Month: March 2022

Letter of the Week – “It just begs to be cranked up to sound its best.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

As you know, I have been picking up quite a few live album Hot Stampers recently. Here is another great example of having to turn the volume up loud to get that “I’m at the concert” feeling.

The sound on the LP is so well-balanced tonally top to bottom with absolutely no grittiness. It just begs to be cranked up to sound its best. That Tubey Magic is oozing from the grooves.

And what a performance from Jimi. I play guitar as a hobbyist and there is a reason why we crave the tones from old tube amps and those Marshall cabs with Celestion pulsonic coned speakers.

That Tubey Magic we love in the recordings just accurately captures what was being played. Superb in every way!!

Thanks as always,
Rob

Rob, thanks for writing. We could not agree more — the sound of the best vintage pressings puts you right there in the concert hall like nothing else can.

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Nat “King” Cole – To Whom It May Concern

More Nat “King” Cole

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

 

  • An outstanding copy of Nat “King” Cole’s wonderful 1959 release with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • The presence and immediacy of Nat’s vocals here are ’50s Capitol Recording Magic at its best – you won’t believe how good this early stereo pressing sounds
  • With some of the biggest, clearest, richest and most natural vocal reproduction, this copy is guaranteed to take Nat’s performance to another level
  • Marks in the vinyl are 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
  • “For this album, Cole had the idea of putting together a set of newly written songs in the classic style, with typically sympathetic arrangements by Nelson Riddle…”

Set the volume right and Nat is right between your speakers, putting on the performance of a lifetime. The selection of material and the contributions of all involved (Nelson Riddle among them) are hard to fault.

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Bill Evans / Symbiosis – One of the Few MPS Pressings with (Potentially) Top Quality Sound

More Bill Evans

More Jazz Piano Recordings

  • An outstanding copy of Evans’ wonderful 1974 album accompanied by symphony orchestra with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
  • We dropped the needle on a copy years ago and heard wonderful audiophile sound right from the get-go
  • Bigger, richer, more Tubey Magical, with more extension on both ends of the spectrum and more depth, width and height than most other copies we played
  • We are not big fans of the MPS label — most of their stuff, especially the Oscar Peterson records they made, is not very good — but we sure liked this one
  • “… a special and unique entry in Evans’ huge catalog… Not your “typical” Bill Evans album–but that’s what makes SYMBIOSIS such a fine, gently challenging listen.”
  • If you’re a Bill Evans fan, this 1974 release might be a perfect fit for your collection.

On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly grainy as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem. (more…)

Stevie Wonder – Music of My Mind

More Stevie Wonder

  • A STUNNING copy of this Stevie Wonder classic, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Anyone who has followed the site for a while surely knows how difficult it is to find the pre-Innervisions Stevie Wonder titles with top quality sound and clean surfaces
  • This pressing gives you everything you ever hoped for from this music and then some — it’s full-bodied and spacious with plenty of the all-important Tubey Magic that only the right pressings have to offer
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Music of My Mind was also the first to bear the fruits of his increased focus on Moog and Arp synthesizers, though the songs never sound synthetic, due in great part to Stevie’s reliance on a parade of real instruments — organic drumwork, harmonica, organs and pianos — as well as his mastery of traditional song structure and his immense musical personality… his first truly unified record…”

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These Two Sarah Vaughan Pablos Didn’t Make the Grade

More of the Music of Sarah Vaughan

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

Here are a couple of the Sarah Vaughan albums we’ve auditioned over the years and found unimpressive.

Without going into specifics, we’ll just say these albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both. They may have some appeal to fans, but audiophiles looking for top quality sound and music — our stock in trade — are best advised to look elsewhere.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find these two in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.

We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

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