sloppy-bass

The records on this list tend to have poorly-defined bass.

Led Zeppelin II – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Below you will find the story of my first encounter with an amazing sounding copy of Zep II back in 1995 or thereabouts.

I had a friend who had come into possession of a White Label Demo pressing of the album and wanted to trade it in to me for the Mobile Fidelity pressing that I had played for him once or twice over the years, and which we both thought was The King on that album.

To my shock and dismay, his stupid American copy killed the MoFi. It trounced it in every way. The bass was deeper and punchier. Everything was more dynamic. The vocals were more natural and correct sounding. The highs were sweeter and more extended. The whole pressing was just full of life in a way that the Mobile Fidelity wasn’t.

The Mobile Fidelity didn’t sound bad. It sounded not as good. More importantly, in comparison with the good domestic copy, in many ways it now sounded wrong.

Let me tell you, it was a defining moment in my growth as a record collector. I had long ago discovered that many MoFi’s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. But this was a MoFi I liked. And it had killed the other copies I’d heard in the past.

So I learned something very important that day.

I learned that hearing a better pressing is clearly the surest way to appreciate what’s wrong with the pressing I thought sounded right.

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Chicago – What We Heard Circa 2008

More of the Music of Chicago

In 2008, we had a lot of trouble finding good sound on the copies of the first album that we had on hand, more than a dozen I’m sure.

Over the next five to ten years we managed to do a much better job of cleaning and playing the band’s debut, to the delight of our listening panel as well as our Hot Stamper fans.

This is the kind of album that most audiophiles would be sorely tempted to give up on. Who can blame them?

So Many Faults, So Little Time

The average copy of this album is an unmitigated DISASTER. The smeary brass alone is enough to drive anyone from the room.

To a list of its faults you can confidently add some or all of the following:

1) blobby, blurry, out of control bass;
2) opaque, veiled mids;
3) rolled off highs, or no highs, whichever the case may be, common to virtually every pressing you find;
4) plain old distortion; and, last but not least,
5) the kind of compressed, lifeless sound that manages to make this groundbreaking album boring — and that’s not easy to do.

The music ROCKS! It’s the crappy records Columbia pressed that suck.

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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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Sonny Rollins Plus 4 – Defending the Indefensible

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

We reviewed this album in 2014 or thereabouts.

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?

I’m starting to feel like Mr. Jones: Something’s going on, but I don’t know what it is. Dear reader, this is the audiophile world we live in today. If you expect anyone to tell you the truth about the current crop of remastered vinyl, you are in for some real disappointment.

We don’t have the time to critique what’s out there, and it seems that the reviewers and forum posters lack the — what? desire, courage, or maybe just the basic critical listening skills — to do it properly.

Which means that in the world of Heavy Vinyl, it’s every man for himself.

And a very different world from the world of vintage vinyl, the kind we offer. In our world we are behind you all the way. We guarantee your satisfaction or your money back.

Now which world would you rather live in?

UPDATE 2025

Still not a single review on Discogs for this pressing.

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Byrd at the Gate – Another Hyped-Up MoFi

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed [decades ago] and found seriously wanting.

This is a title Mobile Fidelity ruined (what else is new?), and having just played an early Riverside LP I can see how their mastering approach was — as is so often the case — misguided to say the least.

First off, the guitar and the drums on the original are tonally right on the money. They sound like bass and drums should. They sound, in a word, correct.

Mobile Fidelity felt it necessary to brighten up both and the results are a phony sounding guitar and phony sounding drums, with tizzy cymbals thrown in for good measure.

(The Wes Montgomery MoFi title has many of the same faults, but it’s not quite as bad as this one. We’ve had Hot Stamper copies of the originals so we know they can sound superb, some of RVG’s best work.)

The old Mobile Fidelity — the pre-Heavy Vinyl Mobile Fidelity — rarely met a master tape they didn’t think needed a healthy dose of top end boost. They also never understood what an acoustic guitar sounds like. They blew it on every last one of the Cat Stevens albums, brightening up the guitars, which, as we all know from playing with the treble controls on our receivers way back when, emphasizes the “picking” of the strings at the expense of the resonating guitar body as well as the vibrating string harmonics.

What makes Byrd At The Gate a good record is the natural acoustic guitar tone. Once you screw that up, what’s left?

An audiophile record, for audiophiles who like phony sounding guitars. (Chesky anyone?)

Another reason the Mobile Fidelity is such a joke is that this recording inherently has a lot of ill-defined bass. Since Half-Speed mastering causes a loss of bass definition, their pressing is even WORSE in this respect. Bad guitars, bad drums and bad bass — that pretty much covers everybody in the trio. Resulting score: 0 for 3. (more…)

The Nightfly on MoFi – More of the Same Old Same Old

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now

More MoFi phony EQ on the top right around 10k and sloppy bass.

You should be able to do a whole lot better and you sure won’t have to work very hard to do it.

Robert Ludwig is the man who knows how to cut this album, not Stan Ricker.

The properly pressed, properly cleaned Robert Ludwig-mastered copies are right in a way that the typical Half-Speed mastered or Heavy Vinyl pressing rarely is. The more critically one listens, the more obvious this distinction becomes.

The real thing just can’t be beat, and you can be pretty sure that the real thing is an old record.

If you are buying these audiophile pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.

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City to City Is a Disaster on Simply Vinyl (and I Used to Sell It)

More of the Music of Gerry Rafferty

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Simply Vinyl pressing debunked.

We had two copies of the Heavy Simply Vinyl pressing to audition as part of our big shootout from many years ago.

We actually used to like it, but it now sounds worse than we remember, especially in the low end, which is a blurry mess.

Better than any domestic copy I suppose, but that’s not really saying much, since those are terrible. 

Rolling Stone Rave Review

Even in his mother’s womb, Gerry Rafferty must have expected the worst. This Scotsman entitled his melancholy 1971 solo album Can I Have My Money Back? (the answer was “No!”). And when Stealers Wheel, the group he subsequently formed with Joe Egan, became an overnight success with the hit single “Stuck in the Middle with You,” only to lapse into morning-after obscurity, he probably said, “I told you so.” On City to City, his first LP in three years, Rafferty sticks grimly to his guns. Not only does he use the same producer (Hugh Murphy) and several of the same musicians, but a similar un-self-pitying fatalism pervades the record.

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“Tour de Force” – Analogue Productions Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Recordings Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Acoustic Sounds had Stan Ricker remaster this record a number of years ago, and of course they (he) ruined it. A twinkly top end and flabby bass were just two of the major shortcomings of their version. Nothing surprising there, as Stan Ricker is famous for his “smile” curve, boosting both ends of the audio spectrum, whether they need boosting or not. (They rarely do).

When you add too much top end to a guitar album and ruin the sound of the guitar, what exactly are you left with?

Please note that not a single title from the Analog Revival series is any good, to the best of my knowledge, and every last one of them should be avoided if high quality sound is important to you.

The same is true for all the 180 gram jazz titles on Analogue Productions that were mastered by Doug Sax, as you may have read elsewhere on the site. Those records received rave reviews in the audiophile press when they came out, but you won’t find too many audiophile reviewers sticking up for them now, as they are, without exception, murky, compressed disasters of the worst kind.

I guess these reviewers eventually acquired equipment accurate enough to notice how bad those pressings are, which goes to show there is hope for practically anyone.

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Brother to Brother – A Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

More of the Music of Gino Vannelli

More of Our Favorite Titles from 1978

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and a Half-Speed Mastered Bomb if there ever was one.

Wooly bass, sucked-out mids, compressed to death, this record is one of the worst of the A&M Half-Speed series, and that is saying a lot.

We’ve played at least a dozen titles from this series and only one of them was any good.

The regular A&M pressings with the right stampers just kill it.

This pressing is every bit as bad.

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