thin-sound

The Happy Blues on Vintage OJC Is No Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Some vintage OJC pressings sound good and some don’t.

This one doesn’t.

Typical bad OJC sound – thin and modern, lacking in the Tubey Magic that makes vintage pressings so musically involving.

This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the OJC pressings we played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that that plays right into the prejudices of most record collectors and audiophiles for whom nothing but an original will do. They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played.

The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.

You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.

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Leftoverture – CBS Half-Speed Debunked

More of the Music of Kansas

Sonic Grade: F

Way too bright and thin. What were they thinking?

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. Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson, expensive and painful as it may have been. 

If your speakers are dull, dull, deadly dull, the way Old School speakers tend to be, this record has the juice to bring them to life in a hurry.

Unmusicality

The best real-time mastered copies get rid of a problem that quickly becomes irritating as you play track after track: a certain “squawky, pinched” sound to the guitars. Bad copies of the album have that sound through and through, along with excessive amounts of grain and grunge. The guitars are very prominent in the mix on practically every song here, so when the guitars sound sour, the track as a whole does too.

These mastering and pressing problems make the overall sound simply UNMUSICAL. The way we found that out was simple. We cleaned and played lots of copies, and every once in a while we heard one that allowed the music to breathe, open up, sound balanced, make sense even.

Those copies showed us a Leftoverture we didn’t know existed and gave us a goal to shoot for with all the other copies we played. After hearing such a truly killer copy we often go back and downgrade the ratings for the copies we thought were the best. Such is the way with these shootouts. (more…)

Time Out Is a Classic Case of Live and Learn

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Reviews and Commentaries for Time Out

Another example of We Was Wrong

When we did a shootout for this album way back in October of 2007, we took the opportunity to play the Classic Records 200 gram pressing. Maybe we got a bad one, who knows, but that record did not sound remotely as good as the real thing. (6 eye or 360, both can be quite good. Skip the Red Label ’70s reissues.)

The piano sounded thin and hard, which was quite unexpected given the fact that we used to consider the Classic LP one of their few winners and actually recommended it.

As we said in our shootout: “We dropped the needle on the Classic reissue to see how it stacked up against a serious pressing. Suffice it to say, the real Time Out magic isn’t going to be found on any heavy vinyl reissue!”

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, I would not have put this record on it.

Here are some others that we think do not qualify as Super Discs.

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Minute By Minute – Nautilus Reviewed

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Doobie Brothers

Sonic Grade: D

You may remember reading on the site that we used to like the Nautilus Half-Speed of this title. Playing our Nautilus copy against the better domestic pressings made us wonder what the hell we must have been smoking.

The Nautilus was awful — veiled and compressed, with a lightweight bottom end. (The Nautilus of Threshold of a Dream is another one we used to like and boy does that record sound awful these days.)

Maybe we had played a better copy years ago, or maybe we had played some really bad domestics back then, who can say? A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

All we can say for now is that our Hot Stampers are going to blow that audiophile piece of junk — and any other pressing of the album that might exist — right out of the water. (Or your money back.)

And the gold CD too of course. I have never in my life heard a CD sound like this record does, and I don’t think anyone else has either. CDs do some things reasonably well, but few of them have the kind of richness, sweetness and Tubey Magic that the best vinyl copies of this album do, cleaned right and played on a proper stereo of course. (more…)

Younger Than Yesterday – Sundazed Mono Reviewed

More of the Music of The Byrds

Sonic Grade: D

We can’t recommend this title. It’s thin, flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, like most of the Sundazed records we played back when we were selling Heavy Vinyl.

I don’t think we carried this title but we might have, and, obviously, we shouldn’t have. Nobody should have. It’s terrible.

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Nautilus’s Digitally Remastered Half Speed Vinyl of Rumours Is Junk

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

A hall of shame pressing and another Half-Speed mastered audiophile pressing reviewed and found wanting.

So compressed and thin. For all I know the CD might be better than this barely listenable audiophile pressing. In fact I would be very surprised if it were not.

Is the digital remastering the source of the trouble?

Who the hell knows?

And what difference would it make?

A bad record is a bad record regardless of why it might be bad.

How Good Are the Domestic Pressings of Days of Future Passed?

More of the Music of The Moody Blues

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and good imports you know that the imports just kill the American LPs. Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, tend to sound more smeary, yet they’re thinner, brighter and more transistory, and overall have a fraction of the Tubey Magic the good imports have.

Moody Blues albums on import are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for the problem.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for.

It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the music with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes, and for that this is the kind of sound that works the best.

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