Month: December 2019

Henry Mancini / The Music From Peter Gunn – Our Shootout Winner from 2010

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

200+ Reviews of Living Stereo Records

This early White Dog pressing (4s-6s) has plenty of the Living Stereo Magic RCA was justly famous for back in 1958. Both sides earned a sonic grade of A+ to A++. (The best Hot Stamper copies of More Music from Peter Gunn show you just how well this kind of music can be recorded.)

Listen to all that crazy reverb on the piano and drums — it may not be the most natural sound in the world but it’s pretty cool when it’s done this well.

Both sides here had excellent brass as well. So often the pop records from this era have smeary, blary, shrill brass reproduction, but this copy managed to avoid that problem. The brass could use a bit more weight on side one and on side two it sounded a bit more crude than we had heard previously.

There was plenty of 3-D space on both sides, although the overall sound was a bit more distant and dark than we would have liked. (more…)

For The Roses – Our Shootout Winner from 2008

OFF THE CHARTS breathiness, delicacy, warmth and sweetness, and that’s just Joni’s voice. The sound of the ensemble throughout is amazingly natural, the recording so spacious. You may have noticed that there were no Joni records on our Top 100 List, but after hearing this wonderful LP on the original white label Asylum pressing we knew we had to add it to that very special list. [Since replaced by other titles.]

Let’s face it, we love Blue but it has its share of problems, as does Ladies of the Canyon. Court and Spark is up at the top up the list as well, but Roses seems to have the most folky recording purity. Perhaps the engineers saw this as an opportunity to address the problems with Blue on this, the followup. By the time she had fully adopted her new jazzy style with the album after this one, Court — with the multi-tracking that that music required — some of the recording quality got lost in the quest for slicker production values.

AGAIG on Side One

This copy has it all: the kind of transparency that allows you to see into the soundfield like never before; presence and immediacy in Joni’s breathy, emotional vocals; air and ambience around all the instruments; and tubey magical guitars. (Listen especially to the acoustic guitar on Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire. That’s the sound we love here at Better Records! Even if your system is all transistor (ouch), that guitar will sound like you own the most tubey magical equipment in the world.)

This copy also had REAL ENERGY and dynamics not found on the typical pressing. With dynamics AND the warmth and richness found here, we’re pretty sure this copy can’t be beat on side one. (more…)

Bonnie Raitt / Streetlights – Our Shootout Winner from 2013

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Reviews and Commentaries for Bonnie Raitt’s Albums

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Our first Hot Stamper shootout for Bonnie Raitt’s classic fourth album yielded a surprisingly good copy, this one, with practically unbeatable (nearly) White Hot Stamper sound on side two, backed with a Super Hot side one that easily put most of the other copies we played to shame. The first three songs on side one — That Song About the Midway, Rainy Day Man, Angel from Montgomery — represent some of the strongest material Bonnie ever got to work with, and they alone would serve to qualify this as a Must Own Bonnie Raitt album.  (more…)

Barney Kessel / Barney Kessel Plays Carmen (Stereo) – Our Shootout Winner from 2014

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This original Black Label Contemporary stereo LP has a STUNNING side two! Barney Kessel Plays Carmen is one of our favorite jazz guitar recordings of all time, and on a copy like this the sound is absolutely KILLER. 

Side Two

White Hot! Clean and clear with great energy and punchy drums. Less compressor distortion, a much bigger stage, and plenty of room around the drums, this is the sound you just never hear on this album.

The horns were the best we heard on any side two — more “real”, full-bodied, and never hard or edgy (which they often are).

Fuller on the piano, and more present, with real top end extension, this is exactly the way this music should sound.

Side One

Good space, clarity and immediacy are this side’s high points. Flip it over to side two to hear what the best copy in our shootout sounds like. (It should blow your mind.) (more…)

Bayou Country – Our Shootout Winner from 2012

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

This is the first White Hot Stamper copy of Bayou Country to ever hit the site. We were shocked at how good this one sounds — on both sides — compared to the copies we’ve heard over the years.

Man, the average copy of this album is an unmitigated disaster. Let’s start with the vocals. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have John Fogerty’s vocals sound as if they were recorded via telephone, but every copy we played had an edgy quality to Fogerty’s voice.

Furthermore, most copies are badly congested and far from transparent. After dropping the needle on the first few copies and hearing the muddy music and gritty vocals, we nearly gave up, but I’m glad we stuck to it long enough to find a few copies that did a good job conveying this classic music.

Keep On Chooglin’

After playing a handful of copies we started to identify what qualities we could hope for in a Hot Stamper pressing. It was only then that we decided to take John Fogerty’s advice and, uh, keep on chooglin.’

We realized that the vocals are never going to sound amazing, but they don’t need to sound irritating either. We realized the stunning transparency was not in the cards, but that on the better copies you can actually pick out the various musicians and make sense of their contributions. And while you’re just not going to get note-like bass from this album, you can certainly find copies that offer SOME definition to the bottom end. If you’ve got a big stack of copies and an excellent cleaning regiment, you just might be able to find a copy that performed reasonably well in all of these areas.

And in the end, that’s exactly what we managed to do. It wasn’t easy, and you won’t be using this record of these to demo your stereo, but if you love this music as much as we do then we imagine you’ll enjoy hearing Bayou Country sound this good.

Side one was incredibly tubey magical with lots of energy and surprising clarity, which you can really hear on the clean guitar transients. The sound is big and open with real weight to the bottom. The top end has natural extension instead of the brightened up sound you might be familiar with for this album.

Born On The Bayou and Bootleg both sound great — I guarantee you’ve never heard ’em sound any better or your money back.

Side two earned A++ honors with excellent presence and energy. It’s a very transparent side two; you can even pick out the piano in Good Golly Miss Molly, which is hardly even audible on most pressings. The vocals are neither edgy nor gritty, and the top end is smoother than what you get on the typical copy.

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Art Pepper / Friday Night At The Village Vanguard

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This Original Contemporary LP has EXCELLENT MUSIC AND SOUND! The real highligh of this volume is the version of Caravan — just listen to Art playing both alto AND tenor! There’s also a great version of Pepper’s bossa-influenced track Labyrinth. The sound is rich and full-bodied. Listen to the cymbal crashes to hear how extended the top end is. The piano has real weight to it, but the sax sounds a little bit compressed and the bass could be a bit tighter.

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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Passion Flower – Our Shootout Winner from 2014

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Jazz Albums Available Now

One of the all time great Pablo sleepers. Why is no one else writing about records like these? The music is wonderful and the sound is top drawer on the best copies. If you’ve tried and failed with other Pablo Zoot Sims records, fear not: this title is one of his best, musically and sonically. 

If you want to hear the Duke’s music swing in top sound, get this album.

This is a big group, probably at least a dozen pieces at any given time, and all that energy is captured on the best copies with tremendous engineering skill. The lively arrangements are by none other than Benny Carter, a man who knows his jazz. His career started in the ’20s(!) and lasted into this century if you can believe it. I consider myself fortunate to have seen him play locally when he was more than 90 years old. He stlll had it, kind of. (more…)

Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – As a Rule, the CDs of Their Music Suck

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

Those of you who have purchased some of this group’s CDs may have noticed that they do not sound very good. It seems as though precious little effort was expended in their mastering, which is no doubt the case.

Almost any good original brown label A&M pressing will be dramatically better.

A Note About The Mix

Fool on the Hill may not be up there with Sergio’s best sonically (not many albums are!), but it can still sound very good when you get the right stamper. The balance of this record takes some getting used to. We weren’t sure what to make of it at first.

If you put your stereo in Mono you will hear dead center sound.

After putting it back in stereo you find most of the sound in the left channel — it took us a while to understand it’s just a choice they made for the mix.

The average copy of this record is thin, aggressive and irritating. What separates the best copies from those typical bad sounding copies is more extension on the top end to balance out the upper midrange and lower highs, and more weight on the bottom end, to correct the overall tonal balance.

If you are at all familiar with this record, it’s easy to spot the good ones: as soon as you drop the needle on side one, you can hear that the tape hiss sounds correct. The high frequency content of the tape hiss is intact.

On the bad ones, the tape hiss sounds dull, which means that the extended highs are missing, leaving only the painfully edgy lower highs.

How About Those Amazing Cover Songs?

Two songs in particular make this a Must Own album: Scarborough Fair and The Fool On The Hill. Both of them are given wonderfully original treatments. These songs hold their own against the originals, and that’s saying something! Sergio took on many of the heavyweights of his day, and most of the time he succeeded in producing a uniquely satisfying version of well known material. Superb original tracks by The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell and others were given the Sergio Mendes latin pop treatment and were much the better for it.

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Led Zeppelin / Coda – Our Shootout Winner from 2010

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock Hall of Fame and another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.

TWO GREAT SIDES and QUIET VINYL on this Swan Song pressing, one of the few good sounding copies we’ve ever played. We just sat down with the dozen-plus copies of Coda that made it through our preliminary round and only found a few that were worth writing home around. Most copies are too dry, grainy, and/or dull to get excited about, but this one is a MONSTER.

The best material on here — We’re Gonna Groove, Poor Tom, and the great live take of I Can’t Quit You Baby, just to name a few of our favorites — sounds darn good.

Of course, this probably isn’t — and shouldn’t be — anyone’s favorite Zep album. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. Drop the needle on the smoldering version of I Can’t Quit You Baby and I’m pretty sure you’ll be a happy man. (more…)

The Everly Brothers / Every Ten Years Like Clockwork

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More Sixties Pop Recordings

This listing was written in 2014. In 2024 we were able to do the shootout again. I don’t think we did one during the interlude.

This compilation contains some real Warners recordings (from after 1960, when they signed with the label) mixed with some re-recordings of their best classic Cadence material, to make an album with as many hits and great songs as a single album can hold.  

In stereo, on the original WB Gold Label, with really quiet vinyl — this is the one!

It took us about five years to find the records for this shootout. Not sure when the next one will be, but we’re pretty sure it won’t be any time soon.

Side Two

A++, lots of tubes in the 1964 mastering chain mean this one is likely to be rich and sweet, and sure enough it is. This is clearly the right sound for this music, although there is occasional evident smear and honk in the midrange. Great energy though.

Side One

A+ to A++. The sound varies quite a bit from track to track. Some songs are too thin and clean, others fare better with this EQ. Overall this side should sound good on tubier systems. Good energy and a solid bottom end are pluses here. (more…)