Month: May 2023

In 2016 We Finally Broke Through with Every Picture Tells a Story

Hot Stamper Pressinsg of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Every Picture Tells A Story shootouts.

We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing back in 2016, a copy that took the recording to a level we had no idea was even possible.

Side one was so jaw-droppingly amazing that we awarded it the rare Four Plus (A++++) grade. 

We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.

In our breakthrough shootout from 2016 the magic stampers were discovered, and they have won every shootout since then.  We would be very surprised to find any stampers that could compete with them, but you never know.

More on the subject of stampers and breakthrough pressings:

This is a superb recording, and on the best pressings it is true Demo Disc material. Not too many of our Hot Stamper titles are going to ROCK you the way this one does. We put it in a class with Led Zep II, Nevermind, and Back In Black — elite company to say the least.

A Quick Check for Tonal Balance

One quick note on how to tell if you have a tonally balanced copy, at least on side two: Maggie May has multi-overdubbed, close-miked mandolins that should have plenty of midrange presence and an extended top end.

As soon as that song ends, a very sweet, smooth guitar opens the next track, Mandolin Wind.

The two songs lean towards opposite ends of the tonal balance spectrum, but on a good copy, both of them sound right.

One’s a little darker, one’s a little brighter, but they’re both right.

And of course the next track, … Losing You, is a great test for energy, whomp and excitement.

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Chicago – III

More Rock and Pop

  • Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on sides one and four, and outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades on sides two and three, this copy of Chicago’s third album will be very hard to beat
  • The sound is lively, punchy, and powerful – with all due respect, it should MURDER whatever copies you may have
  • 4 stars: “Chicago’s third effort…is packed with a combination of extended jams as well as progressive and equally challenging pop songs. Their innovative sound was the result of augmenting the powerful rock & roll quartet with a three-piece brass section – the members of whom are all consummate soloists. Once again, the group couples that with material worthy of its formidable skills.”

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Mozart Record from 1960

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1960 Living Stereo are impressive.

LSC 2287 might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.

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Letter of the Week – “…it is now a reference or demo if you wish, that lets me know how good my system really is.”

More of the Music of The B-52’s

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

Hey Tom, 

Hey guys, before I talk about my very first Hot Stamper let me say this. I have been going to your site for well over two years and was very reluctant to spend the kind of money that you charge for a used record. Come on! Are you kidding??

But I was very intrigued by the description of your system. I had felt that the weakest part of my system may be the cartridge. So I sprung for the 17d3.

WOW! A first class improvement. So I thought “Well if these guys are right about the cartridge, maybe there is something about these used records. After all I can always send it back, right?”

So I ordered the B-52’s first album and played it. And played it. No No No, get up off your knees and stop begging. You can’t have it back. It’s MINE. Although I do not have this album in any format, it is now a reference or demo if you wish, that lets me know how good my system really is. It has also revealed to me that I have records that sound pretty darned good. It has also given me a lesson on critical listening.

I have been listening to music for over 55 years, and you are never too old to learn. Last week I received my new VPI with Disc Doctor package, and it seems to have been a wise addition. I have found a few treasures that have been lurking in my collection. And I ordered a Peter Gabriel today. I am a happy camper.

Kevin B.

Kevin,

Thanks for your letter. Now you have the ideal cartridge to play back our Hot Stampers pressings and hear just how phenomenally good they really sound.

Playback accuracy is at the heart of everything we do. We want to hear our records naked and unadorned. That’s what the 17dx does for us, and of course it can do the same for you.

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The Pretenders on Nautilus – Dead As a Doornail Sound

More of the Music of The Pretenders

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Half-Speed mastered audiophile LP reviewed and found wanting.

This pressing is completely lifeless. The brain trust at Nautilus managed to take all the rock out of this rock and roll band.

It’s yet another ridiculous joke played on a far-too-credulous audiophile public.  If this Nautilus LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.

But look who’s talking? I bought plenty of Nautilus pressings in the ’70s and ’80s, some good ones, some not so good. And some of them I still liked well into the 2000s. What’s my excuse?

Even as recently as, say, fifteen years ago, I still had yet to achieve much of the progress in audio I would need to achieve in order to get past the last of the audiophile pressings I still clung to.

And there’s still one that just cannot be beat, even now.

Keep in mind I had been heavily into audiophile equipment and high quality records for thirty years at that point.

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Letter of the Week – “…they sound WONDERFUL…..no surprise but LOTS of satisfaction!”

More of the Music of  The Grateful Dead

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

Hey Tom,     

Just got the Fresh Cream and Grateful Dead albums, cranked up the rig and they sound WONDERFUL, no surprise but LOTS of satisfaction! Thanks for your sale to enable this “poor” retired audiophile access to great sound.

Thanks for being such a unique person to have discovered what the audio world never really knew or appreciated or admitted to, and for making it available to others.

Best Regards,

EdZ

Ed,

It was our pleasure.

Thanks for your letter.

Best, TP

Beware The Green Manalishi with the Two Prong Crown

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many years ago, more than 20 in fact!, a copy of this record was returned by one of my customers for poor sound quality, so I threw it back on the turntable to see if I had been mistaken in my judgement of its sound.

I confess that hearing the first track again, The Green Manalishi, was painful — it’s the worst sounding song on the album.

But then Oh Well starts up, and it’s full of midrange magic, ambience and exceptional transparency.

The sound varies from track to track after that, but if your stereo can’t find the magic on records like this, you seriously need to look into some better equipment.

This record sounds amazing on our system and it ought to at your house too.

The real test for a stereo is to get difficult to reproduce recordings to sound good, not easy to reproduce recordings.

If you want to test your system after doing some tweaking and tuning, these are the kinds of difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.

When these records start sounding better, there’s a good chance that whatever you did to your system to improve it actually worked.

And if you’re up for a challenge and want to buy some records that can sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.

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Kris Kristofferson – Me and Bobby McGee (aka Kristofferson)

More Kris Kristofferson

More Singer-Songwriter Albums

  • This vintage Monument pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Kristofferson’s debut LP, earning seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades from start to finish
  • You won’t believe how rich, Tubey Magical, big, undistorted and present this copy is (until you play it anyway)
  • Although the self-titled originals will always win our shootouts, the early reissues with the cover you see above can sound quite good on the right pressing
  • 5 stars:: “[Kristofferson] brought a conviction to his vocals and a complete understanding of the nuances of the lyrics. The songs were so personal that they seemed to demand a personal interpretation, and established the persona of a poor songwriter struggling against despair.”
  • This is an excellent title from 1970, which just happens to be a great year for Rock and Pop Music, maybe the greatest of them all

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Rachmaninoff / De Falla – Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini / Nights In The Gardens Of Spain

More of the Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff

  • The rich, textured sheen of the strings the RCA engineers achieved in the ’50s and ’60s is a joy to hear throughout these pieces
  • This is something the Heavy Vinyl crowd will never experience, because that sound just does not exist on modern remastered records the way it does on these vintage pressings
  • Tonally correct from top to bottom and as transparent as practically any vintage recording you may have heard, the combination of clarity and Tubey Magic here will be hard to beat
  • To see more of the best orchestral recordings with top quality sound we’ve done shootouts for, click here
  • If you’re a fan of Rachmaninoff and/or Rubinstein, we think this Living Stereo from 1960 belongs in your collection.

This superb Living Stereo recording checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records.

Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it was somewhat crude and congested, and badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.

Well, now we know. The early Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we are offering here.

We never offered the record as a Hot Stamper pressing because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.

Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.

Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.

Did Harry have a good later pressing? Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did? We’ll never know.

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The Best Jazz Record Ever Made, or the Best Jazz Record We’ve Ever Played?

Masterpieces of Jazz – The List So Far

I ran across this listing for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else today, a record we raved about after doing a shootout for it years ago. Notice the careful hedging in the phrases with newly added italics:

The music here is amazing — as I’m sure most of you know, this is as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball himself — but the good news for audiophiles is that it’s also one of the BEST SOUNDING BLUE NOTE ALBUMS we know of. When you hear it on a copy like this, it’s just about As Good As It Gets.

After doing this shootout in 2015 I would like to amend the above remarks for being much too conservative. The current consensus here at Better Records is that this album deserves to hold three — count ’em, three — somewhat related titles:

One, The Best Sounding Blue Note record we have ever played.

Two, The Best Sounding Jazz Record we have ever played.

Three, Rudy Van Gelder’s Best Engineering (based on the copies we played).

Our shootout winners had more energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space than any jazz recording we have ever heard. The sound was as BIG and BOLD as anything in our audio experience.

Add to that a perfectly balanced mix, with tonality that’s correct from top to bottom for every instrument in the soundfield and you may begin to see why we feel that the best copies of this album set a standard that no other jazz record we’re aware of can meet.

Have we played every Blue Note, every RVG recording, every jazz record?

Of course not. We would never make such a claim. It’s preposterous on its face.

All Well and Good, But Bear This in Mind

In our defense, who could possibly claim to have critically evaluated the sound of more jazz records than we have?

There are multitudes of music experts in the world of jazz. For jazz sound quality the numbers must surely be orders of magnitude smaller, and here is where we’re [pretty sure we have more than a few critically valuable advantages, to wit:

  • better playback equipment,
  • better record cleaning technologies,
  • stacks of pressings of the same title,
  • a scientifically oriented approach and, most importantly of all,
  • a single-minded purpose. 

All our efforts are in service to only one end, to find the pressing with the ultimate in analog sound.

(Naturally we leave the sound of CDs and other digital formats to others. Although CDs often outperform their modern Heavy Vinyl pressing equivalent — here is a case in point — we know our lane and and are happy to stay within it.) (more…)