Month: April 2025

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 — 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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Our Guide to Legrand Jazz on Impex

Hot Stamper Pressings of 30th St. Recordings Available Now

Years ago I wrote about how important the Legrand Jazz album was in my growth as a critical listener.

It’s yet another example of an album that helped make me a better audiophile by showing me the error of my tweaking and tuning ways.

Now there is a new pressing of it. Well, new to us anyway. (We readily admit to being behind the times and make no apologies for it. With records like these, we often find ourselves wondering why we bother.) Two new pressings in fact. One on a single disc at 33 RPM as of 2017, and one mastered at 45 RPM on 2 LPs as of 2019, still in print and available for $59.99.

Production details can be found at the end of this review, along with some favorable comments, some from none other than Steve Hoffman himself.

But first let’s hear from the personification of the well-meaning audiophile reviewer, Michael Fremer. He gives the Impex pressings an 11 for sound. He writes (emphasis added):

“This IMPEX reissue is sourced from an “analog mix-down transfer of the original 1958 work tape by Mark Wilder at Battery Studios” and cut by Chris Bellman and Bob Donnelly at Bernie Grundman Mastering on Grundman’s all-tube mastering system. I have a clean, original 6-Eye pressing that this superbly pressed reissue betters in every way. This will make both your stereo and your heart sing. Some of the greatest jazz musicians of that or any era wailing and clearly having a Legrand time. Limited to 3000 copies. Don’t miss it!”

Our notes (for those who have trouble reading our scratch)

  • So bright and thin and dry.
  • Crazy bad!
  • Unnatural, ugly.
  • Worst reissue ever?
  • Void of tubes and body.
  • So far off the mark.
  • Awful.

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Blonde On Blonde and Some Bad Side Fours

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Here’s a little something that you may have come across on your own, but since we’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else, perhaps this will come as news to you the way it came as news to us about ten years ago.

There is a stamper used on some Blonde on Blonde side fours that is so ridiculously bad, you might as well be listening to a cassette playing underwater.

To be sure, we pick up plenty of mediocre copies all the time, but these side fours are so beyond terrible it’s clear someone was asleep at the wheel.

They’re fascinating to hear in their own way, because it’s simply shocking that a good recording could sound that bad. Like the best pressings of our favorites (but in a very different way), words don’t do it justice.

Its awfulness has to be heard to be believed.

If you’ve been reading this blog much, you may have noticed that we’ve been saying that more and more lately.

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