Month: February 2022

Breakaway Is Generally Grainy, Harsh and Shrill

Reviews and Commentaries for TAS Super Disc Recordings

The problem with this album is that, for whatever reason, practically every copy you find is, to some degree, grainy, harsh and shrill in the loudest passages of the music. When the music gets loud, the sound often becomes strained and unpleasant. A copy like this one that doesn’t do that is the exception, not the rule.

Listen to the song ‘Disney Girls’ on side one. If you own the average pressing – odds are your copy is in fact quite average unless you went through a pile of copies and played them in order to find a good one – parts of that song will sound painfully hard and shrill, assuming your playing the record at the kinds of levels we do.

Which is the main reason I’ve never understand what qualified this record to be on the TAS Super Disc list. Now, having heard the best of the best copies sounding so big, rich and tubey, I can certainly say I hear what impressed HP (he likes that sound, as do we). It may indeed be a very well recorded album, but we feel it falls a bit short for our own Rock and Pop Top 100 List. (To be fair, as you know we play a lot of amazing albums around here.)

The Best Songs

The late Harry Pearson knew little about popular music and may have been more impressed by this album than those of us who play pop and rock albums by the boatload.

Most of the pop albums on his Super Disc TAS list are a joke. Only the people who listen almost exclusively to classical or jazz seem to take them seriously, in my experience anyway. (Check out the 12″ pop singles for a good laugh.)

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Britten / The Suites for Cello / Rostropovich – Reviewed in 2011

More of the music of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

This solo Cello recording on London from 1970 has Super Hot Stamper sound on both sides, with a cello that might not be realistically portrayed, but is certainly portrayed POWERFULLY.

Honestly, we kid you not, the cello occupies all the space between the speakers, which, being about seven feet apart, makes for a cello that’s seven feet wide!

Now if you turn down the volume, you of course get a smaller cello, but the real fun of this recording is to hear the instrument in your room, front and center, with every nuance of its sound reproduced clearly. So we left the volume up.

The cello sound is full, rich and harmonically natural, with only the slightest trace of smear. In other words, it’s correct in every way but its size.

The longer and more intently one listens, the easier it becomes to accept the size of the cello as presented here. It stops being an issue. One finds oneself lost in the music, amazed at the preternatural skill of this man, the most famous and renowned cellist of the late 20th century, a man for whom the work was written no less. (more…)

If That’s What It Takes – One of the All Time Great Jeff Porcaro Drum Exhibition Records

More of the Music of Michael McDonald

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Eyed Soul Albums Available Now

Let us not forget that this is also one of the All Time Great Jeff Porcaro Drum Exhibition Records.

His work here is pure genius. Play this album next to Katy Lied: I think you will find the comparison instructive. If That’s What It Takes and Katy Lied are the pinnacle of achievement for Jeff on the drums.

I’m proud to count Michael McDonald among my favorite recording artists. He made this Desert Island Disc and single-handedly turned the Doobie Brothers into a band I could enjoy and even respect.

This is a Must Own if you like the later Doobies and the kind of highly-polished but heartfelt and intelligent pop records that band excelled at in the ’70s.

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Like Someone In Love – Good in Mono, Better in Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now

With two outstanding Double Plus (A++) sides, this MONO original pressing from 1957 (the only way to fly) will be hard to beat

Ella’s voice is noticeably breathier, fuller, more relaxed and more musical here than it is on most of the other copies we played

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.

What We’re Listening For on Like Someone In Love

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top (to keep Frank Devol’s string arrangements from becoming shrill) did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record! We know, we heard them all.

We’re glad to report this copy was doing more of what we wanted it to do than most others we played.

And we know a fair bit about Ella’s recordings at this point. As of today we’ve done commentaries for more than a dozen different Ella Fitzgerald albums, and that’s not counting the sixteen (yes, 16!) titles we put in our Hall of Shame.

We’ve searched high and low for her records and played them by the score over the years.

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Rhett Davies Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rhett Davies’ Recordings Available Now

Rhett Davies is one of our favorite producers and recording / mixing engineers.

Davies recorded some of our favorite albums of all time and we want to pay tribute to this unsung hero, a man who has brought so much joy and pleasure to audiophiles through albums like those listed below.

Many can be found in our rock and pop Top 100 list of Best Sounding Albums with the Best Music (limited to titles that we can actually find enough copies of in order to do a Hot Stamper shootout).

Select Discography

1973 – Genesis – Selling England by the Pound (Engineer/Asst. Engineer)
1974 – Robert Palmer – Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley (Engineer)
1974 – Eno – Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (Engineer)
1975 – Eno – Another Green World (Producer, Engineer)
1975 – Phil Manzanera – Diamond Head (Engineer)
1975 – Fripp/Eno – Evening Star (Engineer)
1975 – Camel – Snow Goose (Engineer)
1976 – 801 – 801 Live (Engineer)
1976 – Camel – Moonmadness (Producer, Engineer)
1976 – Roxy Music – Viva! (Engineer)
1977 – Brian Eno – Before and After Science (Producer, Engineer)
1977 – Phil Manzanera/801 – Listen Now (Keyboards, Hammond Organ, Engineer)
1977 – Camel – Rain Dances (Producer) 
1978 – Brian Eno – Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Engineer)
1978 – Dire Straits – Dire Straits (Engineer)
1978 – Talking Heads – More Songs About Buildings and Food (Engineer)
1979 – Roxy Music – Manifesto (Engineer)
1980 – Roxy Music – Flesh + Blood (Producer, Engineer)
1981 – King Crimson – Discipline (Producer)
1982 – Roxy Music – Avalon (Producer, Engineer, Mixing)
1982 – King Crimson – Beat (Producer)

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Letter of the Week – “The sound on Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is to die for.”

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

Hey Tom, 

Another WINNER. Just spun my latest purchase from you folks, Jeff Beck’s “Wired,” and it’s KILLER. The sound on Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is to die for. THANK YOU guys, for always coming through with THE best sounding LPs. I now have two dozen of “your” albums in my collection – owning their own special shelf – and they continue to occupy not just a special place on my Well-Tempered Amadeus GT, but in my heart. 🙂 

Steven

Further Reading

New to the Blog? Start Here

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

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Letter of the Week – “…a trance of ‘rightness’ bordering on a religious experience…”

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

Hey Tom, 

The Coltrane I got from you recently is mind-blowing. The texture and tone are something I’ve never heard from him before.

I played the first track (Lush Life) on my super high end digital setup first to set a baseline, while reading through the LP liner notes, and it sounded great. We’re talking a $17.5k streamer and a $27k DAC.

Then I played the same track on your record while attempting to finish the liner notes (with balanced levels etc.). I couldn’t focus on the text for even a minute. It was completely different and totally captivating. I went through the whole of side one (AAA) in a trance of ‘rightness’ bordering on a religious experience, in true communion with ‘Trane.

That’s why I buy Better Records!

C

Conrad,

Your letter makes me sad. You spent all that money on expensive digital playback and you got NOTHING for it but junk CD sound.

How many audiophiles have had the experience you just had? Not many. And certainly not from the typical cheap reissue.

But the cheap reissue kills the originals we’ve played, more evidence that you had a very special experience not shared by even those audiophiles with good turntables. Cheap reissues can’t sound any good! They’re cheap. They’re reissues.

And of course the CD and digital guys are really shit out of luck. They have no way of even knowing what they are missing, right?

Here’s the $64,000 question:

Did you?

No, you didn’t. Not until you played the right record. Then the skies opened up and the scales fell from your eyes.

Those are precisely the records we run into when when we do shootouts and listen for the knockouts. We find records with that sound.

Nobody else can find records like the ones we sell except by luck, and luck is not a good approach to record collecting. (But it can help.)

Enjoy!

TP

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

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Letter of the Week – “This record is an absolute treat and a real sleeper in the jazz catalogue.”

More of the Music of Charles Mingus

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Charles Mingus

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased.

Hey Tom, 

I wanted to congratulate you on the Mingus record I purchased. It is an absolute masterpiece.

The performers are a who’s who of the golden age of Jazz. The arrangements and performances are as good as any in large group jazz I’ve ever heard.

The sound is as you say. Tonally perfect with wonderful spatial expansiveness and transparency. The only comparable large group jazz with comparable recorded fidelity I’ve heard is on Ellington Indigos, which ironically you had for sale in the same mailer; and Duke Ellington is Mingus’ idol in terms of arrangement and sound.

This record is an absolute treat and a real sleeper in the jazz catalogue. The combination of the Duke, Debussy and Ravel creates textures that are unique in all of music, classical or jazz. Sketches of Spain is close, but not quite in the same league.

Brilliant discovery on your part, and great fortune on mine. Thank you.

Phil

Phil,

We recently discovered that the best copies of this album are even better sounding!

Shorty Rogers Big Band / Jazz Waltz

 

The original Reprise pressing, whether in mono or stereo, has never sounded very good to us. The mono is quite a bit worse than the stereo – no surprise there – but both must be considered poor reflections of the master tape.

We sold one many years ago, describing it this way: “Beautiful Original with decent sound — rich, smooth and sweet.”

Which it was, but from us that’s little more than damning with faint praise. The Discovery pressing you see below is so much bigger, clearer and livelier it’s almost hard to imagine it and the 1962 Reprise original were both made from the same tape. Something sure went wrong the first time around — I think it’s safe to say at least that much.

Original equals Better? Not for those of us who play records rather than just collect them. Leave the originals for the Jazz Guys.

The Hot Stamper reissues are for us Music Loving Audiophiles.

Don’t be put off by the title; these are not some sleepy old-fashioned waltzes. This is swingin’ West Coast jazz at its best. The arrangements may be done in waltz time but that sure doesn’t keep them from swingin’.

And the amazingly good sound? Credit BONES HOWE, a man who knows Tubey Magic like practically no one else in the world. The Association, The Mamas and the Papas, The Fifth Dimension, and even Tom Waits — all their brilliant recordings are the result of Bones Howe’s estimable talents as producer and engineer.

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Harry Nilsson – Son of Schmilsson

More of the Music of Harry Nilsson

  • With two nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this copy of Nilsson’s second-in-a-row Masterpiece of Bent Rock is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • This is one of Nilsson’s best albums, sonically and musically. (With Ken Scott at the board at Trident Studios the sound has to be good, doesn’t it?)
  • Son of Schmilsson has more than half a dozen of the best songs Nilsson ever wrote, and should make it a Must Own for every right thinking audiophile with sophisticated tastes in popular music (this means you)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… this is all married to a fantastic set of songs that illustrate what a skilled, versatile songsmith Nilsson was. No, it may not be the easiest album to warm to — and it’s just about the weirdest record to reach number 12 and go gold — but if you appreciate Nilsson’s musicality and weirdo humor, he never got any better.”
  • This title from 1972 is clearly one of Nilsson’s best, and also one of his best sounding recordings
  • The complete list of titles from 1973 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

We had a great time shooting out a big stack of these, as we’re just wild about Harry here at Better Records. Unfortunately, most copies are too dark and grainy to get excited about.

Here’s a copy that tells a much different story —both sides have good energy, smooth and sweet vocals, and nice extension up top.

Drop the needle on Turn On Your Radio or The Lottery Song and we bet you fall in love with this one.

Ken Is The Man

It’s yet another triumph from one of our favorite engineers, KEN SCOTT (Ziggy Stardust, Magical Mystery Tour, Honky Chateau, Crime of the Century and many more).

This is one of Nilsson’s best albums, sonically and musically. Side one is amazingly good from start to finish. On the two CD set of Nilsson’s greatest hits (which is excellent, by the way) almost all of side one from this album is used, as well as the best material on side two, which includes Spaceman and The Most Beautiful World In The World.

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