veiled-sound

The sound of these pressings is veiled. It’s as if someone threw something over your speakers and you are listing to music through a curtain.

Sometimes the sound is so lacking in presence, clarity and immediacy it can seem as if the curtain would better be described as a blanket, and in the worst cases, a quite heavy one.

Brain Salad Surgery on Shout Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

If you’re a fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s fifth album, and you know, or at least suspect, that the British original pressings are more than likely to be better sounding than most, you might find yourself in a bit of a quandary, pocketbook-wise.

Early British pressings in audiophile playing condition aren’t easy to find, and they don’t tend to be cheap when you do find them.

Ah, but there is a fairly cheap and exceptionally easy solution: just buy the Shout Heavy Vinyl reissue from 2008.

It says it’s made from the master tape, it has a replica of the original packaging, and even comes with a poster.

What could go wrong?

The sound could be shit — NFG in our shorthand — that’s what could go wrong.

  • The top end could be overly-textured, tizzy and hot, the kind that constantly calls attention to itself.
  • The bass could be smeary and thick.
  • And the overall presentation of the music could be veiled and recessed.

Alas, the money you thought you were saving buying this potentially wonderful flat, quiet pressing made from the master tapes ends up flushed down the tubes. Now what?

Now you have to do what you should have done to begin with: find yourself a real British pressing.

(more…)

On Dark Side of the Moon, “Breathe” Is a Good Check for Midrange Tonality

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

Breathe is my favorite test track for side one for any version of Dark Side Of The Moon, Half-Speed or otherwise. When the voices come in about halfway through the song, you can tell that most copies are too bright simply by listening to the vocals on this track. The cymbals might sound wonderful; lots of other instruments might sound wonderful; and there might be plenty of ambience, detail and transparency.

But all of that counts for nothing if the voices don’t sound right.

And far too many copies have the voices sounding bright, aggressive, grainy and transitory. (This is unfortunately the case with the 180 gram 30th anniversary edition. That pressing will wake up a sleepy stereo, but my stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play that recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.)

The discussion below may shed light on some of the issues involved in the remastering of Dark Side.

Of course, most audiophiles are still under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity, with their strict ‘quality control’, which they spend hundreds of words explaining on their inner sleeves, eliminates pressing variations of these kinds.

Isn’t that the reason for Limited Edition Audiophile Records in the first place? The whole idea is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Copy money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 99% of what we do around here would be a waste of time.

(more…)

So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

(more…)

Audiophiles Should Give Monteux’s Surprise and Clock Symphonies a Miss

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joseph Haydn Available Now

None of the pressings we played of this RCA (LSC 2394) were remotely competitive with Fjelstad’s recording for RCA from 1959.

The sound of the RCA Shaded Dog we played was consistently compressed and veiled, a case of the “old record” sound we find on far too many vintage pressings.

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that have been stamped out for the last seven decades.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless the average record will show itself to be.

The White Dog pressing was even worse. It was hot, dry and flat. Who wants to play a record that sounds like that?

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

(more…)

We Review the Classic Records Pressing of SR 90212

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

The Classic Records pressing of the famous Mercury is a gritty, shrill piece of crap.

I used to have a less-than-revealing all-tube system back in the 90s, but even that system, limited as it was and not remotely as revealing as the one we have now would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful record.

I don’t know how dull and smeary a stereo would have to be in order to play a record this phony and modern sounding in order to make it listenable, but I know that it would have to be very dull and very smeary, with the kind of vintage sound that might work for Classic’s Heavy Vinyl pressings but not much else.

It’s a disgrace, and the fact that it’s on the TAS Super Disc list is even more disgraceful.

Which all adds up to an audiophile hall of shame pressing and a record perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

Argenta and Ansermet

I much prefer Ansermet’s performances on London to those of Paray on Mercury.

As of 2022 we actually prefer the famous Argenta recording for Decca that’s on the TAS List, CS 6006.

Both are excellent and clearly superior to the Paray, even on the original Mercury pressings we’ve played.

UPDATE 2024:

This recording is no longer on the TAS Super Disc list. Our favorite, the London with Argenta, is however.

We call that progress! Maybe there’s hope for the TAS List yet.

(more…)

You Can Do a Lot Better than this Tchaikovsky 5th

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We played a few copies of the album we had sitting in the backroom and none of them quite worked for us.  The sound was somewhat veiled and dry. (The 1s/1s pressing was the worst of the bunch, by the way.)

A decent record, not much more than that, and not really not worth putting in a shootout with the better pressings of the work we have discovered over the years. The best of the bunch might earn a grade of 1.5+, so why even bother?

Yes, we still have no Hot Stamper pressings of the work to offer, but we know they are coming, someday. Our current favorite is a performance by Mravinsky on DG from 1961.

It’s a “good, not great” vintage classical record, best played on an old school stereo system that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, like the one we employed to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to spot its many faults.

(more…)

Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment Good and Hard

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s take stock. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustible supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

(more…)

Domestic Pressings of Clear Spot? Forget ‘Em!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Captain Beefheart Available Now

We did this shootout many years ago, so many years ago that I cannot find a record of it.

I remember we thought the German pressings were perhaps a bit boosted on both ends and not as natural sounding as the domestic pressings.

After a multitude of improvements in our cleaning and playback, we would agree with our previous understanding that the German pressings are often wrong, but now we also know how right the right ones can be.

It turns out tha some German pressings are not particularly good, another piece of the puzzle that fell into place during our most recent shootout, as painful as that turned out to be considering the money wasted on them.

Did we have the bad German stamper pressings last time around? Who knows?

The producer, Ted Templeman, (Doobie Brothers, James Taylor) brought his mainstream talents to bear on this music, and when the Captain’s free-form tendencies smashed into Templeman’s conservatism, the result was this musical supernova — out there, but not too far out there.

(Play Trout Mask Replica sometime if you miss that feeling from your old hippie days of being on acid. With that music, drugs are entirely superfluous.)

I don’t know how many audiophiles like Captain Beefheart, probably not too many, but if you’re ever going to try one of his albums, this is the place to start: his masterpiece.

(more…)

Boston’s First Album on MoFi Anadisq

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Boston Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The MoFi Anadisc of Boston’s first album has the same problems that seem to have plagued the whole of the Anadisq 200 series. The sound was:

  • thick,
  • opaque,
  • blurry, and
  • murky.

A real slogfest. Audiophile trash of the worst kind. If this isn’t the worst version of the album ever made, I cannot imagine what would be.

Many of the worst releases from MoFi in this era were mastered by Ken Lee. If you happen to come across a record in a store with his name in the credits, or his initials in the deadwax, you are best advised to drop it back in the bin and keep moving. Anything else is just asking for trouble.

Do people still pay good money for this kind of awful sound?

Yes they do!

Go to ebay and see the high prices these kinds of records are fetching. This is in equal parts both shocking and disgusting. 

Here is what is available for the MoFi pressing on Discogs today (2/2/2022). If you have $400 you can order one there.

Marketplace 3 For Sale from $399.99

And people complain about our prices? At least we send you a great sounding record for all the money we charge.

(more…)

This Linda Ronstadt Album from 1969 Did Not Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

Transistory and veiled. Not worth the Capitol vinyl it was pressed on. Not the least bit enjoyable on today’s much more revealing high quality equipment.

The only stereo that can play a record that sounds the way this album does is a stereo that is powered by a pair of vintage tube amps like the Macs seen below, or something like them. (Some modern amps try to recreate that sound, and if you want to hear what is on your records, you had best avoid them.)

The above approach to record playback is also very good at hiding the faults of the modern Heavy Vinyl record.

Remastering Out The Good Stuff

What is lost in the newly remastered recordings so popular with the record buying public these days?

Lots of things, but the most obvious and irritating is the loss of transparency.

(more…)