Month: October 2021

The Vaughan Brothers – Family Style

More Stevie Ray Vaughan

More Electric Blues

  • This pressing of Jimmie and Stevie Ray’s 1990 release has superb Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Space, clarity, transparency, and in-the-room immediacy were off the charts on this pressing – it beat every copy we had hands down
  • “Jimmie makes his vocal debut on ‘White Boots’ and ‘Good Texan,’ and the brothers blur the lines between their expected guitar styles — Stevie sometimes going for a less sustainy twang, Jimmie moving into Albert King territory.”

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Ella Fitzgerald / Like Someone In Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now

Ella Fitzgerald Albums We’ve Reviewed

  • With two Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this stereo pressing simply could not be beat
  • Ella’s voice is noticeably breathier, fuller, more relaxed and more musical here than it is on the other copies we played
  • An album that is beyond difficult to find with decent surfaces and undamaged inner grooves – most copies we get in are just trashed
  • “Most of the songs are veteran standards, Stan Getz’s warm tenor helps out on four tunes, and her voice was so strong and appealing during this era that all of her recordings from the mid- to late ’50s are enjoyable and easily recommended.”

Take it from an Ella fan, you can’t go wrong with this one, assuming you can put up with some ticky vinyl. This is about as quiet as we can find them. Like Someone in Love is five times rarer than Clap Hands, and twice as likely to be noisy.

The sound is rich and full-bodied in the best tradition of a classic vintage jazz vocal album. You could easily demonstrate your stereo with a record this good, but what you would really be demonstrating is music that the listener probably hasn’t heard, and that’s the best reason to demonstrate a stereo!

The space is huge and the sound so rich. The vocals have dramatically less hardness and the orchestra — especially on side two — is not brash for once.

Prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic as well, which is key to the best sounding copies. The sound needs weight, warmth and tubes or you might as well be playing a CD. (more…)

Tony Bennett – I’ve Gotta Be Me

More of the Music of Tony Bennett

More Vintage Columbia Hot Stamper Pressings

  • This vintage Columbia 360 label pressing gives Tony the sound he deserves, with Double Plus (A++) grades on both of these early stereo sides
  • Brilliant engineering by Frank Laico, the man who recorded I Left My Heart In San Francisco and Sketches of Spain, among others
  • Tony Bennett was in fine form and still able to sing the hell out of these songs in 1969 – when you hear the quality of his voice on this very album you will perhaps appreciate the toll this century has taken on him
  • Vintage record guys with top quality turntables – like us – get to hear Tony the way he should be heard, with his voice at the peak of its powers

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We Get Letters – “Have never seen such ridiculous pricing…!!”

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

Click here to see more letters from fans and detractors alike.

This one comes from a fellow who, judging by the number of exclamation marks he saw fit to use, seems more than a little upset with us.

WHERE DO YOU GET THESE PRICES.!!!!!!!! Talk about overcharging customers…..
I’ve been collecting vinyl for over 35 years… Have Never seen such ridiculous pricing…!!
Even from Elusive Disc.!!!
What a joke.!!!!

Yes, we readily admit it, we are quite a bit more expensive than Elusive Disc.

But their records don’t sound good.

Shouldn’t that count for something?

To be fair, some of them might, but nobody that works there could tell you which ones do and which ones don’t, not even if you put a gun to their head.

If you would like to write us a letter, about our pricing or anything else, you may use as many exclamation marks as you deem sufficient to express the outrage you’re feeling. The more the merrier! (We’ll just go with one here.)

People ask us: How can your records possibly be worth these prices?, and we think we have a good answer.

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Milt Jackson with Oscar Peterson – Ain’t But a Few of Us Left

More Milt Jackson

A Top Pablo Recording

  • An outstanding Pablo pressing, boasting Double Plus (A++) sound throughout and playing about as quietly as these LPs ever do
  • Both sides here are rich and full-bodied with tons of energy and a nice extended top end – this is the sound of ANALOG, and Pablo knew how to get it on tape and from there on to vinyl
  • “The music is unsurprising but still quite enjoyable and virtuosic as Bags and Co. perform blues, standards and ballads with their usual swing and bop-based creativity. Highlights include the title cut, “Stuffy,” “What Am I Here For” and a vibes-piano duo version of “A Time for Love.”” – 4 Stars

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Roy Orbison – The All-Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison

More Roy Orbison

Reviews and Commentaries for Roy Orbison

  • You’ve never heard Roy Orbison sound better than he does here
  • Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead on correct tonality – everything that we listen for in a great record is here
  • The phenomenally talented Bill Porter recorded many of Orbison’s classic songs from the early ’60s that are found on this compilation
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… no one conveys pain and longing more sublimely or succinctly than Roy Orbison. But his songs are also masterpieces of production: so technically precise that his deceptively simple tunes and lush melodies flow even more smoothly behind his desperate baritone croon and quivering falsetto.”

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Overtures and Intermezzos – Solti

More Living Stereo Pressings

  • Off the charts “Triple Triple” (A+++) sound for this classic Decca engineered “Living Stereo” Victrola from 1965 – both sides of this pressing of VICS 1119 earned our top grade of A+++
  • Listen to how rich the cellos sound — this is Tubey Magical Analog and its most luscious and enchanting.
  • You could easily play one hundred classical albums and not hear this kind of sound!
  • If you have the real Living Stereo pressing (with the cool die-cut cover), let us send you this pressing to compare — who knows, you might like it even better than your Shaded Dog
  • Classic Records did this title back in the 90s, and it was one of the worst of their sorry releases

This 1959 Decca recording is overflowing with the kind of rich, spacious, Tubey Magical sound that can only be found on vintage vinyl.

On this copy you will find As Good As It Gets sound. It’s so BIG and RICH you will have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1965, but that’s precisely what it is.

Ah but it’s a reissue from back in the day when they knew how to cut a record properly, regardless of its retail price.

The rich, textured, rosin-on-the-bow lower strings on this record are to die for. Find me a modern record that sounds like this and I will eat it.

And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. NO ONE alive today can make a record that sound even remotely as good as this. To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: they can’t begin to compete.

After twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples the engineers of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful and life-like as this London from almost fifty years ago.

Fortunately for the both of us we are not trying to make a record that sounds the way this one does. We’re just trying to find one, and folks, we found the hell out of this one. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “It is a raucous chaos of undigestible noise.”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

Reviews and Commentaries for Some Girls

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased a while back:

  Hey Tom, 

I have recently purchased from you great copies of Aftermath, Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers, so I think is have some idea of how Stones records should sound when they are great. This copy of SOME GIRLS is virtually unlistenable. It is harsh, hard-sound, unmusical. It is a raucous chaos of undigestible noise. I don’t know if you personally play graded it, but someone in your group seriously missed the boat. I am returning it. 

Dear Sir,

I played that Triple Plus Shootout Winning copy myself. I like to think I know the album well, and I had never heard it sound so good in my life. It was really quite shocking to hear it sound open and free from distortion, literally for the first time. Obviously we were hearing it differently.

But it is a very different recording from the three Stones albums you mention.

This entry from Wikipedia may be helpful for those trying to better understand the sound that Chris Kimsey and the Stones wanted this time around.

Writing and Recording Some Girls

Especially this part:

Kimsey’s direct method of recording, together with the entrance of the then state-of-the-art Mesa/Boogie Mark I amps instead of the Ampeg SVT line of amps, yielded a bright, direct and aggressive guitar sound.

The record is supposed to sound the way our copy sounded — when played back on our system anyway. I can’t know what it sounds like on yours. (Which is why it’s never a problem to get a refund any time you have an issue with one of our records.)

How do we know what Some Girls is supposed to sound like? The most obvious answer is that we’ve played them by the score, probably a hundred copies or more by now. We’ve learned to recognize what the best copies do well that the average ones do not do as well. (more…)

The Tommy Flanagan Trio – On Moodsville

More Piano Jazz

  • Rich, natural, transparent, spacious and musical throughout – you won’t believe how good this Mellow Jazz Classic from 1960 sounds
  • “Rudy van Gelder captured the exquisite sound in his usual manner by setting up a couple of high-fidelity microphones and letting the players and room speak for themselves. If I close my eyes, I’m in the Village Vanguard listening to him live.”
  • “With bassist Tommy Potter and drummer Roy Haynes giving the pianist fine support, the trio plays such songs as “You Go to My Head,” “Come Sunday” and “Born to Be Blue” quietly and with taste.”

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The Ramsey Lewis Trio – More Music From The Soil

More Ramsey Lewis

Yet Another Record We’ve Discovered with (Potentially) Excellent Sound

  • More Music From The Soil makes its Hot Stamper debut with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to last on this early Argo stereo LP
  • This pressing stood head and shoulders above the pack, with the kind of big, present, full-bodied sound this top piano trio demands (which is precisely where the Modern Heavy Vinyl reissue fails so spectacularly, most notably in the areas of size and presence)
  • Hard to imagine we could find another copy with sound this good and vinyl this quiet – not many Ramsey Lewis records from this era did survived with audiophile quality playing surfaces the way this one did
  • “This is a typically enjoyable and accessible early Ramsey Lewis Trio recording. The pianist, bassist Eldee Young, and drummer Red Holt swing their way through…”

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