Month: July 2024

Cat Stevens – The World of Cat Stevens

More Cat Stevens

More Folk Rock

  • A vintage copy of Cat Stevens’ 1970 compilation LP with an INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to an superb Double Plus (A++) side one, and British Decca vinyl that is about as quiet as we can find it
  • This side two is doing everything right – the sound is rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, Cat’s vocals are present, and there is plenty of studio space on the recording
  • Everything you want in a Folky Pop Star recording is here
  • Not an easy record to find in audiophile playing condition with top quality sound – it took us years to get this shootout going

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). (more…)

Deep Purple – Made In Japan

More Recordings Engineered by Martin Birch

  • Get ready to rumble! This UK copy (one of only a handful to hit the site in over a year) boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “huge and tubey and weighty”…”great detail and powerful”…”leaping out [of the speakers]”…”big, transparent and rich”…”extended from top to bottom”
  • A phenomenally well-recorded album that’s a true Demo Disc on an exceptional pressing such as this
  • Turn it up and you will hear sound that is incredibly powerful and natural with amazing presence, energy and weight down low
  • Rolling Stone: “They’ve done countless shows since in countless permutations, but they’ve never sounded quite this perfect.”
  • If you’re a fan of the band, this title from 1972 is clearly one of their best

Having just played a stack of copies of Made In Japan, I’d put the album right up there with the best sounding live albums of all time.

In terms of Tubey Magic, richness and naturalness — qualities that are usually in very short supply on live albums — I would have to say that the shootout winning copies of Made In Japan would be very likely to take Top Honors for Best Sounding Live Album of All Time.

Yes, the sound is that good.

Machine Head Live? That would not be far off, and the fact they brought Martin Birch along with them all the way to Japan in order to engineer a live album that was only supposed to sell to the Japanese market (!) could not have been more fortuitous for us audiophiles.

Machine Head is clearly one of the best sounding hard rock records ever made, and Made In Japan, its successor, sounds more like a top quality studio production than any live album I’ve ever heard. It’s shocking how clean and undistorted the sound is. Equally shocking is the fact that it’s every bit as big and lively as a Hard Rockin’ Live Album should be.

This is a combination the likes of which we have never heard.

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Joe Satriani – Surfing With The Alien

More Joe Satriani

  • Boasting two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this vintage copy of Joe Satriani’s sophomore release (one of only a handful to hit the site in nearly three years) was giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for
  • Trust me on this one – you’re going to have a difficult and (and expensive) adventure trying to find a great sounding copy of this album on your own
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Joe Satriani’s 1987 breakthrough can be seen as the gold standard for guitar playing of the mid- to late 80s, an album that captures everything that was good about the glory days of shred.”

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Peter Gabriel – So

More of the Music of Peter Gabriel

  • Here is an incredible copy of Gabriel’s breakthrough album from 1986 with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Both of these sides are lively, solid and rich – drop the needle on any track and you’ll see what we mean
  • Great songs including “Don’t Give Up,” “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time,” “Mercy Street,” “Red Rain,” “In Your Eyes,” and more
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “…[Gabriel’s] most accessible and…catchiest, happiest record he ever cut. “Sledgehammer” propelled the record toward blockbuster status, and [it] had enough songs with single potential to keep it there.”

Here is a copy of So with the Big and Bold Peter Gabriel sound we love. If you want your Art Rock to actually rock (as well as be arty), this is the copy for you.

It’s not a perfect recording by any means, but when it sounds this good you can easily forget its shortcomings and marvel at how consistently good the material and the production are.

No Mean Feat

It’s exceptionally hard to find good-sounding copies of this album, as you can read about below. With a digital recording such as this, the margin for mastering error is very slim. Most copies just aren’t worth the vinyl they’re pressed on. They can sound harsh, gritty, grainy, edgy, and thin.

We did a shootout years ago that taught us a few things. The most surprising finding? The Brit copy I had in my own collection sucked — how about that! As a rule, I like the Brit pressings best for PG, but that rule got broken after playing all these domestic copies, some of which really sound good, clearly better than the average Brit.

Recording Issues

This is a digital recording, and most of the time it is bright, spitty, and grainy like a typical digital recording, which plays right into our prejudices. After hearing a bad copy, what audiophile wouldn’t conclude that all copies will have these bad qualities? After all, it’s digital. It can’t be fixed simply by putting it on vinyl.

Ah, but that’s where logic breaks down. Proper mastering can ameliorate many if not most of a recording’s shortcomings. When we say Hot Stampers, we are talking about high-quality mastering doing exactly that.

Mass-Produced Plastic Problems

But of course the mastering is only one part of the puzzle. I have multiple copies with the same stampers. Some of them are terrible, some of them are wonderful — you just can’t rely on the numbers to guide you with a piece of mass-produced plastic like this. You have no choice but to play the record to know what it sounds like. (And that’s a good thing. Keeps you honest. There’s no “cheating” when you have nothing to go by but the sound.)

This album sold in the millions. They stamped it out until the metalwork was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Those badly pressed copies are not going to have any high-frequency extension, which leaves them with all the harsh upper mids sticking out of the mix to peel the paint in your living room and make your ears bleed.

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The RCA Later Label Pressings from the 70s Fall Short Yet Again

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

Many of the later RCA pressings we’ve played recently have left a lot to be desired.

We’re on record as telling audiophiles that it’s never a good idea to judge records by their labels, so when it came time to do a shootout for this famous Heifetz recording from 1963, LSC 2652, it was only fitting that we force ourselves to clean and play every pressing we had on the shelf, including the White Dogs and Red Seal reissues.

The White Dog did fine (2+ for the Bruch on side one, 1.5+ for the Mozart on side two).

The Red Seal had all the hallmarks of the transistory sound RCA apparently preferred in the 70s.

There are Red Seal pressings with excellent sound — some of them have won shootouts — but this one had too many similarities to the awful Classic Record classical titles produced in the 90s. You know the ones I’m talking about. They have bright, screechy string tone that no self-respecting audiophile with even passable equipment should find tolerable.

(The fact that many of them remain on the TAS list speaks volumes about the self-identified experts’ ability to distinguish a good record from a bad one. More on that subject below.)

More of the Same

Below you will find links to other records we’ve played that had the same problems as this RCA and are best avoided by audiophiles looking for high quality pressings to play.

There is no shortage of other records that we’ve run into over the years with these kinds of obvious shortcomings.

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It’s Official – The Audiophile World Has Lost Its Mind

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

  • Nasal, upper midrange boost
  • No real space
  • Hard and smeary
  • Sizzly rain intro
  • Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

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Paul Simon – Live Rhymin’

  • Simon’s first live album (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in two years), here with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one
  • You get clean, clear, full-bodied, lively and musical analog sound from first note to last
  • Forget whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl they’re making – the Tubey Magic, size and rock and roll energy of this very special vintage pressing simply cannot be beat
  • Features great versions of Simon classics, including “The Boxer,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “The Sound Of Silence” and many more

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We Was Wrong about Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Albums Available Now

My history with Led Zeppelin’s seventh album is a classic case of me mistakenly blaming the recording.

In our listings for Presence from about fifteen years ago (a lifetime in audio, at least for us) we noted:

“By the way, Royal Orleans (at the end of side one) never sounds good; it’s always grainy. Same story with the intro to Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It sounds like groove damage, but since it’s on every last one of our domestic copies (the only ones that have the potential to sound amazing in our experience) we know it has to be a pressing problem and not a problem with the individual copies. It’s a shame, but the rest of the songs here all sound amazing.”

This is no longer true, or at least the part about Nobody’s Fault But Mine being grainy or distorted isn’t, since I didn’t test Royal Orleans this time around.

I had just put in a fresh Dynavector 17d3 two days before and spent almost three hours getting the setup dialed in. In fact, it was so right when I was done that I spent the next three or four hours experimenting with room treatments.

When I was done the changes seemed to have opened up the sound and increased the transparency even further. (I went a little too far and had to dial it back a bit, but that’s not at all unusual in my experience.)

Wait a Minute

So now I’m reading about the problems we used to encounter with Nobody’s Fault and thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. I didn’t hear any grain or distortion. Not on the good copies anyway.”

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard those problems is that over the last year or so we’d fixed them.

How I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better.

Or maybe it was that in combination with a few new room tweaks.

Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know.

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Speakers Corner Peer Gynt Reviewed, with Handy VTA Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Sonic Grade: C+

The Fjeldstad has long been one of our favorite performances of Peer Gynt here at Better Records. 

This record is handy for VTA set-up as well, a subject discussed below in our listing from 2010.

The sound is excellent for a modern reissue*, but in the loudest sections the orchestra can get to be a bit much, taking on a somewhat harsh quality. (The quieter passages are superb: sweet and spacious.)

So I adjusted the VTA a bit to see what would happen, and was surprised to find that even the slightest change in VTA caused the strings to lose practically all their rosiny texture and become unbearably smeared.

This is precisely why it’s a good heavy vinyl pressing for setting up your turntable.

If you can get the strings to play with reasonably good texture on this record you probably have your VTA set correctly.

VTA

Correct VTA adjustment for classical records (as well as all other kinds of records) is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may in fact be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound or your records once you have taken the time to correctly set the VTA, by ear, for each and every record you play.

We heard the improvement on this very record, and do on all the classical LPs (and all other kinds of records) we play.

The Big Caveat

As for the asterisk (*) above, it concerns the caveat “…for a modern reissue…” What exactly do we mean by that? Allow us to reprint what we wrote about another Heavy Vinyl classical pressing, one that we actually used to like.

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Gene Ammons – Blue Gene

More Gene Ammons

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • Blue Gene returns to the site after a nearly two year hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish, and pressed on fairly quiet vinyl
  • One of the best sounding Ammons records we know of – it’s huge, rich and Tubey Magical, with a solid bottom end and bluesy jazz energy like no other
  • Clean and clear and open are nice qualities to have, but rich and full are harder to come by on this record – this pressing has it all
  • The original pressings we’ve played were astonishingly bad — those of you who are interested can go to the blog in the coming weeks to read all about just how awful they can sound
  • “Some ballad performances in his oeuvre are a testament to an exceptional sense of intonation and melodic symmetry, powerful lyrical expressiveness, and mastery both of the blues and the bebop vernacular that can now be described as, in its own way, ‘classical.'”

For us audiophiles, both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1958 All Tube Analog recording by Rudy Van Gelder on Prestige can sound, this killer copy will do the trick.

This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

This IS the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is, of course, a CD of this album, but those of us who possess a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.

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