Month: August 2019

Amtrak Blues – Our First Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

Absolutely amazing sound – Alberta is uncannily present and real on this copy. This is High Fidelity Top Quality Uncolored Studio Sound like few records you’ve heard. 

And the crazy thing about Amtrak Blues is that it was recorded in 1980 (when Alberta was 83), not a decade we expect good sound to come from. But this is no ordinary recording. Behind the album is none other than legendary Columbia engineer FRANK LAICO. 

Hearing is definitely believing, especially in our business — we don’t give a fig about who, why or when a record was made; we just play it and judge it based on what we hear in the grooves.

Needless to say, this pressing of the album was judged to be a knockout.

Side One

White Hot, open, clear and lively as any record you’ve heard in a very long while. The piano is solid and very dynamic. Practically nothing to fault in the sound. So natural and effortless, why do so few records sound like this?

Side Two

Nearly as good. Listen to the second track to hear how vibrant and young she sounds. This is an 83 year old woman?

The sound gets better as it plays; by the second track it’s the equal of side one.

Side One

The Darktown Strutters Ball 
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out 
I’m Having a Good Time 
Always 
My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More

Side Two

Amtrak Blues 
Old Fashioned Love 
Sweet Georgia Brown 
A Good Man Is Hard to Find 
I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble

AMG Review

Alberta Hunter’s second recording since launching her remarkable comeback (she was 83 when this album was cut) finds the veteran blues singer (a survivor of the 1920s) still in surprisingly strong form and full of spirit. Such songs as “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” “My Handy Man,” “Old Fashioned Love” and “I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble” are given fine treatment by Hunter, who is joined by the Gerald Cook quartet, trombonist Vic Dickenson, trumpeter Doc Cheatham and tenorman Frank Wess on various tracks.

AMG Bio

Alberta Hunter was a pioneering African-American popular singer whose path crosses the streams of jazz, blues and pop music. While she made important contributions to all of these stylistic genres, she is claimed exclusively by no single mode of endeavor. Hunter recorded in six decades of the twentieth century, and enjoyed a career in music that outlasted most human lives.

When Hunter retired from nursing in 1977, she was 81 and ready to go back on the road. By this time her voice was gritty, down and dirty, and her fans loved her for it. She made four albums for Columbia between 1977 and her death in 1984, including the extraordinary Amtrak Blues, and for many younger listeners these are the records by which Alberta Hunter is defined.

Alberta Hunter was one of the earliest African-American singers, along with Sippie Wallace, to make the transition from the lowly brothels and sporting houses into the international spotlight. That she defies easy categorization attests to the astonishing fact that she was on the scene a little before the genres themselves were defined.

Berlioz / Symphonie Fantastique / Fourestier – Reviewed in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of Well Recorded Classical Albums Available Now

This obscure French label stereo reissue of an original Omega recording from the 60s is SUPERB SOUNDING, without a doubt the best sound I have ever heard for the work. [The stereo is much better these days than it was years ago when we auditioned other pressings, so comparisons with those other, older records are practically pointless.]

And the performance is Top Notch as well; I know of none better.

This is a piece that is difficult to fit onto a single LP, clocking in at around 45 minutes, which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record: compress the dynamics, lower the level, or filter the deep bass. Fortunately it seems that none of those approaches were taken by the engineer who cut this record in the early ’80s — there’s plenty of punchy deep bass, as well as powerful dynamics, and the levels seem fine. How he do it? Beats me. Glad he did though!

Side One

A++ Super Hot Stamper sound from top to bottom. The strings are BIG, sweet, clear and textured — the kind of strings that one might hear on maybe one out of thirty or forty classical recordings.

We might prefer them a bit richer, and they can get a bit shrill when at their loudest, but considering how important the strings are to the success of this work, one must be thankful that they are as good as they are.

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Milstein / Masterpieces / Susskind – Reviewed in 2013


This is a RARE and WONDERFUL SOUNDING original Capitol pressing of Milstein playing pieces for violin and orchestra by Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Saint-Saens and others. The recording of the Mozart Rondo on side one boasts DEMO DISC quality sound. Side one is amazingly rich, sweet and tubey magical. The violin is tonally correct, with the kind of immediacy few violin records (in our experience) manage to capture as well, while still retaining the correct size of the instrument. (more…)

Jacques Loussier / Jacques Loussier Plays J.S. Bach Encore

This is a Japanese 45 RPM Audiocheck Pressing with DEMO DISC quality sound! This is absolutely one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played here at Better Records!

For those of you who are not familiar with the Audiocheck 45 RPM series from Japan, these are albums remastered at 45 with some material left off by necessity, since the maximum for each side is closer to 12 minutes than the standard LP limit of 20 minutes.

These don’t come my way very often, so I hadn’t played one in quite awhile, but I have to tell you that this is one of the best sounding jazz records I’ve played in months. It sounds like a Direct to Disc recording! I knew the original albums that Jacques Loussier recorded for Philips had good sound but I never realized they had this kind of Demo Disc quality sound. (He also made a number of recordings for London previous to this one and most of those are mediocre in my estimation.) 

The music is lots of fun: Bach played in a jazzy style by a band that really swings. For music and sonics this record is an audiophile dream come true.

This is an Older Jazz Review.

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

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Letter of the Week – “I played the ‘Party Out Of Bounds’ on their cost-no-object flagship system. It was spectacular!”  

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Yesterday, I attended an audio event at Audio Connection, in Verona, NJ (where I purchased my stereo).

I played the B-52s, Wild Planet, “Party Out Of Bounds”, on their cost-no-object flagship system.
It was spectacular!  

I played other titles that were also spectacular, such as Sly And The Family Stone’s “Dance To The Music” and The Cars’ “Good Times Roll” (all purchased from your store).

A couple of other pressings were very good, but not as impressive (Cat Stevens’ WHS, for example). And my WHS of ELP’s “Take A Pebble” had a fair amount of sibilance (a song I had not previously played). But overall, a wonderfully musical experience.

Great job unearthing / identifying these gems! (more…)

Prokofiev / Concerto No. 2 / Frager – A Top Performance

More of the music of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

This is a very nice looking RCA Living Stereo Shaded Dog LP. Some parts sound better than others but the real reason to buy this record is the performance. Frager is amazing here; he won awards for his performance of this piece in international competitions. The record also features Haydn – Sonata No. 35. The record is a member of HP’s TAS list.  

Ray Ellis / Our Man On Broadway

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

200+ Reviews of Living Stereo Records

A DAZZLING TOUR OF THE BROADWAY SHOW SCENE… courtesy of Mickey Crofford’s engineering in NYC’s legendary Webster Hall. If we could only find more vintage pressings with this kind of fidelity and musical invention our job would be a lot easier. We have to play a huge stack of titles to find even one that can do what this copy is doing, and how many of those will be this quiet? One out of a hundred? Two hundred? The whole enterprise boggles the mind. 

Side One

Huge, rich, and Tubey Magical as all get out, the instruments will positively come jumping out of your speakers like few records you have ever heard.

Huge bass and richness helps keep the brass from getting too blary. (more…)

Mendelssohn & Schubert / Symphony No. 4 & Symphony No. 5

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Felix Mendelssohn Available Now

The strings are rich, with lovely rosiny texture and virtually no tube smear. Played with zest and the recording is every bit as lively. 

The grade on side one could even be better than Two Pluses — we just don’t have enough clean copies to know. Big bass at the end, powerful dynamics too.

Side two was good but nothing like this amazing side one. Too much smear hurts it badly, and the mark is not helping either.

We’re pricing this one for just the one side. Fortunately it’s the complete symphony, one of Mendelssohn’s most famous works.

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Security – Our Shootout Winner from 2009

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

Our first Hot Stamper shootout for Security is finally here, and man does this album sound better than I remember it from back in the ’70s when I first played a copy. Stereos have come a long way since then, along with a host of other things that help records sound better, such as cleaning fluids, room treatments and all the rest. 

Now you can really hear INTO the soundfield in a way that simply was never possible before, picking out all the drummers and counting all the layers of PG’s multi-tracked choruses.

For all you PG fans, it’s been a long time coming. We’ve wanted to do this album for years but kept running into a roadblock we could not find our way around: the fact that most copies are thick, opaque, turgid, veiled — pick your favorite adjective for mud, most copies fit the profile. Nice clean copies would come in, sound murky and get filed away, as if aging them would bring out the transparency we were hoping to find.

Now we can clean them and play them better, and like we always say, if you clean and play enough copies, something good will come of it. (more…)

Oscar Peterson – We Get Requests

This is the way it must have sounded inside the RCA Studios in New York way back in 1964, not the club shown on the cover. The legendary RCA engineer Bob Simpson was behind the board. 

If you have full-range speakers one of the qualities you may recognize in the sound of the piano is WARMTH. The piano is not hard, brittle or tinkly. It’s more like a real piano and less like a recorded one. This is what good “live” recordings tend to do well. There isn’t time to mess with the sound. Often the mix is live, so messing around after the fact is just not an option.

Bad mastering can ruin the sound, and often does, along with worn out stampers and bad vinyl and five gram needles that scrape off the high frequencies. But a few — far too few — copies survive all such hazards. They manage to capture these wonderful musical performances on their molecules of vinyl, showing us a sound we never expected. 

Both Sides

Right away you hear a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. These sides were simply richer and fuller than the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work, to allow all the instrumental elements to balance. The natural top doesn’t hurt either.

Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — these sides were up there with the best Peterson albums we played.

The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge. With an extended top end the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced correctly.

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