recall, sounded pretty good. (One of my other early CD purchases was Tumbleweed Connection, the regular label release, and it was dreadful.)

I still own Stand Up on Gold CD, and I still find it superb in every way. (Many of the MFSL Gold CDs from this era are excellent and worth seeking out.)

It sounds nothing like this new vinyl release, and that’s a good thing.

On vinyl, Stand Up has rarely been given the care it deserved. The last version of Stand Up to have sound we would want to listen to was pressed in the UK in the early ’70s. That was close to fifty years ago.

We sold some domestic pressings of the album back in the early 2000s, describing them at the time as made from dub tapes with all the shortcomings that entails, but mastered very well from dub tapes. The best domestic pressings are rich, smooth, tonally correct and natural sounding. They’re too dubby to sell as Hot Stampers, but they are not bad records. Some later Chrysalis pressings are big and open, but often they are too thin and bass-shy for the music to work. We’ve never taken them seriously.

It wasn’t long before we’d eliminated everything but the early UK pressings for our shootouts, and we quickly discovered that the earliest of the UK pressings on the older Island label were not good at all. We wrote about the problem with some originals more than ten years ago.

What was surprising about the shootouts we had done in past years was how disappointing most of the early British pressings we played were. They were flat, lacked energy and just didn’t rock the way they should have.

We learned the hard way that most British Pink label pressings aren’t especially rich, that some are small and recessed, and some are just so smeary, thick and opaque that they frustrate the hell out of you as you’re trying to hear what any of the musicians other than Ian Anderson is doing.

So when a reviewer comes along and says something positive about the new pressing compared to some unidentified original, we appreciate the problem that is at the root of his mistaken judgments:

Here’s the deal: if the goal was to duplicate the original pink label Island sound, this reissue misses that, which is good because this new double 45 reissue is far superior to the original in every possible way.

The tape was in great shape, that’s for sure. Clarity, transparency, high frequency extension and especially transient precision are all far superior to the original. Bass is honest, not hyped up and the mastering delivers full dynamics that are somewhat (but only slightly), compressed on the original. Ian Anderson’s vocals are naturally present as if you are on the other side of the microphone. Most importantly, the overall timbral balance sounds honest and correct. But especially great is the transient clarity on top and bottom.

If you’re fortunate to have an original pink label Island, at first you might think the sound is somewhat “laid back”, but that’s only because the mids and upper mids are not hyped up as they are on the original. That adds some excitement, but it clouds the picture and greatly obscures detail.

If you scroll down to our notes, you will see what we thought of the “laid back” sound this reviewer talks about. (Keep in mind that we first read the above review mere moments ago.)

We think “smaller, thick and stuck in the speakers” may be someone’s idea of “laid back,” but, just so there is no misunderstanding, it’s our idea of “awful.”

None of these are good things. Our Hot Stamper pressings are never small, thick or stuck in the speakers. They’re the records with the opposite of that sound. Our records are big, transparent and open. That’s why we can charge so much money for them and have people scooping them up from our Wednesday mailer the moment they become available.

They deliver the big, bold sound that the brilliant engineer for the album, Andy Johns, was known for. Laid back was not in his vocabulary.

Here is more of what we heard on side one.

Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square

“Transients are sharp but body is dull. Kinda phony.”

Phony sound is the key here. Messing with the EQ in the mastering benefits some aspects of the sound at the expense of others.

Nothing new there. Audiophile pressings with wacky EQ are the norm. I would be surprised if any common Reprise pressing from back in the day wouldn’t sound more “right,” more tonally correct, more seamless. I’ve played quite a few and I don’t recall ever hearing one sound “phony.”

On side two we played the first two tracks.

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One of the Great Audio Disasters, Courtesy of Mobile Fidelity

More of the Music of Steely Dan

We recently amended this listing. Scroll down to see what we have to say about it in 2023.

More MoFi bashing, but boy does this MoFi deserve it. In our estimation, it is tied with the Cisco 180g pressing (2007) for the worst version ever.

I remember back in 1977 when Aja was released. I was a big Steely Dan fan by then, having been turned on to their albums with Countdown to Ecstasy in 73. With each new Dan record I became more impressed with their music, from Pretzel Logic to Katy Lied to Royal Scam and finally on to this, their commercial breakthrough.

At the time I thought the album sounded pretty good on my plain old ABC original.

Then I got a copy of the Mobile Fidelity pressing and I thought it sounded much, much better.

Side two of the MoFi had bass that was only hinted at on my domestic copy. Wow! Listen to all that bass!

Sometime in the 80s, I realized that the MoFi was hideously phony sounding, and that all the bass on side two was boosted far out of proportion to what must be (I’m guessing) on the master tape.

If I May

How much bass is on the master tape is of course of no concern to anyone not mastering the record. The bass has to be right on the record, not the tape.

The song Home At Last has at least an extra three or four DBs added around 50 cycles. It’s ridiculous.

And that’s just the bottom end; the highs are every bit as wrong.

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Ridiculously Phony and Compressed Sound – The White Album on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found seriously wanting. The phony sound here is perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past. I should know. I had a stereo like that back in 1982 when this record came out, and I thought it sounded great.

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi, I could not believe how ridiculously bright, phony and compressed it was.

As sibilant as any Beatles record they ever did. Cry Baby Cry spits like crazy!

And to think I used to like their version when it came out back in the 80s.

A good example: on Yer Blues, the MFSL pressing positively wreaks havoc with all the added bass and top end The Beatles put on this track. The MoFi version is already too bright, and has sloppy bass to start with, so the result on this track is way too much BAD bass and way too much BAD spitty 10k-boosted treble. The MoFi is nothing like the good imports, which have way too much GOOD bass and treble.

Yer Blues ROCKS! Listen to the big jam at the end of the song, where John’s vocal mic is turned off but his performance is still caught by a room or overheard mic. They obviously did this on purpose, killing his vocal track so that the “leaked” vocal could be heard. (We have since learned from Ken Scott that it was mistake, but one they liked and left in.)

Those crazy Beatles! It’s more than just a cool “effect.” It actually seems to kick the energy and power of the song up a notch. It’s clearly an accident, but an accident that works. I rather doubt George Martin approved. That kind of “throw the rule book out” approach is what makes Beatles recordings so fascinating, and The White Album the most fascinating of them all.

The EQ for this song is also a good example of something The Beatles were experimenting with, as detailed in their recording sessions and later interviews with the engineers. They were pushing the boundaries of normal EQ, of how much bass and treble a track could have. This track has seriously boosted bass, way too much, but somehow it works.
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The Hunter – A Cisco Disaster

More of the Music of Jennifer Warnes

More Reviews and Commentaries for Audiophile BS LPs

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing from Cisco/Impex/Boxstar.

Some of the worst sound I have ever heard in my life. An absolute disgrace, both sonically and musically. 

If you like your Heavily-Processed Big Production Pop [1] to sound as unnatural as possible, this is the album for you.

Not one instrument sounds remotely like it should, and that is surely an insult to audiophiles of every stripe.

The problem was that so many self-identified audiophiles did not seem bothered by the execrable sound, certainly not the way we were.

Oh, but it’s on vinyl! That solves all the problems with the recording, doesn’t it?

Yes, the CD was bad, but the vinyl was no better. I had them both and couldn’t tolerate the sound of either of them.

[1] Note that some of our favorite records are on this list. Yes, they are heavily-processed, “unnatural” recordings, but the engineers, producers and artists who worked on these albums were attempting to create a unique sound for the music they were making, not recreate one, and in many cases the results of their efforts are some of the most powerful and enjoyable albums we’ve ever played.

The only album we like by Ms Warnes is Famous Blue Raincoat

It is her Masterpiece, a Core Collection record, and a clear case of One and Done.

When you have a good copy of Famous Blue Raincoat, you have all the Jennifer Warnes you will ever need.

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Two CDs that Sound Nothing Like Their Vinyl Counterparts

Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers

Reviews and Commentaries for Back in Black

I made the mistake of buying both Back in Black and Sticky Fingers on CD to listen to in the car, and both are a disaster — no bass, no rock weight, with boosted upper mids, no doubt in a misguided attempt to provide more “clarity” and “detail.”

But trying to achieve more clarity at the expense of the rock and roll firepower that makes both of these albums Must Own Rock Records is beyond foolish.

These albums did not need a new sound or a more modern sound. The sound of the original pressings of both of them is superb, as close to faultless as you are likely to find in this world.

Mobile Fidelity managed to get more transparency in the midrange for their pressing, and look what it got them: our award for the worst version ever.

On both of these CDs, even in the car I couldn’t get past the third song.

If this is what the digital lovers of the world think those albums actually sound like, they are living in some kind of parallel universe.

The best pressings on vinyl sound nothing like them. In fact the best pressings sound so good they are on our Rock and Pop Top 100. Rest assured that you don’t get to be on our Top 100 with anemic, upper midrangy sound.

New to the Blog? Start Here

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Audiophile Wire Testing with Jethro Tull and His Friend Aqualung

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

… who seems to have a rather nasty bronchial condition…

[This commentary is from 2008 or so I’m guessing. Still holds up though.]

Like Heart’s Little Queen album, Aqualung presents us with a Demo Disc / Test Disc that really puts a stereo through its paces, assuming it’s the kind of stereo that’s designed to play an album like Aqualung.

Not many audiophile systems I’ve run across over the years were capable of reproducing the Big Rock Sound this album requires, but perhaps you have one and would like to use the album to test some of your tweaks and components. I used it to show me how bad sounding some of the audiophile wire I was testing really was.

Here’s what I wrote:

A quick note about some wire testing I was doing a while back. My favorite wire testing record at the time (2007)? None other than Aqualung!

Part One

Here’s why: Big Whomp Factor. Take the whomp out of Aqualung and the music simply doesn’t work, at all. To rock you need whomp, and much of Aqualung wants to rock.

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