Month: March 2023

Randy Newman – Good Old Boys

More Randy Newman

More Singer Songwriter Albums

  • A superb original pressing of Good Old Boys, with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • 5 Stars: “Good Old Boys is one of Newman’s finest albums; it’s also one of his most provocative and infuriating, and that’s probably just the way he wanted it.”

With Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman producing, and Lee Herschberg and Donn Landee engineering, this album has the exceptionally smooth, rich, analog sound you would expect to find on a production guided by these men. It also happens to be a sound we love here at Better Records.

It’s the sound of vintage Reprise from 1974. (more…)

Listening in Depth to Rumours

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

This is a rock album — it needs to be played LOUD and it needs to be played on a DYNAMIC system.

Case in point: consider how quietly The Chain starts out, and how loud it is by the end. Those kinds of macro-dynamics are very rare on a pop recording. Rumours has the kind of dynamics you just don’t hear anymore, which is why the killer copies are a such a THRILL to play on a big dynamic system fitted with a top-notch turntable.

The best copies exhibited the kind of presence, bass, dynamics and energy found only on the kind of Super Demo Discs we rave about here endlessly: the BS&Ts, Stardusts, Zumas and the like. When you get a good copy of this record, it is a Demo Disc.

Who knew? Who even suspected? Who raves about Rumours but us? Let’s fact it, the audiophile world has no clue how good this record can sound.

Quick Listening Test — Dreams

What do the best copies have that the also-rans don’t? Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you may want to pay special attention to: the sound of the snare. When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to the sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the stuff we ADORE about the sound of the best copies of Rumours.

Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare on Dreams. That’s probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to the entire Rumours album, as well as anything by The Beatles, and Neil Young’s Zuma, and lots of our other favorite records, and we expect favorites of yours too.

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Paul McCartney – McCartney

More of the Music of Paul McCartney

  • With seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard McCartney’s Apple debut sound this good
  • It’s practically impossible to find copies of this album that sound this good and play this quietly
  • The musicality, energy and presence are right on the money (particularly on side one), not to mention that the studio space is huge
  • A Top 100 pick and Paul McCartney’s One and Only Masterpiece
  • Record Collector highlighted “Every Night,” “Junk,” and “Maybe I’m Amazed” as songs that “still sound absolutely effortless and demonstrate the man’s natural genius with a melody.”
  • This is our pick for Paul McCartney’s best sounding album. Roughly 100 other listings for the Best Sounding Album by an Artist or Group can be found here.
  • This is a Must Own Title from 1970, a great year for Rock and Pop music

The best tracks here have the quality of live music in a way that not one out of a hundred rock records do. The music jumps right out of the speakers and fills up the room.

The album sounds like it’s recorded live in the studio, but of course that’s impossible, because Paul plays practically all the instruments himself! It just goes to show how good a multi-track studio recording can sound when done well.

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How can I find my own Hot Stamper pressings?

New to the Blog? Start Here

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

There are four basic steps you must take, and you have to do right by each of the four if you are going to be successful at discovering and evaluating your own Hot Stampers. 

We discuss every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this blog. Although none of it will come as news to anyone who has spent much time reading our stuff, we cobbled together this commentary to help formalize the process and hopefully make it easier to understand and follow.

If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly and carefully and above all scientifically than most audiophiles and record collectors we’ve met apparently think is necessary. Don’t be one of those guys. Do it right and get the results that are simply not possible with any other approach.

The Cornerstones of Hot Stampers

There are four aspects to the work required to find these very special pressings:

  1. You must have a sufficient number of copies to play in order to find at least one “hot” one.
  2. You must be able to clean your copies properly in order to get them to sound their best.
  3. You must be able to reproduce your copies faithfully.
  4. You must be able to evaluate them critically.

There is a clear benefit to doing it this way, and it’s something you should consider when tweaking your system too.

Lately we have achieved the best results by going about it like this:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John beats the hell out of on Norwegian Wood just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.

This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time, you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive a great deal more pleasure from the music you play, especially if you use our approach.

It works for us and there’s no reason it can’t work for you.

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Percussion Is Key to Night and Day

More of the Music of Joe Jackson

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Joe Jackson

Rich solid piano tone, lively drums, tight powerful bass and plenty of vocal presence make this one come ALIVE and sound just the way it should. You’ll want to turn it up to get the full effect, because the music really swings on a copy that sounds as good as this one. It not only swings, it ROCKS.

From that opening big drum on ‘Another World,’ you know you’re in for some wonderful sound: BIG, spacious, transparent, dynamic — you name it, this record has it all. Lesser original copies can be grainy, irritating, flat and lifeless. Nothing new there, right?

Most reissues are clearly made from sub-generation tapes. They sound smeared and dead and are guaranteed to bore you to tears. With the right originals the sound is MAGIC.

Night and Day is Joe Jackson’s masterpiece. The music is simply WONDERFUL from start to finish. 

Side One

Another World 

The big drum and all the percussion instruments that lead off this track — and by percussion instruments I am also referring to the piano — tell you everything you need to know. The timbre of the big drum is very pronounced on the best copies.

Chinatown
T.V. Age
Target 

This track has some really deep bass. Check it out.

Steppin’ Out

Side Two

Breaking Us in Two
Cancer
Real Men
A Slow Song 

This is a tough track because Jackson’s vocal can sound strained on even the best copies, and positively painful on the worst ones. If side two has plenty of top end and not much edge to his voice, you have a copy that’s definitely in the ballpark.

AMG  Review

Jackson’s Night and Day and Costello’s Imperial Bedroom announced to the world that both were “serious songwriters,” standing far apart from the clamoring punkers and silly new wavers.

Eric Clapton – Journeyman

More Eric Clapton

More British Blues Rock

  • A superb import copy with Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • Forget the commonly dry-sounding domestic copies – the pressings mastered in Germany and the UK were the only ones good enough for us to put in a shootout
  • Rich, lively, spacious – the right pressings are surprisingly good-sounding for a recording from 1989
  • The big hit was “Pretending,” but “Bad Love” (both went to Number One) won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… a laid-back and thoroughly engaging display of Clapton’s virtuosity. On the whole, it’s the best studio album he’s released since Slowhand.”

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Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Original Soundtrack Recording)

More Bob Dylan

More Soundtrack Albums

  • An incredible copy of Dylan’s 1973 soundtrack album with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • This one is doing practically everything right – it’s bigger, bolder, richer and more clean, clear and open than almost anything else we played
  • Includes the hit “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which charted on the Top 20 and would be famously covered in later years by the likes of Eric Clapton and Guns N’ Roses
  • “This record also proved that Dylan could shoehorn his music within the requirements of a movie score without compromising its content or quality, something that only the Beatles, unique among rock artists, had really managed to do up to that time…”

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The Who – My Generation

More of The Who

More Debut Recordings of Interest

  • A My Generation like you’ve never heard, with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this vintage Mono import pressing
  • Both of these sides were bigger and richer, and with more rock energy, than most of what we played
  • If you want to hear this music EXPLODE out of the speakers and come to life the way The Who wanted you to, this record will do the trick
  • The right stampers make all the difference on this title – the average copy of this later pressing is hardly worth the vinyl it’s pressed on (we know, we’ve learned about them the hard way)
  • “An explosive debut, and the hardest mod pop recorded by anyone. [T]he Who never surpassed the pure energy level of this record”

We recently finished a shootout for this record and this copy was a solid step up over most of what we played. Some tracks do sound better than others, but that’s par for the course with this kind of material. On the best songs, it had all the top-end, bass and presence that was missing from other copies. I’ve rarely heard these songs sound better than they do here.

This vintage-but-far-from-original UK Mono 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.

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Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 23 (“Appassionata”) / Kamiya – (45 RPM)

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

More TAS List Super Discs

  • This rare TAS-approved Japanese import LP boasts INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) DEMO DISC sound on both sides
  • You will have a hard time finding a better recording of the piano than this – it’s one of the all time great Direct-to-Discs
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than all of the other copies we played
  • All of which adds up to a top quality piano recording in every way
  • A famous resident of the TAS list, this album offers excellent music, performed with feeling, and recorded properly, the best of all possible worlds for us audiophiles
  • A friend of ours tells me that Kamiya plays this piece exactly the way Horowitz did, and that’s probably a good thing – good luck finding a Horowitz recording that sounds like this!

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Tchaikovsky / Swan Lake Highlights / Fistoulari

More of the music of Tchaikovsky

  • This Demo Disc quality pressing of Fistoulari’s powerful and exciting recording (CS-6218) boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • So transparent, dynamic and REAL, this copy raises the bar for the sound of ballet music on vinyl
  • One of the most popular ballets in the world, presented here with out-of-this-world Decca engineered All Tube Chain sound from 1961 – it’s a match!
  • For the Highlights of Swan Lake, we know of no better performance, and we certainly know of no better sounding recording on vinyl
  • It took us years to find enough copies to do this shootout – not many copies will play as quietly as this one, and many of them will have their inner grooves destroyed by the mistracking tonearms of the day
  • The big finish at the end of the second side is so powerful it might just take your breath away – show me a modern remastering with that kind of sound and I will eat it
  • “It is a superb account of Swan Lake, perhaps better than most recordings out there. Maestro Fistoulari and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam are in top form.”
  • If you’re a fan of delightful orchestral showpieces such as these ballet highlights, this LP from 1961 belongs in your collection

This London UK import is one of the best single-disc versions of the ballet we have ever played. This is the one folks, assuming you do not want a (nearly) complete performance of the work. (For that we recommend the 2 LP box set with Ansermet.)

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. (more…)