Month: February 2023

Super Session – A Poster Boy for Gritty, Spitty Vocals

More of the Music of Al Kooper

A Great Record for Getting Your Turntable Setup Dialed In

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.

Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals can be a real problem on this album. The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, the music on this album — like any rock and pop album — pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes.

On the better copies, the ones with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and Grain
  2. Midrange Tonality
  3. Sibilance (It’s a Bitch) 
  4. Upper Midrange Shrillness

Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, about every three to four months.

Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.

Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and think we know well.

For the longest time our favorite test discs for this purpose have been these three:

  1. Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular,
  2. Tea for the Tillerman, and
  3. Led Zeppelin II.

Further Reading

Tchaikovsky / Swan Lake – Fistoulari Conducts Our Favorite Recording of the Highlights

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

More Imported Pressings on Decca and London

Kenneth Wilkinson engineered this album for Decca in 1961, and, as usual, he did a great job.

It’s as wide, deep, and three-dimensional as any, which is, of course, all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

Highlights of the recording include huge amounts of bass; a clear snare at the back of the hall (a good test for transparency, of both the record and of your system and room); full-bodied horns and strings which never become blary or shrill; and of course huge amounts of space.

This is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your heavy vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage. They cannot begin to sound the way this record sounds. (Before you put them in storage or on Ebay please play them against this pressing so that you can be confident in your decision to rid yourself of their mediocrity.)

Quality record production is a lost art, and it’s been lost for a very long time.

Like Live Music

In my notes I remarked that when the music is quiet the sound is so spacious, clear, and sweet it will have you thinking you are sitting in the concert hall.

One thing live classical music does much better than any recording in my experience is that it gets very, very quiet, yet stays clear and spacious.

None of the thousands of classical recordings I have heard to date reproduce that quality completely, but this one gets awfully darn close. Other records with that live music quality can be found here.

Note that the big finale at the end of side two is loud and HUGE on this album. There is a touch of compressor overload, but no actual inner groove distortion. At first we thought the former may have indeed been the latter because we had a copy or two with chewed-up inner grooves.

This one plays clean to the end, and boy does it get loud and powerful at the climax of the work.

All the qualities we look for in a classical recording are here:

  • lovely string tone and texture,
  • rich tonality,
  • a big hall,
  • no smear,
  • superb transparency

How many classical records have all of these qualities in such abundance?

One out of a hundred? If that!

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Hall and Oates – H2O

More Hall and Oates

  • A stunning copy of this Hall and Oates classic from 1982 – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • It’s lively, open, and natural – the voices of the two leads sound especially full-bodied, real and tonally correct from top to bottom, which is pretty much all you need to earn top grades in a shootout
  • Much more consistent than most of their releases, this one boasts three killer hits including Maneater, Family Man and my All Time Favorite by the band, One on One
  • 4 stars: “Private Eyes solidified Hall & Oates’ status as one of the most popular acts in America in the early ’80s, and…… with 1982’s H2O, they capitalized on its success, delivering an album that turned out to bigger than its predecessor, as it climbed higher on the charts and launched three Top Ten singles…”

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Our Playback System – And Why You Shouldn’t Care

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Advice on Making Audio Progress

Below you will find a list of most of the equipment we have been using over the years to carry out our Hot Stamper pressing evaluations, or “shootouts” as we like to call them.

Of course the old 80/20 Rule comes into play here — 80% (probably more like 90 or 95%, truth be told) of the sound is what you do with your audio system, 20% (or 10 or 5%) of the sound is the result of the components you own.

We like to say it’s not about the audio you have, it’s about the audio you do: how you set up your system, what you’ve done to treat your room, how good your electricity is and all the rest of it.

Our VPI Aries (original, not the latest model) with Super Platter (no longer made) and TTWeights Carbon Fiber Platter (a big upgrade, no longer made) / VPI Synchronous Drive System (as of 2016 now sitting on a Townshend Seismic Sink) Triplanar Tonearm / Dynavector 17d3 [now 17dx] / Aurios (no longer made), which sit on a Townshend Seismic Sink (another big upgrade, contact me if interested) / EAR 324P and the hundreds of hours we’ve spent setting up and tweaking this beast is at the heart of everything we do around here.

We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers, even more now that they have much improved high frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.

Mix in extensive room treatments, aided inestimably by three pairs of Hallographs (as we like to say, there is no practically no Hi-Fi without them), more than thirty years of experience and endless hours of experimentation and you have a system that can separate the winners from the losers like nobody’s business.

Exactly like nobody’s business, because nobody does it in this business but us. Having heard hundreds of systems over the years, it’s an open question as to whether anyone else could do what we do.

The Benefits of Low Power Amps

Our preamp and amp are vintage and low power; the Focus can play quite loudly with the thirty-five watts our amp puts out. We are big fans of Low Power (but not single ended) and are not the least bit happy with the current trend toward high-power amps, whether tube or transistor. I remember well when this trend started in the early ’70s with the Phase Linear 400 amp. It has only gotten worse with each passing year.

A few years back we tried using higher power amps when doing shootouts for the likes of Nirvana, AC/DC and such. We found that using a bigger amp involved major trade-offs, trade-offs (opacity; loss of transient information, spaciousness and ambience) whose costs far exceeded their benefits.

With more power comes less Tubey Magic, sweetness, transparency, three-dimensionality and that wonderful relaxed quality which allows the music to flow. High power amps in our experience do none of these things well. As most speakers today are terribly inefficient, they require the use of high power amps, a choice most audiophiles do not even know they are making when they buy inefficient speakers. 

If you own large power amps, there is a very good chance you do not know what you are missing.

Most of our wiring — interconnect and speaker (the Triplanar is hardwired with a top quality phono interconnect) — is custom, although we recommend certain power cords when you buy specific equipment from us (such as the EAR phono stages). We occasionally engage in audiophile wire-bashing in our commentaries.

And Why You Shouldn’t Care

Having said that, we don’t think you should care a whit about what equipment we use.

No, I take that back. Let’s be honest. The equipment we’ve listed is the equipment we use and recommend because it’s the best equipment we have had the opportunity to audition, or managed to acquire, or happened to come our way, and was affordable at the time. In truth, it was some combination of the above. It’s what works for us.

The bulk of audiophile equipment we have auditioned over the last thirty plus years would make our famous Hot Stamper shootouts difficult to carry out.

Most of it sounds far too colored, limited and often — not to put too fine a point on it — just plain wrong.

This commentary about the music of The Beatles targets the issue, but in hundreds of our listings we try to help the reader/ listener focus specifically on what a recording should be doing in the home. The better your equipment and room, the better your Hot Stamper pressing will be able to do what we know it can do.

If you would like to hear your records sound their best, we would love to help you accomplish that goal. There is no greater thrill than hearing your favorite music sound better than you ever thought possible. It’s what Hot Stampers are all about. And the right equipment is a big part of that better-than-you-ever-thought-possible sound. Not the biggest part; the biggest part is you.

Still, a very big part.

A Good Record Is an Education

A good record is an education for us too. This is not only how we’ve managed to learn about the pressing in question; it’s the same process that allows us to make improvements in the sound of the stereo. It’s learning how to identify what is right and what is wrong with the sound of any pressing — the same process that helps us recognize whether any change to the stereo makes it sound better or worse, and to try and figure out by how much and in what way.

And the best part is, like the practice of any skill, the more you do it, the better you get at it. We do it all day, every day. Not because we’re noble or dedicated. We do it because we enjoy it. It’s fun. It’s the most fun part of this job. Discovering great sounding recordings is a THRILL. It’s what this hobby is all about — hearing music sound better than you ever thought it could.

Change For The Better

Of course, as I’ve stated elsewhere on the site, you learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same equipment. What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change. You have to CHANGE something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.

How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record. The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. Most records do not have the same sound on both sides, not the records we play anyway, and we play them by the thousands.

Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to our knowledge. Because few audiophiles and almost no record dealers make the effort to listen critically at anything approaching this level of scrutiny.

Training Your Ears

If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following. Either your system is not good enough to resolve these differences, which is sometimes the case, or, much more likely, you simply haven’t trained your ears to listen for them.

This has nothing to do with listening for pleasure. This is listening like it’s a job. Critically. Analytically.

Try to listen for one quality by itself. Listen for grain, or top end extension, or bass, or dynamics — anything, the list is endless. Focus in on that single quality, recognize it, appreciate it, then flip the record over and judge that one quality for side two.

Cheap Tables

There is a minimum level of resolution your front end must attain before these differences are important. With a cheap rig you certainly don’t need us to find records for you. (More on the limitations of cheap tables here.)

Many of the records we praise highly present a severe test for a playback system, one that less sophisticated setups will have a hard time passing. Sergio Mendes’ records come readily to mind. You need to have one helluva well-setup, high-quality front end before you can play them without sibilance and grain, let alone bring out all the magic. I don’t know a tougher test than Stillness, or Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66. They will bring most stereos to their knees, mine included if I haven’t tuned it right.

Better in What Way?

Much of the commentary on the site is there to explain how to differentiate the better pressings from the not-so-better pressings. The better the system, and the more careful the listener, the more these differences will matter. That’s why we charge so much money for the really hot copies – to us, they are worlds better than the runners-up.

They are right in a way that the typical half-speed mastered or heavy vinyl pressing rarely is. The more critically one listens, the more obvious this distinction becomes. The real thing just can’t be beat, and you can be pretty sure that the real thing is an old record.

Not just any old record of course. It needs to have been cleaned properly, mastered properly and pressed properly. Ideally it should have Hot Stampers, but that is not a requirement for top quality sound. Lots of old records have top quality sound, but not all of them have Hot Stampers. (More on that subject here.)

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Letter of the Week – “I assumed that there must be some better sounding pressings out there. Now here they are.”

More of the Music of Neil Young

More of the music of Leonard Bernstein

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

Hey Tom, 

The West Side Story I picked up from you a few months ago was just something else. I was sitting on my couch watching the stage as Tony and Maria sang through the WSS songbook. I mean, there they were. Sure Mono has a particular feel and you can only quiet down an old 6-eye so much, but it was just beautiful.

I was very happy with what I received. All four records sound wonderful and are well worth the outlay. I have had several copies of “El Rayo-X” and “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”.

They sounded quite good but I assumed that there must be some better sounding pressings out there. Now here they are.

Paul S.

Paul,

Thanks for your letter. We love all those albums too, and we love finding killer pressings of them for our customers.

Further Reading

Dire Straits – The Best Pressings Have Surprisingly Natural Sound

More of the Music of Dire Straits

Reviews and Commentaries for Love Over Gold

This modern album (1982) can sound surprisingly good on the right pressing. On most copies the highs are grainy and harsh, not exactly the kind of sound that inspires you to turn your system up good and loud and get really involved in the music. I’m happy to report that both sides here have no such problem – they rock and they sound great loud.

We pick up every clean copy we see of this album, domestic or import, because we know from experience just how good the best pressings can sound.

What do the best copies have?

REAL dynamics for one.

And with those dynamics you need rock solid bass. Otherwise the loud portions simply become irritating.

A lack of grain is always nice — many of the pressings we played were gritty or grainy.

Other copies that were quite good in most ways lacked immediacy and we took serious points off for that.

The best copies of Love Over Gold are far more natural than the average pressing you might come across, and that’s a recognizable quality we can listen for and weight in our grading.

It’s essential to the sound of the better pressings, which means in our shootouts it’s worth a lot of points. Otherwise you might as well be playing the CD.

Domestics or Imports?

Both can be good. The good copies tend to be good in the same way, and the bad copies, domestic or import, are likewise bad in the same way. It just goes to show, once again, that the only way to know how a record will sound is to play it.

If I had only one or two copies to judge by, I might have preferred an import over a domestic or vice versa. In the old days (before the advent of Hot Stamper shootouts), I would probably have drawn some surely erroneous conclusion concerning the relative merits of one or the other. Small sample sizes are the primary cause of these mistaken judgments. Unless you have a big batch of copies to play, you really can’t be sure about the sound of a recording.

And If I’m not mistaken, aren’t all the original copies, imports and domestics, mastered here in the states at Masterdisk, some by RL, some by BK (Bill Kipper) and some by HW (Howie Weinberg)? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all three sets of initials in the dead wax of the copies we played over the years.

Further Reading

If you would like to run some tests on the copy of Love Over Gold that you own, listen for the qualities we describe above.

Here are some other titles that are good for testing these same qualities, many with advice on specifically What to Listen For.

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Miles Davis – Porgy and Bess on the 360 Label

More Vintage Columbia Pressings

More Miles Davis

  • Superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this vintage Columbia 360 Stereo pressing
  • The 360 label pressings don’t win shootouts, but they can sound very good, and are guaranteed to beat anything you have ever heard — from any era — at any price
  • Both sides are full of that Vintage Columbia jazz Tubey Magic – the brass is full-bodied with lots of air, the bass is surprisingly well-defined, the top end is extended and sweet, and the soundfield is HUGE and three-dimensional
  • 5 stars: “It was Evans’ intimate knowledge of the composition as well as the performer that allowed him to so definitively capture the essence of both… No observation or collection of American jazz can be deemed complete without this recording.”
  • Teo Macero was the producer and Ray Moore the engineer — it’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.
  • If you’re a fan of the marvelous collaborations of Miles Davis and Gil Evans circa 1959, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this album belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1959 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Frank Sinatra – Moonlight Sinatra

More Frank Sinatra

  • You’ll find STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last on this elusive favorite from Ol’ Blue Eyes
  • We’ve been working on this shootout for years – this is one of the few copies to ever hit the site
  • Master engineer Lowell Frank correctly captured the sound of every instrument here: the guitars, piano, strings, drums, percussion instruments — everything has the natural timbre of the real thing
  • Marks 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
  • “Driven by a set of lush, sparkling Nelson Riddle arrangements, Moonlight Sinatra is a low-key, charming collection. An enjoyable, romantic listen.”

The presence and immediacy here are wonderful. Turn it up and Frank is between your speakers, putting on the performance of a lifetime. On the best, hard-to-find copies, the sound is big, open, rich and full. The highs are extended and silky sweet. The bass is tight and punchy.

This Blue Green Label LP also has the midrange magic that’s missing from the later reissues. As good as some of them can be, this one is more real sounding. It gives you the sense that Frank Sinatra is right in front of you.

He’s no longer a recording — he’s a living, breathing person. We call that “the breath of life,” and the best pressings have it in spades. His voice is so rich, sweet, and free of any artificiality, you immediately find yourself lost in the music because there’s no “sound” to distract you. (more…)

Little Feat – Transparent in the Midrange, But So What?

Yes, We Have No Hot Stamper Pressings of Little Feat’s Albums

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Little Feat

Sonic Grade: D

After playing a killer Hot Stamper pressing of the album many years ago, we wrote the following: 

If you own the Nautilus Half-Speed, a record we actually liked years ago even after we had forsworn those kinds of pressings, you are really in for a treat. THIS is what the band sounds like in the REAL world, not the phony audiophile world that so many of our fellow hobbyists appear to be perfectly happy living in.

Just listen to how punchy the drums are on the real pressings, a perfect example of what proper mastering does well and Half-Speed mastering does poorly. When you listen to a top quality Hot Stamper pressing you feel that you are hearing this music EXACTLY the way Little Feat wanted it to be heard. I just don’t get that vibe from the half-speed.

I was fooled back in the day myself. The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.

It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. That’s how they get those audiophile records to sound the way they do.

For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with blurry bass.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with those qualities and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with sound like that.

Further Reading on the subject of Half-Speed Mastering

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed Mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.

It’s dead as a doornail sound, plain and simple.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the ’70s and ’80s. The average Heavy Vinyl LP I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? But there are scores of companies turning out this crap; somebody must be buying it.

If you are still buying these modern pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl Pressings and Half-Speed Mastered Records.

People have been known to ask us:

How come you guys don’t like Half-Speed Mastered records?

That’s an easy one. We’ve played them by the hundreds over the years, and we’ve found that as our ability to reproduce the sound of these records improved (better equipment, table setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity and the like), the gap between the better non-half-speed mastered pressings and the half-speeds got bigger and bigger, leaving the half-speeds further and further behind, in the dust you might say, again and again, with so few exceptions that they could easily be counted on the fingers of one hand.

We’ve been playing half-speed mastered records since I bought my first Mobile Fidelity in 1978 or 1979. That’s forty years of experience with the sonic characteristics of this mastering approach, an approach we have found to have consistent shortcomings.

These shortcomings have somehow eluded the devotees of these records, how, we cannot imagine.

(That’s really not true, of course. Fans of half-speed mastered records are as clueless as I was starting out. Many of the records I used to like were half-speeds. With almost no exceptions, my failure to recognize what they were doing falls under the general heading of Live and Learn.)

Eventually we came to understand them better, and we have laid out their faults, chapter and verse, in the 140+ reviews we’ve written on this blog to date.

The dozen or so commentaries found here are a good way to get a taste of what we’ve learned.

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Gram Parsons – GP

More Country and Country Rock

  • A KILLER sounding copy and the first to hit the site in many years; both sides have Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it
  • This copy is doing just about everything right — clean, clear, full-bodied and present with tons of energy and a nicely extended top end
  • “… his first solo album, 1973’s G.P., is probably the best realized expression of his musical personality. Working with a crack band of L.A. and Nashville’s finest, he drew from them a sound that merged breezy confidence with deeply felt Southern soul… this album remains a haunting reminder of Parsons’ talent and influence, and has only gotten better with the passing years.” 

If you’re a fan of country rock, this is some of the finest you’ll ever hear. James Burton, Ron Tutt and Byron Berline all play on here and quite well I might add. The harmonies between Gram and Emmylou are absolutely breathtaking, just drop the needle on ’We’ll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning’ to hear what I’m talking about.

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