Month: April 2025

Deep Purple – Fireball

More Deep Purple

  • An early Harvest UK pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This copy was simply bigger, richer and clearer, with more Tubey Magic, less smear and less congestion than most of the others we played
  • One of Ian Gillian’s favorite albums, “… it was really the beginning of tremendous possibilities of expression.”
  • 4 1/2 stars: “One of Deep Purple’s four indispensable albums (the others being In Rock, Machine Head, and Burn), 1971’s Fireball saw the band broadening out from the no-holds-barred hard rock direction of the previous year’s cacophonous In Rock.”

This vintage Harvest pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

How Did Columbia Make So Many Great Sounding Records Without Today’s Obviously Superior Mastering Equipment?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

When I play Columbia recordings from the 50s and 60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles Davis and other jazz giants, what I find most striking about them is how natural, warm and sweet they sound.

I was playing an old mono Ellington record a while back, and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing.

Those guys — the engineers and the musicians — knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how many of the best sounding records in the world managed to be recorded without the benefit of any of that stuff.

RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos.  Decca didn’t need it.

Contemporary Records managed to record many of the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great records get made with such bad equipment?

I guess we’ll never know.

Columbia may not have always recorded the best “serious” jazz, but they were very serious about the sound of their jazz. Outside of Contemporary, Columbia has better sounding jazz records than any other label of which I am aware.

Recordings made at their 30th Street Studio are pretty hard to beat. There is no Heavy Vinyl reissue on the planet that can compete with the sound of one of our Hot Stamper pressings of any of the albums recorded there you see available on our site, and they are guaranteed to knock your socks off or your money back.

And the Brubeck albums recorded by Fred Plaut are some of the most amazing sounding of all the Columbias, something few audiophiles would dispute. (Try to get the early pressings in stereo. Nothing can touch them. If you can’t afford our prices, we are more than happy to help you find your own. )

UPDATE 2025

We have two new lists for those who would like to know which Columbia label pressings win shootouts — one for 6-Eye Label winners and one for 360 Label winners.

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Our Amazingly Good Shootout Winning Copy Fell Short in One Area

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now

With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) live jazz sound or close to it throughout, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Getz – Gilberto #2 you’ve heard.

Rich, tubey and musical, the sound is wonderful for these live performances of the two very different groups – one side featuring Getz, the other Gilberto.

As you can see from the notes, side one of our most recent White Hot stamper Shootout Winner was doing everything right.

However, we had a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

The Second Round

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side two of another pressing showed us the sound could be even more open than we thought the first time around.

As a consequence, we dropped side two’s grade a half plus, from 3 to 2.5+.

This is exactly why we do shootouts. If you really want to be able to recognize subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) differences between pressings, you must learn to do them too.

And make sure to take notes about what you are hearing, good and bad.

One side falling short of the full Three Pluses happens more often than not. One out of five records that has one shootout winning side will have a matching shootout winning other side.

The math works like this. 3+/3+ records go in this section, which currently holds 29 titles as of 4/2025. Records with at least one 3+ side go in this section, and there are 145 of those as of the same date, about five times as many.

Getz Is the Man

Stan Getz is a truly great tenor saxophonist, the cool school’s most popular player. Over the years we have invested an insane amount of time and money in our search for Hot Stamper copies of this and other Getz albums.

We rarely have much to show for our efforts — certainly not in terms of quantity, as years can go by without a single record of his on the site.

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Brewer & Shipley / Down In L.A.

More Brewer and Shipley

  • Brewer & Shipley’s debut LP is back on the site for only the second time in years, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them throughout this vintage A&M pressing
  • Fairly quiet vinyl too – we can hardly believe that we found one that plays like a normal rock and pop record after finding one stitchy, ticky, groove-damaged pressing after another for the last ten years
  • Side one has the smooth sweet analog sound we were listening for – it’s rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear that make it the best of both worlds, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • “Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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 Hippie 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.

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Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Southern Accents

More of the Music of Tom Petty

  • A Southern Accents like you’ve never heard, with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this early MCA pressing
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • “Southern Accents is an ambitious album, attempting to incorporate touches of psychedelia, soul, and country into a loose concept about the modern South… ‘Rebels’ and ‘Spike’ are fine rockers, and ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ and ‘Make It Better (Forget About Me)’ expand The Heartbreakers’ sound nicely.”
  • If you’re a fan of Tom Petty and his bandmates, this classic from 1985 surely belongs in your collection.

If you’ve tried to find a good sounding copy of this album you could easily be forgiven for throwing in the towel — we almost did ourselves, and more than once. We’ve cleaned and played a pile of copies over the years, and now we are glad to report that this one sounds like a completely different album — it’s rich, smooth, and sweet, a big step up over the typical gritty, grainy copy.

Credit must obviously go to the man behind the console, Shelly Yakus, someone who we freely admit, now with a sense of embarrassment, had never been one of our favorite engineers. After hearing a White Hot Stamper pressing of Damn the Torpedoes and a killer copy of Crack the Sky’s Animal Notes, as well as amazing sounding pressings of Moondance (his first official lead engineering gig) and Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, we realize that we have seriously underestimated the man.

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Somethin’ Else on MoFi – How Is This Company Still in Business?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

For our 2023 White Hot Stamper shootout winning pressing we wrote:

A triumph for Rudy Van Gelder, a top Blue Note title, and as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball Adderley.

The best sides of this album have as much energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space as any jazz recording we’ve ever played.

When you hear it on a copy like this, it’s hard to imagine it could get much better.

We’ve heard more than our fair share of tubby, groove-damaged originals and smeary, lifeless reissues over the years, but this White Hot Stamper blew them all away.

This is a record we could play every week and never tire of. 

But this expensive ($125) MoFi pressing had us wondering what the hell we were on about, because almost nothing about it is right except for something we were not expecting: it’s actually tonally correct.

What are the chances?

With Mobile Fidelity, slim and none, but in this case they managed to pull off slim. So let’s give credit where credit is due.

But the sound is still a mess no matter how tonally correct it is.

Allow me to list its faults based on the notes we took as the record was playing. The last line sums up the experience nicely.

  • 1) It’s very recessed and lean.
  • 2) The trumpet is thin and very squawky.
  • 3) There is an exaggerated resonance in the peaks.

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What to Do When Early Warner Bros. Pressings Have Bad Sound

More Label Advice for Audiophiles

There are a lot of Green Label Warner Bros. records from the 60s and 70s that sound dark, murky, recessed and so on.

The shortcomings we list below are hardly exhaustive but they should help you make a good start. Click on any link to see the pressings we have identified with that specific problem.

But the later label LPs are rarely any better and more often than not much, much worse. When you play most of them, it’s obvious that their mastering engineers have gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inappropriate and more often than not disastrous.

But don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of good ones. On this blog we’ve taken the time to identify the Green Label Warner Bros. records with the potential to win shootouts. (Potential is the key word in that sentence.)

Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity may not be easy, but for most Warner Bros. albums it can be done. It’s what we get paid to do, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same thing at home as long as you make sure to follow our approach.

That Old Record Sound

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

The average record we play tends to suffer from some of these faults. It might be:

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that were stamped out over the last seven decades with no concern for sound quality.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless — relatively speaking of course — the average record will show itself to be.

Average records don’t sound like our amazingly good shootout winning copies, but they look just like them, and that’s what makes finding them so difficult. For classical and orchestral music, the effort required must be seen as the work of a lifetime.

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Talking Heads / Speaking in Tongues

More Talking Heads

  • Both sides of this vintage Sire pressing were giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning solid Double Plus (A++ ) grades
  • “Burning Down the House” – our favorite track on the album and one of the band’s best – is really rockin’ right out of the gate!
  • The sound opens up nicely, allowing you to hear into the music and appreciate the more subtle details, details that more often than not get lost on other pressings
  • 4 stars: “… their most popular album yet…” – it also was #54 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 best albums of the 1980s”

We recently finished a shootout for Speaking In Tongues, the band’s 1983 release, the last great Talking Heads album, and were pleased as punch to hear a copy or two deliver the kind of magic that we’ve been getting on Little Creatures.

Most copies of Speaking In Tongues are too flat, dry and veiled to get worked up about, but this one will show you that excellent sound for this album is indeed possible, albeit awfully difficult to find.

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Joan Baez – Self-Titled in Mono

More Pure Folk Recordings

  • Excellent sound for Baez’s debut album, with both sides of this early MONO Vanguard pressing earning Double Plus (A++) grades
  • Both of these sides boast glorious All Tube chain recording quality that will be very hard to beat
  • One of Joan Baez’s best sounding albums in our experience, shockingly free of artificiality – play it against your favorite female vocal album to hear the difference
  • A TAS list Super Disc that actually deserves to be on a Super Disc list, how about that
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • 140 weeks on the charts and Five Stars on AMG: “…a brace of traditional songs (most notably ‘East Virginia’ and ‘Mary Hamilton’) with an urgency and sincerity that makes the listener feel as though they were being sung for the first time…”

This former member of the TAS list is the kind of recording that has everything going for it: Golden Age equipment in a live acoustic with a simple arrangement for voice and guitar (or two).

The voice and the material come together nicely. If I were to recommend only one Joan Baez record it would surely have to be this one. Diamonds and Rust is a nice pop album but I think if you go back and play it today you will find that it sounds somewhat dated. Good folk tunes like the ones found on this album, however, never seem to go out of style.

The record sounds like a live demo session because that is exactly what it is:

In 1983 Baez described the making of the album to Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder:”…It took four days. We recorded it in the ballroom of some hotel in New York, way up by the river. We could use the room every day except Tuesday, because they played Bingo there on Tuesdays. It was just me on this filthy rug. There were two microphones, one for the voice and one for the guitar. I just did my set. It was probably all I knew how to do at that point. I did ‘Mary Hamilton’ once and that was it…That’s the way we made ’em in the old days. As long as a dog didn’t run through the room or something, you had it…”

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Oscar Peterson’s Best Recording? Sure Sounds Like It to Us

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

It sounded great to me at the time, although I had nothing to compare it to. I was not an Oscar Peterson fan in those days. The CD may be very good, but it is unlikely to hold a candle to any of our Hot Stamper vinyl pressings.

I now realize that this album is clearly one of the best jazz piano recordings ever made. In its own way it’s every bit as good as  another landmark recording we talk about, The Three, recorded in 1975.

This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

The description for the amazing copy we found in our shootout more than a decade ago has been reproduced below.

The Right Sound from the Get Go

Side one starts out with a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. This side was richer and fuller than all the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work. It keeps all the instrumental elements in balance. The natural top on this side is just more evidence that the mastering and pressing are top drawer. Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — this side could not be beat.

And side two was every bit as good! The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge, probably bigger than it would be in real life, but I can live with that. Once again, with this kind of extended top end, the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced brilliantly.

Testing with Oscar

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term)
  • We like them to be solidly weighted
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in the audiophile reviews we read [more on smear at the end of this commentary]

Here are some of our favorite jazz records with top quality piano sound

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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