Which publishers usually make poor recordings?

[L3000]

Are there any publishers notoriously known for making poor pressings or recordings of VGM? For some reason every soundtrack I've listened to from Five Records and even some early recordings from Suleputer have sounded really bad. The tables they use sound bland and lifeless.

[Carl]

The question you're probably asking is "who's Mastering Engineer does a sloppy job"...

Sometimes Labels stick with using the same Mastering Studio each time, and sometimes they go a different studio the next year. (even at the same studio it can have new staff members over time too). So this varies on a per-album basis.

Recording Engineers and Mastering Engineers can have a noticeable impact on an album's sound, so this information is just as useful and important as the Composer and Arranger credits are.

Worst is hard to say, but my vote for Best would probably be Yasman Maeda at Bernie Grundman Mastering Tokyo, who mastered a lot of the DigiCube albums. (SSCX catalog numbers, which everyone loves).