Month: September 2025

Peggy Lee – If You Go

More of the Music of Peggy Lee

  • Outstanding sound throughout, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from first note to last
  • Side two of this vintage Capitol stereo pressing is rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical – we’re talking All Tube Analog from 1961, after all – with wonderfully sweet and breathy vocals, and side one is not far behind in all those areas
  • Both our top copies in the shootout were too noisy to sell, ouch! I doubt if we will be doing this title again, the vinyl is just too noisy on these old Capitol pressings
  • “… the man writing the charts here is Quincy Jones, and he is only occasionally interested in underscoring the heartbreak with suitably sad music… Lee responds to the music with a world-weary tone, but an occasional swing in her step, as if this is not her first romance, nor her first one to go wrong.”

This vintage Capitol pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely begin to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back. (more…)

Listening for Energy and Rock and Roll Firepower on Bad Company’s Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Classics Available Now

The drums on this album are so solid, punchy and present, they put to shame 99% of the rock records on the planet.

As well as having great drums, the overall sound of the best pressings is raw, real and wonderfully unprocessed.

Here you will find none of the glossy artificiality you might hear on many of the rock and pop records we sell.

There’s nothing wrong with that sound, mind you, but this recording captures much more of what the real instruments sound like in the studio.

And, if you’re playing this album good and loud, you’ll feel like you’re in the room with the boys as they kick out the jams. “Ready For Love” sounds great here — shocking clarity, tons of ambience, and silky sweet highs.

This album was one of Ron Nevison‘s early engineering jobs.

The year before (1973) he had been behind the board at Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio for Quadrophenia, one of the best sounding Who albums we know of, and a longtime member of our Top 100 (as is this album).

He also knocked it out of the park on Bad Company’s follow-up, 1975’s Straight Shooter.

He worked on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffiti the same year.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Mussorgsky & Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition

More of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky

  • With two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, this British EMI import pressing is doing just about everything right – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Our favorite performance by far, with big, bold and powerful sonics like no other recording we know
  • The brass clarity, the dynamics, the deep bass and the sheer power of the orchestra are almost hard to believe
  • No vintage recording of these works compares with Muti’s – and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite is an extra special added bonus on side two
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we’ve awarded the honor of offering the best performances with the highest quality sound, and this record certainly deserve a place on that list.
  • If you like orchestral spectaculars, have we got amazing sounding records for you

This EMI import pressing gives you the complete Pictures at an Exhibition with a top performance and superb sonics.

As this is my All Time Favorite performance of Pictures, this record naturally comes very highly recommended. Pictures is a piece of music that has been recorded countless times, and I’ve played scores of different recordings, but the only one that truly satisfies is this one, Muti’s 1979 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Much like Previn and the LSO’s performance of The Planets, he finds the music in the work that no one else seems to.

A Must Own Classical Record

This orchestral spectacular should be part of any serious Classical Collection. Other Must Own classical recordings can be found here.

For his 1979 review of the Mussorgsky, Robert Layton in the GRAMOPHONE writes of Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra :

…what orchestral playing they offer us. The lower strings in ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’ have an extraordinary richness, body and presence, and “Baba Yaga”, which opens the second side, has an unsurpassed virtuosity and attack as well as being of demonstration standard as a recording. The glorious body of tone, the richly glowing colours, the sheer homogeneity of the strings and perfection of the ensemble is a constant source of pleasure.

Of the performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird, Layton writes:

…Muti’s reading is second to none and the orchestral playing is altogether breathtaking. The recording is amazingly lifelike and truthful.

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How Do the Early Pressings of The Poll Winners Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A recent Shootout Winning copy with the early stereo badge cover was described this way:

Stunning sound throughout this vintage Black Label Stereo Records pressing, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them

Roy DuNann always seems to get the real sound out of the sessions he recorded – amazingly realistic drums in a big room; Tubey Magical guitar tone; deep, note-like bass, and on and on

4 1/2 stars: “The choice of material, the interplay between the three players, and the lead work all meld together beautifully on The Poll Winners, making it a classic guitar album in a small-group setting.”

Musically, all true. Sonically, not so much. The early D1/D2 stampers on the early Black Label might be passable on side one (1+), but side two was just a mess (NFG).

Side One

Track Two

  • A bit bright and flat

Track One

  • Very clear but lacking richness, weight and depth
  • Thin, and bright up top
  • 1+

Side Two

Track One

  • Narrow stereo field
  • Weird tape hiss
  • Metallic top end
  • Very recessed and weird
  • Nope

A different Stereo Badge Cover copy sporting a Black Label won the shootout by the way. Go figure.

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Donald Fagen / The Nightfly

More of the Music of Steely Dan

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Warner Bros. pressing
  • Punchy and high-resolution, check out the cymbals and muted guitar on “I.G.Y.” — they sound pretty much right on the money here
  • Big, open and spacious with virtually no smear, this copy is doing just about everything we want it to
  • The sound may be too heavily processed and glossy for some, but we find that on the best copies that sound works about as well as any for this album
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date.”
  • We played the Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing not long ago — I hope to god no one reading this blog thought it was anything better than passable
  • Of course the Mobile Fidelity Half-Speed pressing is not right either — it has the sloppy bass and boosted top end that almost all of their records have, perfect for the stereo systems of the 80s but not a good fit for the best of what came after

Energetic and present, this copy is on a completely different level than most pressings. We just finished a big shootout for Donald Fagen’s solo effort from 1982 (just two years after Gaucho and the end of Steely Dan) and we gotta tell you, there are a lot of weak-sounding copies out there. We should know; we played them.

We’ve been picking copies up for more than a year in the hopes that we’d have some killer Hot Stamper copies to offer, but most of them left us cold. Flat, edgy and bright, like a bad copy of Graceland, only a fraction had the kind of magic we find on the better Steely Dan albums.

Both sides here are incredibly clear and high-rez compared to most pressings, with none of the veiled, smeary quality we hear so often. The vocals are breathy, the bass is clear and the whole thing is open and spacious.

How Analog Is It?

The ones we like the best will tend to be the ones that sound the most Analog. The more they sound like the average pressing — in other words, the more CD-like they sound — the lower the sonic grade. Many will not have even one Hot Stamper side and will end up in the trade-in pile.

The best copies sound the way the best copies of most Classic Rock records sound: tonally correct, rich, clear, sweet, smooth, open, present, lively, big, spacious, Tubey Magical, with breathy vocals and little to no spit, grit, grain or grunge.

That’s the sound of analog, and the best copies of The Nightfly have that sound.

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Jack Sheldon / Unreleased UHQR Test Pressing – Reviewed in 2007

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Quality Sound

UPDATE

2007 was a long time ago, so please take that into condideration when reading this review.

This is a practically brand new UHQR JVC test record.

I’m SHOCKED at how good this record sounds.

It has AMAZING live jazz sound. 

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Do The Original Domestic KC Pressings Always Beat the Later PC LPs?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

Here is our description for the Super Hot (2+) copy that is currently on the site:

One of the most important records in my growth as an audiophile from 1971 to the present – my stereo was forced to evolve in order to play this kind of big production rock at the loud levels that the album needs in order to work its magic.

No matter how many times you play it, you will most likely hear – or at least gain more of an appreciation for – something new in the exceptionally dense, sophisticated soundfield Chris Kimsey creates for these songs.

And each time you make an improvement in the quality of your playback, this is the album that will show you exactly what you have just accomplished.

Overall, the best performers in our most recent shootout were UK pressings. They ranged in sound from the 3/3 Shootout Winning pressing (not shown) to the lowest graded British copy which earned grades of 1.5+/2+ (at the bottom of the top box).

On the left is a portion of the breakdown, minus the actual stamper numbers that earned the highest grades (for obvious reasons.)

We had six UK pressings, all with the same stampers — the five you see graded and the one hidden to the left that actually won the shootout. (Three sides earned White Hot Stamper grades, an unusual outcome and a good one for the bottom line.)

Note that with the “right stampers” you could have ended up with an incredible Demo Disc (copy #1) or just a very good sounding copy on side two mated to a passable side one (copy #6).

Finding six clean UK pressings is, as you can well imagine, neither cheap nor easy. We probably bought close to twice that many to end up with six that we’re in something close to audiophile playing condition.

As you can see from the grades, two of them were clearly inferior to the other four. In the case of this title, a small sample size could have been very misleading. Fortunately for us, we spent the money and the time it takes to track down a good-sized batch of UK pressings in order to avoid that possibility.

Next come the better domestic pressings. There was a 2+/2+ that outscored all the other domestic pressings, and four others that came in behind it, all with the same stampers.

Of the five copies that had those stampers, two had side two’s that scored sub-Hot Stamper grades, which marked them as unsaleable. (Perhaps we will offer them as one-sided records since their side one’s are so good.)

KC VS PC

We rarely have good luck with PC reissue copies when the originals come with the KC prefix, rarely meaning we find a PC winner maybe once out of every ten titles we play.

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Which Art Pepper Today Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written in 2010 or thereabouts.

There is new information about the album as of 2024, which can be found here.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; in our experience, the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

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Santana (III) – The Most Tubey Magical Santana Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

I may be going out on a limb here, but to these ears, the best pressings of Santana’s third album have more Tubey Magic than any other Santana album we’ve ever played.

Tubey Magic in this case means you not only get all the richness, sweetness and three-dimensionality that the term implies, but also amazing transparency.

There’s no smear to the sound, no veil to peer through — you just hear into that huge, deep soundfield of the studio with nothing between you and the musicians.

They’re all right there in the studio together; there’s no question this record is practically a live recording. It has the feel and energy of a recording where everyone is in the room at the same time, much like the first Santana record. That gives the sound AND the music a very special quality that’s hard to create any other way.

A True Demo Disc

This is a true Demo Disc in the world of rock records. It’s also one of those recordings that demands to be played LOUD. If you’ve got the the big room, big speakers, and the power to drive them, you can have a LIVE ROCK AND ROLL CONCERT in your very own house. When Santana lets loose with some of those legendary monster power chords — which incidentally do get good and loud in the mix, unlike most rock records which suffer from compression and “safe” mixes — I like to say that there is no stereo system on the planet that can play loud enough for me. (Horns maybe, but I don’t like the sound of horns, so there you go.)

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Fleetwood Mac / Greatest Hits

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

  • With two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this vintage British import will be very hard to beat
  • Big, rich, energetic, with an abundance of analog Tubey Magic, this original Orange Label UK pressing has exactly the right sound for this music
  • “Oh Well, Parts One and Two,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Man of the World,” and the surprise Number One single “Albatross” are all here and guaranteed to blow your mind
  • Peter Green is hands down our favorite British Blues Guitarist of All Time – play this record and you will surely see why we feel that way
  • This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, this copy is guaranteed to blow your mind. Like all the best vintage British pressings, the sound is smooth, rich and full. This is Old School ANALOG, baby. They don’t make ’em like this anymore because they don’t know how to.

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