Month: July 2023

Letter of the Week – “Nothing I’ve done has ever offered a more DEEPLY SATISFYING audio improvement than Hallographs.””

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

Many years ago one of our good customers had this to say about the Hallographs he had purchased.

They are no longer made, but if you have a chance to get hold of a pair, take it. You may find yourself as knocked out by the sound as Dan was.

Hey Tom, 

Man, you weren’t kidding. Hallographs, utilizing a process as comprehensible to me as voodoo magic, have got to be the most AMAZING sonic upgrade ever. Hallographs allow my stereo to induce not just pleasure, but euphoria. That’s not hyperbole.

I don’t know how these tall sticks of wood, albeit expertly crafted, do whatever it is they do, but the sound emanating from my speakers reached a whole new league of sonic reproduction.

Edginess to the highs? Gone.

Bass bloat? Gone.

High volume distortion? Gone.

Meanwhile, it adds rich tones, warmth, detail, clarity, dynamics, life-like three-dimensional sound, and a wonderful ease and naturalness to the overall sound. To top it off, I’ve been able to calibrate focus and immediacy vs. soundstaging and depth. Did I mention it adds a beautifully rich tone?

That I could achieve such wonderful sound with Hallographs in my mid-sized room should be an encouragement to any of your customers who, like me, are still working their way up to a large listening room. I was worried that I might not get much out of the Hallos in the absence of a full range of placement options, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the tens of thousands of dollars of stereo equipment I’ve purchased, nothing I’ve done has ever offered a more DEEPLY SATISFYING audio improvement than Hallographs. When can I get a second pair?

Dan L.

Dan,

Thanks so much for your letter. We are as enthusiastic about the Hallograph’s ability to improve the sound of the stereo as anyone, as can be seen from the photo below. Three Hallos can be seen in the picture surrounding one old man, but we actually use a total of six of them, with two in the back corners of the room behind the listener.

Discovering these room treatments around 2004 completely changed audio for me.

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Boston’s First Album on MoFi Anadisq

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Boston Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The MoFi Anadisc of Boston’s first album has the same problems that seem to have plagued the whole of the Anadisq 200 series. The sound was:

  • thick,
  • opaque,
  • blurry, and
  • murky.

A real slogfest. Audiophile trash of the worst kind. If this isn’t the worst version of the album ever made, I cannot imagine what would be.

Many of the worst releases from MoFi in this era were mastered by Ken Lee. If you happen to come across a record in a store with his name in the credits, or his initials in the deadwax, you are best advised to drop it back in the bin and keep moving. Anything else is just asking for trouble.

Do people still pay good money for this kind of awful sound?

Yes they do!

Go to ebay and see the high prices these kinds of records are fetching. This is in equal parts both shocking and disgusting. 

Here is what is available for the MoFi pressing on Discogs today (2/2/2022). If you have $400 you can order one there.

Marketplace 3 For Sale from $399.99

And people complain about our prices? At least we send you a great sounding record for all the money we charge.

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Letter of the Week – “I get a lot of buyer’s remorse when I purchase records from you.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Aaron sent us this email not long ago:

This email to you reminds me of a thought I’ve been having recently: I get a lot of buyer’s remorse when I purchase records from you. The best antidote to my buyer’s remorse is to play the record. For all the records I’ve kept, whenever I listen to them, I’m glad I purchased them. The only remorse I’ve felt, actually, is when I went super hot instead of white hot. Or when I put something in my cart, but it vanished while I dithered.

This happened to me last night. I was feeling pretty bad about the money I spent on the Zep 1 WHS I just purchased. It didn’t help when you posted that favorable review of the Classic Records Zep 1. I just sold that record, sealed, as part of a box set. I got $2000 for the set, having paid $500 just four years ago, but that $2000 is a fraction of the cost of getting them as white hot stampers. If the Classic Records Zep 1 sounded nearly as good as the Zep 1 WHS I just purchased, then I’d have a lot of remorse. Because I sold it sealed (having disliked 2 and 4 from that set), I couldn’t compare, so I’ll never know.

With all these thoughts swirling through my head, last night I put on my headphones (everybody else was asleep) and gave an end-to-end listen to the Zep 1 WHS. It is perfect. Hard to imagine any other mastering and pressing coming even close to it. I shut down my stereo happy, buyer’s remorse obviated, at least until the next one.

Aaron

As you suspect, there is not a chance in the world that the Classic reissue comes close. We know because we have played both, but you don’t have to take our word for it. When you hear sound as good as the sound on that White Hot Stamper pressing we sold you, it’s simply not the kind of sound you can find on any modern reissue.

You were wise to leave those Heavy Vinyl pressings sealed and sell them. New records such as those Classic Records pressings don’t do what the copy you now own can do — leave you happy after spending a ton of money on a single record.

You’re not the first person to tell us how good our Led Zeppelin Hot Stamper pressing sound either. We actually hear it a lot.

As always, thanks for your letter,

TP

Loggins & Messina – Self-Titled

More Loggins and Messina

More Country and Country Rock

  • A superb copy of the duo’s sophomore release with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • This pressing allows the music to be totally involving, with breathy voices; clear, natural picking on the strings of the guitars and mandolins; choruses that get good and loud – everything you want from this band is here and more
  • L & M are famous for putting plenty of bass on their recordings, but the trick is to find the pressing that actually keeps that bass tightly under control, like this one
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The first full-fledged L&M album found the duo in good form as songwriters, with Messina turning in the sparkling ‘Thinking Of You,’ and the two collaborating on the hit single ‘Your Mama Don’t Dance’ and ‘Angry Eyes.'”
  • If you’re a Loggins and Messina fan, any of the first four albums are Must Owns. This, their second album, released in 1972, is clearly one of their best, and a record I have never tired of in the fifty years I’ve been listening to it.
  • The complete list of titles from 1972 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

We’re big fans of this band, not only for their music but also because their recordings are so good. We know this album about as well as anyone can, having done countless shootouts for it over the years. When it’s good, it’s really good, and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

What we have here is the perfect example of a top quality analog studio pop recording. It’s rich, sweet, and dynamic, with the kind of sound that has practically disappeared from the face of the earth. Not to worry though; it can still be found on certain pressings from the ’70s, the ones that we put so much time and effort into auditioning. Why shouldn’t we? It’s where the BEST SOUND is. (more…)

Where Cheap Turntables Fall Flat – The Music of Franz Liszt

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Music Available Now

Classical music is unquestionably the ultimate test for proper turntable/arm/cartridge setup.

The Liszt Piano Concerto record you see pictured is a superb choice for making small adjustments to your setup in order to improve the playback of these very difficult to reproduce orchestral recordings.

Here are some other reviews and commentaries touching on these areas of turntable setup.

One of the reasons $10,000+ front ends exist is to play large scale, complex, difficult-to-reproduce music such as Liszt’s two piano concertos. You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you choose to, it would surely be the kind of record that could help you recognize the sound quality your tens of thousands of dollars has paid for.

It has been my experience that cheap tables more often than not collapse completely under the weight of a mighty record such as this.

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These Two Lena Horne Living Stereo Releases Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vocal Albums Available Now

The words “Living Stereo” on the cover are apparently no guarantee of good sound.

We have never played a copy of either of these two albums that was especially good sounding, certainly not good enough to charge the kind of money we charge.

We love female vocal recordings, but these two just did not make the grade.

There are a great many male and female vocal albums that actually did make the grade, most often by going through a shootout, and here are some of the categories we use to separate them:

We’ve Played ‘Em

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find these two in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

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Tchaikovsky / Serenade for Strings – Munch

The Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Outstanding Living Stereo sound for Munch’s recording with the Boston Symphony, with both sides of this original Shaded Dog pressing earning Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • The 14 minute long Elgar piece on this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Surely one of the greatest performances ever recorded, more powerful and emotional than any with which we are familiar
  • “In his conception of the Serenade, Tchaikovsky envisioned a work which falls somewhere between a symphony and a string quintet. The work is as personal as any of the composer’s symphonies and as intimate as his chamber music.”

The texture and harmonic overtones of the strings are near perfection. As we listened we became completely immersed in the music on the record, transfixed by the remarkable virtuosity the performers brought to the work in 1958, as well as the quality of RCA’s engineering.

The overall sound is rich, sweet and Tubey Magical. For those of you who have only the Cisco pressing, you are in for a world of better sound. After playing these sides, you may be inclined to take all your heavy vinyl classical LPs and put them up on ebay, or at the very least, in storage. None of them, I repeat not a single one, will ever sound the way this record does.

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

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Beethoven / Symphony No. 3 – As Good as We Thought?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We’ve just done the shootout for this album again and we could not find an original that sounded as good as the one we review here. Not only that, none of the originals we played earned even our minimum Hot Stamper grade.

To see the superior sounding reissue pressing we like now, please click here.

  • Both sides of this original copy were giving us the rich and Tubey Magical Decca / London sound we were looking for, earning excellent Double Plus (A++) grades
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than most of what we played
  • A top performance from Solti and the Vienna Phil – it’s classic Solti: fast-paced, exciting and powerful
  • Solti’s Beethoven recordings from 1959 are superb, with the 5th and 7th being every bit as good — it’s his later recordings, the ones from the early 1970s, that we find lacking

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Ladies of the Canyon and its Growly Cellos and Solid Pianos

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

The growl of the cello on Rainy Night House can clearly be heard behind Joni, with the wood of the instrument sounding real and correct. The kind of You Are There immediacy and transparency of the best copies has to be heard to be believed. 

Listen to the piano Joni plays throughout the album. This is not the thin and hard-sounding instrument that accompanies her on practically every LP you have ever had the misfortune to audition, hoping against hope that someday you would find that “elusive disc,” the one with sound worthy of such extraordinary music.

No, this piano has real weight; it has body; and it’s surrounded by real, three-dimensional studio space.

This side two is warm, rich, and sweet in a way that we’ve only heard on a handful of other copies in the past. Joni’s vocals just couldn’t sound any better; they’re full-bodied, breathy, textured, and shockingly present. This is the copy to play if you want Joni Mitchell singing to you right there in your listening room. What could be better than that?

With the transparency of the better copies comes the sound of Joni’s right foot on the pedal. It’s clearly audible through most of the takes, something the engineers we doubt could hear. And if they did, you can be sure they didn’t think you could.

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The Dark Side of the Moon – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

I admit to some bias when it comes to DSOTM. I must have played more than a hundred copies over the last forty-odd years. Whenever I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, again and again I would be proved wrong.

We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five ten years ago. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think still makes for some good reading twenty years later.

It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality-controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are those without.

Our Take on DSOTM Pressings

The domestic pressings we have auditioned over the years have never made it into a real shootout. They have always sounded far too flat and veiled to be taken seriously. There are some very good sounding Pink Floyd pressings on domestic vinyl — Wish You Were Here and The Wall can both sound amazing on domestic vinyl — but Dark Side is not one of them in our experience.

The Doug Sax-mastered Heavy Vinyl version from 2003 we played when it came out was way too bright and phony to these ears. We hated it and made that clear to our readers at the time.

We came across a very early British pressing about fifteen years ago, the one with the solid blue triangle label, but it was not as good as other pressings we were playing back then and we never bought another one.

We’ve liked a lot of later UK pressings over the years, but we don’t go out of our way to buy those anymore now that we have heard the really amazing pressings we like now.

As I said, we discovered the killer stampers about five ten years ago, and that showed us an out of this world Dark Side we had no idea could even exist.

We have a name for records like those. We call them breakthrough pressings, and we used to award them a sonic grade of more than Three Pluses in some cases.

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