Month: November 2021

Today’s Cool Record Find from 1961 – Jack Sheldon And His All-Star Band

More Jazz Featuring the Trumpet

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  • With a Triple Plus (A+++) side two and a better than Double Plus (A++ to A+++) side one, here’s a copy that’s practically as good as it gets
  • This fun, lively, superbly well-recorded 1961 release is a real SLEEPER of Demo Disc Quality West Coast Jazz
  • Huge, spacious, clear, Tubey Magical, natural and above all REAL, this copy blew our minds when we stumbled on it in our shootout
  • 4 Stars: “High-quality and consistently swinging West Coast jazz … this was the initial album to gain wide recognition and helped to introduce the L.A.-based trumpeter’s talents to the East Coast.”

This is a wonderful example of the kind of record that makes record collecting FUN.

If you large group swinging West Coast Jazz is your thing — think Art Pepper Plus Eleven — you should get a big kick out of this one.
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Hall and Oates – Daryl Hall & John Oates

More Hall and Oates

  • Here the duo’s voices are rich, clear and present – they’re breathier and yet more natural, a combination that works wonders on this copy and is the main reason it won our shootout
  • Man, this is one tough nut to crack– gritty vocals, thin vocals, recessed vocals, smeary vocals — this music is all about the vocals and the vocals leave a lot to be desired on most of the copies we’ve played over the years
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… much of the album is lush and catchy, featuring ballads and midtempo numbers that are nearly as engaging as the duo’s breakthrough single, ‘Sara Smile.'”

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Haydn – 3 Quartets / The Janacek Quartet

More of the music of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Reviews and Commentaries for the music of Joseph Haydn

  • A wonderful album of chamber music with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Another one of those “sleeper” records we chance upon from time to time – it’s the very opposite of those echo-drenched recordings that some audiophiles like, with mics twenty feet away from the performers so that they are awash in “ambience.” Please.
  • If you’re looking for brilliantly performed quartet music recorded on an All Tube chain by the best engineers Decca had to offer (Gordon Parry in this case), hard to imagine you could do much better than this very disc

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George Shearing and the Montgomery Brothers – The Best Sounding George Shearing Record We’ve Ever Played

More Jazz Piano Recordings

More Wes Montgomery

  • This superb collabration makes its Hot Stamper debut here with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish on this early Jazzland stereo pressing
  • With a rich, lively, present piano, as well as dead-on timbral accuracy for everyone else, this is by far the best sounding George Shearing record we have ever played
  • “… features a rich blend of sound between piano, guitar and vibes all firmly supported by Monk Montgomery’s formidable bass work and Walter Perkins’ solid drumming.”
  • 4 stars: “Pianist George Shearing meets up with guitarist Wes, vibraphonist Buddy, and bassist Monk Montgomery on this enjoyable if slightly lightweight outing… some fine soloing by the principals.”

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Van Halen – Women And Children First

More Van Halen

Reviews and Commentaries for Van Halen

  • Full-bodied, smooth analog sound is the key to the best Van Halen pressings, and here both sides have it 
  • One of our favorite engineers, Donn Landee, worked his magic here (together with Ted Templeman) and the results are superb
  • 4 1/2 stars: “After two pure party albums, the inevitable had to happen: it was time for Van Halen to mature, or at least get a little serious … This is the first Van Halen album to consist entirely of original material and there’s some significant growth here to the writing…”

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Milt Jackson Quintet – That’s The Way It Is

More Milt Jackson

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

  • You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound and fairly quiet vinyl on both sides of this is a killer live jazz album from Shelly’s Manne-Hole
  • Big, rich and real, with the kind of relaxed Tubey Magical sound that not many live albums achieve
  • Wally Heider engineered and he knocked it out of the park – You Are There, and even better, it’s 1969
  • “This is not experimental jazz. It’s beyond that, or as they say in New York, outside that. This is solid, rooted, sweet-smelling earth of an enduring style, as played by masters.”

We dropped the needle on a copy of this record last year and could hardly believe how good it sounded. So rich, so tubey, so big and clear – this is one of the best Impulse records we have played in a very long time.

It’s clearly another “sleeper” discovered by your friends here at Better Records. Who else is finding vintage albums with this kind of sound and music? (more…)

David Lee Roth – Crazy From The Heat

More David Lee Roth

More Van Halen

  • David Lee Roth’s solo debut finally arrives on the site with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is rich, smooth, and full — you’ll have a hard time finding a better sounding pressing on the planet
  • 4 stars: “For his first solo effort, David Lee Roth strips away the gonzo guitars that are Van Halen’s trademark and accentuates his lounge-lizard-as-rock-star persona, resulting in an EP that succeeds because of that persona.”

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Bill Evans – Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. Many years ago we had played copies of the record and thought the sound was fine, shootout material in fact.

Flash forward to 2015 or 2016.  Now it sounds thin, flat and opaque.

Worse, it’s actually in mono.

On today’s modern stereos it leaves a lot to be desired, and for that reason we say skip it.

A stereo recording reissued in mono for no apparent reason?

What were they smoking over there at Milestone? 

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Lee Herschberg Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Lee Herschberg

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Lee Herschberg

More of Our Favorite Engineers

Lee Herschberg is one of our favorite producers and recording / mixing engineers. Click on the links above to find more of the albums he engineered or produced, along with plenty of our famous commentaries. 

One of the top guys at Warners, you’ll find his name in the credits for many of the best releases by the Randy Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, The Doobie Brothers, Ry Cooder and Frank Sinatra, albums we know to have outstanding sound (potentially anyway; you have to have an outstanding pressing to hear outstanding sound).

And of course we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the album most audiophiles know all too well, Rickie Lee Jones’ debut. Herschberg’s pop and rock engineering credits run for pages. He won the Grammy for Strangers in the Night.

The one album that gets my vote for Herschberg’s Pop Engineering Masterpiece would have to be Michael McDonald’s If That’s What It Takes. On the best copies the sound is out of this world.

The most amazing jazz piano trio recording we know of is Herschberg’s as well: The Three (with Shelly Manne, Ray Brown and Joe Sample).

It may not have the most natural sound — Shelly Manne’s arms stretch from one side of the room to the other — but it is explosively dynamic, capturing more of the energy of a live performance than practically any jazz record we’ve ever played.

The List to Date

Top Engineers – Alan Parsons 

Top Engineers – Alan Reeve 

Top Engineers – Allen Sides 

Top Engineers – Andy Johns 

Top Engineers – Armin Steiner 

Top Engineers – Arthur Lilley 

Top Engineers – Baker Bigsby 

Top Engineers – Bill Halverson 

Top Engineers – Bill Porter 

Top Engineers – Bill Price 

Top Engineers – Bill Schnee 

Top Engineers – Bill Szymczyk 

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Commoners Crown – A Must Hear Album of English Folk Rock

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

The list is purposely wide-ranging. It includes some famous titles (Tumbleweed Connection, The Yes Album), but for the most part I have gone out of way to choose titles from talented artists that are less well known (Atlantic Crossing, Kiln House, Dad Loves His Work), which simply means that you won’t find Every Picture Tells a Story or Rumours or Sweet Baby James on this list because masterpieces of that caliber should already be in your collection and don’t need me to recommend them.

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