Month: June 2022

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on Speakers Corner – Reviewed in the 90s

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

We were impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out back in 1994. We wrote at the time:

Probably the best sound and performance of the Eine Kleine available — highly recommended!  

We haven’t played a copy in years, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds.

Our Hot Stamper classical pressings will be dramatically more transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which heavy vinyl pressings tend to fall short in in our experience.

Cowboy Junkies – Whites Off Earth Now!!

More Cowboy Junkies

More Debut Albums of Interest

  • An outstanding copy of the band’s debut album – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This pressing is well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs as well as an open and spacious soundfield
  • “Whites Off Earth Now!! establishes the spare country blues sound that took the band to international fame with their next album.”
  • “… it’s fascinating to hear their signature country-on-valium sound develop. Margo Timmins sings beautifully.”

This vintage Latent Recordings pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

Love / Self-Titled – Killer Sound from Bruce Botnick

More Love

More Psych Rock

  • An original Gold Label stereo pressing of Love’s debut album with excellent Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
  • Exceptionally quiet vinyl doesn’t begin to do this one justice – I simply cannot remember a time that a copy with sound this good played this quietly, and we have been doing shootouts for Love for 15 years or more
  • A classic from 1966, a combination of proto-punk and psychedelia featuring “My Little Red Book,” “Hey Joe” and more
  • The first Love album is without a doubt the punchiest, liveliest, most POWERFUL recording in the Love catalog
  • Engineered by none other than Bruce Botnick, here is the kind of massive bottom end weight and energy that we like to call WHOMP
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Love’s debut is both their hardest-rocking early album and their most Byrds-influenced…”

Some of you may not know this music, but it’s a true Must Own Psychedelic Gem from the ’60s, a record no rock collection should be without, along with other groundbreaking albums from the ’60s such as Surrealistic Pillow, The Doors’ debut, the first Spirit album and too many others to list.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan – Forget Layered Depth and Pinpoint Imaging

More of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan

Hot Stamper Pressings of Electric Blues Albums

This copy gets Stevie’s room-filling guitar to sound about as rich and powerful as a recording of it can. When playing this record, first make sure the volume is good and loud. Now close your eyes and picture yourself in a blues club, with the volume ten times louder than your stereo will play. Electric Blues played at loud levels in a small club would sound pretty much like this album does, a bit messy but also real.  

If you’re one of those audiophiles who insists on precise soundstaging with layered depth and pinpoint imaging, forget it. That’s not in the cards. The producers and engineers were going for the “live in the studio” sound with this one (and most of his other albums it seems), which means it’s a bit of a jumble image-wise.

But that’s the way you would hear it performed live in a club, so where’s the harm? (more…)

Aerial Boundaries Has Some of the Most Unnatural Digital Sound We Have Ever Heard

A Record Better Suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/fail record, I don’t know what would be.

It sounds as if someone went into the biggest room in the studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool out in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls. Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using.)

And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!

If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.

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Listening in Depth to Crosby Stills & Nash – Now with Bonus CD Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

Although millions of copies of this album were sold, so few were mastered and pressed well, and so many mastered and pressed poorly, that few copies actually make it to the site as Hot Stampers.

We wish that were not the case — we love the album — but the copies we know to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound are just not sitting around in the record bins these days.

Whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Joe Gastwirt-mastered CD. It couldn’t be any more awful. (His Deja Vu is just as bad.)

In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young? Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with bad midrange reproduction — like most of them — is a worthless record.

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Buffalo Springfield – Self-Titled (Compilation from 1973)

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

More Country and Country Rock

Sonic Grade: D

The tonal balance is right on the money on the better pressings, but because this is a compilation, it is made from copies of the master tapes, not real master tapes themselves, so it will always have that blurry, smeary, opaque, airless, sub-generation-tape sound.

Love the music, but you really need to have the real albums to hear these songs at their best.

Hey, that’s what we hear on most of the Heavy Vinyl we audition. Imagine that.

One high point though: the complete nine minute long version of Bluebird. If you see the album for cheap, buy it for that song

A1   For What It’s Worth 3:00
A2   Sit Down, I Think I Love You 2:30
A3   Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing 3:26
A4   Go And Say Goodbye 2:19
A5   Pay The Price 2:35
A6   Burned 2:14
A7   Out Of My Mind 3:05
B1   Mr. Soul 2:35
B2   Bluebird 9:00
B3   Broken Arrow 6:13
B4   Rock ‘N’ Roll Woman 2:44
C1   Expecting To Fly 3:29
C2   Hung Upside Down 3:24
C3   A Child’s Claim To Fame 2:09
C4   Kind Woman 4:10
C5   On The Way Home 2:25
C6   I Am A Child 2:15
D1   Pretty Girl Why 2:24
D2   Special Care 3:30
D3   Uno Mundo 2:00
D4   In The Hour Of Not Quite Rain 3:45
D5   Four Days Gone 2:53
D6   Questions 2:52

Tchaikovsky and the Musical Heritage Society – Bill Kipper Is The Man

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This is an older review from at least ten years ago and perhaps more. We no longer sell the MHS pressing of this recording, or any MHS pressing for that matter.

We much prefer the Heifetz recording for RCA from 1958. We’ve identified about 170 orchestral recordings that offer the discriminating audiophile the best performances and top quality sound. The right pressings of the Heifetz (the ones with Hot Stampers) have earned a place on that list.

For our review for the MHS pressing of the concerto, we noted:

MHS remastered the original 1967 Melodiya tape in 1979 in order to produce this record, dramatically improving upon the sound of the version that I knew on Angel, which shouldn’t have been too hard as the Angel is not very good.

Wait a minute. Scratch that. MHS didn’t cut the record, an engineer at a mastering house did. Fortunately for us audiophiles, the job fell to none other than Bill Kipper at Masterdisk.

Think what a different audio world it would be if we still had Bill Kipper with us today, along with the amazingly accurate and resolving cutting system he used at Masterdisk.

As far as we can tell, there are no records being produced today that sound remotely as good as this budget subscription disc.

Furthermore, to my knowledge no record this good has been cut for more than thirty years. The world is awash in mediocre remastered records and we want nothing to do with any of them, not when there are so many good vintage pressings still to be discovered and enjoyed.

The likes of Bill Kipper are no longer with us, but we can be thankful that we still have the records he and so many talented others mastered all those years ago, to enjoy now and for countless years to come. Keep in mind that it’s all but impossible to wear out a record these days with modern, properly set up equipment, no matter how often you play it.

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Borodin / Symphony No. 2 / Tchaikovsky / Francesca Da Rimini / Varviso

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

More Classical ‘Sleeper” Recordings We’ve Discovered with Demo Disc Sound

This London Whiteback pressing (CS 6578) has SHOCKINGLY GOOD sound; in many ways it deserves to be called a Demo Disc. It has at least one quality that one virtually never hears on an audiophile reissue: a smooth, natural top end. This record only sounds correct and “real” at louder volumes, in the same way that a live orchestra often sounds a bit lifeless in the quiet passages, only to get exciting, big and powerful when the score calls for it. For this to happen on record you need real dynamics and tonal neutrality.

We have not heard many audiophile reissues pull these things off either, just two of the reasons we no longer carry them.

And you can find all the other reasons on the site easily enough. We can’t stop talking about how disappointing Heavy Vinyl sounds to us now.

We graded both sides AT LEAST A++, a bit vague we admit; we just don’t have enough copies to know if the sound could get much better.

We played a good many vintage classical LPs that day and this was clearly one of the best sounding, so we feel this grade should be accurate, perhaps even conservative.

Credit for the sound must go to the Decca engineers, of course, but also to the hall that the L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande played in, where so many of the great Ansermet recordings were made. This recording is from 1968. Ansermet died in 1969. One imagines that he was perhaps not able to conduct at this stage of his life and turned his wonderful orchestra and hall over to Varviso, a man better known for conducting operas at the time.

Side One – Borodin

At Least A++, with the kind of Golden Age sound that has rarely if ever been realized in the modern era. Big, wide and deep, with smooth, rich orchestral sound, these are the kind of records that let you forget the sound and just enjoy the music. The performance is taken a brisk pace, rarely a bad thing.

More reviews and commentaries for recordings of the Second Symphony.

Side Two – Tchaicovsky

At Least A++, and a lovely work that has never made it to the site in Hot Stamper form before, hint hint.

Rich, with deep bass, big stage, huge space and so 3-D, this is what we love about vintage recordings. And a great performance as well.

Letter of the Week – “I was dumbfounded when the horn blast opening the title track practically leapt out of my speakers.”

More of the Music of The Beatles

More Customer Letters that Extoll the Virtues of Our Beatles LPs

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

Hey Tom,   

Just wanted to say I was blown away by this copy. Having lived with the MoFi pressing since the box set first came out in the 80’s I was dumbfounded when the horn blast opening the title track practically leapt out of my speakers. I am so impressed that I just placed an order for 3 more Hot Stamper Beatles vinyl. It’s time to replace the MoFi.

Honrado L.

Thanks for writing, Honrado.

You’re not the only person who wants to get rid of their half-speed mastered records after playing a Beatles pressing that is mastered in real time and pressed properly.

And, if you are still buying modern pressings that are not half-speed mastered, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl too.

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