Hot Stamper Pressings of the Pines of Rome Available Now
We were only slightly impressed with this Speakers Corner pressing of Maazel conducting The Cleveland Orchestra, writing at the time:
The famous TAS List recording. Very good sound. You can do better but it’s not easy. This work is just too difficult to record.
Mostly true. Not sure about very good sound but difficult to record is spot on.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
You might agree with some reviewers that EMI’s engineers did a pretty good job with the new Sgt. Pepper.
In the March 2013 issue of Stereophile, Art Dudley weighed in, finding little to fault on this title but being less impressed with most of the others in the new box set.
His reference disc? The MoFi UHQR. Gadzooks!
Oh, and he also has some old mono pressings and a domestic Let It Be. Now there’s a man who knows his Beatles.
Fanatical? You’re damn right he’s fanatatical. And who can blame him? We’re talkin’ The Beatles for Chrissake!
When I read the reviews by writers such as these I often get the sense that I must’ve fallen through some sort of Audio Time Warp and landed back in 1982.
How is it that our so-called experts appear to have so little understanding of how records are made, how variable the pressings can be, and, more importantly, how critical it is to maintain rigorously controlled conditions when they carry out the comparisons among pressings that they discuss in their reviews.
Here’s the gist of the problem:
Critically comparing LPs is difficult and time-consuming. It requires highly developed listening skills. Looking back, these are skills that I know I could not possibly have had because I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about acquiring them.
I see no evidence that the audiophile reviewers of today are better at it than I was in 1982, and I was terrible.
Moving on, let’s look at what one well-known reviewer has to say, keeping in mind that he’s using his original British pressing for comparison. I quote at length — without prejudice so to speak — so there can be no misunderstanding. (Emphasis added.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tom Petty Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This commentary was written in 2014 after having played (and finally been able to reproduce) a killer copy of Damn the Torpedoes.
Damn the Torpedoes is the best sounding Tom Petty album we have ever played.
Credit must go to Shelly Yakus, someone who we freely admit, now with a sense of embarrassment, has never been one of our favorite engineers.
After hearing this beyond-White Hot Stamper side two and a killer copy of Animal Notes, we realized we’d seriously underestimated the man, and for that we can only apologize.
If your Damn the Torpedoes doesn’t sound good (and it probably doesn’t), you sure can’t blame him — the master tape is mind-boggling in its size, weight, power and rock n’ roll energy.
Our 2014 better than White Hot Stamper copy had the kind of sound we never expected to hear on Damn The Torpedoes, an album that’s typically bright, thin, pinched and transistory — radio friendly but not especially audiophile friendly.
Well folks, all that’s changed, and by “all” I don’t necessarily mean all to include the records themselves. This may very well be a record that sounded gritty and pinched before it was cleaned. And our stereo has come a long way in the last five or ten years, as I hope yours has too.
One sign that you’re making progress in this hobby is that at least some of the records you’ve played recently, records that had never sounded especially good to you before, are now sounding very good indeed.
In our case Damn the Torpedoes is one of those records. It’s the best sounding Tom Petty album we have ever played.
We wrote about another famous rock album that somehow got a whole lot better sounding here. An excerpt:
More of the music of Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
None of the pressings we played of this RCA were remotely competitive with Maag and the PCO on London.
The sound of this RCA was consistently boxy and congested, a case of the “old record” sound we find on countless vintage pressings. The world is full of bad records. We’ve suffered through them by the thousands.
Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.
There are quite a number of Golden Age pressings that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.
Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve auditioned, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.
This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better records that works. If you know of one, please write me!
We are not the least bit interested in records that are “known” to sound the best.
Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of records?
I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature. The audiophile experts and reviewers I’ve encountered on the web seem hopelessly lost to me.
UPDATE: 2024
Woops, I take that back. I have met one, a certain Mr. Robert Brook. He has been conducting his own shootouts for a few years now and has made his findings available on his blog, The Broken Record. This is information you can trust.
This is one of the rare Greatest Hits compilations (and this band had a LOT of hits) that is sonically competitive with the original albums.
You’ll find most of the best Bread ballads here, including Make It With You, Everything I Own, Baby I’m A Want You, and If.
Listening to these acoustic guitars brings back memories of my first encounter with a British original of Tea for the Tillerman. Rich, sweet, full-bodied, effortlessly dynamic — that sound knocked me out thirty plus years ago, and here it is again.
I guess I’ve just always been a sucker for this kind of well-crafted pop. I was buying Bread album in the early Seventies while still in high school.
If you’re a sucker too, then this killer copy of The Best of Bread will no doubt become a treasured disc in your home as well.
When you hear sound this good, it makes you appreciate the music even more than the sound. Over the years I’ve even come to enjoy the rockers on side two. I used to consider side two the weak part of the album. To hear the vocal harmonies that these guys produced is to be reminded of singers of the caliber of the Everly Brothers or The Beatles. It’s Pure Pop for Now People, to borrow a good line from Nick Lowe.
Of course, by Now People, I’m referring to people who appreciate the music that came out more than thirty years ago. Whenever I hear a pop record with sound like this, I have to ask myself, “What went wrong with popular recordings over the last two or three decades? Why do none of them ever sound like this?”
Not to worry.
Audiophiles with good turntables have literally an endless supply of good recordings to discover and enjoy. No matter how many records you have, you can’t have even scratched the surface of the recorded legacy of the last 60+ years. That’s the positive thought for the day. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just another step on your journey through the world of music.
One further note.
Records like this only get better over time. There are no shortcomings in this recording to be revealed by better equipment, in painfully stark contrast to the vast majority of audiophile pressings and remasterings that reveal their phony, lifeless and often just plain weird sound as your stereo and critical listening skills improve. In other words, if you make a change to your stereo and this record starts to sound better, you did the right thing. (more…)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now
This review is for a pressing we put up around 2010.
Up to that time we had never played a clean, early pressing, and when we finally were able to put some in our shootout, one of them had sound that was out of this world.
In the commentary below we discuss what we think the early pressings probably sound like. Now, having heard how good the best of them can sound, we admit we clearly needed to do more research and development.
The record pictured above can have superb sound, much better than any modern Heavy Vinyl reissue you care to name.
However, the right properly-cleaned early pressings have the potential to take the sound of this music to the next level, a level we had no idea could exist until that right record came our way.
Back in 2019 we had this to say about the best sounding copy from the shootout we had just done:
Most Byrds’ records are far from audiophile demo discs. However, what the best originals give you is relatively good sound.
This album will never sound as good as Abbey Road. Keeping that rather obvious point in mind, as I listened to this copy the thought that went through my mind is that this tape had been mastered about as well as it could be.
It’s tonally correct from top to bottom; the frequency extremes are there; and the vocals have a silky, sweet quality to them (when they haven’t been bounced down too many times of course).
Do you know how you can tell when you’re listening to a properly mastered record? It’s very simple. You find yourself getting into the music. Liking songs you never used to like. When music sounds right, it bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the emotional center.
You can analyze these recordings until you’re blue in the face but ultimately it all comes down to this: Do you want to hear the whole album? Do you want to turn it up? If the answer to those two questions is yes, you have a great record. This pressing gets two yeses.
As you can see from the rave at the top of this listing, now the best copy from the shootout we just did in 2024 sounds great! (Yes, it only took us five years to find enough clean 360 label pressings to get another shootout going.)
How did that happen?
Who knows. We just keep working on improving the system using blind faith as our guide.
Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — “the world’s greatest hi-fi”.
What would it mean in the end?
Geoff Edgers has written a highly entertaining story about an extremely misguided audiophile who went “searching for perfect sound” in ways that practically guaranteed he would never find it.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this fellow’s mistakes.
Just to take one obvious example, this picture of some of the records in his collection speaks volumes, at least it does to me.
He built a million dollar stereo to play records like these?
No amount of money spent on equipment can make most of these titles sound good, and failure to appreciate that fact is just one of the many fatal errors the late Mr. Fritz made in his approach to both records and audio.
He mistakenly thought he was at the “I know everything” stage, but that is just the prelude to the stages of knowledge where real understanding and progress begin, not end.
My own stereo history may be of some value in helping to shed light on these issues. Like everyone else, I started at the bottom. Thank god I didn’t have a million dollars to waste back then because I clearly didn’t understand audio any better than the late Mr. Fritz did.
Like him and practically every audiophile I’ve ever come in contact with, I sure thought I did. Having suffered myself from a serious case of pretentious-knowledge syndrome, it’s easy for me to spot the signs in others. (My understanding is that you can’t sign up on the Hoffman Forum without first proving your know-it-all bona fides.)
Why So Uncomfortable?
In a recent letter I received about the Dynavector 17dx cartridge we use, this question was posed:
Why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right.
I answered as follows:
I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it sounded good to me and was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted.
Is the audiophile of today doing anything different?
What would you be doing if you hadn’t stumbled on a guy with some credibility — he sold you some records that sounded amazing, so he must know something — who turned you on to some audio stuff that sounds great and, better yet, didn’t cost that much?
And how did this guy — me — come to find out about all this stuff in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel Available Now
UPDATE 2026
Speaking of 1A and 1B, the evidence is in. We have now confirmed that one of these sets of stampers (one for each side) can win shootouts. Which of the two it is we will leave to you to discover, as we make it a point never to give out the shootout winning stampers except under the rarest of circumstances. We give out plenty of stamper information, just not the stampers of the winners.
[Actually, as if 2026, now we do.]
Before we go any further, I have one question:
Why are we guessing?
I received an email recently from a customer who had gone to great pains to do his own shootout for a record; in the end he came up short, with not a lot to show for his time and effort. It had this bit tucked in toward the end:
Some of [Better Records’] Hot Stampers are very dear in price and most often due to the fact that there are so few copies in near mint condition. I hate to think of all the great Hot Stampers that have ended up in piles on the floor night after night with beer, Coke, and seeds being ground into them.
Can you imagine all the 1A 1B or even 2A 2B masters that ended up this way or were just played to death with a stylus that would be better used as a nail than to play a record!
To be clear, it’s extremely unlikely than any Hot Stampers have ever ended up in piles on the floor. Hot Stampers are not just originals or good sounding records.
Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now
Billy Preston is all over Black and Blue on piano and organ and his contribution is crucial to the musical vibe on practically every song. Listen for Billy’s full, solid, clear piano sound. When the piano is thin, the mix is thin and that’s not the sound you want on a Stones album.
If the piano gets lost, your copy either has a smear problem or a transparency problem. Those are certainly easier to live with — all the 70s systems I owned were smeary and opaque compared to my system today and I enjoyed the hell out of all of them — but far from ideal.
Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.
Other records that we have found to be good for testing in order to improve your playback, as well as your critical listening skills, can be found here.
