Month: September 2021
Billie Holiday – All Or Nothing At All
More Billie Holiday
More Titles that Sound Best in Mono
- This outstanding pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound on all four sides – reasonably quiet vinyl too
- This 2 LP set features most of the tracks from the original release plus another handful of recordings from the same period (1955-1956)
- It’s one of the better sounding Billie Holiday records we’ve heard, any guaranteed to beat any Heavy Vinyl reissue you’ve wasted your money on
- 4 1/2 stars: “… features some of Billie Holiday’s top Verve performances from the mid-’50s… she runs the emotional gamut from summery optimism to pathos-rich musings. Befitting her perennial after-hours mood, the majority of songs here feature Holiday in a low-down mood of the highest order.”
Naturally, the highest quality vocal reproduction has to be the main focus on a Hot Stamper pressing for any Billie Holiday record we would offer. Her voice should be rich and tubey, yet clear, breathy and present.
In addition to being tonally correct and natural, the pressings we offer must also be highly resolving. With the right room and the right equipment, properly setup and adjusted of course, you will hear everything that these vintage recordings have to offer, including the three-dimensional space of the studios in which the various sessions were recorded, under the auspices of Norman Granz.
The Sound of the Original
The original Trumpet Player Verve mono we had on hand to play suffered from an EQ problem we frequently run into during our shootouts for vintage vocal albums. Actually, to be clear, there were two main problems in the case of All or Nothing At All: a boosted midrange and occasional quite serious sibilance issues.
Ella Fitzgerald’s albums can suffer from these same two problems. It’s a trick to find the copies that are tonally correct in the midrange and do not have the kind of cutter head distortions that result in excessive sibilance. (more…)
Turntable Tweaking Works Its Magic Once Again – “I’m sitting in shock!”
More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters
Hi Tom,
Just wanted to give you a big thank you for the commentary on turntable tweaking. I constantly learn important advice on the audiophile subject from your website. I check it everyday.
Lately I have been thinking my audio sound was lacking. It didn’t sound as good as I remember it. After reading the turntable tweaking advice, I reset up the tonearm. VTF, VTA, and azimuth.
I have “magic” in my sound now.
Listened to some Neil Young, [Ten Years After] A Space in Time. Very Tubey.
Listened to my Miles Davis Kind of Blue. It sounded better than I ever heard it. I’m sitting in shock!
The killer was Chicago 2. I love 25-6-to 4 so I was blown away and normally I’m not interested in the rest of that side of the album but I sat through the rest of it and was enthralled by the vocals. Memories of Love is one track I was never interested in but it sounded so good I loved it.
When you want to listen to every record in your collection, you know you’ve done something right.
Anyway I want you to know we audiophiles appreciate the time you take to put up your advice and commentaries. I just got a huge upgrade and it didn’t cost me a cent. Only some time and I learned a little more.
Thanks a bunch,
Steve E.
Steve,
You are more than welcome!
Thanks for writing,
TP
The Young Rascals – Groovin’
More Breakthrough Pressing Discoveries
- Both sides of this Blue and Green Atlantic stereo pressing are rich and smooth, with vocal presence that will bring the Young Rascals’ pop music to life in your very own listening
- We stumbled upon the right stampers a few years back purely by chance,
- Which of course is the only way to do it, as Peter Lynch well knows
- The right original label is far more likely to have bad sound than good, and the later labels are uniformly awful
- Good luck finding a quiet copy with good sound – we gave up!
Atlantic pressings are all over the map. When you find a good one, you can be pretty sure it’s the exception, not the rule. That’s been our experience anyway. (more…)
Another Bad Sounding Chet Baker Reissue – OJC 303
Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now
It Could Happen to You badly needed to be mastered with some tubes in the chain, but that didn’t happen. We’ve written a fair amount on that subject, and you can find more here.
It’s another case of an OJC with zero tubey magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. Maybe even better!
I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp (like the Mac 30 you see below), you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?
The OJC pressing of this album is obviously better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems of today.
These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).
For a more complete list of those records, click here.
We Knew This Was a Good Record in the ’80s, We Just Didn’t Know How Good
More of the Music of Chet Baker
This is a wonderful Chet Baker record that doesn’t seem to be getting the respect it deserves in the wider jazz world. You may just like it every bit as much as the Chet Baker “Chet” album, and that is one helluva record to compare any album to. In our estimation it is about as good as it gets in most respects.
Both sides of the best copy in our last shootout were Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’d never heard the record sound better, and we’d been playing the album since it was first reissued in the ’80s.
I used to sell these very records in the ’90s — we retailed them for ten bucks, if you can believe it — but we had no clue just how good they could sound back then.
We couldn’t clean them right, or even play them right, and it would never have occurred to us to listen to a big pile of them one after another in order to pick out the best sounding copies.
Based on what I’m hearing my feeling is that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the master tape, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound correctly on to disc was simply to thread up that tape on a reasonably good machine and hit play.
The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record — certainly not as good sounding as this one — these days tells me that in fact I’m wrong to think that such an approach would work. Somebody should have been able to figure out how to do it by now. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years.
George Horn was doing brilliant work for Fantasy all through the ’80s. This album is proof that his sound is the right sound for this music. (more…)
The Grand Wazoo – Smear, Sibilance and Tubey Magical Keyboards to Die For
More of the Music of Frank Zappa
The Tubey Magic found on the title cut is really something to hear.
The Grand Wazoo now gets my vote as the best sounding record Zappa ever made (along with Absolutely Free).
Biggest Problems
Smear on the horn transients are always a problem on this album (and Zappa’s previous big band album, Waka/Jawaka) .
After that we would say a lack of top end is the other most common shortcoming we hear. To find a copy that’s not dull and smeary is no mean feat.
The vocals on For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers) are usually slightly spitty. The best copies keep the spit under control. (more…)
The Mahavishnu Orchestra – The Inner Mounting Flame
More Mahavishnu Orchestra
More 5 Star Albums
- A KILLER copy with Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sound from the first note to the last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- The band’s debut is a true Jazz/Rock Fusion Demo Disc with the Big Sound we love here at Better Records
- This album was recorded in 1971, only a year after Bitches Brew single-handedly created the genre of Jazz Fusion itself
- 5 Stars “…a furious, high-energy, yet rigorously conceived meeting of virtuosos that, for all intents and purposes, defined the fusion of jazz and rock…”
This is the first album by the band, recorded only a year after Bitches Brew single-handedly created the genre of Jazz Fusion itself. Or is it better described as an album of Prog Rock without the vocals? Remember, King Crimson had a violinist and not a whole lot of singing too.
Whatever it is, mostly what this music wants to do is rock. And on this copy it rocks like you will not believe. The louder you play it the better it sounds.
The best copies had huge amounts of bottom end weight as well as rich, Tubey Magical grungy guitar tone. Once you’ve heard it sound that way, on the copies without both you’ll notice that the sound falls flat pretty quickly.
It’s hard to think of another record that rocks as hard, and it’s not even a real rock record! We find ourselves playing albums like Zep II and Back in Black for hour after hour, with dozens of copies to get through, and we do it on a regular basis. If anybody knows Big Rock Sound, it’s us. But can we really say that those albums rock any harder than this one (more…)
Jim Reeves – The Intimate Jim Reeves
More Recordings by Bill Porter
More Living Stereo Titles Available Now
Yet Another Record We’ve Discovered with (Potentially) Excellent Sound…
and One We Will Probably Never Shootout Again
Some records never justified the time and money required to find Hot Stamper pressings of them in order to make it worth our while to give them a second go around. This is one such album, and the link above will take you to many more.
For us audiophiles both the sound and the music found here are enchanting. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1963 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy may be just the record for you.
All the copies we played were stereo. We’ve had very poor luck with mono pressings of Living Stereo recordings and tend to avoid them.
Produced by Chet Atkins in Nashville, 1960, with Bill Porter engineering, this is superb countrypolitan pop by the man who practically invented it.
Jim Reeves is lucky to have had the Bill Porter and his staff of RCA engineers from the era on his team. Although we love to do these vintage Hot Stamper shootouts, finding clean copies of these albums is getting harder every day.
Sade – Promise
More Sade
More Titles Only Offered on Import LP
- Sade’s Best Album returns with stunning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Both sides of this UK disc are guaranteed to be amazing sounding compared to whatever you’ve heard
- There’s no denying the power of Sade’s sultry voice when you can actually hear it – she is on fire on this album
- Her best song is on side one here – Is It a Crime – and the big band arrangement will surely send chills up and down your spine, especially with Triple Plus sound quality
Not many copies manage to have this kind of consistently sweet sound across both sides. Here are the kind of present, breathy vocals this music absolutely requires to work its magic.
If you know this album at all, you know that most pressings are just too damn dark sounding. Sade herself is typically recessed in the mix and veiled; it takes an exceptional copy such as this one to make her voice both present and breathy. (more…)