zero-tube

Some records are so completely lacking in analog warmth, richness and sweetness that they sound more like bad CDs than records. They have so little Tubey Magic that you might as well peg the figure at ZERO.

This is definitely not our sound. No Hot Stamper pressing could possibly lack Tubey Magic — it’s one of the analog qualities that sets our records apart from even the best of those pressed on Heavy Vinyl – but plenty of other records do, and this link will take you to about 50 of them.

Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim on Bad Rhino Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Sinatra

Sonic Grade: C-

The Rhino 180 gram LP mastered by Kevin Gray is passable, but the real thing is the real thing and just can’t be beat by some wannabe reissue.

There is a richness, a sweetness and a relaxed naturalness on the best early pressings that are virtually never found on modern remasterings.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the analog qualities the better originals have plenty of, most notably Tubey Magic. [1]

In other words, it sounds like a CD.

Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles are looking for on vinyl?

Back in 2007 we put the question this way: Why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?

[1] Some records are so completely lacking in Analog Warmth, Richness and Sweetness that they sound like CDs, and bad ones at that. They have so little Tubey Magic that you might as well peg the figure at ZERO.

This is decidedly not our sound. No Hot Stamper pressing could possibly lack Tubey Magic — it’s one of the things that sets our records apart from the modern mediocrity known as the Heavy Vinyl LP.

The Voice (Isn’t What It Should Be) on Heavy Vinyl

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Sinatra

Sonic Grade: D

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records popular music LP badly remastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

There is a boatload of TUBEY MAGIC to be heard on the early pressings, no doubt due to the fact that they are mastered with tube equipment, but you would never know it by playing this barely passable Classic repressing.

The difference is night and day.

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as nothing special. Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D, for below average. It sounds far too much like a CD.

Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities we audiophiles are looking for on vinyl?

Back in 2007 we put the question this way: Why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?

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September of My Years – Yet Another Kevin Gray Mediocrity

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

Sonic Grade: C-

Reprise reissued this album on 180 gram vinyl in 2004.

Our advice: skip this Heavy Vinyl mediocrity.

The originals are far better and not that hard to find.

In fact, the good originals are so good that they can be found in our vocal Demo Disc section. I’m pretty sure that this run-of-the-mill reissue is nobody’s idea of a Demo Disc.

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals are full of.

In other words, it sounds like a CD.

Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles are looking for on vinyl? Back in 2007 we put the question this way: Why Own a Turntable if You’re Going to Play Mediocrities Like These?

Also, skip the orange label reissues. We’ve never heard a good one and we stopped buying them a long time ago.

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1812 Overture on Telarc

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for Recordings of the 1812 Overture

Sonic Grade: D

If you want an amazingly dynamic 1812 with huge amounts of deep bass reproduced for the cannon, you can’t do much better than this (or its UHQR brother). 

But if you want rich, sweet and tonally correct brass and strings, you had best look elsewhere. I’ve never liked the sound of this record and I’m guessing if I heard a copy today I would like it even less. 

Who in his right mind thinks live classical music actually sounds like this?

Telarc makes clean, modern sounding records. To these ears they sound pretty much like CDs.

If that’s your sound you can save yourself a lot of money avoiding vintage Golden Age recordings, especially the ones we sell. They’re much more expensive and rarely as quiet, but — again, to these ears — the colors and textures of real instruments seems to come to life in their grooves, and in practically no others.

We include in this modern group analog labels such as Reference, Sheffield, Chesky, Athena and the like. Having heard hundreds of amazing vintage pressings, at this stage of the game I find it hard to take any of them seriously.

Twenty years ago, maybe. But twenty years is a long time, especially in the world of audio.

We started a list of records that suffer from a lack of Tubey Magic like this one, and it can be found here.

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We Heap Scorn Upon Chesky Records, With Good Reason

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Sonic Grade: F

Chesky is one of the WORST AUDIOPHILE LABELS in the history of the world. Their recordings are so artificial and “wrong” that they defy understanding. That some audiophiles actually buy into this junk sound is equal parts astonishing and depressing.

Their own records are a joke, and their remasterings of the RCA Living Stereo catalog are an abomination.

The best RCA Living Stereo pressings are full of Tubey Magic. The Chesky pressings I have played have none.

What else would you need to know about their awful records than that?

If there is a more CLUELESS audiophile label on the planet, I don’t know what it could be, and I don’t want to find out. 

(Turns out there is someone producing the worst kind of remastered junk vinyl who may be even more clueless than Chesky, imagine that!)

John Coltrane – Another in a Very Long Line of Disappointing Rhino Remasters

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we like to call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

In other words, it sounds too much like a CD.

Any properly-mastered, properly-pressed 70s copy on the red and green label will be richer, fuller, sweeter, and just plain more enjoyable than this 180 gram version.

It’s below average, which means it merits a D.

That said, “Giant Steps” is not an easy record to find in good condition, because any serious jazz lover would have played it plenty. It is inarguably one of John Coltrane’s greatest achievements. 

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be unsatisfactory, with sound quality substantially lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

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Ray Charles & Betty Carter – DCC Clear Vinyl Pressing

More Soul, Blues and R&B Albums with Hot Stampers

This Dunhill Compact Classics LP pressed on CLEAR VINYL is one of DCCs earliest forays into analog production from way back in 1988.

Unfortunately it sounds like a bad CD.

Screechy, bright, shrill, thin and harsh, it’s hard to imagine worse sound for this music.

No warmth.

No sweetness.

No richness.

No Tubey Magic. In other words,

No trace of the original’s analog sound.

I have to wonder how records this awful get released.

You can be sure that Hoffman’s Gold CD murders it in every way.

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Love Is the Thing – Remixed, Remastered and Ruined

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

Love Is the Thing on DCC was given a “new sound” and I don’t like it

I really liked the Nat King Cole albums on DCC when they came out back in the ’90s. Thought they were a revelation as a matter of fact.

Now I find them insufferable. Here are some of my reasons for not liking Hoffman’s remix.

Nat’s voice is much too forward and loud in the mix; consequently the orchestra is too soft. The balance is off. At least on my stereo, at the levels I play the record at, the balance seems off. You surely have a different system, in a different room, and may not feel the way I do.

But without a top pressing to compare, how do you know the mix is right or wrong? Like everything in audio, it’s relative.

The balance problem is bad enough, but what really sets my teeth on edge is the fact that the Nat King Cole record on DCC doesn’t sound remotely like any Nat King Cole record I have ever heard, outside of the ones Hoffman worked on of course.

Where is all the Capitol reverb? Nat’s records all have it, and although the reverb may be a bit excessive or unnatural in some ways, at least to some people, when you take it away you end up with a sound that never existed before, and, to my ears, it’s a sound that’s just wrong for the music.

The more I listened to the DCC the less I liked it.

The first full-length commentary I ever wrote in my record catalog in 1994 took Analogue Productions to task for remastering Way Out West and giving it a “new sound,” a sound I had never heard coming from any Contemporary pressing, from any era.

I didn’t like what Doug Sax did with Way Out West, Jazz Giant, Waltz for Debby and many, many others, and I don’t like what Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray did to Love Is the Thing, The Very Thought of You and Just One Of Those Things.

I have tried to listen to the Gold CD in my car, but even in the car I found the sound boring and insufferable.

Is this the kind of sound you hear on your DCC Nat King Cole records? If it is, we recommend you try a Hot Stamper. If it doesn’t kill your DCC you get your money back.

At the very least it will show you some of the things your DCC is doing differently, and, we think, wrong.

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Another Bad Sounding Chet Baker Album on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

It Could Happen to You badly needed to be mastered with some tubes in the chain, but that didn’t happen. We’ve written a fair amount on that subject, and you can find more here.

It’s another case of an OJC with zero tubey magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. Maybe even better!

I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp (like the Mac 30 you see below), you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?

The OJC pressing of this album is obviously better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had 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).

For a more complete list of those records, click here.

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There’s a Riot Goin’ On – From the Analog Master!

More of the Music of Sly and the Family Stone

Sonic Grade: F

Ouch this record sounds bad. Some of the worst sound I have ever heard on Heavy Vinyl. The average cassette sounds better than this piece of crap.

My notes:

Side one: track one is thin and hard. Track two is not very tubey and the sibilance is harsh.

Side two: track two is full and tubey but track three shows that the sound may be tubey but it is very compressed.

But some people think that records that were made from the analog master tapes should sound good. 

Especially when those records were pressed on virgin vinyl.

But do they?

This one sure doesn’t. What could possibly have gone wrong?

We have no idea. We just play the records and listen to them. We let them tell us if they are wrong or right.

This one told us it may have been made from good tapes — may have been, the good folks at Columbia records might be lying to us about that, it wouldn’t be the first time and I certainly would not put it past them — but it sure wasn’t made very well.

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