Month: July 2023

The UK Imports of On the Third Day Are Made from Dubs

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Electric Light Orchestra Available Now

It’s obvious, or should be, that the British vinyl pressings are made from sub-generation copy tapes.

The imports make it sound as if someone threw a blanket over your speakers.

We know this because we had a bunch of them cleaned up for our shootout many years ago and they all sucked.

We tend to buy Electric Light Orchestra records on import vinyl; those are the ones that have proven themselves to have the best sound.

Most of the domestic pressings of their albums sound as though they were mastered from dub tapes.

But On The Third Day is proof that this is not always the case, just as Siren proves that the best Roxy Music albums are not always British.

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John Coltrane – Coltrane’s Sound

More John Coltrane

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • This early pressing boasts two excellent Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • An authentic Green and Blue Atlantic stereo pressing, the only version of the album that has the potential for Hot Stamper sound, which explains why this is one of the few copies to have hit the site since 2011
  • If this price seems high, keep in mind that the top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1000, and the vinyl was about as quiet
  • Our last shootout was in 2018, would should tell you when to expect us to find another copy of this quality: 2028!
  • “This is one of the most highly underrated entries in Coltrane’s voluminous catalog. Although the same overwhelming attention bestowed upon My Favorite Things was not given to Coltrane’s Sound upon its initial release, both were actually recorded during the same three-day period in the fall of 1960… these recordings remain among Trane’s finest.”
  • Coltrane’s Sound, recorded in 1960 but not released until four years later, is a Must Own Jazz Album from 1964

This is yet another superb Tom Dowd recording of Coltrane in his prime, with support from the brilliant McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.

Forget the later Red and Green Atlantic pressings. Every one we’ve ever played was flat, dry, and thin. They sound like the cheap reissues that Atlantic churned out in the ’70s. Don’t get me wrong; there are some good sounding records on the Red and Green label, but you really have to know what you are doing — or be really lucky — to find them.

We’ve played them by the score, and found relatively few winners among a slough of losers. If you want to take your chances on some, knock yourself out, more power to you, but expect to come up with nothing to show for your time and money almost every time. That’s been our experience anyway.

And be very thankful if you happen to run into one of these early Atlantic stereo pressings, especially if it plays as quietly as this one does. Few Classic Coltrane albums survived the jazz lovers of the day and their awful turntables.

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Johnny Winter – Self-Titled

More Johnny Winter

More Electric Blues

  • An original 360 Stereo pressing of Johnny Winter’s sophomore release that was doing practically everything right, earning incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy has the Midrange Magic that’s surely missing from whatever 180g reissue has been made from the 50+ year old tapes (or, to be clear, a modern digital master copied from those tapes)
  • There is a surprisingly healthy dose of bottom end in this recording – it’s the right sound for this kind of heavy blues-rock
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Winter’s debut album for Columbia was also arguably his bluesiest and best… [his] playing and vocals have yet to become mannered or clichéd on this session, and if you’ve ever wondered what the fuss is all about, here’s the best place to check out his true legacy.”

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An Experiment Apparently Not Worth the Trouble

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

A couple of years ago, an interested party inquired about a Hot Stamper pressing of Aja he had seen on our site, specifically whether we were selling the AB first pressing or the AA reissue. You can find the discussion that ensued here.

As a kind of a postscript, we added:

By the way, [Joe] ended up not buying our Hot Stamper pressing. When you have to have an original, you have to have an original and that’s all there is to it.

If Joe was of a more scientific or skeptical bent — in other words, if he were more like me — he would have acquired an original, and then ordered our Hot Stamper in order to compare the two.

This is the subject I want to talk about today.

Audiophiles tend to subscribe to widely-held, conventional theories about what kinds of records are most likely to have the best sound. Outside of those of us who write for this blog, you will find very few audiophiles who believe that a substantial percentage of vintage reissues — not the modern ones, we’re talking about the ones from the 60s, 70s and even the 80s — are superior to their more original brethren.

Assuming Joe wanted the best sound — nobody who pays our prices could possibly be interested in anything else, right? — then he was simply making the point that since he wanted the best, and an original pressing absolutely had to be the best, nothing else would do, and that was that.

Joe could have done the experiment for himself easily enough. Had he asked us to send him our best AA pressing, we could have done that, and he could have compared that pressing to the original he no doubt owns, or, in the case that he had no original, acquiring one or more could have easily been arranged. They made them by the millions.

And that experiment might have resulted in an interesting learning experience, or not — who can say what the best pressing would have been on Joe’s stereo, with Joe’s ears doing the listening? It could have gone any which way, but something would have been gained in the act of sitting down to find out, for a fact, what pressing sounded better.

With all this in the back of my mind. just recently we did a shootout for Aja, and I checked the stampers for the two top copies.

Sure enough, the stampers found on the AB pressings won.

But those same stampers are found on the AA pressings for one of the titles, and one of the sides for the other title.

I could not even tell you for sure which pressings — AB or AA — actually won, because we rarely keep track of that information.

We only buy early pressings on the original labels because those are the only ones that sound good to us.

We don’t pay attention to the catalog number on the label because that doesn’t tell us anything of value. Playing the records is how we know what they sound like, and unless all the AB pressings beat all the AA pressings, or vice-versa, then that information is none of our concern.

Even if all the AB copies beat all the AA copies, we still have to buy, clean and play the AA copies in our shootouts because some of them are going to do well and can be offered to the customers who don’t want to spend the big bucks the top copies command.

We are generally opposed to having one-size-fits-all theories about the messy world of records, and you can find some of the commentaries we written about that subject here.

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Peggy Lee – Dream Street

More of the Music of Miss Peggy Lee

Over the years we’ve had the pleasure of playing some copies of her mono album from 1957, but it has never sounded very good to us and we stopped buying them years ago.

If you see one for cheap, pick it up. The music is wonderful. Many of Peggy Lee’s performances are superb, if not definitive.

To make our case, check out Miss Lee’s wonderfully delicate rendering of  “It Never Entered My Mind.” I know of none better.

This guy is pretty good too. We sell Hot Stamper pressings of this 1964 release, or at least we used to. Can’t find them anymore. The one album of his that belongs in every collection is this one, a collaboration of the ages.

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 this one 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.

We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.

We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

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Frank Sinatra – She Shot Me Down

More Frank Sinatra

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • An excellent pressing of Sinatra’s Reprise swan song with Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
  • It’s richer, warmer and more natural than most of the other copies we played, with wonderful transparency and plenty of studio ambience, especially considering this is a recording from 1981, not 1961
  • “A thought-provoking set of torch songs with soaring strings, lyrics fraught with loss and regret, and heart-rending, world-weary vocals”
  • “She Shot Me Down is Frank Sinatra’s last great album, a dark, brooding record of saloon songs delivered with an understated authority… It’s a dense, moody record that works spectacularly — Sinatra’s vocals are more alive and rich in detail than on Trilogy, and the concept is more concise and well-executed.”

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Eric Dolphy – Out To Lunch

More Eric Dolphy

More Blue Note Records

  • Out To Lunch is finally back on the site after a four year hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early pressing
  • Dolphy’s debut for Blue Note is an absolute knockout musically, and the quality of the sound on this pressing was everything we could have ever hoped for
  • Both of these sides are amazingly transparent, with stunning immediacy and exceptional clarity – thanks, RVG!
  • Bobby Hutcherson murders on the vibes on this album – hearing his stellar, groundbreaking work played back on a Top Shelf Hot Stamper copy through a high-end stereo is nothing less than a thrill
  • Turn this one up good and loud and revel in the glory that is Out To Lunch, the man’s Masterpiece, and a Must Own Jazz Album from 1964
  • 5 stars: “Dolphy’s magnum opus, an absolute pinnacle of avant-garde jazz in any form or era.”

Folks, Out To Lunch is one of the ultimate Blue Note titles for both music and stereo sound, and I don’t think you could find another pressing of the album that sounds this good no matter how many you played, realistically speaking of course.

Thankfully for us audiophiles, the sound on the better pressings can be stunning. The trick, of course, is finding those copies. For the lucky customer who snaps this bad boy up, I am positive this White Hot Stamper will prove well worth the wait.

I wish I could tell you to look forward to more great copies like this in the future, but I’m not sure we’d be able to back that up. Clean copies of Out To Lunch are extremely scarce nowadays, and it’s going to take us ages to build up a big enough stack of ’em to get this shootout going again.

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What the Best Copies of Boston Really Get Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums with Huge Choruses Available Now

The multi-tracked layers of guitars really come to life on the better copies. The not-so-great pressings tend to be congested and compressed, thickening the sound and diffusing the layers of multi-tracked harmonies. Tom Scholz’s uniquely overdriven, distorted leads have near-perfect timbre. On the top copies you can really hear how much power that sound adds to the music.

As is the case for the better pressings of Aqualung,just to take one example, when the guitar sounds this good, it really makes you sit up and take notice of the guy’s playing. When the sound works the music works, our seven word definition of a Hot Stamper.

Our killer copies have sweetness and tubey warmth we didn’t expect to hear. Better yet, the best copies have jump-out-of-the-speakers presence without being aggressive, no mean feat.

The good ones make you want to turn up the volume; the louder they get the better they sound. Try that with the average copy. When playing mass-market pop-rock music like this, more level usually means only one thing: bloody eardrums.

The typical Boston EQ is radio-friendly, not audiophile-friendly. But some were cut right, with the kind of richness, sweetness and smoothness that we fondly refer to here at Better Records as the sound of analog.

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Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie – Classic Records Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now

There is no reissue, and there will never be a reissue, that will sound as good as a good vintage pressing of Clap Hands.

The Classic Heavy Vinyl Reissue is a disgrace. 

I would rather play the CD.

(20 years ago, when I still had a CD player in my system, the CD was one of my favorites for testing, along with Blue and dozens of other well-recorded vocal albums.) 

Long time customers know that I have been raving about this album from way back in 1990 or so – ever since I first heard it in fact. I consider it the finest female vocal album in the history of the world. I could go on for pages about this music. Suffice to say this is a record that belongs in every human being’s record collection.

Just not the Classic Records pressing of it.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Our advice: don’t do it.

Ry Cooder – Into the Purple Valley

More Ry Cooder

  • A vintage Reprise pressing of Ry Cooder’s 1972 release boasting KILLER Tubey Magical Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Master Tape sound or close to it on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Side two was Tonally Right On The Money from top to bottom and from start to finish – it’s got the kind of presence and energy needed to bring these old songs to life
  • All of the elements you could ask for from this kind of music are here: superb clarity; amazing richness and warmth; serious energy and immediacy; texture to the vocals and so on
  • It’s pretty cool to hear these old Dust Bowl-era numbers by greats like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly performed by top musicians and recorded on quality equipment by one of the All Time Great engineers, Lee Herschberg
  • 4 1/2 stars: “‘Phenomenal’ is the descriptive word to describe his playing, whether it is on guitar, Hawaiian ‘slack key’ guitar, mandolin, or the more arcane instruments he has found. This is a must for those who love instrumental virtuosity, authentic reworkings of an era, or just plain good music.”
  • If you’re a Ry Cooder fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1972 is clearly one of his best, and one of his best sounding

We’ve become pretty big Ry Cooder fans here at Better Records, and an amazing pressing like this one will show you exactly why. We played a big stack of these this week, and you’re going to have a very difficult time finding a copy that can keep up with this one!

Most of the copies we played were overly clean sounding, lacking in the richness and warmth that are critical to the enjoyment of top quality analog. Not this one though — it’s got plenty of Tubey Magic, with the kind of sound that keeps guys like you and me digging in bins and spinning dusty old records instead of going digital.

There’s A Good Reason Audiophiles Love Ry

Ry’s music holds special appeal to us audiophiles, as he’s always throwing instruments into the mix that you hardly ever hear on your standard rock album. I wish I could tell you everything he plays on this album, but I’d just be guessing if I tried. (Wikipedia credits him for guitar, bass, and mandolin, but I’d bet my bottom dollar there’s more to it than that.)

This I can tell you — when the man picks up an instrument, he can sure play the heck out of it, and it’s an audiophile’s treat to hear how naturally he incorporates these sounds into his songs.

I’m not personally familiar with Fitz Maclean’s original version of “F.D.R. In Trinidad,” but I can’t imagine there’s a recording of it that sounds nearly as good as Ry’s version here.

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