Do Poor Quality Modern Pressings Provide Any Value?

A statement in the form of a question.

Yes they provide a value, and that value is to put on your list of things to avoid. Enjoy the music, not bad recordings

GZ pressed the VMP Miles Davis - The Electric Years box set. These are pristine sounding recordings - read other reviews of this set; most everybody considers these to be at least as good, if not better, than the MoFi ones....

they do because not all of them are bad.

@larsman why does their quality swing in such big directions. I have vastly more GZ presses that are poor versus quality pressings. I'll take unknown plants if GZ as a general rule to be completely honest. 

I saw some discussion of that, and it seems that a lot of poorly recorded source material is also pressed at GZ as well. Garbage in, garbage out, I suppose.

@larsman do we know why or how it happens? I've heard records that sound horrible compared to digital versions. Is this from how the source files are sent in? Is it from a label literally looking at this as a profit center and not listening to test pressings? It just seems even small labels wouldn't want this low quality of records to be put out, but I guess I'm just naive. I'd as a consumer pay more if labels would actually put in the work, but maybe asking for decent quality is just too much. 

Hi @j-wall  - I wish I could find that article or video where the fellow from Vinyl Me Please addressed the concerns about GZ pressing, and how GZ did such an awesome job on the Miles set and some others from VMP. But he's the one that mentioned that GZ gets pressing jobs from all kinds of labels, and quality control may not be the best at some of them, or they may have just been poorly recorded. But in essence, it's 'Don't blame the pressing plant for bad pressings if they were given something bad to press'....  But yeah, when that happens, people can easily draw the wrong conclusions that the plant is the problem. 

@larsman that's very true. GZ just had a track record for poor sonics and I've had more poor quality records from them so they get the best. I guess we hold the label accountable to the pressing quality and the labels/bands accountable to the pressing sonically. Interesting I've never thought of it this way. I'll have to hunt town the vinyl my please article. I know they've had their highs and lows with pressing quality so I'm sure they're a great sample to learn from.

I guess it just becomes frustrating that the reward for a fantastic record is a poor pressing. Then people like myself enjoy the music, but don't buy from the band or label and the quality issue doesn't get solved and they in turn sell less records due to skepticism about sound quality. Just seems like it could be solved with some effort and accountability for at least decent products and also sell more units. Win-win. 

Totally agree with you, @j-wall - I think I may have heard about GZ on one of the VMP podcasts for the Miles Davis set; there were 4 of them, and I think they discussed this on either the 2nd or 3rd one.