Month: July 2020

Record Cleaning Tips – Reverse Osmosis Rinse Water

Record Cleaning – An Overview

We’ve had very good results with reverse osmosis water for rinsing.

It is audibly superior to everything else we’ve tried.

We’re not saying it’s the best rinse water on the planet; we’re simply saying it’s the best we’ve heard. For a couple hundred bucks, having a reverse osmosis water system installed in your house will turn out to be money well spent if you are cleaning a large collection.

Aquarium stores sell it by the gallon if you don’t plan on cleaning enough records to justify the expense of installing a unit.

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Roberta Flack – First Take

  • Roberta Flack’s stunning debut album finally arrives on the site with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish 
  • The sound here is richer, fuller, more musical and more natural – Flack’s breathy voice is reproduced with a solidity and immediacy that’s not easy to find on vinyl
  • 5 stars: “Roberta Flack’s debut album, titled First Take in true underachiever fashion, introduced a singer who’d assimilated the powerful interpretive talents of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan, the earthy power of Aretha Franklin, and the crystal purity and emotional resonance of folksingers like Judy Collins… one of the most fascinating soul debuts of the era.”

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Letter of the Week – “Closed, muffled and flat as a pancake.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

Our good customer Bennett bought very expensive, top quality pressings of two killer Miles Davis albums from us recently.

His letter reads:

Hi Tom,

Last night I listened to my 2015 Mobile Fidelity 45 RPM pressing.

I couldn’t get through the first cut.

Closed, muffled and flat as a pancake. No life or energy whatsoever.

Bennett,

Agreed on all counts. My notes for their pressing read:

  • Thick, dark, flat.
  • Lacks air, space, presence.
  • Not a bad sound but it’s not right.

Thanks for  your letter,

Tom

PS

Having listened to the record more extensively, I see now I was being much too kind.

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Lowell Frank Is The Man

Credit engineer Lowell Frank for correctly capturing the sound of every instrument here: the guitars, piano, strings, drums, percussion instruments — everything has the natural timbre of the real thing.

One of the best sounding Frank Sinatra records is his as well: September Of My Years, from 1965, also on Reprise and only good on the original label and only good in stereo, like this title.

There must be plenty of Tubey Magic on the tapes. It’s key to the best pressings. Without it, you might as well be playing a CD.

And let’s not forget the amazing (when you find a good one) Sinatra At The Sands, a record that blew my mind the first time I heard it back in the early 70s.

Side One

Moonlight Becomes You
Moon Song
Moonlight Serenade
Reaching For The Moon
I Wished On The Moon

Side Two

Oh, You Crazy Moon
The Moon Got In My Eyes
Moonlight Mood
Moon Love
The Moon Was Yellow (And The Night Was Young)

AMG  Review

Driven by a set of lush, sparkling Nelson Riddle arrangements, Moonlight Sinatra is a low-key, charming collection. Although the basic concept is somewhat nebulous — all of the songs have the word “moon” in the title — Riddle wrote a series of charts that suggest a warm, lovely evening with a variety of tones and moods, from light Latin rhythms to sweet ballads… An enjoyable, romantic listen.

Sarah Vaughan – Live In Japan

  • With two shootout winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides and two superb Double Plus (A++) sides, this is a phenomenal copy of Live in Japan
  • This album captures Vaughan’s rich, playful style and transfixing vocal range like you’ve never heard before
  • Full, big, present, and open, this album will recreate the sound of the concert hall right in your very own listening room
  • 5 stars: “This two-fer (which finds Sassy accompanied by pianist Carl Schroeder, bassist John Gianelli, and drummer Jimmy Cobb) gives one a definitive look at the brilliant (and sometimes miraculous) singer.”

You may remember that Mobile Fidelity remastered this very album on CD, one of their very first releases, long before they came up with the idea of gold plating their discs and doubling the price. Some of those early discs were outstanding; I still own many of them to this day. That said, I don’t think I ever played this particular title. (more…)

A Little Soft Rock Never Hurt Anybody, Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

I’m glad to say I’m not the kind of audiophile snob who looks down his nose at a good soft rock hit.

I may be a snob in other ways of course; who isn’t?

I don’t mind admitting I enjoy the hell out a good Hall & Oates jam, and I positively love Bread.

Ambrosia can and does hold their own with the best of these soft-rockers. And they usually sound better doing it.

One Eighty (recorded on 1/80, get it?) kicks off with a real rocker: Ready, which is a great name for an opening track and really gets the album off to a high-energy start.

Side two opens with my favorite track on the album, Livin’ On My Own. I actually used to demonstrate my system with it: the bass is huge, way up in the mix and really punchy.

Additionally there are powerful multi-tracked vocal harmonies in the chorus that are wall-to-wall, surprisingly dynamic, yet breathy and sweet.

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Albeniz / Iberia from 1960 – Amazing on the Original and the Right Reissues Too

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More of the music of Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909)

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from May of 1960 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall.

It’s yet another remarkable Demo Disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the added benefit of mastering using the more modern cutting equipment of the ’70s. (We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of 30+ years ago, not the bad modern mastering of today.)

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these better than Super Hot sides.

The sound of this copy is so transparent, undistorted, three-dimensional and REAL, without any sacrifice in solidity, richness or Tubey Magic, that we knew we had a real winner on our hands as soon as the needle hit the groove.

We were impressed with the fact that it excelled in so many areas of reproduction. The illusion of disappearing speakers is one of the more attractive aspects of the sound here, pulling the listener into the space of the concert hall in an especially engrossing way.

Side One – Iberia (1-4)

A huge hall, correct string tone, spacious and open as practically any orchestral recording you can find! (more…)

Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra – Viva Cugat

This crazy Cugat record (is there any other kind?) is a BALL and has absolutely amazing Demo Disc quality sound on side two, better than Super Hot Stamper quality. 

It sounds like Henry Mancini on speed, and the recording quality puts most of Mancini’s records to shame to boot. This is Bachelor Pad music for those who like their Bachelor Pad to be FUN!

Side Two

With A++ to A+++ sound this side is pretty much doing it all. So spacious! And such tremendous low and high frequency extension, the kind that vintage records usually have trouble with. Not this copy. The strings and horns can get slightly aggressive

Make sure you have your VTA set dead right or this record will be a mess. Careful adjustment is critical to reproduce this kind of complex and lively sound. (more…)

Johnny Mathis – Johnny’s Newest Hits

  • This early Columbia 360 pressing of Johnny’s Newest Hits (hey, they were new in 1963!) boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The best copies demonstrate the big-as-life early Columbia Sound at its best – full-bodied and warm yet clear, lively and dynamic
  • Both sides here are clean and present with wonderfully full strings and rich vocals
  • “…a collection of his ‘latest hits, the ones that brought him back to the singles charts.'”

Finding clean Johnny Mathis records from 50+ years ago, on Columbia, in stereo, is no easy task, which is why you see so few come to the site. We would be hard pressed to find one good title to shootout in a given year — there are simply too few original pressings that have survived the turntables of the day.

One tip we can offer any Mathis fans who may be out there: stick to the Columbia era if you want audiophile sound. His Mercury recordings, at least the half-dozen or so we’ve played, were godawful sounding. (more…)

Rhapsody! – The Story of an Old Fave We Were Wrong About

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

A great example of an album We Was Wrong about.

As you can see by the commentary below, I used to think this was a wonderful sounding London “Sleeper” classical recording.

That was many years ago – five, six, seven, I cannot be sure. I ended up acquiring a half dozen copies of the album or so over the course of those years, had them cleaned up and proceeded to do a shootout.

It did not go well. Immediately I noticed that the pressings I was playing were sounding clean, clear and lively, but much too modern, too much like a good CD and not enough like the good Golden Age classical recordings we audition regularly.

Those recordings, on the right pressings, will take your breath away.  Rhapsody! was leaving me asking myself what was wrong. The more I listened the more obvious the faults of the recording became.

The pressings I played lacked warmth, richness, sweetness, space, and a number of other analog qualities I won’t belabor here. Too much of what makes listening to vintage vinyl so involving was just not on these records no matter how much I may have wanted them to be.

The extreme top and bottom were also lacking, giving the sound a “boxy” quality. The presentation was wide but not tall. Of the five levels of sound we discuss on the site in various listings, levels one and five were not as evident as they should have been.

This is, again, what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, some records should get better, some should get worse. It’s the nature of the beast for those of us who constantly make improvements to our playback and critically listen to records all day.

We cannot rely on our previous judgments. With all the changes we’ve made over the years, we can now clean our records better and play our records better than ever before.

That means that some will rise and some will fall. This one fell, pretty hard in fact. Not a bad record, but not a good one either, and far from as good as I once thought.

Below is our previous commentary.  All of this was true for my old stereo and room, my critical listening skills at the time, my old cleaning regimen. And by old I mean my approach from only about five or six years ago!

Things have changed, dramatically, and nothing in all of audio could make me happier.

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is one of the greatest SLEEPER albums of all time.

This London reissue from 1979 of recordings from 1978 in Detroit, the year in which Dorati became director of the Detroit Symphony has the kind of orchestral sound we drool over here at Better Records. Dark and rich strings — the basses growl just like the real thing. Dynamic. Deep solid bass. Fluffy tape hiss, which sounds exactly the way it should. This tells you that the top end is untweaked. (Almost all Classic Records have funny sounding tape hiss as you may or may not know. It”s a dead give away that the top end is boosted. Tape hiss is like pink noise: it always sounds the same, unless somebody has fooled with it. Steve Hoffman taught me to listen for this quality and it was a lesson important to my growth as a critical listener.) (more…)