Month: July 2023

Give Your Cleaned Records 1 to 3 Plays Before Listening

Record Cleaning – An Overview

We have a series of turntables set up in the cleaning room that play through every record we’ve cleaned before it goes into the Hot Stamper shootout rotation.

We recommend that you play your records at least once and as many as three times through completely before listening to them, whether you are listening for pleasure or testing for sound quality.

Playing previously cleaned records plows loosened grunge out of the grooves and helps the cartridge “seat” itself in the dead center of the groove at the same time.

Two or three plays usually gets the job done, resulting in a clearly audible improvement of surfaces and sonics.

If you care to, you can clean them the way we do at 45 RPM in order to speed up the process.

For more record cleaning tips and tricks, click here.

To order The Prelude Record Cleaning System, exclusively available from Better Records and 100% guaranteed to be the best record cleaning fluid you have ever used or your money back, please click here.

Once you hear every record you have cleaned sounding better than it ever has, not to mention quieter, we think you will be more than glad you did.

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Miles Davis / In Person – Friday Night

More Miles Davis

More of Our Best Jazz Trumpet Recordings

  • This early 6-Eye Stereo pressing had the big, rich, transparent and real sound we were looking for, earning outstanding Double Plus (A++) sonic grades on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • If you want to hear a healthy dose of the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful live session, the first of two recorded at the Blackhawk in April 1961, this copy will let you do that
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The first of two sets recorded during a weekend in 1961 features the Miles Davis Quintet at a period of time when Hank Mobley was on tenor and the rhythm section was comprised of pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. This is an underappreciated group because of its relatively short life, but as evidenced here, the bandmembers swung fast and hard and never looked back.”

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – You Do the Best You Can with What You’ve Got to Work With

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

The founding members of CSN chose the Albert brothers to engineer this 1977 reunion.

Their most famous album is Layla. Ever heard a great sounding Layla? Me neither. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Layla’s — we’ve done the shootout many times — just as there are better and worse CSNs, but we have never played amazing Demo Disc pressings of either and I doubt we ever will.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side some songs have wonderful sound — the midrange magic, the “breath of life” that makes the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album such a special listening experience — and some don’t.

That’s a recording problem.

It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like Shadow Captain and Dark Star, among others.

But Just a Song Before I Go on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best copies do well and the rest do less well and grade them accordingly, on a curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got to work with.

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Seals & Crofts’ Folky Rock – What to Listen For

More of the Music of Seals and Crofts

Hot Stamper Pressings of Folk Rock Albums Available Now

In our recent shootout, all our best copies had very similar numbers and letters in the dead wax, which doesn’t happen all that often but does from time to time.

This album does not have a single set of stampers that always win, but it does have a set of very similar stampers that always win. All of the best stampers can only be found on the Green Label original pressings, if that’s any help.

What We’re Listening For On Summer Breeze

Here are some of the things we specifically listen for in a vintage Folk Rock record. Our hottest Hot Stamper copies are simply doing more of these things better than the other copies we played in our shootout. The best copies have:

  • Greater immediacy in the vocals (most copies are veiled and distant to some degree).
  • Natural tonal balance (many copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; those with the right balance are the exception, not the rule).
  • Good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful).
  • Spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space).
  • Tubey Magic (without which you might as well be playing a CD).
  • And last but not least, transparency, the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this sometimes simple, sometimes complex and sophisticated recording.

Further Reading

If you would like to run your own tests on the Folk Rock records you own, we make that easy. Here are some other titles that are good for testing these qualities, many with specific advice on what to listen for.

The VPI Super Platter and Testing Advice

Revolutions in Audio, Anyone?

This review was written in 2005, perhaps before. To see what comprises our current system, click here.

We love the new VPI Super Platter. It’s a big step up over the acrylic platter, which makes records sound more like CDs, kind of thin, vague, edgy. The original TNT type Aries platter is a very similar design to the Super Platter, and so when I got my super platter it was obviously better after the first five seconds of play but not dramatically better. On a customer’s TNT with the acrylic platter it was huge.

The bigger and more powerful the stereo, the bigger will be the difference, because it has to do with weight and heft and solidness and those sorts of sonic qualities, the kind that too many modern audiophiles ignore. (The CD guys don’t even know what those things are because CDs so rarely have those qualities, certainly never in abundance the way good records do.)

It has been our experience that VPI upgrades tend to be actual sonic improvements over the earlier versions of their equipment, unlike so much of what passes for “better” audio in the land of Hi-Fi, which is often just different and in many cases actually worse. [I cannot back up that claim now, as we have been out of the turntable-auditioning business for more than a decade. I simply have no idea whether VPI’s products are any good these days. Caveat emptor, as always.]

These are the kind of upgrades we love to do, and the reason is no doubt obvious to all you audiophiles out there. Pop the new platter on and thirty seconds later you can hear the difference. Not sure about the change? Don’t like it? Thirty seconds later you can have your old platter spinning to see exactly what happened to the sound.

It’s the kind of testing we do here all day long with Hot Stamper and other pressings. [1] Take ten copies of any title and play them, making notes as to their strengths and weaknesses. Assign each one an overall sonic grade. Think numbers 2 and 7 are the best of the bunch on side one, but not quite sure which of the two is better? No problem. Take one of them, throw it back on the table, listen for a minute, then pop on the other. That kind of head-to-head shootout is the easiest, most reliable way to find out which record really has the Hot Stamper Magic and which one only appears to.

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Parallel Lines – We Broke Through in 2016

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blondie Available Now

Can this kind of music get any better? This album is a MASTERPIECE of Pure Pop, ranking right up there with The Cars first album. I can’t think of many albums from the era with the perfect blend of writing, production and musicianship Blondie achieved with Parallel Lines.

As expected, if you clean and play enough copies of a standard domestic major label album like this one, sooner or later you will stumble upon The One, and boy did we ever.

This side two had OFF THE CHARTS with presence, breathy vocals, and punchy drums. It was positively swimming in studio ambience, with every instrument occupying its own space in the mix and surrounded by air.

There was not a trace of grain, just the silky sweet highs we’ve come to expect from analog done right. 

Gone is the compressed muck of the MOFI (and most domestic pressings, to be fair). In its place is the kind of clarity, transparency and pure ROCK AND ROLL POWER previous pressings only hinted at. I became a giant fan of this album the moment I heard it back in 1978, but the sound always left much to be desired.

So many copies were thick and compressed; the music was cookin’ but the sound seemed to be holding it back.

But there are good sounding pressings, and now we know which ones they are.

Learning the Record, Any Record

More of the Music of the Traveling Wilburys

Many of the pressings we played of Volume One suffered from too much compression and a phony hi-fi-ish quality on the vocals. We knew there had to be better sounding copies out there somewhere, so we kept dropping the needle on every pressing we could get our hands on until we found one. Here is how we described a killer copy we ran into during that process.

We heard a lot of copies with a spitty, gritty top end, but this one is smooth like butter.

Side two is nearly as good but doesn’t have quiet the same energy factor. It’s still dramatically better than most copies out there.

Now that we’ve discovered these Hot Stampers, the sound is finally where we want it to be. Until this week, we were convinced that these songs sounded better on the radio. (That’s what tons of compression and FM bass boost will do for you.)

Learning the Record

For our recent shootout we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought would have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

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