Month: October 2022

Stravinsky / The Firebird Suite on Speakers Corner

More of the Music of Igor Stravinsky

This is probably one of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, 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.

Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

“Excellent sound with a wonderful performance from Ansermet.”

Currently our favorite Firebird is the original pressing on Mercury with Dorati conducting. Our opinion is very unlikely to change concerning the best combination of sound and performance. The record is simply a monster on the right pressing.

We have never heard an especially good sounding London or Decca of Ansermet’s performance, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We tend to avoid judging records we have not played and we encourage the audiophile community to do the same.

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in most of the following areas:

Curiosity and the Pursuit of Perfect Sound

One of our good customers has started a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

He invited a friend and colleague to talk about his own personal journey through the twin worlds of audio and records, and we expect you will find his story excellent reading.

This bit caught my eye:

On my new stereo, my modern pressings and reissues sound better than they did on my old stereo. But what’s improved more, FAR more, is the sound of my vintage vinyl. Not just my Hot Stampers, but many of my other vintage records as well. Here is a sampling of the titles where I’ve been able to make a direct comparison between an early (like, pre-CD-era) pressing and a recent (vinyl resurgence) pressing: Led Zeppelin 2, Willie Nelson’s Stardust, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, E. Fitzgerald’s Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie, Carmen, played by Ruggerio Ricci, Santana Abraxas, Carole King’s Tapestry, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and Mingus Ah Um.

Good company to say the least!

Please to enjoy.

Sibelius / Finlandia / Mackerras

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

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

[This review is from a good ten years ago or more. Our current favorite pressing of Finlandia with Mackerras is this one, on a budget Decca reissue. Go figure.]

A shocking Stereo Treasury sleeper with a superb Shaded-Dog-beating side one. Side one is nearly White Hot – it’s exceptionally transparent and dynamic. Real Demo Disc sound and music on side one – spectacular works played with feeling.

This is yet another wonderful example of what the much-lauded Decca recording engineers were able to capture on analog tape all those years ago. The 1960 master has been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer.

Side One

More spacious than practically any other copy we heard thanks to an extended, correct top end.

This side was also very dynamic, and it gets loud in the right way, never harsh or screechy.

Correct from top to bottom, and there are not many records we can say that about. So natural in every way.

The brass is HUGE and POWERFUL on this side. Not many recordings capture the brass this well. (Ansermet on London comes to mind of course but many of his performances leave much to be desired. Here Mackerras is on top of his game with performances that are definitive.)

The brass is big and clear and weighty, just the way it should be, as that is precisely the sound you hear in the concert hall, especially that part about being clear: live music is more than anything else completely clear. We should all strive for that sound in our reproduction of orchestral music.

Side Two

Good clarity and top extension, with full-bodied, textured strings. Gets a little hot at its loudest but manages to stay under control and enjoyable throughout.

The opening track on side two, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, is one of my favorite pieces of orchestral music. Mackerras and the London Proms make it magical.

The Search for Finlandia

On a well-known work such as this we started by pulling out every performance on every label we had in our backroom and playing them one after another. Most never made it to the half-minute mark. Sour or thin brass on the opening salvo of Finlandia? Forget it; onto the trade-in pile you go.

(If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works. Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start; it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it. If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten you’re probably setting the bar too low if our experience is any guide.)

A few days went by while we were cleaning and listening to the hopefuls. We then proceeded to track down more of the pressings we had liked in our preliminary round of listening. At the end we had a good-sized pile of LPs that we thought shootout-worthy, pressings that included Shaded Dogs, Deccas, Londons, Stereo Treasury’s and Victrolas — representing most of our favorite labels from the Golden Age.

This Decca took the top prize. It beat every recording on every pressing we could get our hands on to throw at it. That’s our shootout in a nutshell.

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How Can I Find My Own Hot Stampers?

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can get your hands on.

This link will walk you through the process we’ve perfected over the last twenty years. If you’re an audiophile who wants to collect better sounding pressings, and learn a lot about records and audio in the bargain, doing shootouts is by far the best way to achieve your goals. As far as we’re concerned, it is the only sure way, since it helps take the unconscious biases and the guesswork out of the process.

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Answers to Some of Your Hot Stamper Questions

The Beatles in Mono, Our Grading System, Our Cleaning System and More

We discuss a number of issues with our letter writer, the kinds of questions we often get, so here are some of the answers we often give out.

  • While Prices for Many Records Have Trended Down, Others Have Gone Up
  • The Beatles in Mono
  • Our White Hot Triple Plus Grade
  • Why Our Stereo Is Good at Its Job, and
  • Record Cleaning

  Hey Tom, 

First off, I got to say, congratulations on a great concept. Also, congrats on having the balls to charge what these albums are worth.

Thanks. Like any business, we charge what the market will bear, and it seems people are willing to pay a lot for these records, although less for some than they used to — some of our records now sell for half or even less than what we were getting two or three or five years ago.

That said, the top copies have held their prices pretty well over the years and often gone up substantially. It’s the second tier and third tier titles and the Super Hots that have really fallen in price. That’s where the real “bargains” are these days.

Ok – I spent a fortune on my system. Including acoustic design, the best of everything – speakers, turntable, preamp, amps – you get it. The whole set up probably cost me over $600k.

Wow. I don’t have $600k in my system, but I do have about $600k worth of labor in it (!) You can read all about Our Stereo here.

I am a crazy fanatic – audio perfection is something that really moves me.

Me too. I wrote about it here, when I fell in love with a record that gave me a good reason to get seriously into audio.

So, you can imagine I am intrigued with what you are doing. I will try you guys out (already bought my first album – CSNY) very hopeful that I will notice a difference between your albums and others.

Hard to imagine that you won’t hear a huge difference. Most versions of Deja Vu, including audiophile ones, are terrible.

I’d love to set up a call to discuss some questions I have regarding some of your best vs. say, they latest Neil Young releases with his archive release bundles. I have first pressings of the newly analog remasters and they are amazing.

I hope we’re not talking about this pressing: After the Gold Rush

I also purchased the Beatles mono set and have a separate mono cartridge and tone arm just for this set. They are real nice – not as great sonically as the Neil releases, but better than the Beatles Stereo box set.

We had a mono set in and spent about a half hour trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I realized in the end that the sound was dead as a doornail. If you want to hear The Beatles sound better than you ever imagined, we can make that happen.

But not in mono. Here are our in-stock Hot Stampers pressings of The Beatles, guaranteed to blow your mind.

I am also curious as to the system you use to evaluate your albums – and what you see as the holy grail of the A+++ standard.

Triple Plus means this: (more…)

McDonald and Giles – A Sleeper Prog Album from 1970

Hot Stamper Pressings of Prog Rock Albums Available Now

More Recordings Engineered by Brian Humphries

Brian Humphries engineered the album, and although you may not be familiar with that name, if you’re an audiophile you should get to know his work better, as this guy recorded some amazing sounding albums.

Take a gander at this group:

  • Black Sabbath – Paranoid
  • Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
  • Traffic – John Barleycorn Must Die
  • Traffic – The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys 

Two are of course on our Top 100 Rock and Pop List, and all four — five if you count McDonald And Giles — qualify as State of the Art Rock Recordings from the era.

Demo Disc Quality Sound

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good the best early Island Label recordings can sound, this killer copy should do the trick.

This UK pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

This IS the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There may well be a CD of this album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.

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A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Record Reviewing

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Allow me to respond to a comment left by a fellow named Ian Malone.

It was left in the comments section for the interview Steve Westman did with me.

He wrote:

Quite happy for you to promote your business Tom, but surely you are a better person than doing it in this way. I know that other people in the industry have said unkind things about you but you can rise above these insults.

My response:

I never say that the people making these modern records, as well as those reviewing them, are malicious or evil. I say they make or review bad sounding records and are simply misguided and, more than anything else, incompetent.

Am I being unkind? If Michael Bay makes one bad movie after another, are we unkind to point that out? I don’t know whether or not he is a bad person, but I do know that he is a bad filmmaker, and gets called out regularly for putting out a bad product.

Everyone understands that this is a matter of taste. If you always wished The Beatles albums had more bass, more compression and a smoother tonal balance overall, you can buy the new Heavy Vinyl pressings and get the sound you prefer on every title The Beatles ever released.

However, I hope you know that the sound I have just described does not exist on the master tapes.

I have no way of actually knowing that for a fact, but since no mastering engineer before 2014 had ever put that sound on an actual record, I think we can safely say that the evidence supports the idea that a completely “new sound” was specifically created for The Beatles when their catalog was remastered early in this century. [1]

A New Sound

Call it The New Beatles Sound. I am on record as not liking engineers who create a new sound for records that had perfectly good sound already. Those of us who do not like our Beatles album to have those qualities should not be buying these newly remastered versions.

We offer the consumer an alternative sound, and, since our Beatles Hot Stampers are far and away our best sellers, it seems our customers agree with us that they actually do sound better. Some come back, sure, but not many, and I don’t think anyone has ever said they liked the new pressings better, although I cannot rule out that possibility in the future, audiophiles being who they are.

In some ways we operate like Consumer Reports. Blender X is terrible at making margaritas and blender Y is good at making those delicious drinks. The company that makes bad blenders should be called to account. If there is a name attached to that company, then I guess we can say that the person who runs that company should learn how to make better blenders or find something else to do with his time.

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American Beauty – An Honest-to-Goodness Killer MoFi LP

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

Sonic Grade: B+

This is a Mobile Fidelity LP with SURPRISINGLY GOOD SOUND. The transparency and presence in the midrange is outstanding for a MoFi. This copy does not have the usual midrange suckout that ruins so many of their records.

The bass actually sounds mostly in control on this copy — there’s much less of the typically bloated bass caused by Half-Speed mastering to be found here.

This is the best sounding Mobile Fidelity American Beauty we have ever heard. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s hugely better than we expected.

Any original Green Label domestic pressing is sure to be better, but sure to be noisier too, so if you must have quiet vinyl, you can do a lot worse than this MoFi.

Which means it belongs on our list of the best sounding Mobile Fidelity records we’ve ever played.

Arnold / English, Scottish and Cornish Dances

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums

Reviews and Commentaries for TAS Super Disc Recordings

  • The rare and highly regarded TAS List Heavyweight, Lyrita mastered as per HP’s preference
  • Full, spacious, with a HUGE hall and amazing clarity
  • Super Hot on both sides, you had better watch your levels – this copy is extremely dynamic
  • This pressing is clearly a Demo Disc for Size and Space as well as a Demo Disc for Dynamics

This Lyrita-mastered title is a member of HP’s famous TAS Super Disc list.

It includes Eight English Dances, Four Scottish Dances and Four Cornish Dances.

The sound is uncolored and natural, with a mid-hall perspective, and very little multi-miking to be heard, all to the good. 

It’s extremely fast, dynamic and clear, in those respects very much like live music. The top end is right and the overall sound balanced.

The woodwinds on the second track of side two are especially lovely.

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Thelonious Monk – Monk.

  • A wonderful early 360 Stereo pressing with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER first note to last
  • Columbia records produced by Teo Macero in the early ’60s have consistently open, natural sound – this one from 1964 is no exception
  • The piano has real weight, the bass definition is wonderful, Rouse’s sax is full-bodied, and the overall sound is Columbia to a “T”: warm, sweet, and rich
  • 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
  • “The Thelonious Monk Quartet of 1964 is well featured on this excellent set… Easily recommended to Monk fans, this set is just further proof that he never made an unworthy recording.”

We’re big Monk fans here at Better Records and we wish we could get more records like this up on the site. Unfortunately, clean, vintage pressings of Monk’s music have become increasingly difficult to find, and even when you can track them down, they rarely play as quietly as this one, and of course, this being a Hot Stamper, they rarely sound as good as this one. (more…)