Month: December 2022

Falla – The Three Cornered Hat / De Burgos

More of the Music of Manuel de Falla

  • With two INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage British EMI import pressing could not be beat
  • Tons of energy, loads of detail and texture, superb transparency and excellent clarity – the very definition of DEMO DISC sound
  • The best sides were always the biggest, clearest and most three-dimensional, assuming they were able to retain the rich, natural, balanced tonality that is inherently key to a good record, or a great one in this case
  • Many of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos’s releases are exceptionally well recorded, making him an audiophile favorite
  • When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1975, but that’s precisely what it is. Some budget reissues are so good, they can actually win shootouts

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Duke Ellington – Blues In Orbit

More Duke Ellington

  • An outstanding original Columbia Six Eye stereo pressing with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Huge amounts of three-dimensional space and ambience, and Tubey Magic by the boatload – this amazing 30th Street recording from 1960 shows just how good Columbia’s engineers were back then
  • “…an album worth tracking down, if only to hear the band run through a lighter side of its sound — indeed, it captures the essence of a late-night recording date that was as much a loose jam as a formal studio date, balancing the spontaneity of the former and the technical polish of the latter.”
  • Teo Macero was the producer, Fred Plaut the engineer for these sessions in Columbia’s glorious sounding 30th Street Studio
  • It’s yet another Tubey Magical Demo Disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording

For us audiophiles, both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1959-1960 Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick.

This 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.

If Large Group Jazz Music is your thing, you should get a big kick out of this one. If you like the sound of relaxed, tube-mastered jazz — and what red-blooded audiophile doesn’t — you can’t do much better than the Ellington recordings on Columbia from this era. The warmth and immediacy of the sound here are guaranteed to blow practically any record of this kind you might own right out of the water. 

Both sides of this very special original stereo pressing are huge, rich, tubey and clear. As soon as the band got going we knew that this was absolutely the right sound for this music. 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.

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Rainbow – Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow

More Rainbow

More Deep Purple

  • Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow makes its Hot Stamper debut on this early domestic Polydor pressing with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • HUGE Rock Sound – the guitars and drums are positively jumping out of the speakers with dynamic energy, with more bottom and top end extension than all other copies we played
  • “[A] young Ronnie James Dio… is at his best when he fully gives in to his own and Blackmore’s medieval fantasy leanings, in hard-rocking tracks like ‘Sixteenth Century Greensleeves’ and ‘Man on the Silver Mountain.’ The dark, trudging doom rock of ‘Self Portrait’ most clearly showcases what they were capable of.”

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Blue – Play The Game, Not the Album

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Another in our series of Home Audio Exercises, one we created all the way back in 2007. If you want to learn more about doing your own shootouts, this listing has lots of good advice on how to go about it.

In 2007, a milestone year for us here at Better Records, we mentioned to our customers that we would not be carrying the new 180 gram Rhino pressing of Blue. We noted:

Since Kevin and Steve are friends of mine I won’t belabor its shortcomings. Let’s just say I think you can do better.

Down the road when we’ve had a chance to do a shootout amongst all our best copies, we will be offering something more to our liking. I recommend instead — and this is coming from a die-hard LP guy, someone who disconnected his home CD player over two years ago and only plays the damn things in the car — that you pick yourself up a nice used copy of the gold CD Hoffman mastered for DCC. It’s wonderful.

Some people are already upset with us over this decision, actually going so far as to question our motives, if not our sanity. Without a doubt we feel this will end up being the single most controversial stance we’ve ever taken. I predict that a great number of audiophiles are going to get really upset over our criticism of this new pressing. We are going to get emails like crazy asking us to explain what on earth could possibly be wrong with such a wonderful sounding LP. The writers of these emails will no doubt extoll its virtues relative to the other pressings they may have heard, and, finding no other reasonable explanation, these writers will feel impelled to question both the quality of our playback equipment and — yes, it’s true — even our ability to recognize a good record when it’s spinning right on our very own turntable.

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Dr. John – Desitively Bannaroo

More Dr. John

More Roots Rock LPs

  • This early Atco pressing was doing just about everything right, earning seriously good sonic grades on both sides
  • Richness and plenty of tight bass are key to bringing the rhythmically challenging music of New Orleans to life, and here there is plenty of both
  • Forget whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl they’re making – for Tubey Magic and energy, this is the only way to go
  • “As in In the Right Place, Mac has taken advantage of the specialized production talents of Allen Toussaint (at Toussaint’s own Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans), and has again used the fabled New Orleans band The Meters as his studio group. Each of the 12 cuts on the LP has been well-conceived, clearly thought-out, and reveals a new level of musical depth for the doctor.”

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Randy Newman – 12 Songs

More Randy Newman

More Singer-Songwriter Albums

  • With two nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this copy of what some consider Randy Newman’s strongest album is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – relatively quiet vinyl too
  • An excellent pressing, with a very strong bottom end, lovely richness and warmth, real space and separation between the instruments and wonderful immediacy throughout
  • The clarity of the piano and guitar perfectly support and complement Randy’s heartfelt vocals
  • 5 stars: “While much of Randy Newman [his first album] was heavily orchestrated, 12 Songs was cut with a small combo (Ry Cooder and Clarence White take turns on guitar), leaving a lot more room for Newman’s Fats Domino-gone-cynical piano and the bluesier side of his vocal style, and Randy sounds far more confident and comfortable in this context.”

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British A&M Vinyl Versus Domestic A&M Vinyl on Stealers Wheel’s Debut

More of the Music of Gerry Rafferty

Like so many British bands on the A&M label, when it came time to master the album for the domestic market, the people in charge (whoever they may have been) took the easy way out and simply ordered up a dub of the master tape to cut the album.

Spooky Tooth, Procol Harum, The Police (often but not always), Fairport Convention, my beloved Squeeze and too many others to think about all had their records ruined by sub-generation masters.

But our Hot Stamper pressings will always be British-pressed vinyl from the real master tapes, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Engineering

The legendary Geoff Emerick engineered (along with John Mills) at Apple Studio, which explains why the sound is so good on these import pressings. The album went on to receive the European Edison Award for recording excellence, whatever that is).

Our standard boilerplate for these kinds of records follows:

Tubey Magic Is Key

This original British pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even 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.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

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Paul Desmond – Pure Desmond

More Paul Desmond

More Jazz on CTI

  • With two excellent Double Plus (A++) sides, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Pure Desmond you’ve heard
  • Huge amounts of three-dimensional ambience, along with boatloads of Tubey Magic, make this a very special pressing indeed
  • Credit goes to Rudy Van Gelder once again for the huge space that the superbly well-recorded group occupies
  • 4 stars: “Paul Desmond reverted back to the relaxed quartet format that suited him well in the past… [this album] sparked a Desmond renaissance where he regained a good deal of the witty spark and erudite cool of his collaborations with Hall…

CTI is better known for the funky grooves of artists like Stanley Turrentine, Ron Carter and Deodato, but this album features mature adult jazz from Dave Brubeck’s former sideman, Paul Desmond.

It’s a lovely album, but if your pressing doesn’t have all the magic, we would forgive you for not giving the music the credit it deserves. Unless your copy has a lot of energy and good amounts of richness and fullness, you probably wouldn’t give the music a second thought.

When you hear a copy like this, it’s an entirely different story. Fans of Contemporary label jazz are sure to get a lot out of this one.

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Airto / Free

More of the Music of Airto

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Fusion Albums Available Now

This CTI LP has VERY GOOD SOUND. 

We’re on a winning streak with RVG these days (September 2006), three in a row, in fact: Chet Baker (She Was Too Good To Me), Freddie Hubbard (Red Clay), and now this wonderful Airto record.

The best music is found on side two, especially the last two tracks.

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Giant Steps – Thick and Dull, Sorry, Not Really Our Sound

More of the Music of John Coltranecoltranegiant45x

John Coltrane – Giant Steps / Rhino 45 RPM 2 Disc Set 

The sound of the 45 RPM 2 disc version cut by Bernie Grundman does not exactly tickle our fancy. It sounds thick, dull, and entirely too smooth.

It reminds us of the awful Deja Vu Bernie remastered years ago for Classic Records.

As is the case with so many of the Heavy Vinyl reissues released these days, the studio ambience you hear on these pressings is a pitiful fraction of the ambience the real pressings are capable of revealing. Real pressings like, you know, the ones mass-produced by Atlantic, original and reissue alike. What’s Bernie’s excuse?

Rhino bills their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using “performance” to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.

(Like the gentleman who sent me the Steppenwolf album, you may of course not be aware that you are stuck in a rut. Most audiophiles aren’t.)

The best way out of that predicament is to hear how mediocre these modern records sound compared to the vintage Hot Stampers we offer.

Once you hear the difference, your days of buying newly remastered releases will most likely be over.

Even if our pricey curated pressings are too dear, as a Brit might put it, you can avail yourself of the methods we describe to find killer records on your own.

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