thin-sound

Could This Be More of the Sound Audiophiles Complain About with RVG’s Mastering?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

Some of the Rudy Van Gelder cuttings of this album were decent, but had you bought a copy with these stampers, you could be forgiven for using the man’s name in vain.

VAN GELDER in the dead wax is no guarantee of high quality sound, on any record. Records don’t work like that.

The 1+ grade found on side one of both discs means the sound for those two sides may be passable, but the NFG sound on side two of record one means you have at best only half an album with decent sound, and what good is that?

As you can see from our notes, the sound is way too hot and messy and thin.

Note that side two of the second record wasn’t played at all. Why waste more time on a record that clearly did not come off the press properly, whether from bad mastering or bad vinyl? Or bad something else, who can say?

We do not sell records with 1+ grades. You should have no trouble finding those on your own. The world is full of them.

Poor Rudy

Rudy Van Gelder comes in for a lot of criticism from the audiophile community, especially from audiophiles who tend to prefer the remastered Heavy Vinyl pressings made from his recordings.

Unsurprisingly, much of the criticism comes from some of the very same engineers responsible for the remastering those records.

Those who produce reissues of his recordings are notable critics as well.

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Soultrane Sucks on the Early OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The early OJC reissues from 1982 of this title are awful.

And whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad, but — I’m guessing, never played one so don’t hold me to it — in the opposite way.

The OJC is thin and bright, and the modern reissue (I’m assuming, based on playing scores of them) is probably thick, veiled, overly smooth, lacking in space and boosted in the bass — because that’s the sound that audiophiles record buyers seem to like these days.

Without the excellent sounding 60s and 70s reissues that we are still able to find in audiophile playing condition, all that we would have available to buy for our shootouts would be the originals. 

At the big bucks those records go for nowadays, shootouts would be impossibly expensive.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job on these later pressings!

UPDATE 2025

We were surprised to find that the right stampers on the new OJC pressings can have very good sound. Click on the link below to that Soultrane has joined the group of good sounding modern OJC pressings.

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The Original Jazz Classics Series Put Out a Passable Relaxin’ in ’85

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

We much prefer the 70s Two-Fer reissue (PR 24001) to the OJCs of both Cookin’ and Relaxin’. Previously we had written:

These 70s reissue pressings are practically as good as any we have ever heard. Full-bodied, warm and natural, with plenty of space around all of the players, this is the sound of vintage analog.

It had been a while since we last played the OJC pressing of either album, so we picked up a copy of Relaxin’ and threw it into the shootout, where it did about as badly as expected.

The first side earned our 1+ grade, which means that, like a lot of reissues it’s passable, but really not good enough for a serious audiophile (hopefully meaning you) to bother with, which is why we didn’t even play side two (the N/A you see noted where the grade should be).

The OJC is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I used to have an old school stereo, and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).

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These Kelly Blue Reissues from the 70s Are a Real Mess

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wynton Kelly Available Now

Sometimes the 70s reissues of vintage jazz recordings that were made in the fifties, sometimes released with different covers similar to the one you see pictured, have excellent sound.

We know that for a fact because we’ve played some very good ones.

In the case of Kelly Blue, we felt we were obligated to play a few to make sure we were hearing as wide a range of different pressings as possible. We wanted to be sure we were hearing the best sounding pressings regardless of what era they were pressed in. (We’re very open minded that way.)

Here are our notes for the Black Label Riverside Stereo pressing with “1971” stampers:

  • Thin,
  • Dry,
  • Honky,
  • Veiled.
  • Severe stereo spread. (Hard left and right, unmusical this way, players are disconnected.)
  • Grade: 1+ on both sides

The other copy we had was even worse:

  • NFG on side one, side two never played.

The Riverside originals we’ve played in the past, like a lot of other Riverside originals from the 50s, such as those by Thelonious Monk, were uniformly terrible.

And trying to find one in audiophile playing condition is as easy as it sounds.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 38 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are rarely better than mediocre, and some of them are just awful, with many of the newest releases being the most awful of them all!

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When Fisher Took Over from Goodall, He Really Let the Side Down

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Please keep in mind that, as per our usual, the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this posting.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

The quick takeaway: Stan Goodall (“E”) cut the Shootout Winning early pressings.

Then, for reasons known only to the folks at Decca, Harry Fisher (“W”) took the reins and managed to cut some side twos that were very good. Not as good, but still very good: 2+ most of the time, some slightly worse. They were not as weighty or rich, and we take a lot of points off for records that are not as weighty or rich as they should be.

By the time Decca had changed its label to the Decca in a Box design, Mr. Fisher was cutting all the pressings, and, in our experience, not doing an especially good job. We do not even offer records with grades that low.

The sound might be passable, and would probably still be better than whatever Heavy Vinyl pressings might have been made from the tapes in the last twenty years, but that’s not good enough for us here at Better Records, not at the prices we charge anyway.

We described Fisher’s sound as dry and hot on side one, and thin and very small on side two of the 5W-stamped pressing we played. We only had the one, and the reason we had even one after having heard other Boxed Decca pressings do poorly, is that it’s a good way to stay honest and to have a better baseline to work with.

If we played nothing but 3E/1E originals, most of those 1E side twos would have earned a 2+ grade, but they would have sounded much better than the 2W-graded copies, and that seriously screws up the grading scale, especially when clean originals cost us a hundred bucks or more these days.

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Waiting For Columbus Gets the Bernie Treatment Care of Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

A Hot Stamper pressing of this amazing sounding album, a title we regret to say we have in stock only rarely, might be described this way:

Some of the best sounding live rock and roll sound you will ever hear outside of a concert venue. If you want to understand the unique appeal of the band, there’s no better place to start than right here.

It’s one of our all-time favorite live recordings and their single best release – a true Masterpiece.

I have lately been listening to this album in its entirety at the gym (playing the standard cassette over headphones) and enjoying the hell out of it. As good as their best studio albums are, and I count myself as big a fan of the band as there is, Waiting for Columbus is surely the pinnacle of their recorded output. It is as close to perfect as any live album I know.

(The Last Record Album is my personal favorite of their studio albums, but since nobody seems to want to buy it at the prices we charge, I regret to say we had to stop doing shootouts for it years ago. We were losing too much money that way.)

But Bernie Grundman’s version is just another one in a very long line of disastrous recuts, the kind of crap he has been churning out for the last thirty years. It’s all but unplayable on modern high quality equipment. (If it’s not on your system, you might consideer the idea that you still have plenty of work left to do, audio-wise.)

As you can see from the notes below, record one may be passable, but record two is NFG. How is it possible to turn such a wonderful recording into such a ridiculously bad sounding pressing? Even Mobile Fidelity did a better job with the album, and they’re one of the most incompetent remastering outfits that the audiophile world has even known.

We’re frankly at a loss to understand any of it.Bernie Grundman used to make good sounding records. We know that for a fact, having played them by the hundreds. Apparently those days are gone, and, based on this album and plenty of others, there is very little chance of them returning.

Notes on the Sound

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How Do You Make a Vintage Jazz Recording Sound Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now

How do you make a vintage jazz recording sound wrong?

Easy. Just take out all the Tubey Magic that was captured on the master tape all those years ago by Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.

You know the kind of Tubey Magic I’m talking about. It’s the trademark sound of every vintage Contemporary pressing ever made. It’s the defining sound of the best jazz recordings from the era. It’s the reason that jazz lovers and record collectors the world over pay big bucks for vintage pressings — because they have the sound of tubes.

When you take away that one quality — just the one, leaving everything else as it should be: the bass, the mids, the highs, the energy, the space, the size, you name it — what you are left with doesn’t sound right.

It no longer sounds the way a jazz record from 1958 would sound.

If you don’t know that sound, it’s possible that this cheap reissue pressing from 1984 might not be as bothersome for you as it was for us. But we’ve played vintage jazz records from the 50s by the hundreds. They never sound like this. The reissues might, but the best early pressings sure don’t.

Maybe This Is Your Sound?

However, if you happen to like the sound of CDs for some reason, something that is frankly hard to imagine but nevertheless seems to be true, this OJC might just be the ticket.

We’ve never liked that sound, and we sure don’t like this pressing.

Other records we’ve played that sounded like CDs to us can be found here.

We’ve only played three releases on the Music Matters label, but all three of them sounded like CDs to us — Green Street, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and Tina Brooks’ True Blue (review coming someday!).

Much of Kevin Gray‘s work has the kind of sound we associate with the compact disc. We don’t understand why everyone doesn’t hear how badly mastered his records are, but we have no trouble recognizing their many faults. They are, to one degree or another:

The OJC pressings of Harold in the Land of Jazz we played were thinner and brighter than even the worst of the 70s LPs we auditioned.

They did not make the cut for our shootout, a shootout we abandoned years ago because the early pressings we liked were just too rare, too noisy and too expensive to justify the cost and effort that would be required to make a shootout a reality.

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Kevin Gray Returns to the Scene of the Crime for One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Robert Brook wrote about the Tone Poets remastered pressing of One Flight Up a few year back. We noted at the time:

We have never heard the Tone Poets pressing that Robert played against the Van Gelder cutting he discusses in his commentary.

We have one in stock and are just waiting to do the shootout for the album so that we can compare it to the better pressings we know we will find.

You may have read that we were knocked out by a killer copy way back in 2007. We expect to be no less knocked out in 2023.

Make that 2025. (Clean Blue Note pressings are hard to come by.)

Robert concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is an excerpt:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

Now that we’ve played the Tone Poets pressing against the best Blue Notes we could find, we know exactly what he means!

Kevin Gray had previously cut the record for Cisco and made a real mess of it, so we are not the least bit surprised that this newer version is every bit as bad sounding as that one.

Why anyone is hiring this hack to make records is a mystery to those of us who play them, and if for some reason it isn’t a mystery to you, it should be.

How inaccurate and unrevealing does a stereo have to be in order to hide the shortcomings of this incompetently mastered record? If you have such a stereo — and there seem to be plenty of them out there in audio land, judging by the fact that Tone Poets is still in business — now is the time to get rid of it, or, at the very least, start making major improvements.

You might want to consider taking some audio advice from us along those lines.

Robert Brook has plenty to say on that subject as well.

Here are the notes we took while playing the Tone Poets pressing after completing our shootout. We had already heard some killer copies, the White Hot shootout winners, so we knew just how good the record could sound.

Side One

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Our Guide to Legrand Jazz on Impex

Hot Stamper Pressings of 30th St. Recordings Available Now

Years ago I wrote about how important the Legrand Jazz album was in my growth as a critical listener.

It’s yet another example of an album that helped make me a better audiophile by showing me the error of my tweaking and tuning ways.

Now there is a new pressing of it. Well, new to us anyway. (We readily admit to being behind the times and make no apologies for it. With records like these, we often find ourselves wondering why we bother.)

Two new pressings in fact. One on a single disc at 33 RPM as of 2017, and one mastered at 45 RPM on 2 LPs as of 2019, still in print and available for $59.99.

Production details can be found at the end of this review, along with some favorable comments, some from none other than Steve Hoffman himself.

But first let’s hear from the personification of the well-meaning audiophile reviewer, Michael Fremer. He gives the Impex pressings an 11 for sound. He writes (emphasis added):

This IMPEX reissue is sourced from an “analog mix-down transfer of the original 1958 work tape by Mark Wilder at Battery Studios” and cut by Chris Bellman and Bob Donnelly at Bernie Grundman Mastering on Grundman’s all-tube mastering system. I have a clean, original 6-Eye pressing that this superbly pressed reissue betters in every way. This will make both your stereo and your heart sing. Some of the greatest jazz musicians of that or any era wailing and clearly having a Legrand time. Limited to 3000 copies. Don’t miss it!

Who are you going to believe, the Self-Appointed Vinyl Experts of the World or some guy like me who thinks he knows a thing or two about the sound of records, especially, as in this case, a record I have been playing since 1990 or thereabouts.

(Back in those early days I also had the standard CD, which is excellent and highly recommended. Since I couldn’t clean or play my original vinyl pressing properly, my guess would be that the CD had the better sound at the time.)

Our notes (for those who have trouble reading our scratch)

So bright and thin and dry.

Crazy bad!

Unnatural, ugly.

Worst reissue ever?

Void of tubes and body.

So far off the mark.

Awful.

A second opinion

Robert Brook reviewed this pressing a while back. He does his best to remain positive when choosing the words that he thinks will help the reader bette understand the experience of playing the Impex release of Legrand Jazz that we had loaned him. In the end he goes with the spoken word over the written one.

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This Joan Baez Album Is Bad News in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Here is how we described the sound of one of the better stereo pressings we played recently:

Both sides of this early Stereo Vanguard pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in years) were doing just about everything right, earning superb grades on both sides.

You get pure, rich, sweet, Tubey Magical analog sound from first note to last, with Baez’s remarkably present and breathy vocals front and center where they should be.

The monos we played, however, just sounded like old records, and not very good ones at that.

Thin and edgy vocals? On a Joan Baez record? What could be worse?

When the voice is wrong on a Joan Baez record, you have yourself a completely worthless piece of vinyl.  (Other titles that get the voice wrong and therefore should be avoided by audiophiles of all stripes can be found here.)

We also noted that the sound may be weighty, but it’s not rich. That lack of richness is what is causing Joan’s voice to sound thin and edgy.

Full of Them

Most record collections are full of these kinds of records. They just sit on shelves, never getting played because the sound is not good enough to make the music interesting.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

The mono pressings of this title are hopeless. For other albums that don’t sound good in mono, click here.

If you see this album in mono at a garage sale, don’t even waste a buck on it. Not even a quarter. It’s just not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.

More on the subject of mono versus stereo.

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