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Well below the reproduction of the front page of our old catalog you will find the review I wrote in 2007 for the Classic Records’ Heavy Vinyl pressing of Witches’ Brew.
Clearly I did not care for it in the least. In fact, I thought it was one of the worst reissues I’d ever heard, so aggressive, boosted and unnatural it defied understanding that anyone could ever play such a record and not notice how wrong it sounded.
Now when I think about the Classic Records reissue of Witches’ Brew and its awful sound, it’s obviously a modern remastering I could not possibly have liked.
However, in preparing to move to Georgia in 2022, I found myself digging through some old catalogs from the early Nineties. Something I read in one of them chilled me to the bone.
There it was in black and white: my rave review for the Classic Records pressing of Witches’ Brew.
It’s actually on the front page of the catalog, along with at least one other record that I would be mortified to sell today: the OJC pressing of Saxophone Colossus.
(As soon as I find my review in the old catalog for Saxophone Colossus, I will post it. I can hardly believe I wrote it, but I did. I wrote all my catalogs back then. My lack of competence and the guilt associated with my lack of expertise at the time is undeniable. It obviously would be foolish and wrong of me to try to deny any of it, so I don’t.)
Below you will find a commentary from 2007 detailing the shortcomings of the Classic.
I sure had a lot of nice things to say about it in 1994.
I thought my stereo was awesome back then, but it was not nearly as awesome as I thought it was. It was better than any system I had heard in a stereo salon, audio show or friend’s house, but that has to be seen as a pretty low bar, and it may even be lower now than it was back then.
I’ve written a bit about the limitations of my 90s system here.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is real, and I clearly suffered from it.
In 1994 I had been a fairly dedicated audiophile for more than twenty years, and a strongly opiniated audiophile record dealer, one who took pride in curating his vinyl offerings right from the start of the business in 1987.
I thought I knew what I was talking about. Looking back it’s clear I had a lot to learn.