Month: April 2025

On Trust, the Bass Is (Almost) All

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Notes from a Hot Stamper shootout we did quite a while back.

There’s a TON of low-end on this record. Regrettably, most copies suffer from either a lack of bass or a lack of bass definition. I can’t tell you how much you’re missing when the bass isn’t right on this album. (Or if you have the typical bass-shy audiophile speaker, yuck.) 

It’s without a doubt THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT of the sound on this album. When the bass is right, everything falls into place, and the music comes powerfully to life. When the bass is lacking or ill-defined, the music seems labored; the moment-to-moment rhythmic changes in the songs blur together, and the band just doesn’t swing the way it’s supposed to.

On the best pressings, you get the full-on bottom end WHOMP you paid for, with no loss in control. You can clearly follow Bruce Thomas’s bass lines throughout the songs, a real treat for any music lover. (He and Elvis don’t get along, hence the end of the Attractions as his backing band. I guess we should be thankful for the nine albums on which they were together; many of them are Desert Island Discs for me.)

Not only that, but the drums have real body and resonance, a far cry from the wimpy cardboard drum sound you’ll hear on most copies.

Hey, these are The Attractions: the pro’s pros. You can’t ask for better, and as expected they deliver big time on this album. But the mastering and pressing problems of most British copies typically make them sound half-hearted and uninspired, which is certainly nothing like what they sound like on the master tape. On the master tape, they play GREAT. You need a very special copy of the LP to hear them play that way, and that’s all there is to it. 

The better the pressing, the better the band.

A Must Own Title

This, along with My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, is as good as it gets for Elvis on LP.

All three are absolute Must Owns that belong in any serious rock collection. This is that rare breed of music that never sounds dated (especially considering the era in which it was produced). Music with real depth such as this only gets better with the passage of time. The more you play it, the more you appreciate it, and love it.

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One of Our Good Customers for Close to Twenty Years Wrote Us a Nice Letter

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

Ivan recenty decided to write us another letter, only his second since 2006, but we think it’s a good one, well worth the wait.

I have been buying records from you since 2006. Yup, bought some Heavy Vinyl from ya, thought it sounded pretty good too! DCC Blowout. I think I have a handful left but really have sold off most because they have been replaced with your hot stampers that frankly sound far superior.

To your credit you were credible then as you are now. In fact, I bought a copy of Aftermath in 2006 for a 100 bucks….man what a deal that was. Probably one of the best sounding LPs I have. Its a gem now and I will not part with that press.

Since then I probably have purchased about 300 or more, but who’s counting. Maybe you know me!

It’s not about investment. It’s about looking for the best sound….a never ending journey. Its important to me and I suspect to every one of your customers. I have spent 49 dollars to 1200 dollars on LP’s from you and the 49 dollar wowed me just the same. So what’s it really worth. It’s worth the sound. The experience of hearing your favorite music sound the best its ever sounded. If you care, as I am sure you do reading this, just buy the record. You will be wowed!

So, what is this service worth? And don’t get me wrong, this is a service and they deserve to charge for it.

I log on to Better Records every day. So last week I see a record, let’s just say its an Elton John LP. I am thinking 499 dollars “Super Hot Stamper,” not a gem Elton LP but he can do no wrong pre ’75.

Rarely I don’t buy that album but stupidity reigns supreme and I think hell; I will buy 5 copies at 30 dollars, all DJM Brits and I have four already and do my own shootout!

9 copies. Save some money. What can go wrong?

Well, at considerable cost, just a miserable fail. All in the trash heap to never be listened to by yours truly. Should have bought that one!

In 300 or so records purchased from Better Records I returned two. A Doors original Electra gold label I got lucky with and actually had a better copy, go figure, and a Beach Boys Pet Sounds that I since bought a different copy again from you. Returned the first one probably cause I was too lazy to set up my turntable properly for that LP, and sorry, maybe a glass of wine involved.

Your staff, no matter what, always accommodating no questions asked for a return. Professional and on point. Your product is superior as is your service. Your packaging on shipments, state of art. The best in the biz!

I have a friend that sells high-end gear. He comes to my place and listens and goes what the hell. I bring my hot stampers over and play them against every copy he has on his mega-expensive system and against his copies that are rare, remastered, Heavy Vinyl, etc., and he goes what the hell.

I am no fool. Great sound starts with what’s in the grooves. Bad records are bad records. My stereo is a mess and looks like shit. Cables suspended. Components sideways on pillows. Old gear, new gear… doesn’t matter. What matters is what you hear.

I thank you Tom Port… I talked to you maybe 18 years ago… a revelation. Thank you for helping me learn about great sound and setting up my system and cleaning records. I wrote it all down and still have it as reference to this day. Thank you for that, when you were giving consults to customers. I listen to all your on-line discussions. Love your passion for sound. I learned and listened.

I am getting older, still listening and learning about the records I have. The cymbal crashes, snare and hi-hat on Dreams may not ever sound the same in a years to follow, but on your Hot Stampers I know they will always be there. Ha!

Thank you Tom Port
Thank you to the Better Records crew.
To everyone behind the console…..Praise

Ivan

Ivan,

Thanks for so many kind words, and thanks for keeping Better Records going for all these years. Customers like you are the reason we are still in business.

We’re sorry your shootout didn’t work out. Doing your own shootouts can be a real pain in the ass, but doing an Elton John album pressed on British DJM vinyl kicks the pain quotient up another level or two. Even we have a hard time getting through those noisy pressings.

The sound may make it worth it in the end, but, like you say, the amount of work we have to do for the five hundred bucks we might charge puts his records and others like them out of the reach of the analog music lover who can’t spend the rest of his life finding, cleaning and playing the same album over and over again until a good one comes his way.

It’s not a career, it’s just a piece of music!

Multiply it by the 300 albums you now own and you see how putting together such a collection no matter how committed you might be would be the work of a lifetime and even over a lifetime practically impossible.

We’re very glad to have made that collection possible. (Sorry about the Heavy Vinyl, we didn’t know what we didn’t know back then and we all had a lot to learn. Most still haven’t figured out that it’s a mid-fi scam, and most never will, which is the truly sad part of that story.)

300 really good records is a lot, and they can be played as often as you like, even long after you have lost your high frequency hearing, as I have. I don’t even notice anything missing. I listen to all my music regularly and it still sounds great to me. (Now I know how people can play Heavy Vinyl and enjoy it. When you don’t know much about sound, it sounds just fine.)

Thanks again for your letter and keep enjoying the very special records you’ve acquired over the years. They are priceless.

Sleep well knowing that nothing will ever come along to beat them. If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that.

Best, TP

P.S.

Ivan’s first letter tells the story of two massive shootouts he carried out with a friend, one for Tea for the Tillerman and one for Aja, both involving 16 copies!

John Mayall / The Turning Point – A Surprisingly Good Later Mayall Album

More Soul, Blues, and R&B

  • Here is a vintage Polydor pressing with two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides or close to them – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This is a superb recording, something that cannot be said for most of Mayall’s output from this period (and none of his later albums, in our experience)
  • More importantly, this is some of the best music we have ever heard from the man – this is a very special group effort the likes of which we had never heard before
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – those on “So Hard To Share” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
  • 4 1/2 stars: “This album also signifies a distinct departure from the decibel-drowning electrified offerings of his previous efforts, providing instead an exceedingly more folk- and roots-based confab… [Jon] Mark’s precision and tasteful improvisational skills [on acoustic guitar] place this incarnation into heady spaces.”

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This Is Why We Love Hippie Folk Rock from the 60s and 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.

If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums? — you should much to like on Down in L.A.

Here is how we described our most recent shootout winner:

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”vox and guitar jumping out of the speakers”…”big and tubey and weighty”…”HTF [hard to fault]” (side one)…”serious bass and energy”…:”rich and 3D and lively.”

Both of these sides have the smooth sweet analog sound we were listening for – they’re rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear that make it the best of both worlds.

The notes for the top copy from our most recent shootout can be seen below. It us six years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort.

Side one was HTF – Hard To Fault.

Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island Disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre.

It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars.

The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul.

All three are built on the same folk pop sensibilities. Tarkio, album number three, is clearly the duo’s Masterpiece, but this record comes next in my book, followed by Weeds, their second album and first for Kama Sutra. After Tarkio it’s all downhill.

“Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome, strident qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking

More British Folk Rock

  • This early British Island pressing of the band’s very well-recorded third album is doing just about everything right, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • A copy like this is a rare audiophile treat – here is the rich, warm, clear, natural and lively sound you want for Fairport Convention
  • This is a superb collection of songs, including two previously unreleased Bob Dylan tracks, as well as Sandy Denny’s first foray into songwriting, with the achingly powerful “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
  • 5 stars: “Unhalfbricking was a transitional album for the young Fairport Convention, in which the group shed its closest ties to its American folk-rock influences and started to edge toward a more traditional British folk-slanted sound.”

Forget the dubby domestic LPs on A&M and whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days — the early UK vinyl is the only way to fly on Unhalfbricking.

The ‘haunting, ethereal’ vocals of the lovely Sandy Denny are sublime here. Some of you may recognize her voice from a ditty called “Battle of Evermore,” found on a grayish 70s rock album that no one even bothered to give a name. Wonder whatever became of that group? No doubt by now their story is lost to the sands of time. I have to say I thought the music was pretty good though.

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Mel Torme – …Loves Fred Astaire aka …Sings Fred Astaire

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Torme’s 1957 release, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound of BETTER throughout this vintage 70s Bethlehem reissue pressing
  • Turn it up and The Velvet Fog will be standing right between your speakers, putting his heart and soul into these American standards
  • Lovely richness and warmth, you may just find yourself using it as an analog Demo Disc – Mel is in his prime and magnificent throughout
  • 5 stars: “Featuring an artist at the peak of his ability and talent, a collection of top-drawer songs from the best pop composers ever, and a swinging ten-piece that forms the perfect accompaniment, Sings Fred Astaire is one of the best up-tempo vocal albums ever recorded.”

The notes for the original pressing we played can be seen above. We’ve played them before with similar results, so I doubt we will be buying them in the future.

It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with grades of 1.5+ on both sides, it fits comfortably in our section for good, not great sounding LPs — but the right reissues from the 70s are a big step up in class sonically.

They represent yet another example of a vintage reissue — accent on the word “vintage” — handily beating the early pressings.

There are a number of budget reissues of vocal music with excellent sound that we’ve discovered over the years, and some of them, counterintuitively with respect to the conventional audiophile record collecting dogma from which many in our hobby suffer, are the best sounding versions that we know of.

What the Best Sides Of …Sings Fred Astaire aka …Loves Fred Astaire Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

  • The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
  • The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1957
  • Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
  • Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
  • Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

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The Enigma Variations on Mercury Was Not to Our Liking (Although We Sure Love the Cover)

Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1959 Mercury (SR 90125) impressed us when we did a shootout for the work years ago.

The performance of the Enigma Variations here seems rushed, and the two other recordings of the work that we like, one on Philips, the other on RCA, are better.

The Philips with Haitink is probably the better of the time and our favorite at this time. Of the three recordings that we felt had the best combination of music and sound, the Merc with Barbarolli was our least favorite, so we decided to concentrate on the best two recordings in our shootout and get rid of the Mercury pressings we had on hand.

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The Crusaders – Chain Reaction

More Jazz Fusion

  • An outstanding copy of Chain Reaction with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • The overall sound here is Tubey Magical, lively and funky, with the kind of rich, solid sound that will fill your listening room from wall to wall
  • If you own the Mobile Fidelity remaster, or some Heavy Vinyl LP, you are in for a real treat – this pressing will show you just how good the recording is
  • 4 1/2 stars: “One of the tastiest concoctions of the mid-’70s jazz-fusion era, Chain Reaction finds the Crusaders at the top of their form. The compositions are both accessible and memorable, and the playing is uniformly excellent.”

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Donald Byrd – House of Byrd

More Donald Byrd

  • Two rare Donald Byrd albums in one, here with superb Double Plus (A++) grades on all FOUR sides
  • The Tubey Magic is fully intact, making these two albums sound just the way a pair of classic All Tube 1956 Rudy Van Gelder jazz albums should
  • Composed of two superb LPs – 2 Trumpets and The Young Bloods – these wonderful MONO pressings capture some of Byrd’s best music and with top quality sound
  • “Art and Donald are in fine form, and if there is any competition it serves only to increase the musical yield.”
  • “… These blowing sessions (typical of Prestige’s albums of the 1950s) have their enjoyable moments with Farmer and Woods taking overall solo honors.”

This reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the added benefit of mastering using the more modern cutting equipment of the ’70s in this case. We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the generally opaque, veiled and lifeless mastering so common today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that these pressings excel in so many areas of reproduction. What was odd about it — odd to most audiophiles but not necessarily to us — was just how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the right pressing.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, lively, clear, rich sound of the recording was still on the tape decades later, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound on to a record was simply to thread up the tape on the right machine and hit play.

The fact that practically nobody seems to be able to make a record nowadays that sounds remotely this good tells me that I’m wrong to think that such an approach tends to work, if our experience with hundreds of mediocre Heavy Vinyl reissues is relevant.

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Terence Trent D’Arby – Introducing the Hardline According To…

More Soul, Blues, and R&B

  • D’Arby’s debut LP (one of only a handful of copies to ever hit the site), here with very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We guarantee there is more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back 
  • 4 stars: “Although the production is quite modern, d’Arby shows his roots in the work of older artists, borrowing a page or two from Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, while James Brown appears to have had the strongest influence on d’Arby’s stage presence.”

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