Month: June 2020

Joan Armatrading – Self-Titled

TWO AMAZING SIDES! We’ve known for quite some time that this can be an amazing sounding record, but until this week we didn’t realize just how stunning the best copies can be! This one’s an absolute knockout — side one earned the high grade of A++ while side two is As Good As It Gets!

The average copy of this album has a tendency to sound a bit too hi-fi for our tastes. Most audiophiles love that kind of sound, but us analog freaks prefer richness and warmth over hyper-detailed, unnatural sound. That’s why most of the heavy vinyl stuff we play around here gets the hook after just moments. We just aren’t interested in records that sound like CDs.

Side one is incredibly airy, open, and transparent. Turn down the lights, drop the needle, and your speakers will practially disapper! The soundfield is spacious and three-dimensional. The top end is silky sweet, the bottom is rich and solid, and the acoustic guitar sounds JUST RIGHT. Listen to how full-bodied and present the vocals sound on Down To Zero — lovely!

Side two has AMAZING MASTER TAPE SOUND! It’s big and lively with unbelievable immediacy to the vocals. The acoustic guitar has just the right amount of pluck and twang. Most copies don’t have this degree of clarity and transparency. There’s lots of ambience and room around the drums that weren’t nearly as clear on other pressings. We gave this side our top grade of A+++.

Our Man Glyn Johns At The Helm

This album was produced and engineered by Glyn Johns and recorded at Olympic Studios in London. Glyn, of course, is one of our all-time favorite engineers. If you like the sound of Who’s Next, Let It Bleed, On The Border (my personal favorite Eagles album), Led Zeppelin’s debut, and Sticky Fingers, you have Glyn Johns to thank for that.

Young-Holt Unlimited – Oh Girl

This is a very nice looking Atlantic LP with AMAZING SOUND! The sound just JUMPS out of the speakers as soon as the needle hits the groove. If more records sounded like this I’d be out of a job — you wouldn’t need me to find good pressings for you. Records like this in my experience are the exception not the rule. Few of these have survived, so I have no other copies to compare to this one.

I can tell you this: the ‘4 Men With Beards’ 180g pressing is a pretty pale imitation of the sound on this album.

Perez Prado (and Better Records) Implore You to Turn Up the Volume

Another in the long list of recordings that sounds its best when you Turn Up Your Volume.

Tube smear is common to most pressings from the late ’50s, and this is no exception. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least amount of smear, or none, yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich. Full sound is especially critical to the horns: any blare, leanness or squawk ruins much of the fun, certainly at the loud levels the record should be playing at.

Which brings up a point that needs making. The tonality of this record is correct when it is playing loud. The trumpets do not get harsh at loud volumes the way they will on, say, a Chicago record. The timbre of the instruments is correct when loud, which means that it was mixed loud to sound correct when loud.

The frequency extremes (on the best copies) are not boosted in any way. When you play this record quietly, the bottom and top will disappear (due to the way the ear handles quieter sounds as described by the Fletcher-Munson curve).

Most records (like most audiophile stereos) are designed to sound correct at moderate levels. Not this album. It wants you to turn it up. Then, and only then, will everything sound completely right from top to bottom.

If you like the sound of percussion instruments of every possible flavor, including some you have never tasted before, you will have a hard time finding a more magical recording of them than this. (more…)

Dean Martin – Sleep Warm

  • Martin’s superb 1959 release makes its Hot Stamper debut here with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
  • Richer, warmer, more natural, more relaxed, this is what vintage analog is all about, that smooth, tonally correct sound that never calls attention to itself and never gives you the sense that someone tried to “fix” it
  • One of the man’s few recordings for Capitol with audiophile potential (and rare in unmarked condition) – it features arrangements by the great Pete King and an orchestra conducted by none other than Frank Sinatra
  • 4 stars: “Martin brought more attention to the sessions than usual, and the sympathetic string arrangements supported his romantic vocals, making this one of his best album releases.”

(more…)

801 Live – It’s All About the Bass (Except for that One Time When It Wasn’t)

Hot Stamper Pressings of 801 Live Available Now

This commentary was written in 2007 or thereabouts.

What’s especially interesting about this copy is that we went crazy for it even though it did not have the best bass of the copies we played, which, as you will see below, clearly contradicts what we had previously written. We thought that the copies with the best bass had the best everything else too, but that was not what we heard this time around.

THIS copy got the music to work its magic, and it did it with most, but not all, of the bass of the best. Not sure how to explain it. Rules were made to be broken maybe?  (more…)

Benny Goodman – Benny Goodman Combos

  • With a Triple Plus (A+++) shootout winning side two and a better than Double Plus (A++ to A+++) side one, this copy of Benny Goodman’s 1951 release is practically as good as it gets
  • Rich, smooth, tonally correct, spacious (for mono), this collection of older recordings was compiled and transferred with consummate skill, ensuring that the highest fidelity was maintained – this pressing sounds right
  • Lively performances from Goodman and his bandmates in their prime
  • “Within this collection, there is a continuing variation in instrumentation that changes the mood and approach with refreshing results… yet there is a truly marvelous similarity of thought and execution and a pleasingly lofty standard throughout.”

We’ve dropped the needle on a number of Goodman vintage mono records over the years but I don’t recall ever hearing one sound like this. Turn it up to hear Benny and his crew playing the hell out of this group of tunes.

On side two listen for the wonderful electric guitar tone, I think on the first track if my notes are correct. Great sound for this era. By the second track on side two the sound is clear and rich. (more…)

Muddy Waters – Vintage Vinyl Vs the Analogue Productions Remaster

More of the Music of Muddy Waters

One of our good customers has started a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out between two pressings of Folk Singer.

Muddy Waters’ FOLK SINGER: Analogue Productions Takes On the ’70’s Repress

I have never heard the AP pressing, and have no plans at this time to play one, mostly because not a single one that I have heard on my system was any better than passable.

You can read some of my reviews here: Analogue Productions

We Have to Pay $18 for Albums Like This Now?

More of the Music of The Talking Heads

UPDATE 2020

Our first shootout was in 2011. You will see below that we complain about copies of this record costing us all of $18.

They run us about four to five times that much now.

If you have a clean original MASTERDISK pressing that you want to sell, please contact us, we may want to buy it and we do we will happily pay you good money for it.

AMAZING SOUND ON BOTH SIDES of this White Hot Stamper LP. Side two rates A+++ and side one is not far behind at A++ – A+++. This copy murdered the typical pressings in an incredibly enjoyable shootout.We couldn’t believe how amazing this album can sound on a top copy. I’d even say that it’s a sonic step up from More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear Of Music and Remain In Light, probably tying with Little Creatures for top Talking Heads honors.

We’re huge Talking Heads fans at Better Records, but we’ve never tried to shoot out this album before this year because the copies we had played to this point were no great shakes. Regular copies of this album are now getting priced up to $17.99 at our local stores, so we just hadn’t bothered to pick up too many until we heard a surprisingly good copy earlier this year. We started stocking up on them and we ended needing a big stack, because only a few of them were able to show us what this album can really do.

This album, and specifically this Hot Stamper, has the energy and power of live rock and roll, no doubt about it. The sound here is so analog — warm, rich and smooth. This copy has the kind of fullness and life that are hard to come by for this music. Put this one up against your old copy and you’ll hear what I’m talking about.

Further Reading

Jellyfish’s Bellybutton – DMM Mastering and Small Sample Sizes

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Jellyfish

The problem with the typical copy of this record is gritty, grainy, grungy sound — not the kind that’s on the master tape, the kind that’s added during the mastering and pressing of the record. When that crap goes away, as it so clearly does on side one of the copy we played recently, it lets you see just how good sounding this record can be. And that means REALLY good sounding.

While during the shootout I had completely forgotten that all the domestic pressings of Bellybutton are direct metal mastered. (The import pressings are clearly made from copy tapes and are to be avoided.) It was only afterwards, when looking for stamper variations, that I noticed the DMM in the dead wax .

On most copies the CD-like opacity and grunge would naturally be attributed to the Direct Metal Mastering process; that’s the conventional wisdom, so those with a small data sample (in most cases the size of that data sample will be no more than one) could be forgiven for reaching such a conclusion. Based on our findings, it turns out to be completely erroneous.

The bad pressings do indeed sound more like CDs. The better pressings do not. All are DMM, so the conventional wisdom, a term of disparagement here at Better Records to start with, again shows how little probative value it actually brings to the discussion.

We would love to hear a version of the album that was not Direct Metal Mastered, just for comparisons sake. That unfortunately is an experiment that cannot be run. What we can do is play the CDs — I have several, the earliest ones being the best — and note that they are clearly grungier and grittier sounding than the better LP pressings. Some of that sound is on the Master Tape, how much we will probably never know.

Spilt Milk, their second album, is one of my top two or three personal favorites of all time, right up there with Ambrosia’s first and The White Album. (more…)