Month: June 2024

Devo – Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo

More Devo

More New Wave

  • Devo’s superb debut LP (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in close to four years), here with incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides of this original copy – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • No copy in our shootout scored more than one half plus moer than this one overall
  • This pressing was doing practically everything right, with the kind of big, punchy, full-bodied sound this music absolutely demands
  • Tons of great songs on here, including “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Jocko Homo,” “Too Much Paranoias,” and their killer cover of The Stones’ “Satisfaction”
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A seminal touchstone in the development of American new wave… had a conceptual unity that bolstered the consistent songwriting, making it an essential document of one of new wave’s most influential bands.”

Let the Devolution begin! Both sides here are really rockin’! The sound is huge with tons of bottom end weight and an energy level that’s off the charts.

While Devo’s music may never sound as rich, warm, and tubey as the typical classic rock album, that certainly doesn’t mean we need to accept completely anemic, sterile sound for this album. It took a big stack of copies, but here’s one that made us sit up straight, pay attention and enjoy!

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Count Basie And His Orchestra – I Told You So

More Big Band Jazz

Labels We Love – Pablo

  • Boasting seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this vintage Pablo pressing will be very hard to beat
  • A Top Basie Big Band title in every way – musically, sonically, you name it, this album has got it going on!
  • This is the way it must have sounded in 1976, in the New York studios where the famous RCA engineer Bob Simpson was still behind the board
  • 4 stars: “This is one of Count Basie’s best big-band studio recordings for Norman Granz during his Pablo years. The arrangements by Bill Holman are both challenging and swinging, containing enough surprises to make this session a real standout.”

On the best pressings, the horns are so present and high-rez, not to mention full-bodied, this could easily become a favorite big band album to demo or test with — or just to enjoy the hell out of.

I never noticed until just now that the album cover picture for Farmer’s Market Barbecue and this album are exactly the same! Wow, Pablo, that takes balls. (more…)

America – Homecoming

More America

More Hippie Folk Rock

  • America’s sophomore album is back on the site for only the second time in seventeen months, here with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this vintage Green Label pressing
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “rich and breathy”…”jumping out [of the speakers]”…”deepest bass yet” (side two)…”so sweet and breathy and present”…”top detail and tubey” (side two)
  • Some of the most Tubey, warm acoustic guitar reproduction you could ever ask for – this is the sound of real analog!
  • There are some bad marks (as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs) on “Moon Song,” but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 stars: “The songs here are tighter and more forthright… The sound quality is clear and bright; the colorful arrangements, while still acoustic guitar-based, feature more electric guitar and keyboards. The performance quality is more assured, among the most urgently committed the group would ever put on vinyl. This top-flight album is a very rewarding listen.”

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).

The guitars on this record are a true test of stereo reproduction quality. Most of the pressings of this record do not get the guitars to sound right. And when the guitars are perfection, the voices and all the other instruments tend to be right as well.

Let’s face it: they just don’t know how to make acoustic guitars sound like this anymore. You have to go back to 49 year old records like this one to find that sound. (more…)

Debussy & Ravel / Julliard String Quartet

More of the Music of Claude Debussy

More of the Music of Maurice Ravel

  • An original Shaded Dog pressing of the famous Juilliard String Quartet’s performance of these wonderful classical works (one of only a handful of copies to ever hit the site), here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from first note to last
  • Having just played some killer copies of Death and the Maiden, we’re tempted to say that this Debussy record has the potential for even better sound – it’s richer and sweeter, but every bit as real and immediate as any chamber recording we know of
  • The Living Stereo sound here is Tubey Magical, lively and clear, with the kind of transparency that puts living, breathing musicians right in your listening room in the way that only the best vintage vinyl pressings can
  • Lewis Layton engineered this recording (along with Ed Begley) and he nailed it, perfectly capturing the rich, textured sheen on the strings, the hallmark of Living Stereo sound in the 50s and 60s
  • He recorded both the Schubert (LSC 2378) mentioned above and this wonderful Debussy/Ravel record (LSC 2413) for RCA in 1960 — it would be quite the understatement to say he had quite a gift for recordings of this kind

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Go Nude for Even Better Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining what the aim of this blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with higher fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Nothing will bring you as much joy as when you manage, by whatever means, probably against all odds, to make significant audio progress.

The more progress you make, the more you will enjoy your favorite music. At least that’s what happened to me over the course of the last fifty years as I set about working on my system, room and a great deal more.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

“NUDE” Your Dynavector KARAT 17DX Cartridge for EVEN BETTER Sound

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.

And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.

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Dire Straits – Self-Titled

More of the Music of Dire Straits

  • The band’s debut album is back on the site for only the second time in ten months, here with a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • One of the best sounding rock records ever made, with rich, sweet, smooth mids; prodigious amounts of bass; superb transparency and clarity; and a freedom from hi-fi-ishness and a lack of distortion like very few rock records we have ever heard
  • Rhett Davies knocked this one out of the park – it’s a Top 100 title, a member of the Tubey Magical Top Ten (see below), and our favorite by the band for both sound and music
  • If you made the mistake of buying the unbelievably bad sounding MoFi 45 RPM Half-Speed, this vintage UK pressing will be a REVELATION
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Knopfler also shows an inclination toward Dylanesque imagery, which enhances the smoky, low-key atmosphere of the album… the album is remarkably accomplished for a debut, and Dire Straits had difficulty surpassing it throughout their career.”
  • It’s our pick for the band’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.

Rhett Davies is one of our favorite recording engineers, the man behind Taking Tiger Mountain, 801 Live and Avalon to name just a few of his most famous recordings, all favorites of ours of course.

The man may be famous for some fairly artificial sounding recordings — Eno’s, Roxy Music’s and The Talking Heads’ albums come to mind — but it’s obvious to us now, if it wasn’t before, that those are entirely artistic choices, not engineering shortcomings.

Rhett Davies, by virtue of the existence of this album alone, has proven that he belongs in the company of the greatest engineers of all time, right up there with the likes of Bill Porter, Ken Scott, Stephen Barncard, Geoff Emerick, Glyn Johns and others we could mention.

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On Super Session, Tonally Correct Vocals Are Key

More Music Produced or Performed by Al Kooper

Most copies have bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, this album pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud. At higher volumes the distortion and grit are just too much.

On the better copies, the one with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange, you are doing better than expected.

We’re Big Fans

Super Session is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Rock Of Ages – A Definitive Sonic Assessment?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Roots Rock Albums Available Now

In 2006 we put up a copy with with what we implied were Hot Stampers (before we were using the term regularly) on at least one side:

“Side One sounds tonally right on the money! This is as good as it gets… Robert Ludwig mastered all of the originals of these albums, but some of them have bad vinyl and don’t sound correct.

“I only played side one of the album, so I can’t speak for the other sides, but what I heard was sound about as good as I think this album can have.”

There are some truths along with some half-truths in the above comments, and let’s just say we would be quite a bit more careful in our language were we writing about that copy today.

One side is no indication whatsoever as to the quality of the other three, and without the kind of cleaning technologies we have available to us today, I wouldn’t want to make a “definitive” sonic assessment for any of them.

When you play uncleaned or poorly cleaned records, you’re hearing a lot of garbage that has nothing to do with the sound of the vinyl itself.

Note that we are joking above: there is no such thing as a definitive sonic assessment of a record, from us or anybody else.

Mistaken audiophile thinking? We’ve done our share and then some.

We firmly believe that plenty of audio progress awaits us all, but to realize that progress we must rationally approach the problems encountered in reproducing music in the home, thinking about them critically, not as True Believers, but as skeptics who require empirical evidence to support their beliefs.

It is axiomatic with us that the more skeptical you become, the more successful you will be in pursuing this devilishly difficult hobby of ours.

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The Police – Synchronicity

More Police

More Sting

  • You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout this this original copy
  • Side one was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • Clearly better than most other pressings we played – when you can hear it sound this good you may come to appreciate, as we did, just how good the music is
  • “Every Breath You Take” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger” are remarkably big, rich and Tubey Magical here – they are exceptional recordings, and this pressing does them proud
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Few other albums from 1983 merged tasteful pop, sophistication, and expert songwriting as well as Synchronicity did, resulting in yet another all-time classic.”

This music can have real Rock and Roll POWER — if you’re lucky enough to own a pressing with the energy of the master tapes inscribed in its grooves. Some have it and some don’t.

Welcome to the world of analog, where no two copies sound the same and most are nothing special. (No two covers of this album look the same either. Get a pile of them out and see if you can find two that match. It’s not easy.) (more…)

Are Your Cellists Digging In on I Am the Walrus?

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles’ Music Available Now

This commentary was written many years ago.

Over the last decade I Am The Walrus has evolved into a good test for side one, a fact that came as a complete surprise to me. As I was listening to the various copies in a shootout years ago I noted that the opening cellos and basses in the right channel were often tonally identical from copy to copy, but sounded quite a bit more lively and energetic on some pressings relative to others. Was it EQ? Level? Compression?  

Why so much more passion from the players on some copies and not others?

As I tried to puzzle it out, playing first one copy and then another, it became clear to me what was happening. The cellists and the bassists were just plain digging HARDER into the strings on the best copies. When you see live classical music, the cellists at the front of the orchestra are usually sawing away with abandon when the music is really going. They dig their bows hard into the strings to make them vibrate as loud as possible. To make their instruments heard in the back row it becomes a matter of muscle, of pure physical exertion.

So armed with the copies where the string players are working the hardest, I checked the other tracks. Sure enough, the opening cut, MMT, jumped out of the speakers with the most energy I had heard on any copy. As I went through the tracks one by one, they had the most life of any of the copies I had been listening to. To use a word that was popular at the time, the music was HAPPENING.

This was the final piece to the puzzle. Tonality always comes first. Frequency extension; lack of distortion; rich, powerful bass — these are important qualities as well. But the life of the music is in the micro and macro dynamics, and that is what I had not been paying sufficient attention to during the shootout.

That was until I listened to Walrus and heard the players working up a good healthy sweat. Then I knew I had a Hot Stamper. And when I played the not-so-Hot Stampers, the string guys sounded like session musicians picking up a paycheck.

Where was their passion? Didn’t they realize they were making a classic?

If you get the right pressing they sure were!

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