Month: November 2021

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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Leon Russell and the Shelter People – His Best Sounding Album?

More Leon Russell

More of Our Favorite Artists’ Best Sounding Albums 

Some records, like this one, are just too noisy for us to find

  • You’ll find excellent Double Plus (A++) from first note to last on this original British pressing 
  • Engineered by Andy and Glyn Johns, this is his best sounding album, especially on a copy that sounds as good as this one does
  • No other Leon Russell album has the richness, the sweetness, and the Tubey Magic of this, his second album from 1971
  • “Russell practically invented what might as well be called Okie rock — with that shit-kicker Gospel sound, heavy on Baptist-revival piano and chorus [a template Elton John found more than a little useful for his first ten albums or so] – and it gets as good on this album as you’ll ever hear.”

Stranger in a Strange Land, which leads off side one, might just be the best song the man ever wrote. What a joy it is to hear it sound so big and powerful.

Domestic Vs. Import

The domestic pressings of Leon Russell and the Shelter People that we’d auditioned over the years always seemed flat, dry, and closed-in. We know that sound well; it’s the sound you hear on records that have been made from dubbed tapes (and it’s the hallmark of the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue, truth be told). It bores us to tears, and had us questioning what we could possibly have seen in the album in the first place. What happened to the glorious sound of early ’70s analog we were expecting to find? (more…)

Jimmy Dean – Everybody’s Favorite

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

and a Record We Will Probably Never Shootout Again

Here is the kind of Tubey Magical richness records routinely offered in 1963. Don Law produced Everybody’s Favorite down in Nashville so it’s the real deal all right. If you liked our killer Marty Robbins’ Hot Stampers you most likely will get a big kick out of this one too. A forgotten sound? Not at Better Records it isn’t.

If you need a refresher course in Tubey Magic after playing too many modern recordings or remasterings, we have just the ticket. 

Our first Hot Stamper listing for Jimmy Dean, and it’s an exceptionally good one indeed. The material is of consistently high quality, the superbly talented Jordanaires are here on backup vocals (click on the tab above), with Don Law, one of the greatest country producers of all time (again with the tab) in charge of the whole affair.

If you hear the Tubey Magical sound of the best Marty Robbins recordings, it’s not an accident. If you don’t know that sound, you are missing out!

Side One

Rich, full-bodied, tubey vocals and plenty of sweet, natural reverb in a huge space make this side a Demo Disc for this style of music.

Side Two

Very nearly as good, the Tubey Magic on this side is nearly off the charts. Jimmy is so clear and present and natural and real on the first track it may make you despair at the loss of this kind of recording quality.

Glen Campbell – By The Time I Get To Phoenix

More Glen Campbell

  • This stereo pressing is relaxed, full-bodied and high-rez, not to mention uncannily present – it’s an outstanding pressing of a surprisingly good recording
  • Most of Glen’s records from mid-’60s make him sound like he’s singing through an AM radio, so when we finally heard some good stampers on this title, we could hardly believe it
  • 4 stars: “Glen Campbell’s commercial breakthrough came by way of the title track, which was the direct precursor in production terms to “Wichita Lineman,” and by the same writer.”

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John Lennon & Yoko Ono – Milk and Honey

More John Lennon

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles Available Now

  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness and presence on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • Milk and Honey is certainly not the greatest album John (and Yoko) recorded… but it is vital if only for completing the musical story of John Lennon… [it] finds Lennon in a happy state of mind, which is not a bad way to end a story at all.” – Pop Matters

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Bach / Organ Music – Karl Richter

More of the music of J.S. Bach (1685-1750)

Hot Stamper Decca and London Pressings Available Now

  • Some audiophiles buy organ records to show off their subwoofers, and records like this can do that, but records this good have musical qualities far beyond simple demonstrations of bass reproduction – with this pressing you can feel the cool air in the hall!
  • With this pressing you can feel the cool air in the hall, something no Telarc or audiophile organ record can offer in our experience
  • We’ve played plenty of them, and it is our opinion that the more modern the recording, the worse it sounds, especially if it’s on an audiophile label — those are the worst!
  • Karl Richter understands this music and makes it come alive in a way I’ve never heard any other musician manage to do – the Decca engineers are of course a big help too

For those of you who think technology marches on — which of course it does in some ways — this 1956 recording (finally released in stereo in 1960) shows that they could capture the authentic sound of the real instrument with the equipment of the day. Maybe they could even capture it better back in those days. I certainly can’t think of a better organ record than this, and musically I don’t think there are too many organists in Richter’s class. (more…)

The Fox Touch Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

The review reproduced below was written in 2010. More recently (2015 or so) I have played copies of these Crystal Clear organ recordings and been much less impressed.

The ambience is a fraction of what it should be, and the reason I know that is that the vintage organ recordings we play these days have dramatically more size and space than these audiophile pressings do. (We wrote about it here.)

A classic case of live and learn.

As we like to say, all these audiophile records sound great sitting on the shelf. When you finally pull one out to play it, you may find that it doesn’t sound the nearly as good as you remember, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a sign you are making progress in this hobby.

Ten years from now, if during that time you’ve worked hard on your stereo system, room, electricity and all the rest, your Heavy Vinyl pressings will also have plenty of flaws you never knew were there.

Our customers know what I am talking about. Some have even written us letters about it.

Linked here are some other records that are good for testing orchestral depth, size and space.

Our old review — way off the mark it seems!

White Hot on both sides, a DEMO DISC quality organ Direct to Disc recording.

Full, rich, spacious, big and transparent, with no smear.

The size and power of a huge church organ captured in glorious direct to disc analog.

We’ve never been fans of Crystal Clear, but even we must admit this recording is Hard To Fault.

Are we changing our tune about Audiophile records? Not in the least; we love the ones that sound right.

The fact that so few of them do is not our fault. 

The methods used to make a given record are of no interest whatsoever to us. We clean and play the pressings that we have on hand and judge the sound and music according to a single standard that we set for all such recordings. Organ records, in this case, get judged against other organ records. If you’ve been an audiophile for forty years as I have, you’ve heard plenty of organ records.

Practically every audiophile label on the planet produced at least one, and most made more than one. Some of the major labels made them by the dozen in the ’50s and ’60s, and many of those can sound quite wonderful.

Who made this one, how they made it or why they made it the way they did is none of our concern, nor in our mind should it be of any concern to you. The music, the sound and the surfaces are what are important in a record, nothing else.

Richter was making recordings of this caliber for London in the ’50s. Clearly the direct to disc process is not revelatory when it comes to organ records (or any other records for that matter), but finding vintage Londons with quiet vinyl that sound as good as this disc does is neither easy nor cheap these days, so we are happy to offer our Bach loving customers a chance to hear these classic works sounding as good as they can outside of a church or concert hall.

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The Grateful Dead – Aoxomoxoa

More Grateful Dead

  • This original Green Label Warner Brothers LP has STUNNING Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • These sides were doing everything right — big, full-bodied and present with tons of energy and a nice extended top end
  • “When the LP hit the racks in the early summer of 1969, Deadheads were greeted by some of the freshest and most innovative sounds to develop from the thriving Bay Area music scene.” – All Music 

NOTE: This is the later remixed version from 1971. We found it far better sounding than the original 1969 mix. If you’re interested in the original mix, we have some of those copies with lower grades but if you want the best sound, this copy is definitely the way to go. (more…)

Liszt / Enesco – Hungarian Rhapsodies / Roumanian Rhapsodies / Dorati

More of the music of Franz Liszt (1811-1880)

More Orchestral Spectaculars

  • This wonderful collection of exciting rhapsodies returns to the site for only the second time in two years, here with superb Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • It’s also impossibly quiet at Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus, a grade that practically none of our vintage classical titles – even the most well-cared-for ones – ever play at
  • One of the best of the Mercury Living Presence titles – the orchestra is big, rich and tubey, yet the dynamics and transparency are first rate
  • Beautifully performed by the London Symphony Orchestra (our favorite performances of these works, in fact, and a true orchestral spectacular), under the direction of Antal Dorati
  • Other versions – the Oscar Danon we like on RDG, for example – may be faster, but Dorati and the LSO bring an energy and spirit to these pieces that we feel is unequaled on vintage vinyl
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • Click on this link to see more records like this one of our favorite orchestral performances with top quality sound

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Letter of the Week – “the violin now is more natural as you described.”

More of the Music of Harry Belafonte

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom, 

I bought the harry Belafonte Carnegie Hall recently, a White Hot. I went to the On The Record site and came across the Offenbach Readers Digest discussion of reversed polarity. I had bought this record on your site a long time ago.

I listened to the record with the polarity reversed.

This is the first time I have heard this record sounding better.

Open, spacious and heard lots of macro and micro details, especially on side one, and the violin now is more natural as you described.

Btw, Do you have records with reversed polarity ready to hit the site? Please let me know.

Very interesting!

Hi,

Thanks for your letter. Glad I was able to help you get that Offenbach record to sound the way it should. It is a knockout performance with audio quality to match.

Funny how you rarely see much discussion of records with reversed polarity.

Do most audiophiles have polarity switches on their preamps or phono stages?

Can they be bothered to go back and forth enough times to make sure they have the correct polarity setting for the records they play?

Do they listen critically enough to hear any of the changes we describe when the polarity is right or wrong?

All good questions,. none of which we are able to answer. Sometimes our own customers don’t get around to switching the polarity of records that are reversed until many months later. Some of them may not ever switch polarity at all.

We discuss a number of records with well known (well known to us anyway) polarity issues here.

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