More Bad Sounding Records Audiophiles Should Avoid
UPDATE 2025
I can find no record of the existence of any regular Zoo label pressing. The only ones on Discogs are mastered by Bernie Grundman, on 150 or 180 gram vinyl.
My advice now would be to buy the CD. I own one and it’s great.
Our Zoo label original LP MURDERED the Classic heavy vinyl reissue. It’s not even close.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now
The Rhino pressing we auditioned from the Doors Box Set was surprisingly good. It’s rich and smooth with an extended top end — tonally correct, in other words — and there’s lots of bass.
This is all to the good. For the thirty bucks you might pay for it you’re getting a very good record, assuming yours sounds like ours, something we should really not be assuming, but we do it because there is simply no other way to write about records other than to describe the sound of the ones we actually have played.
What it clearly lacks compared to the best originals is, first and foremost, vocal immediacy.
Jim Morrison seems to be singing through a veil, an effect which becomes more and more bothersome over time, as these kinds of frustrating shortcomings have a habit of doing.
A bit blurry, a bit smeary, somewhat lacking in air and space, on the plus side it has good energy and better bass than most of the copies we played. All in all we would probably give it a “B.” You could do a helluva lot worse.
Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now
This is a Limited Edition Black Label Island Numbered Import 2 LP set.
The sound is passable at best. Unfortunately, like many of the compilations done over the years, this is a very dubby sounding album. It’s smeary, veiled, and lacks space.
The good vintage pressings of the original albums just kill it.
Not all compilation albums are bad. Here are some with the potential for very good sound.
More of the Music of Alice Cooper
The last White Hot Stamper copy we put up had the two best sides back to back we heard in our shootout, with a killer side two that really brought this music to life.
Which is not easy to do, given that the average copy of this album is a sonic mess —
There are a lot of green label Warner Bros. records from the 70s that sound like that, one might even call it their “house sound.”
When you play most of the later pressings, it’s obvious that they’ve gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inapt and more often than not disastrous.
Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity, especially on this album, may not be easy, but it can be done. This side two was far and away the best we heard and proves that the album can sound good.
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.
More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Guitar
This Crystal Clear 45 RPM Direct-to-Disc LP is pressed on white vinyl. Of the couple of copies we played, this one had the best sound.
It had more clarity than the other copy, which sounded even more veiled and smeary than this one.
I sure never liked the sound of this record though.
It’s dark and unnatural to my ears. It would be best to avoid it if you are looking for audiophile sound.
There are so many other, better Charlie Byrd recordings, why waste your time and money on this one? It’s yet another example of an “audiophile” record with practically nothing in the way of audiophile merit.
Which should not be too surprising. The bulk of the Crystal Clear records we’ve played had third-rate sound and pointless music.
Most of their direct to disc recordings were nothing but audiophile bullshit.
This Charlie Byrd title is the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to buy back in the ’70s — typically at stereo stores, or “audio salons” as they are often called now, the ones that are still in business anyway — before we had anything resembling a clue.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Freddie Hubbard Available Now
That’s too often the sound we hear on the Heavy Vinyl records being pressed these days. From time to time we get hold of some to audition just to see what they’ve done with (to?) the titles we know well.
We sure don’t have any intention of selling them. That would violate our principles. And the very name of our operation: Better Records. It’s rare for anything pressed on Heavy Vinyl to qualify as a Better Record, which is why so many of them can be found in our Heavy Vinyl disasters section.
Not sure why so few reviewers and audiophiles notice these rather obvious shortcomings, but we sure do, and we don’t like it when records sound that way.
But that sound can be found on plenty of vintage pressings too. We should know, we’ve played them by the tens of thousands!
Smear is by far the most common problem with the copies we played. When the transient bite of the trumpet is correctly reproduced, maintaining its full-bodied tone and harmonic structures, you know you have a very special copy of Sky Dive (or First Light or Red Clay, etc., etc.).
When the sound is blurry, thick, veiled, dull or slow, you have what might be considered something more like the average copy.
Rudy gets one hell of a lively trumpet sound in this period of his career. If you have a good pressing of one of his early ’70s jazz recordings the sound can be positively EXPLOSIVE, with what feels like all the size and power of live music.
If you don’t have a hot copy of Red Clay, get one. It’s some of the best funky jazz ever recorded. No collection should be without it.
Sonic Grade: C
Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.
The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.
We shelved the project for another day.
In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.
Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.
How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play it against?
Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.
But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.
The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.
I won’t say the new pressing is boring. Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)
More of the Music of John Coltrane
Sonic Grade: B+ (at least)
This is one of the better sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings we have played recently.
What makes it different from so many others that fail to live up to the remastering hype that surrounds them? (And regularly irritates the hell out of those of us who actually know what a good record actually sounds like.)
It is slightly veiled, and lacks some of the life, the space and obviously some of the presence of the real thing, the real thing in this case being an early stereo pressing on the Blue and Green Atlantic label.
Still, for your money you are getting a helluva good record.
One of the top two or three Rhino records to date.
(Bernie did a great job on this Coltrane album, but whatever you do, don’t waste your money on his recut of Lush Life. It is just plain awful, an audiophile hall of shame pressing that’s so bad it defies understanding. Something sure went wrong somewhere, I can tell you that. Stay tuned for my review.)
• Lacquers cut by Bernie Grundman
• LPs cut from the original analog masters
• Packages replicated to the finest detail manufactured with more care than ever
Our Previous Hot Stamper Commentary for Coltrane’s Sound
This is yet another superb Tom Dowd recording of Coltrane in his prime, with support from the brilliant McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now
Not a bad Mercury Golden Import, but not a very good one either — there aren’t too many of those by the way — and certainly not in the same league with the better recordings of the work.
Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile sound.
These days, practically all of the Golden Import reissues we play sound much too much like the bulk of the Philips pressings we’ve auditioned over the years have a tendency to sound:
Hot Stamper pressings of Mercury classical and orchestral recordings can be found here.
More than anything, the changes we hear in the records we play now tie into the idea of progress in audio, since without progress the records that sounded good to me in 2006 would still sound good to me now, and thank goodness they don’t.
Live and learn is our motto, onward and upward, and we have made that approach to audio the very foundation of our business.
If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.
More of the Music of ZZ Top