Month: February 2024

The Rolling Stones – Exile On Main Street

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Reviews and Commentaries for Exile on Main Street

  • With roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on all FOUR sides, this copy is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • This is Exile raw and real the way it should be – with full-bodied, immediate vocals and plenty of hard-rockin’ energy
  • The better copies are also much less gritty and hard, but manage to keep the raw, grungy, heavily tube-compressed sound the Stones and their exceptionally talented engineer, Glyn Johns, were going for
  • 5 stars: “Few other albums, let alone double albums, have been so rich and masterful as Exile on Main St., and it stands not only as one of the Stones’ best records, but sets a remarkably high standard for all of hard rock.”
  • If you’re a Classic Rock fan, this Must Own from 1972 surely belongs in your collection.
  • Exile on Main Street is a founding member of our prestigious none rocks harder club.
  • The sound may be too grungy for some, making Exile fairly difficult to reproduce, but the best sounding pressings — played at good, loud levels on big dynamic speakers, in a large, heavily-treated room — are a blast.

The harder you work to get distortion out of your system and room, the more enjoyable you will find this album, which is exactly the reason you want to do all that work in the first place — in order to get the most out of difficult-to-reproduce albums like Exile.

All four sides here have the kind of bass, energy, and presence that is essential for this music to rock the way it wants to. A copy like this conveys the emotional power of The Stones’ performances in a way that most pressings simply fail to do.

This shootout is always a struggle, an uphill battle all the way. You’d have to find, clean and play a ton of copies to come up with four sides that can do this music justice. We’re sure that Stones fans and Hot Stamper die-hards are going to be very pleased with this copy.

This vintage Artisan mastered pressing (the only ones that have any hope of sounding good) has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

Black Sabbath – Sabotage

More Black Sabbath 

More Rock Classics

  • Sabotage debuts on the site with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this original Palm Tree pressing
  • The sound is lively, punchy, and powerful – with all due respect, it should murder whatever copies you may have
  • If you want to hear this music explode out of the speakers and come to life the way the band wanted you to hear it, this record will do the trick
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…the real revelation on Sabotage is Ozzy Osbourne, who turns in his finest vocal performance as a member of Black Sabbath. Really for the first time, this is the Ozzy we all know, displaying enough range, power, and confidence to foreshadow his hugely successful solo career.”

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Can Anybody Tell Me What’s Wrong with Sweet Baby James on Warners-Rhino?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

There is one obvious and somewhat bothersome fault with this new pressing of Sweet Baby James, an EQ issue. Anybody care to guess what it is? Send us an email if you think you know.

Hint: it’s the kind of thing that sticks out like a sore thumb, the kind of obvious EQ error I can’t ever recall hearing on an original pressing, as bad as many of those tend to be.

Our review for the Steve Hoffman remastered pressing follows.

This Warner Brothers 180g LP is the BEST SOUNDING Heavy Vinyl reissue to come our way in a long long time. Those of you who’ve been with us for a while know that that’s really not saying much, but it doesn’t make it any less true either, now does it? Let’s look at what it doesn’t do wrong first.

It doesn’t sound opaque, compressed, dry and just plain dead as a doornail like so many new reissues do. It doesn’t have the phony modern mastering sound we hate about the sound of the new Blue. (We seem to be pretty much alone in not liking that one, and we’re proud to say we still don’t like it.)

The new Sweet Baby James actually sounds like a — gulp — fairly decent original.

The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equalled by an audiophile pressing like this. (It hasn’t happened yet and we remain skeptical of the possibility.) Considering that this pressing is sure to beat most reissues, imports and such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.

Hoffman and Gray can take pride in this Sweet Baby James.

It’s some of the best work I’ve heard from them to date. If more DCC and Heavy Vinyl reissues sounded like this, we wouldn’t be so critical of them. Unfortunately they don’t, and there are scores of pages of commentary on the site to back up that statement for those of you interested in the subject.

The real thing can’t be beat, but this gets you a lot closer to the sound of the real thing than most of the Heavy Vinyl we’ve heard. I would say it easily qualifies for a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten ranking. We don’t actually have a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten List, but if we ever make one up, expect to see this record on it.

What to Listen For

As a general rule, Sweet Baby James, like most Heavy Vinyl pressings, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

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Fire and Water – Hats Off to Roy Baker

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

More Demo Discs for Big Speakers that Play at Loud Levels

Roy Baker engineered the album (later to be known as Roy Thomas Baker), the man responsible for the amazing recordings of The Cars, Devo, Queen, T-Rex and too many others to name. His work here is hard to fault.

This is a true Demo Disc. On our system it is anyway. Our stereo is all about playing records like this, and playing them at good loud levels as nature — and the artists — intended.

This is the sound of a real rock ‘n’ roll band — no gimmicks, no tricks — just guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. This album has stunning live-in-the-studio rock sound that must be heard to be believed. 

The recording sounds more alive than 99 out of 100 rock records we’ve played, and we’ve played the best sounding rock records ever made

It’s got exactly what you want from this brand of straight-ahead rock and roll: presence in the vocals; solid, note-like bass; big punchy drums, and the kind of live-in-the-studio energetic, clean and clear sound that Free practically invented.

(AC/DC is another band with that kind of live studio sound. With big speakers and the power to drive them YOU ARE THERE.)

Side one leads off with Fire and Water, and boy does it ever sound good. This track will show you exactly what we mean by live in the studio sound. You can just tell they are all playing this one live; it’s so relaxed and natural and REAL sounding.

One thing that really took us by surprise on the first track is how BIG and FAT the toms are on the best copies and how thin and small they are on the average copy. Play a few copies for yourself and just listen for the size and power of the toms. Most copies will leave you wanting more.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

Fire and Water should sound best this way:

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Let’s Face It – Some Truly Great Records Are Almost Always Noisy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. McCartney’s first album is one of them.

Copies of McCartney’s first can rarely be found on the site, but if there are any copies available, they are most likely in our section for records with condition issues, which contains about 30% of all the Hot Stamper pressings active on the site at any one time.

Hot Stampers are almost exclusively vintage vinyl pressings — “old records” you might say — and old records, even after a good cleaning, are rarely quiet. (We lay out the particulars of our grading system here.)

One of our customers noted that the Hot Stamper we sent him of McCartney’s first album was a bit noisier than he would have liked. We replied:

As for surface issues, we wish we could find them quiet, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. In the listing we noted:

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Lee Ritenour – Friendship

More Lee Ritenour

More Audiophile Recordings

  • Superb sound throughout this original Direct-to-Disc Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the guitar is surprisingly real here
  • Both of these sides are Tubey Magical, lively and funky, with the kind of rich, solid sound that will fill your listening room from wall to wall
  • “The third of three Lee Ritenour sets originally cut for Japanese JVC matches the studio guitarist with … Ernie Watts (on tenor and soprano), both Dave and Don Grusin on keyboards, electric bassist Abraham Laboriel, drummer Steve Gadd and percussionist Steve Forman.”
  • Friendship is without a doubt this group’s best sounding album, and, to our way of thinking, their only essential one

This is one of my all time favorite audiophile discs. It’s actually real music.

The song “Woody Creek” is wonderful and reason enough to own this excellent album. The guitar of Lee Ritenour and the saxophone of Ernie Watts double up during a substantial portion of this song and the effect is just amazing.

Special kudos should go to Ernie Watts on sax, who blows some mean lines. But everybody is good on this album, especially the leader, Lee Ritenour. I saw these guys live and they put on a great show.

By the way, looking in the dead wax I see this record was cut by none other than Stan Ricker of Mobile Fidelity fame himself!

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Christopher Cross / Self-Titled

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Pure Pop Albums Available Now

  • With a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated a superb Double Plus (A++) side one, this original Warner Bros. pressing of Cross’s debut LP is practically as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • The sound is full, rich, lively and Tubey Magical in the best tradition of late-70s pop productions
  • The sound may be too glossy for some, but we find that on the best copies that sound works just fine
  • This is the album that swept the Grammy awards with songs like “Never Be The Same,” “Sailing” and “Ride Like The Wind”
  • 4 1/2 stars: “While the hits like the dreamy ‘Sailing’ and the surging ‘Ride Like the Wind’ deserved all the attention, they’re hardly the only highlights here — to borrow a sports metaphor, this has a deep bench, and there’s not a weak moment here.”
  • In our opinion, Dream Weaver is his best sounding album, and probably the only Gary Wright record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call one and done.

If you like Michael McDonald, Toto, The Doobies, Hall and Oates, The Bee Gees and countless other bands we have lovingly found a home for on our site, you will no doubt find much to like here. A guilty pleasure, you say? When a record sounds this good there is nothing to feel guilty about.

Besides Michael McDonald‘s amazing background vocals, listen for the contribution Michael Omartian (the producer) makes on the keyboards. The keyboards more than the guitars are really the driving force behind these songs. If you hear some Aja in his playing, that’s because he played on Aja too. He was also instrumental in many of the Direct to Discs Sheffield made, I’ve Got the Music in Me probably being the best known of the batch.

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Wish You Were Here – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

We have added some helpful title specific advice at the bottom of the listing for those of you want to find your own Hot Stamper pressing.

This is the perfect example of everything we look for in a recording here at Better Records: it’s dynamic, present, transparent, rich, full-bodied, super low-distortion, sweet — good copies of this record have exactly what we need to make us audiophiles forget what our stereos are doing and focus instead on what the musicians are doing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the album, Pink Floyd managed to record one of the most amazing sounding records in the history of rock music. The song Wish You Were Here starts out with radio noise and other sound effects, then suddenly an acoustic guitar appears, floating in the middle of your living room between the speakers, clear as a bell and as real as you have ever heard. It’s obviously an “effect,” but for us audiophiles it’s pure ear candy.   

Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 1-5

Right from the dynamic intro you can tell this is going to be a wild ride. David Gilmour’s haunting guitar line that comes cutting from out of the abyss should be warm with tons of room for his phasers to do their phasing.

After the band comes in and the vocals begin (listen for the man chuckling in the left channel) you should pay attention to the balance of the mix. Most copies tend to be very midrangy which can make the guitars aggressive and harsh, often times taking emphasis away from the vocals. The good copies have lots of transparency and allow everything to sit in their respectively places. This is probably most noticeable during the saxophone solo.

The tenor that starts off this section needs to be breathy, full-bodied, and sitting delicately in the center of your speakers. It does NOT need be be honky and hard sounding without any top extension. As the solo slowly crescendos, notice the guitar line spread across the soundstage that actually bookends the saxophone. The more dynamic copies really let you hear the intricacy and delicacy of his picking that foreshadows the time signature shift about to come.

When the time does change to 6/4, the saxophone player changes to alto, totally changing the sound of the solo! You can clearly hear on the better copies that he is further away from the mic than during the previous section, but if you listen closely, it sounds as though he is moving on and off axis. Whether this is part of his mic technique or him just dancin’ and groovin’ to the music, we may never know. I certainly hope for the latter.

Other Pressings

Most copies of the CBS Half-Speed lack deep bass, and for that matter bass in general.

They’re also consistently brighter. The upper mids and highs call attention to themselves at every turn. When you switch back to a good domestic copy or import, you might not notice as much detail, but everything will sound correct and balanced: less like a recording and more like music.

Phony highs cause listener fatigue for the same reason that bright CDs get tiresome.

Just listen to the sax break on side one. If your pressing is too bright that sax will tear your head off.

The Seventies – What a Decade!

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Big Production Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn’t get much better than Wish You Were Here.

A Big Speaker Record

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

It demands to be played loud. It simply cannot come to life the way the producers, engineers and artists involved intended if you play it at moderate levels.

Obsessed? You Better Believe It

Wish You Were Here is yet another record we admit to being obsessed with.

Currently we have identified about 150 that fit that description, so if you have some spare time, check them out.

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Jethro Tull – This Was

More Jethro Tull

More British Blues Rock

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this British Island pressing of Tull’s debut album – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Side two is very close in sound to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • We’ve only had a handful of copies go up since 2013 – it’s tough to find these vintage UK pressings in clean condition with this kind of sound
  • Guaranteed to soundly trounce any Pink Label Island original you may have heard – these are the Hot Stampers
  • Melody Maker thoroughly recommended the album in 1968 for being “full of excitement and emotion” and described the band as a blues ensemble “influenced by jazz music” capable of setting “the audience on fire.” — Wikipedia
  • If you’re a fan of Ian and his band, this UK reissue originally recorded in 1968 belongs in your collection
  • More reissue pressings that, in our experience, handily beat the best originals can be found here. Skeptical of that claim? Please order this record so that you can play if for yourself. If it does not beat your original (or any other pressing you may have), we will pay the domestic shipping to return it and happily refund 100% of your money. What have you got to lose?

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Willie Nelson and Leon Russell – One for the Road

More Willie Nelson

More Country and Country Rock

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  • The sound is big and rich, the vocals breathy and immediate, and you will not believe all the space and ambience
  • This is an exceptionally good (studio) recording, and this pressing really nails the smooth, rich analog sound of what must be an awesome master tape
  • Our notes for sides one and two on our shootout winning copy read: big/rich/no smear/not bright/breathy vox/big bass/3D/huge vox — that’s our kind of sound!
  • 4 stars: “…it’s a small, priceless gem for any serious fan of either singer.”

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