Month: October 2022

A Chat with Yours Truly

The Video That Started It All

Steve Westman graciously invited one of the most controversial members of the Audiophile Community — that would be me — to appear on his youtube channel for a half hour chat. When he couldn’t shut me up, it ended going for an hour.

I want to thank him for putting up with me while I spent the time mostly criticizing all the modern reissues he seems to favor.

Please read the comments and feel free to post your own if you have something you would like to say. I read them all.

Say whatever you like, I can take it!

 

Unlike the Tom Port of twenty years ago, and some rather famous reviewers still writing today, my skin has grown quite thick since I started causing trouble in the vinyl community with my crackpot ideas and uncontrolled greed. People seem to enjoy  beating up on me and the snake oil they think I am selling, but more than a thousand years ago one of the great Stoic philosophers offered his advice on how to deal with the criticisms of one’s detractors. This is advice that I have tried to heed myself for lo these many years, not always successfully.

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday.

The secret from Marcus Aurelius for when we get flak or insults or judgment from other people? He said we should look inside their soul.

“Get inside him,” Marcus wrote. “Look at what sort of person he is. You’ll find you don’t need to strain to impress him.”

His point was that too often we blindly “accept” what haters throw at us without stopping to actually examine who these haters actually are. You wouldn’t take driving advice from a bad driver, or be guilted about your finances from someone who knows nothing about money.

Nor should you listen to people telling you you’re not good at this or that, that you’re failing here or there, whether you should act in one way or another, if you don’t respect that person and their own choices.

If you want to stop caring what other people think, take a second and actually look at those people for a second. You’ll quickly find that there isn’t much to be harried on about, that you’re doing just fine.

In response to some of my critics, I wrote a commentary entitled a kinder, gentler approach to record reviewing.

Check it out if you have time.

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Darin at the Copa / Another Great Sounding Reissue? What the Heck Is Going On!?

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

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

  • Darin At The Copa arrives on the site with stunning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from top to bottom 
  • Recorded live at the Copacabana in New York City, this album captures Darin’s unique charisma, as well his phenomenal music
  • With clear, present vocals, huge amounts of space, and boatloads of Tubey magic – the kind they had plenty of in 1960 – this copy blew away the competition in our recent shootout
  • “…an appearance that confirmed for the adult pop crowd that the former singer of ephemera like “Splish Splash” had made the complete transition from rock & roll to more “serious” music. Serious this record certainly isn’t, though.” 
  • If you’re a fan of Bobby Darin’s, this live album from 1960 surely deserves a place in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1960 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

This Shootout Winning pressing of Bobby Darin’s live album from 1960 has ENERGY and TUBEY MAGIC like you will not believe. The reissues on Bainbridge that we used in our shootout just KILL the original pressings, which are truly awful based on the ones I have heard. I started out with a copy such as this way back in the early ’90s, and when I finally tracked down a clean original on Atco, not a hard record to find really, I was shocked at just how bad it sounded.

This is, of course, one of the best reasons to own a good CD player. It’s simply a fact that some recordings, vintage and otherwise, were never mastered properly for the analog medium.

Defending Reissues

We bash reissue labels like Classic and Sundazed mercilessly on this site for making the worst kind of substandard pressings, all the while absurdly promoting them as “superior.”

Bainbridge reissued this album sometime in the early ’80s I would guess, and they did this one right. Discovery Records reissued some jazz in the ’70s (Shorty Roger’s Jazz Waltz comes readily to mind) and they did a great job.

Reissues can sound great, but they seem to be limited to the ones from back in the day when they still knew how to make good sounding records. Modern reissues, for whatever reason, almost never do, and that’s the reason we criticize them (and their apologists / promoters so relentlessly).

We are not anti-reissue. We are anti-bad-sounding-reissue.

Bobby Darin was a tremendously talented performer and this record catches him showing off his stuff to good advantage. I don’t know of a better Darin album on vinyl.

Variety Review

Darin’s finger snapping, jazzy and extremely hep delivery has its moments of humor, ease and at all times, a singular brand of charm that make it big at this particular scene.

Darin on CD

Speaking of CDs, This Is Darin from 1960 on the ’90s CD pressing is, or can be — CDs don’t all sound the same either — superb, and the record is, again, just awful. We don’t make many CD recommendations here at Better Records but we do recommend that one. We don’t know if the newer version is any good so that’s a caveat emptor situation you will have to figure out for yourself.

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The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Home Plate

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

This is a classic case of a record that really starts to work when the levels are up. It’s so free from distortion and phony processing it wants to be played loud, and that’s the level this music works at. It’s the level it was no doubt mixed at, and that mix sounds pretty flat at moderate levels. If you want to hear the real rockin’ Bonnie Raitt you gots to turn it up!

Like a lot of the best recordings from the mid-’70s, the production and recording quality are clean and clear, and we mean that in a good way. There is very little processing to the sound of anything here; drums sound like drums, guitars like guitars, and Bonnie sings without the aid of autotuning –– because she can sing on-key, and beautifully. Her vocals kill on every song. (Her dad had a pretty good set of pipes too.)

Her Best Material

What sets this album apart from others made around this period is the strength of the material. Every song on side one would fit nicely on a greatest hits album, they’re that good. The reason side one has always been a personal favorite is that it ends with the best track on the album, maybe the best song Bonnie ever sang, the excruciatingly heartfelt ballad, My First Night Alone Without You. If that one doesn’t hit you hard, something somewhere is very wrong. 

More Hot Stamper Commentary from 2008

This original WB Palm Tree label LP has THE BEST SIDE ONE we have ever heard here at Better Records. “A Triple Plus” sound means you’re probably hearing the album better than they did when they played back the master tape in the control room. (Studio monitors being what they are.) Since this is one of my three favorite Bonnie Raitt albums — the others being Sweet Forgiveness and Nine Lives — and quite possibly the best sounding album she ever made, it goes without saying that this is THE Must Own Bonnie Raitt Hot Stamper Pressing of All Time.

Nine Lives? Luck of the Draw?

What about the Capitol albums she recorded with Don Was?

Man, they sure don’t sound like this! That stuff is way too digital, overly-processed and modern sounding for my taste, not to mention my delicate hearing.

The first two she did for Capitol are fine albums in their own right, but she was already out of gas by the time she got accepted by the record buying public and the Grammy Award committee.

That was 1989; this album is from 1975 when she still had her groove on. You may gain a lot of wisdom as you age from thirty-six to fifty, but you don’t gain a lot of rock and roll energy (or any other kind, for that matter).

The Big Sound

This a big production, with horns and strings and lots of wonderful sounding instruments thrown into the mix such as tubas, mandolins and autoharps to name just a few. Getting all these sounds onto the vinyl of the day is a tough challenge, but some copies had the goods, and this is one of them.

Illinois Jacquet / How High the Moon – A Killer Two-Fer Thanks to David Turner

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

More Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder

  • This superb Prestige Two-Fer boasts Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side two and outstanding double plus (A++) sound on the other three
  • Compiled from four Jacquet albums released in 1968 and 1969, including favorites like “Bottoms Up,”The Blues; That’s Me”, and “The King”
  • Jacquet’s one of the creators of the big, soulful tenor sax sound – I know of no one who does it better 
  • “… a fine sampler to Jacquet’s music… it features Illinois in a variety of settings (ranging from a quartet to a mini-big band)…”

The album combines material from four different Illinois Jacquet albums (Bottoms Up, The King, The Soul Explosion, and The Blues; That’s Me!). The sound is AMAZING and Jacquet plays with wonderful emotion and skill throughout.

Check out the man’s bassoon playing on ‘Round Midnight, the last track on side four — now there’s a sound you don’t hear too often on a jazz record!

As a bonus, they selected only about half the material from each of these classic albums, turning over to each of them about one side of these two discs. Which simply means that the quality and variety are consistently high on all four of these sides. No unreleased material or alternate takes; in other words, no filler. (more…)

What if I like the copy I already own as much (or more!) as the one I bought?

New to the Blog? Start Here

You get your money back, no questions asked.

Seriously, we have been in business since 1987 and there has never been a time when we did not give a customer a full refund on any order he returned. We also refunded records that were abused by customers and no longer saleable. We refunded records that were damaged in transit because of poor packaging.

We refunded all of them, no matter what.

Why? Because that is our policy and we adhere to it one hundred per cent of the time. We make no exceptions to that policy and never have. If anyone says otherwise, that person is not telling the truth.

And if we decided not to provide a refund, for any reason, the credit card companies would simply take the money out of our account and put it back in the customer’s.

We take great pride in our money back guarantee, which, as far as audiophile records go, seems to be unique in the industry.

However, if you’re in the business of selling not very good sounding remastered pressings on Heavy Vinyl, you might have to have a very different return policy from the one we offer. As in, no returns.

What’s a Hot Stamper Worth to You?

Even if you actually like our copy better than yours, but don’t think the difference in sound quality justifies the price, the same policy applies: you get your money back.

If you simply don’t like the music or have issues with the recording itself, you get your money back.

If the record plays noisier for you than you would like, you get your money back.

Part of the fun of having auditioned so many records over the course of so many years is that we’ve run into scores of amazingly well recorded albums, albums that most audiophiles don’t know well or may have never even heard of.

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Chopin / Scherzo No. 2 / Auer – Direct to Disc

More of the music of Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings with Hot Stampers

This is an IMMACULATE RCA Direct-to-Disc LP with SUPERB SOUND! This recording is every bit as good as the famous RCA Beethoven Direct Disc and ten times as rare. You will have a very hard time finding a better sounding solo piano recording.  [Or so we thought in 2008.]

Virgil Fox – The Fox Touch Volume 2

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings

Played against the best Golden Age organ recordings, these Crystal Clear titles are noticeably lacking in ambience.

The best pressings, assuming one would do a shootout for them, might be expected to earn a sonic grade of B- or so.

Volume 1 is a TAS List record. But seeing as they were all recorded at the same time, this one might sound every bit as good. Then again, it might not. 

By the way, did you know Stan Ricker cut this record live direct to disc? He did a pretty good job, too.

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Bonnie Raitt – Luck of the Draw

More Bonnie Raitt

More Women Who Rock

  • This import pressing will blow the doors off any other Luck Of The Draw you’ve heard with superb sound from start to finish
  • Amazingly open and transparent, with tons of energy and real immediacy to Bonnie’s wonderfully breathy vocals
  • This copy had more ANALOG qualities than most others in our recent shootout, which tended to have that digital / sterile sound that ruins so many albums from the era
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…Luck of the Draw is an unqualified success, filled with strong songs — including the hits ‘Something to Talk About’ and ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me,’ plus the Delbert McClinton duet ‘Good Man, Good Woman’ — appealing productions, and just enough dirt to make old-school fans feel at home.”

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City Boy – Dispatches from the Front of the Digital Apocalypse

Records We Only Sell on Import Vinyl

I like this band so much I made the mistake of buying the CD of their first two albums. Talk about No Noise! The CD had nothing on it over 8K. It sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over my speakers. It’s so irritatingly dull I can hardly stand to play it even as background music.

It seems that many of the CDs I come across fall into two categories: either mastered with little care and too bright, or No Noised with a heavy hand until they are way too dull.

Oh, and a third one: compressed to death.

That seems to cover about 80-90% of the stuff I come across. Thank god for a good turntable. For those of you without one, may I express my deepest sympathy for your unbearable — to me, anyway — loss.

Side One

Dear Jean (I’m Nervous)
Bordello Night
Honeymooners
She’s Got Style
Bad For Business

Side Two

Young Men Gone West
I’ve Been Spun
One After Two
The Runaround
The Man Who Ate His Car
Millionaire

AMG  Review

On this album, the band focuses on the glam rock sound of the mid- to late-’70s (swirling guitars, high-pitched harmonies) on tracks like “Dear Jean (I’m Nervous)” and “The Man Who Ate His Car,” but City Boy maintains its soft rock sound with light keyboard touches and soft vocals on songs such as “One After Two” and the title track.

Young Men Gone West has an interesting, albeit uneven, mix of songs that doesn’t have the same quirky, eclectic feel of the first two albums — but it is a worthy effort nonetheless.

If You Own This Classic Records Pressing, I’ll Bet It’s Pristine

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc list, I would not have put this record on it.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

When Classic Records was blowing out its unsold inventory through the Tower Records Classical Annex in Hollywood many years ago — apparently they had run into some financial trouble — this was a title you could pick up for under ten bucks. I remember it being $7, but my memory may not be correct on that point. Whatever the price, it was cheap.

And even at that price it seemed nobody really wanted it.  Which is as it should be. Heavy Vinyl or no Heavy Vinyl, a bad record is a bad record and not worth the bother of sitting down and listening to it.

If you own this record, my guess is it is pristine.

If you played it at all, you played it once and put it away on a shelf where it probably sits to this very day. Good records get played and bad records don’t. If you have lots of pristine records on your shelves, ask yourself this question: Why don’t I want to play them?

You may not like the implications of the answer: They aren’t very good.

And that means you should never have bought them in the first place. But we all make mistakes.

Owning up to them may be hard, but it is the only way to make any real progress in this hobby.

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works. You may be surprised at how lackluster the sound is on the majority of them.

Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start.

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