Month: April 2021

Bill Withers – Live at Carnegie Hall

More Bill Withers

  • KILLER Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on sides two and three and solid Double Plus (A++) sound on the other two sides
  • These sides are incredibly spacious, clear, rich and chock full of analog Tubey Magic – exactly the right sound for this surprisingly well recorded live album
  • 4 stars: “A wonderful live album that capitalizes on Withers’ trademark melancholy soul sound while expanding the music to fit the room granted by a live show… One of the best live releases from the ’70s.”

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John Lee Hooker – Endless Boogie

More John Lee Hooker

  • This original ABC pressing has Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on ALL FOUR SIDES! 
  • These sides are out of this world — rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical with a big punchy bottom end and lots of energy
  • “… the timeliness of Endless Boogie is an unmitigated plus, and producers Bill Szymczyk and Ed Michel get a relaxed groove out of a cast of supporting musicians who can boogie Canned Heat right out of the studio.” – Robert Christgau

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Canteloube / Songs Of The Auvergne Vol. 2 / De La Roche

This original Vanguard Black Label pressing (VSD-2132) has a side one that’s simply OUT OF THIS WORLD, A Triple Plus all the way.

Why such a high rating? Of all the copies we played, this side one was the perfect blend of Tubey Magical richness coupled with clarity and presence.

Miss Devrath is front and center, live in your living room, as natural a human voice as you will ever hear on record. Of the six sides of this music we are offering today, this was the only Triple Plus side. There is simply nothing to fault; side one on this copy sounds right in a way that no other side we played did. And some of the other sides were quite good; you wouldn’t think the sound was lacking in any way. But after playing this side one it’s clear what the best copies are really capable of — completely natural Demo Disc Sound.

I believe Volume One used to be on the TAS Superdisc List, and for a time the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue may have been as well. I remember playing the Classic years ago and thinking the sound was not bad, not as awful as most of their stuff, but still far from what it should be.

How anyone can take Classic Records seriously is beyond me, yet HP has many of their records on his Super Disc list and he is certainly not alone in praising their remastered pressings. In our opinion you should be able to hear what’s wrong with their records from another room, a test we would happily submit to.

That dark, hard, smeary, transient- and texture-free sound one hears on all their records is pretty obvious to those of us who listen to vintage vinyl all day. (Vintage vinyl has its own share of problems, just not those.) How the vast majority of audiophile reviewers can be fooled by such second-rate fare is frankly beyond understanding. (more…)

Every Label Made Bad Sounding Records – Reprise Released this Fleetwood Mac Album in 1969

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Fleetwood Mac

We’ve never heard this album sound good, on domestic or import vinyl. If you know of a good sounding pressing, drop us a line, would love to know what it is.

Some audiophile reviewers prefer to review only the records that sound good to them and ignore the rest. We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.

Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things. They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.

They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.

We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.

It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.

No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a small fraction of the records that we’ve played. We’ve been looking for the best sounding records for a very long time. Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.

That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.

Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

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Motley Crue – Theatre of Pain

  • A superb sounding copy with impressive Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish and the first to ever hit the site!  
  • Both sides here are clean, clear, full-bodied and present with tons of energy and a much nicer bottom end than most copies we played
  • “Mötley Crüe really began to hit their commercial stride with Theatre of Pain, which broke them on MTV with the power ballad “Home Sweet Home” and a remake of Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” – All Music

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The Cars in 1979: The Year in Music

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1979 Available Now

More of Our Favorite Rock, Pop, Soul, etc. Titles from 1979

We’re big fans of this album, and a Shootout Winning Hot Stamper copy like this one will show you exactly why. It’s a favorite recording of ours here at Better Records for one very simple reason: Candy-O has got The BIG ROCK SOUND we love!

Drop the needle on Let’s Go and check out the sound of the big floor tom. When the drummer bangs on that thing, you FEEL it! It’s similar to the effect of being in the room with live musicians — it’s the difference between hearing the music and feeling the music. That difference is what you get from our best Hot Stamper copies when you turn them up good and loud and let them ROCK your world.

A New Wave Classic

What other New Wave band ever recorded an album with this kind of demonstration quality sound? The sound of the best copies positively JUMPS out of the speakers. No album by Blondie, Television, The Pretenders or any of their contemporaries can begin to compete with this kind of huge, lively, powerful sound, with the possible exception of the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures.

It Rocks!

If you have big dynamic speakers and like to rock you cannot go wrong here. Neil Young albums have the Big Rock sound, and if you’re more of a Classic Rock kind of listener, that’s a good way to go. 

For a band with skinny ties, leather jackets, jangly guitars, synths and monstrously huge floor toms that fly back and forth across the soundstage, Candy-O is the girl for you, no doubt about it.

1979 – The Year in Music

1979 sure was an interesting year. The Wall, Breakfast in America, London Calling, Off the Wall, Get the Knack, Damn the Torpedoes, Armed Forces, Spirits Having Flown, Tusk, The B-52s, Rust Never Sleeps, Rickie Lee Jones, and our bad boy here, Candy-O — the variety is remarkable.

Even more remarkable is the number of albums recorded in ’79 that sound fresh and engaging to this day, more than 35 years after they were released. I could sit down in front of my speakers today and play any one of them all the way through.

Try that with your ten favorite albums from ’89, ’99 or ’09.

 

Charles Mingus – Three Or Four Shades Of Blues

  • An incredible sounding copy with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from the first note to the last
  • These sides are KILLER — clean, clear and full-bodied with a big bottom end and lots of space around all of the players
  • Robert Christgau called it the best composed bebop he’d heard in 1977; if you’re a bebop fan, we’re sure you’ll agree!

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Beethoven / Septet / Members of the Vienna Octet

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

  • With outstanding grades on both sides, the sound here is realistic and natural, if not DEMO DISC quality
  • Both sides are full, rich, spacious, big and present, with no smear and a healthy dose of Tubey Magic
  • At the right level, the level at which these instruments are heard in performance, the sound is perfection
  • We’ve been raving about this album forever, on Blueback and on UK Stereo Treasury – both can be superb

We normally do not put as much effort into finding top quality pressings of chamber music as we do for the large orchestral works favored by audiophiles (or at least the audiophiles who are willing to spend the money to buy our records), works such as Scheherazade and The Planets. However, if more of them sounded as good as this one we would be more than happy to do just that. (more…)

Nat King Cole – Welcome To The Club

More Nat “King” Cole

More Pop and Jazz Vocals

  • Nat King Cole’s wonderful 1959 release finally makes its Hot Stamper debut with outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides
  • The sound on this superb pressing is full-bodied and lively, with solid and present vocals, as well as excellent clarity all around
  • With Cole’s smooth vocals, superb arrangements by Dave Cavanaugh, and accompaniment by the legendary Count Basie Orchestra, this album is a sheer delight
  • 4 stars: “… one of Cole’s most powerful collections supported by a big band. In fact, it is Cole’s unmistakable ultra-cool intonations that flawlessly reign in the fiery… ensemble arrangements.”

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Bob Dylan Listening Test – Here’s One to Wet Your Whistle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Presenting today’s Home Audio Exercise. Play your copy of Nashville Skyline — on speakers, no fair cheating on headphones! — and see if you can answer this question. At the beginning of one of the songs on this album two sounds are heard, neither of which is produced by an instrument, but could be said to have been produced by a singer. What are these two mysterious sounds?  

If you have a good copy of the record, a good stereo and the ability to listen critically, you should have no problem figuring out what these sounds are. When you do, drop us an email. Until we come up with a better prize, for now we can offer you an extra 10% off your next order.

Have fun. Once you hear it you will be pretty amazed that you never noticed it before. We sure were.

What’s most striking about this album is the sound of Johnny Cash’s voice in the duet he sings with Bob (we’re on a first name basis, don’t you know). I can’t remember when’s the last time I heard Johnny Cash sound better.

The stuff he did for American Recordings had much to recommend it; the first album sounded especially good. It was practically Mono.

But you just can’t beat a well produced, well engineered Columbia from this era. There’s a richness and a naturalness to the sound that has almost completely disappeared from the modern world of music.

You really do have to go back to these old originals to find it. And then you have to find just the right old originals for it to be there.

Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way: