Month: March 2023

That’s the Way of the World – The Hit Is Made from a Dub Tape

More of the Music of Earth, Wind and Fire

We’re pretty sure that the first track on side one, Shining Star, is made from a dub tape, a common occurrence with planned hit singles. The rest of the songs on side two are a step up in class; when you play the side, see if you don’t hear some veiling and smearing on Shining Star, both of which are good indications of a dubby tape.

These are problems we hear in the sound of practically all the Heavy Vinyl pressings that, let’s be honest, we waste our time auditioning, which leads us naturally to conclude that they are not really made from master tapes, but high quality analog dubs or high-rez digital masters. Some of course sound better than others, but none will ever sound the way this copy does.  (more…)

Harry Belafonte – The Many Moods of Belafonte

More Harry Belafonte

  • This outstanding pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Lively, balanced and vibrant, with a healthy dose of the Tubey Magical Living Stereo full-bodied sound these recordings need to work their magic – qualities which are rarely evident on the modern reissues made from whatever tapes they are using
  • Several crowd-pleasers were introduced on this album for the first time: the calypso “Zombie Jamboree,” which soon replaced “Matilda” as Belafonte’s epic audience participation song; and the showtune “Try to Remember,” from the off-Broadway show The Fantasticks.
  • If you’re a fan of Harry’s, this vintage record from 1962 belongs in your collection.
  • To see Living Stereo titles with Hot Stampers, click here. To see the 200+ Living Stereo titles we’ve reviewed, click here.

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How much better will a Hot Stamper pressing sound on my system?

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More Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

That’s a tough question, because it involves two things I can’t know: how good your stereo is, and how critically you listen to it.

Really, the only way to find out how much better sounding a Hot Stamper pressing is would be to try one or two and see if the sound quality justifies the price. Which is why we offer a 100% money back guarantee: the record has to perform to your satisfaction or we give you all your money back.

A fellow wrote me a while back with a long list of his equipment. I replied:

I would like to help you but I know very little about any of the equipment you discuss below other than the EAR 834p, which I do like. I very much like KEF speakers in general — they are neutral as a rule — which means that probably anything you buy that makes them sound better will most likely be a good piece of gear, but what that would be I cannot say, sorry.

The only way to know if your system can resolve the differences between our records and everybody else’s is to try some. You are the ultimate judge of what the value of that difference is and no one else.

All guaranteed of course. Try anything you like and send it back if you don’t feel it’s worth the cost.

And keep in mind that as your stereo gets better, our records get better. This is not true for most audiophile reissues, whose flaws become more obvious the better your system gets.

Just a few days back a fellow asked me why Led Zeppelin III sounds so awful — he’s hated the sound of his copy since he bought it in the ’70s.

I sent him a link to our Hot Stamper pressing, which was priced at many hundreds of dollars, and said that our copy will show you the sound you’ve been missing for 40 years. This is the service we offer.

He hasn’t bought it yet and probably never will, but think about what he’s missing: the enjoyment of that music.

Some have even written to us about just how good that record sounds on the pressings we sell.

And if you’re like the guy that thought that this record sounds good, then you probably will return any Hot Stamper we send you, which he did.

If super smooth is the sound you are going for, lots of audiophile record dealers have what you want — on Remastered Heavy Vinyl — in stock and ready to ship. How anybody falls for that sound is beyond me. (More on the subject here.)

(Actually, two men, a Mr Dunning and a Mr Kruger, came up with a workable explanation. It comports with practically everything I know about this hobby and the people who pursue it, and it matches up especially well with my own experience for the first twenty years I struggled to make sense of high end audio.)

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Stravinsky / Song Of the Nightingale / Reiner

More of the music of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

More of the music of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

  • A vintage Shaded Dog pressing of these popular 20th century works featuring superb Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound from first note to last
  • The orchestra is wide, tall, and the dynamics and transparency of this copy are first rate
  • Spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence

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Letter of the Week – “The sound just LEAPS out of the system.”

More of the Music of Cannonball Adderley

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

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

Holy Moly Fellows!

I’m playing through my most recent Better Records Short Stack ™. First up, Somethin’ Else by Cannonball and Bill, followed by Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night.

Man. The sound just LEAPS out of the system. I’m not kidding, it literally JUMPS from the speakers, smooth, clean, big, bold and beautiful. Did someone play with the volume? Did I change the gain? No man! These records just sound FANTASTIC!

Thank you gentlemen. Happy New Year!

Doug

Doug,

Thanks for writing. There is a reason that on every listing we put this boilerplate in the body of the text:

What We’re Listening For on Record X

    • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
    • Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them
    • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
    • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
    • Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
    • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
    • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Exactly right: We want our records to have presence and energy, to be big and bold and jump out of the speakers.

This is the opposite of what everyone whose stuck in the world of Heavy Vinyl is hearing.

Most of those records are veiled, recessed and compressed.

Who on earth wants that sound?  It’s beyond our understanding how it is that so many audiophiles cannot tell the difference between a good record and the mediocre-at-best product being offered today.

Thanks for your letter. Glad you liked our Hot Stamper pressings as much as we did.

TP

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Letter of the Week – “I know in one sense you’re only doing your job but who the hell else does what you do?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

Just received Deja Vu – so good. I have never ever heard the vocals sound so natural and so full of power and energy.

The only similar record I have is After The Gold Rush and I got that from you guys too.

I know in one sense you’re only doing your job but who the hell else does what you do?

Thanks again guys for a brilliant record, a fantastic piece of history and art that I can hear whenever I want to.

Peter

Peter,

Thanks for your letter. Those are two of our favorite records too, with sound that is hard to beat once you figure out which stampers are the ones with the potential for top quality sound.

These two records have a lot in common as it turns out.

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Arlo Guthrie – Alice’s Restaurant

More Arlo Guthrie

  • This early Reprise stereo pressing of Arlo Guthrie’s classic debut boasts outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – unusually quiet vinyl too
  • These Two-Color pressings are practically impossible to find with surfaces this quiet, but we found this one, don’t ask me how
  • The 18 minute plus title song sounds wonderful here – natural, Tubey Magical, and tonally correct, as befits any top quality vintage pressing, especially one with Lee Herschberg handling the engineering duties
  • 4 stars: “… provide[s] an insight into his uniformly outstanding — yet astoundingly overlooked — early sides on Warner Bros.”

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Led Zeppelin II – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Below you will find the story of my first encounter with an amazing sounding copy of Zep II back in 1995 or thereabouts.

I had a friend who had come into possession of a White Label Demo pressing of the album and wanted to trade it in to me for the Mobile Fidelity pressing that I had played for him once or twice over the years, and which we both thought was The King on that album.

To my shock and dismay, his stupid American copy killed the MoFi. It trounced it in every way. The bass was deeper and punchier. Everything was more dynamic. The vocals were more natural and correct sounding. The highs were sweeter and more extended. The whole pressing was just full of life in a way that the Mobile Fidelity wasn’t.

The Mobile Fidelity didn’t sound bad. It sounded not as good. More importantly, in comparison with the good domestic copy, in many ways it now sounded wrong.

Let me tell you, it was a defining moment in my growth as a record collector. I had long ago discovered that many MoFi’s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. But this was a MoFi I liked. And it had killed the other copies I’d heard in the past.

So I learned something very important that day.

I learned that hearing a better pressing is clearly the surest way to appreciate what’s wrong with the pressing I thought sounded right.

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Frank Sinatra & Duke Ellington – Booth? What Booth?

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

More of the Music of Duke Ellington

Notice that, at least for most of the material, and perhaps all of it, Sinatra does not seem to be stuck in a vocal booth. He sounds like he is actually standing on the same stage as Ellington’s band.

Whether this is a recording trick — he’s in a booth but the engineer did a great job creating a sound for the booth that matched the ambience and space of the studio — or whether he is standing front and center with the band, the illusion is convincing and adds greatly to the “reality” of the performance..

Recorded one year after the remarkable Sinatra-Jobim record that we treasure here at Better Records, Sinatra takes the opportunity to work with one of the greatest bandleaders in the history of jazz, the Duke himself. We had good luck with the stereo originals on the lovely Blue and Green Reprise labels — they can be as big, rich and warm as Sinatra’s legendary Capitol recordings when you find the right pressing, and that’s really saying something.

Transparency

What typically separates the killer copies from the merely good ones are two qualities that we often look for in the records we play: transparency and lack of smear. Transparency allows you to hear into the recording, reproducing the ambience and subtle musical cues and details that high-resolution analog is known for.

(Note that most Heavy Vinyl pressings being produced these days seem to be quite Transparency Challenged. Lots of important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply not to be found. That audiophiles as a whole — including those passing themselves off as the champions of analog in the audio press — fail to notice these failings does not speak well for either their equipment or their critical listening skills.)

Richness and Lack of Smear

Lack of smear is also important, especially on a recording with this many horns, where the reproduction of leading-edge transients is critical to their sound. If the sharply different characters of the various horns (trumpet, trombone, and various saxes) smear together into an amorphous blob, as if the sound were being fed through ’50s vintage tube amps (for those of you who know that sound), half the fun goes right out of the music.

Richness is important — horns need to be full-bodied if they are to sound like the real thing — but so are speed and clarity, two qualities that ensure that all the horns have the proper bite and timbre.

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Buffalo Springfield – Again

More Country and Country Rock

  • Buffalo Springfield’s sophomore release is back on the site with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Tubey Magical Analog sound or close to it from from start to finish – unusually quiet vinyl for an ATCO original as well
  • Consistently brilliant songwriting and production: “Mr. Soul,” “A Child’s Claim To Fame,” “Expecting To Fly,” “Bluebird,” “Hung Upside Down,” “Rock & Roll Woman,” “Broken Arrow” and more!
  • A true Desert Island Disc – 5 stars: “…this record stands as their greatest triumph… its classic status cannot be denied.”
  • If you’re a fan of The Buffalo Springfield, this early pressing from 1967 surely belong in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1967 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. This band’s second and third albums are both good examples of records many audiophiles may not know well but should.

Listen to the vocal harmonies — you can separate out all the parts much more clearly on these Hot Stamper pressings. You can really hear precisely who’s in there and what part they are playing in the vocal arrangement. I can’t remember ever hearing it sound so clear. The best copies really let you hear into the music. (more…)