Month: February 2025

Listening in Depth to A Hard Day’s Night

More of the Music of The Beatles

Play it against your MoFi or Heavy Vinyl pressing and you will quickly see why those lifeless LPs bore us to tears. Who in his right mind would want to suffer through a boring Beatles record?

Drop the needle on any song on the first side to see why we went crazy over a recent Shootout Winner on side one. The emotional quality of the boys’ performances really comes through on this copy.

They aren’t just singing — they’re really beltin’ it out. Can you imagine what that sounds like on the title track? We didn’t have to imagine it, we heard it!

Side One

A Hard Day’s Night
I Should Have Known Better
If I Fell

This is a wonderful example of The Beatles’ harmonies at their best. Toward the end of the song, during one of their harmonic excursions, you can hear John’s voice drop out when something apparently catches in his throat, and I could swear that you can hear Paul McCartney react to it with a little laugh.

If their voices sound warm, sweet, and transparent on this track, at the very least you have a contender, and possibly a winner. Not many pressings are going to bring out all the timbral qualities of their voices.

I’m Happy Just to Dance With You
And I Love Her
Tell Me Why
Can’t Buy Me Love

Always starts with a bit of grit and grain, but usually sounds better by the second verse.
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The Doobie Brothers – Stampede

More of The Doobie Brothers

  • Stampede returns to the site for only the second time in three years, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from top to bottom
  • These sides are rich and full, with punchy bass and plenty of rockin’-down-the-highway Doobies energy – thanks, Donn Landee, you da man
  • Contains contributions from such guest musicians as Maria Muldaur, Ry Cooder, and Curtis Mayfield
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The Doobie Brothers’ rootsiest album to date, Stampede was virtuoso soulful countrified rock of a gritty nature, crossing over into blues as well as reaching back to a raw, traditional rock & roll sound…”

The average copy of this album is compressed and congested, recessed and veiled, grainy and thin; in other words, it sounds like an old Doobie Brothers album. It takes a copy like this one to show you just how good the Master Tape must be.

And if we hadn’t had plenty of copies to play with, we would never have found this one. (more…)

Hall and Oates – H2O

More Hall and Oates

  • A vintage copy of this Hall and Oates classic from 1982 with killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • It’s lively, open, present and natural – the soundfield is big and spacious and the bottom end is killer
  • Much more consistent than most of their releases, this one boasts three monster hits including “Maneater,” “Family Man” and my all time favorite by the band, “One on One”
  • 4 stars: “Private Eyes solidified Hall & Oates’ status as one of the most popular acts in America in the early 80s, and…… with 1982’s H2O, they capitalized on its success, delivering an album that turned out to bigger than its predecessor, as it climbed higher on the charts and launched three Top Ten singles…”

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Letter of the Week – “Some records absolutely JUMP out of my speakers. Including all of yours. It’s a thrill.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I’m the one who purchased Ricci’s Carmen yesterday. I can’t wait to receive it! I was surprised and delighted to read on your blog about the copy that sold on ebay for *even more* than I paid for mine. (I never even look at records on ebay anymore – after getting caught up in a couple of bidding wars, I just don’t feel good buying that way anymore.)

This is my fifth purchase from you. It’s my first white hot stamper, it’s the most I’ve paid so far, and it’s the first time I am purchasing a record that I don’t already have multiple copies of. I’ve been dying to see if my system is up to the task of reproducing violin well, and this beautiful music seems the ideal test case. I’ve been on a spree, but I’m going to have to cool it for a while after this. I’ll keep an eye out for a good copy of Avalon, or Leonard Cohen’s Songs, or maybe if a DSOTM comes back up, I won’t chicken out this time…

Aaron

Aaron,

I hope you like the record as much as we did. It is indeed a very special album, and I hope it sounds like six hundred dollars worth of music and sound to you. The Heifetz recordings have especially good violin reproduction if you want to keep going in that direction.

Take your time on picking up Hot Stampers, most of them come around again eventually, no since going broke!

Thanks for your letter.

TP

Thanks Tom! I’m having a lot of fun with my records from you, but yes, now it’s time to delight in what I’ve got for a while. I’ll probably go back to being a lurker/drooler on your site, the way I was for several years until recently.

I upgraded to a Soundsmith Sussurro cartridge during the pandemic, and now, some records absolutely JUMP out of my speakers. Including all of yours. It’s a thrill. You’re letting me see what my system is capable of, and instead of that new amp I thought I needed, I’m buying some records from you instead.

Plus, when a cartridge/system gets the *tone* of instruments right, there’s no mistaking it, and you didn’t even realize you were missing anything. It’s easy to think a recording and system are accurate, but then you hear accurate reproduction and you just say “oh.”

Aaron

Aaron,
You make a good point. If I could get more audiophiles to try a Hot Stamper pressing, and simply take the time to compare it to whatever Heavy Vinyl LP they might have been listening to, I think there would be a lot of them saying “Oh.”

How will they ever know what they are missing if they won’t try a different approach?

I think you know the answer as well as anyone. You were a lurker, and now, having actually heard some Hot Stamper pressings, you are a believer.

The records speak for themselves.

As I wrote to a customer not long ago, “explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

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Bob Dylan and The Band – The Basement Tapes

More Bob Dylan

More of The Band

  • Boasting excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on all FOUR sides, this vintage copy will be very hard to beat
  • Side three was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • The recording may not be an audiophile dream come true, but these pressings are far better than most others we can ever recall playing, and lets the music come through in a way that we guarantee you have never heard before
  • 5 stars: “… the music here (including the Band’s) is astonishingly good. The party line on The Basement Tapes is that it is Americana, as Dylan and the Band pick up the weirdness inherent in old folk, country, and blues tunes, but it transcends mere historical arcana through its lively, humorous, full-bodied performances. Dylan never sounded as loose, nor was he ever as funny as he is here, and this positively revels in its weird, wild character… among the greatest American music ever made.”

This vintage Columbia Double LP pressing has some of the very best sound we’ve ever heard for this album.

Of course, given the nature of these recordings, you don’t get stunning sonics along the line of, say, Magical Mystery Tour or Dark Side Of The Moon, but at least you get to hear these great songs sound the way they were intended to, without the complications of bad mastering and pressing getting in the way.

Most of the copies we’ve heard wouldn’t be fit to list on the site at any price, but we felt strongly that this copy did justice to the music in a way that the typical pressing does not. While this may not be a Demo Disc, it’s MUCH better sounding than most copies we’ve come across. We’ve played a bunch of these over the years and most of them paled in comparison to this one.

This is of course a famous album, with The Band backing up Dylan (and adding some of their own material) in the famous Big Pink House which would later be the place where The Band’s 1st album was born. (more…)

Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle

More Steve Miller Band

  • Fly Like An Eagle returns to the site after a three year hiatus, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades from start to finish
  • A surprisingly difficult record to find with good sound and quiet surfaces — they pumped these out by the millions and most copies aren’t worth eve the bad vinyl they’re pressed on
  • The sound is clear, full-bodied and detailed with tremendous space, critical to reproducing the recording’s spacey (and pretty cool) effects
  • The title track and “Take The Money And Run” both sound excellent (but so does pretty much everything else)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The key is focus, even on an album as stylishly, self-consciously trippy as this, since the focus brings about his strongest set of songs (both originals and covers), plus a detailed atmospheric production where everything fits.”
  • If you’re a Steve Miller fan, or perhaps a fan of mid-’70s Classic Rock, this title from 1976 is surely a Must Own.

On this copy, you get richness and warmth, front and center immediacy, extension up top and down low, and loads of energy. The synths have texture, the guitars are full-bodied and the bottom end is nice and meaty.

The soundfield is especially open and transparent, with three-dimensional space that brings out the trippy effects the band threw in all over the place. When they sound this good, they really work some Seventies Analog Magic. (more…)

Chicago and The Hottest Sounding Vinyl – Are You a Thrillseeker Too?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

I want to hear the music I love LOUDER and BETTER, with more ENERGY and EXCITEMENT, and the reason I spent an ungodly number of hours over the last 40+ years working on my stereo is that the kind of sound that can give me thrills doesn’t happen by accident.

You have to work your ass off to get it.

And spend a lot of money.

And search for those pressings that have the sound you are looking for.

And be very lucky.

I don’t play records to sip wine and smoke cigars. I play records to ROCK. Whether the music is rock, jazz or classical, I want to feel the power of the music just as you would feel it at the live event.

To me that means big speakers and loud levels.

Naturally, for our last shootout we played Chicago VII as loud as our system could without distorting.

“(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long” just KNOCKED ME OUT on this Hot Stamper copy, which had the best Side Three we played during the entire shootout. Exhilaration and adrenaline rush is right. As we said in our review:

How can you write a better song than (I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long? That track, with its huge buildup of strings and wall to wall brass, just KILLS. It’ll send shivers up your spine at the live music levels we were trying to play it at. It actually has some real dynamics built into the mix, which is not something pop songs are even supposed to have.

But sometimes they do; the best copies are proof that that kind of sound is actually on the master tape. Not many audiophiles (besides the listening panel here at Better Records) will ever get the chance to hear it sound as powerful as we heard it that day. I built a stereo system dedicated to playing records like Chicago VII. It was a thrill all right.

The above commentary was prompted by Ed’s letter about the Hot Stamper pressing he had recently bought.

What follows is Ed’s story of looking for love (or a good sounding record, whichever you prefer) in all the wrong places, and finally finding that special feeling, the feeling you get when you hear something right, which to us is the very definition of a Hot Stamper. Now to Ed’s story.

Dear Tom,

As you know, Chicago is one of my all time favorites. I relate having played trumpet along with the albums blaring when they were first released. So I couldn’t resist the opportunity to grab your recent Hot Stamper of Chicago 7. It arrived yesterday and I rushed up to my “music room” and dropped the needle on “Wishing You Were Here”. Oh Wow……never heard it like this. The tonality was just simply beautiful. The three dimensionality was incredible. The extension of bass to highs was simply total and balanced. The voices were “right there”. I thought that this is what happens when you are hearing through to the master tape on an LP that hasn’t destroyed or even impaired the original sound. It pulls you from the first song to the next and on. It draws you into the music and makes you forget about all the “stuff” around it.

This journey to the Hot Stamper level of audio reminds me of skiing. You wake-up having packed carefully for your trip. You travel hours, maybe even fly to the mountain. Then you drive up the mountain to the lodge and haul everything to the changing room. After struggling to put on the ton of clothing and equipment you trek across to the lifts and travel to the very top of the mountain. At the top you are now temporarily exhausted and wonder if all this effort and work could in any way be worth it… Then you jump off and fly down the mountain and realize that yes, it was worth it. The exhilaration and adrenaline rush is an immediate flash back to why you do this. It’s the Holy Grail!

Well, getting a Hot Stamper gives me a similar feeling. The work to build a great sounding stereo system: the mixing and matching of components and voicing of the sound to your room and your preferences is part of the “trip to the mountain.”

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Harry Belafonte – Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall makes its Hot Stamper debut on this original copy with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Living Stereo sound on all FOUR sides
  • So hugely spacious and three-dimensional, yet with a tonally correct and natural sounding Harry, this is the way to hear it
  • Compared to every other copy we played — on all four sides mind you — these sides are richer, fuller, and livelier. 
  • They’re also more open and transparent, with notably improved clarity, less smear, and better bass
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Highlights include Odetta’s powerhouse medley of the work songs ‘I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain’ and ‘Water Boy,’ the Folk Singers’ exciting ‘Ox Drivers Song,’ Makeba and Belafonte’s charming duet on ‘One More Dance,’ and the Mitchell Trio’s exuberant Israeli song ‘Vaichazkem.'”

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Rimsky-Korsakoff / Scheherazade – Reiner (Shaded Dog Label)

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov

  • Reiner and the Chicago Symphony’s performance of this dazzling symphonic suite returns to the site on this vintage White Dog pressing that boasts outstanding Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or close to it from first note to last
  • We guarantee there is more richness, fullness, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you own any of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that are currently on the market
  • Our favorite Scheherazade for about the last 15 years or so has been the one Ansermet conducted for Decca in 1961, but the roller-coaster excitement Reiner and the CSO bring to the fourth movement is something very special
  • True, the side with the fourth movement earned a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, but we still guarantee that it will beat the pants off any Heavy Vinyl reissue, because every one of those that we’ve played was ridiculously opaque, muddy and thick enough to have us crying “uncle” after five minutes (reviews available on this blog)
  • We’ve come up with a simple listening test to help our audiophile brethren judge pressings of Scheherazade, especially those woeful iterations of the music on Heavy Vinyl. We hope you will find time to avail yourself of the lessons we’ve learned

UPDATE 2024

Now that we know which stampers have the potential to win our shootouts, it turns out that the Shaded Dog originals have been coming out on top, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good to us, just not as good.

And for all you Bernie Grundman fans out there, you may want to consider the implications of the fact that the Living Stereo CD of Reiner’s Scheherazade is dramatically better than the awful Classic Records pressing of it.

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the fourth movement being the Ball Breaker of all time, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Ansermet. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing those ten or so other pressings, but such is the nature of our business.

TAS List

As you may know, Harry Pearson put this record on his earliest TAS list of Super Discs.

Of course, the fact that a recording is on the TAS list doesn’t guarantee that the pressing you buy will have great sound, but Better Records does precisely that. If you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve described it, we’ll always happily take that record back and refund your money.

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