Month: December 2023

The Original Mercury Pressings Don’t Sound Good on this Title, But Why?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings) on the plum label are the way to go, right? 

In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.

And the FR pressing of the Rachmaninoff record you see pictured above may indeed have the best sound.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

(We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping this title closer to the vest.)

Note that we had FR1, FR2 and FR3, all originals, yet none of them could be considered good enough to offer our customers.

It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.

Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.

Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?

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Letter of the Week – “whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

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

Hey Tom, 

That latest S&G album — BOTW — is absofuckinglutely blowing my mind tonight. Wow. Those deep horns (?) blasting at times (end of Keep the Customer Satisfied, chorus of Why Don’t You Write Me, end of The Boxer… whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound. Hard to sit down!!

Dear C.

The power of those horns is exactly what I was telling you about –  they cannot be reproduced properly until you have speakers with dynamic drivers large enough to play the full weight of the brass.

TP

We discuss the idea of Big Speakers in this boilerplate commentary all over the site:

Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Further Reading

Bee Gees et al. – Saturday Night Fever

More Bee Gees

More 5 Star Albums

  • An OUTSTANDING copy of this ’70s classic with top quality sound on all FOUR sides
  • There’s real Bee Gees vocal magic here – “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “More Than a Woman,” “Jive Talkin’,” and more!
  • One of the most underrated tracks that holds up surprisingly well after all these years is “A Fifth of Beethoven,” and it sounds great here
  • 5 stars: “Saturday Night Fever is virtually indispensable as a Bee Gees album, not just for the presence of an array of songs that were hits in their own right but because it offered the Gibb brothers as composers as well as artists…”
  • If you’re a Bee Gees fan, this title from 1977 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1977 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here

This copy of the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack has truly killer sound throughout, and that ain’t no jive talkin’! We collected a bunch of these and put them through the shootout process and were delighted to find out that some of the material on here can sound wonderful on the best pressings.

Like any compilation, some songs are going to sound better than others. The good news here is that most of the tracks you’d hope to be impressive actually are: “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Disco Inferno” are among the better-sounding songs here.

Find your favorite song on here, drop the needle, and see if the dramatically improved sound doesn’t bring back some special memories, and maybe even inspire you to bust a move!

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The Who – Live At Leeds

More of The Who

Records We Only Sell on Import Vinyl

  • A hard-rockin’ copy – this British Track pressing boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) DEMO DISC sound or close to it on both sides
  • The recording is huge and lively with startling dynamics and in-the-room-presence like nothing you’ve heard
  • This is demo disc quality sound by any measure, especially on big speakers at loud levels
  • The vinyl is fairly quiet, but that is rarely a concern when an album has music this loud and powerful
  • Drums so solid, punchy and present they put to shame 99% of the rock records on the planet
  • The sound of the best pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • Cited as the best live rock recording of all time by The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, the BBC Q magazine, and Rolling Stone. In 2003, it was ranked number 170 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
  • We should have all the papers that come with the album, but please be sure to double check with us, if having all the papers is important to you

Get ready to rock out, as this is one of the BEST SOUNDING live albums ever recorded. “Young Man Blues” on a copy such as this has drums that are so solid, punchy and present they positively put to shame the drum sound on 99 out of 100 rock records! Keith Moon lives on!

The bass is AMAZING on this record. Present vocals and clear guitars in both channels are also key to the best copies.

Most pressings do not get the guitars to jump out of the speakers the way the best can.

Few copies get the highest highs and the lowest lows but this one had it going on from top to bottom.

The seven minute long “Magic Bus” that finishes out the side is The Who at their best.

Rock fans will have a hard time finding a better sounding Who pressing than this one, on either side.

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David Bowie – Heroes

More David Bowie

More Art Rock

  • An excellent vintage UK pressing with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • This copy has real depth to the soundfield, full-bodied, present vocals, plenty of bottom end weight, and lovely analog warmth
  • This reissue is the only way to fly – if you have an original, or any other pressing, you don’t know what you are missing!
  • These are the stampers that always win our shootouts, and when you hear them you will know why – the sound is big, rich and clear like no other
  • We’ve discovered a number of titles in which one stamper always wins, and here are some of the others
  • 5 stars: “Repeating the formula of Low’s half-vocal/half-instrumental structure, Heroes develops and strengthens the sonic innovations David Bowie and Brian Eno explored on their first collaboration. The vocal songs are fuller, boasting harder rhythms and deeper layers of sound.”

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Letter of the Week – “This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

You’ve blown my mind yet again. This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC… I’m just glad I didn’t blow up my hi-fi; there should’ve been a warning label!

Best,

Ben

Ben,

You are right about that. This album is powerful like few others we have the pleasure to play regularly.

This is Demo Disc quality sound by any measure, especially on big speakers at loud levels.

You’ve got to hand it to Bruce Botnick — he knows how to get real rock-’em, sock-’em bottom end onto a piece of magnetic tape.

And sometimes that bottom end whomp* actually makes it onto the record, as is the case here, making for one helluva demo disc for bass (if you have speakers big enough to play it, of course.)

Waiting for the Sun

The track to play to hear massive amounts of bass and energy is one we should all know well: Waiting for the Sun.

If you’re looking for Demo Quality song on this album, that’s the one. Prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic as well.

*For whomp factor, the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp.

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Question – Where Are All Your New Wave and Post Punk Titles?

Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob

Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records

One of our good customers wrote us a letter recently

Hey Tom, 

Just a quick message to let you know that I really enjoyed reading those two recent pieces on the Dangerous Minds blog (“Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob” and “Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records”).  As always, it is a total pleasure to read anything in which you are interviewed at length, as you articulate ideas about sound and music so much better and more eloquently than anybody else.

Very kind of you to say, we try! I did an interview with a colleague which you may enjoy: detail versus weight

Loved some of the nuggets I had never heard you speak about before (the lack of any hot stampers for Then Play On, the difficulty with the first CSN album, and your hilarious take on the live Fleetwood Mac album).  Hearing those kinds of insights from you gives me a total buzz for hours afterward! 

Awesome. We do a lot of that stuff on the blog. Do a search for any record and something will usually come up. Also we have a “never again” tag for some of the records that probably won’t go into shootouts now that I have retired.

The only point you offer in the whole interview with which I would quibble at all is your take on new wave and post-punk titles.  Your sense is that there wouldn’t be a market for $200 pressings of records by Nick Cave, Joy Division, et al., but I suspect the exact opposite is true.  I for one would leap at Hot Stampers by both of those artists, as well as many others from their time (Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Blue Nile, The Psychedelic Furs, Public Image Ltd., etc.), and I’m certain that there are many others like me.  What’s more, I suspect we would pay a lot more than $200 for each title.  Your point about the sound quality of some of those albums being less distinguished than records from previous eras could certainly be true.  Nonetheless, as we’ve talked about before, people don’t expect every record they buy from you to sound like Aja or Dark Side of the Moon.  Rather, they want the albums they love to sound the best they possibly can.

While not precisely analogous, I might mention your recent success with Hot Stampers of Beck’s Sea Change as indicative of the untapped market that awaits you.  By my count, at least three copies of that title (two White Hot Stampers and a Super Hot Stamper) recently flew off the shelves of Better Records.  I have no doubt that Sea Change is an exceptionally well recorded album and perhaps—as your write-ups indicated—an especially analog-sounding one.  But all of the records on your website have those qualities.  The copies of Sea Change went so fast because that title and that artist had never been available from your store before.

Having said all of that, I completely get your point about the time, money, and hard work that would be involved in introducing new titles to the Better Records inventory.  Given that you and your team are working full time as it is, and given that you are massively successful with the existing pool of titles, there doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive to change course for an unproven commodity.  Nonetheless, if you ever do decide to test the waters with some of these other artists, I would gladly share my two cents as far as artist/album selection goes, and I would gladly share my thousands of dollars for the shootout winners.

All good points. The reason it was easy for me to get Beck going was that I owned both Sea Change and Mutations and knew the sound was excellent. The R and D had already been done.

I have played albums by The Blue Nile, Psychedelic Furs and Public Image and found them all to be unacceptable, along with a host of others. Ultravox is a good sounding band, but who will buy them if we have trouble selling Roxy Music? We can hardly do Roxy Music these days for cryin’ out loud. One of the greatest bands ever.

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On Fillmore East, Transparency Is Key

More of the Music of Frank Zappa

We’re big fans of this album, and Zappa in general, but it’s incredibly difficult to find copies that do justice to the music. 

So many pressings don’t let you hear INTO the music. This is a live recording with musicians sprinkled all over the stage — three-dimensional transparency is absolutely KEY to the best pressings, the ones that let you immerse yourself in the spectacle, never losing sight of the individual performances of Zappa and his merry band of obscene nut jobs. This band works BLUE. It will have you in hysterics if you get into the down and dirty spirit of the show. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, steer clear of this one. It’s raunchy as hell, and the raunchiest bits are the most hilarious.

The Greatest Rock Opera Ever

As for the music, it’s a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. This to me is the ultimate rock opera. In point of fact it’s actually a parody of a rock opera, which makes it doubly enjoyable.

The two former leaders of The Turtles (aka Flo and Eddie) variously play groupies (What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are) and members of the band. As the saying goes, hilarity ensues.

What makes this album so special is that the rock songs that are generated out of this story are actually great rock songs. They’re not filler. They’re not connecting tissue. They’re good songs with strong melodies that stand up on their own. Moreover, connected to each other through this crazy story sung by men pretending to be women, they become something even greater: a True Rock Opera. Better than that: A True Rock Opera Parody that’s as hilarious as it is musically satisfying. Zappa missed his calling — he should have dedicated himself to musical theatre. He has a real gift for it. This album is proof.

The entertainment value of this record is as good as it gets. Off the scale. If you’re a fan of The Firesign Theater, Zappa, improv comedy and such like, you will love this album.

Fillmore East – June 1971 checks off some important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Gordon Lightfoot – Dox Quixote

More Gordon Lightfoot

More Folk Rock

  • This vintage Reprise pressing boasts very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We guarantee there is more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back – it’s as simple as that
  • “Lightfoot pays tribute to the many and varied places that make up his [Canadian] homeland. All in all, there’s not a bad cut here. It’s well worth your time.”

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Before and After Science – Rules Are Made to Be Broken

Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Recordings Available Now

The domestic pressings of Before And After Science are typically grainy, low-rez and hard sounding — they’re simply not competitive with the smoother British Polydors.

But our best Hot Stamper pressing isn’t an import; it was made right here in the good old US of A.

Say what? Yes, it’s true. We were SHOCKED to find such hot stamper sound lurking in the grooves of a domestic Eno LP. It’s the One and Only.

In thirty plus years of record playing I can’t think of any domestic Eno LP that ever sounded this good.

Now hold on just a minute. The British pressings of Eno’s albums are always the best, aren’t they?

For the first three albums, absolutely. But rules were made to be broken. This pressing has the knockout sound we associate with the best British originals of Eno’s albums, not the flat, cardboardy qualities of the typical domestic reissue.

Kinda Blind Testing

Since the person listening and making notes during the shootouts has no idea what the label or the pressing of the record is that he is evaluating — this is after all a quasi-scientific enterprise, with blind testing being the order of the day — when that domestic later label showed up at the top of the heap, our jaws hit the floor.

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