Month: January 2026

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young / 4 Way Street

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

  • These early Atlantic pressings boast roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades or close to them on all FOUR sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner (side four actually won the shootout) – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This live album gives you the “naked” sound of the real thing – the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that would never happen again
  • Bill Halverson worked his magic, but only the better pressings let his genius shine the way it does here
  • This is a record we rarely do shootouts for, simply because reasonably quiet, unscratched copies are getting more scarce by the day – much of what we can find is not in good enough condition to pass audiophile muster
  • 4 1/2 stars: “4 Way Street, released in April of 1971: a live double-LP set, chock-full of superb music distilled down from a bunch of nights on that tour that more than fulfilled the promise of the group.”
  • Rolling Stone raves that “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are all performers of unquestionable talent, and mostly because they stay out of each others’ way, 4 Way Street must surely be their best album to date.”

If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this copy will let you do it. It’s not easy to find good sound on even one side of this album, let alone all four!

The Naked Sound of Live Music

The song “Triad,” just to cite one example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and his acoustic guitar. It’s as real sounding as anything I’ve ever heard from the band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded compared to what the microphones must have picked up.

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The Cars – Heartbeat City

More of the Music of The Cars

  • You’ll find very good Hot Stamper sound on both sides of this vintage Elektra pressing – 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 – it’s as simple as that
  • 5 stars: “… a gleaming pop masterpiece. The producer’s golden touch, the strength of the songs Ric Ocasek wrote, and the stunning vocal performance both he and Benjamin Orr deliver make the album one of the best of the 80s and something that still sounds perfect many years later.”

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Letter of the Week – “When the sound field is this huge, lots of things click into place.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a comparison he did between a Super Hot and a White Hot pressing of Rumours.

Dear Tom and Fred,

White Hot Stampers are very special records. I know you know this already, but it still astonishes me every time. It’s been a pleasure to compare the WHS of Rumours to my SHS [Super Hot Stamper].

Tom, I hear you talk about the size of the acoustic space a lot on your blog, but it was hard for me to picture what you meant until I heard it myself.

The WHS sounds bigger than the SHS. It is like I’m sitting a few rows back at a show. It’s such a palpable difference, I feel like I can measure the increased size of the sound field for the WHS. I’d say it’s about two feet more forward, up, and out compared to the SHS.

When the sound field is this huge, lots of things click into place. The instruments have their own space, and that seems to make it easier to follow each of them, and to notice all the details in someone’s playing. It’s really exhilarating.

Vinyl amazes me. It’s just so remarkable that two pressings can differ in terms of the size of the soundstage. What parameter of the pressing gives you that? I’d love to know, but even without understanding the physics of it, the effect is unmistakably real.

I imagine that picking out the white hot stampers is the easiest part of your job. I’m guessing that all it takes is a couple notes of music to know when a particular copy has THAT sound. Finding good candidates, I’m certain, can be tedium, then disappointment when they don’t pan out. But, spotting a 3+ is probably a cinch.

When I first got the SHS of Rumours, I shot it out against all the other copies I had, and it bested them all. It took me a whole afternoon (a delightful afternoon, but still.)

The WHS is simply in a different league. I went back and forth between it and the SHS, track after track, amazed by how easy it was to hear the differences, particularly in the size of the acoustic space. It’s really no wonder your white hots seem to sell faster than your super hots, even at 3-4x the price.

Aaron

Aaron,

The size and space that any given pressing reproduces is one of the most important aspects of the sound that we listen for. Bigger and bolder, without being hyped-up in any way — that is our sound.

This brings to mind a milestone event in the history of Better Records. We did a huge shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second album many years ago, all the way back in 2010. We found two copies with sides that went far beyond any we had ever played. They reproduced the brass from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in a way that we had no idea was possible. We described it this way:

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If Only I Could Remember My Name – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?

On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:

  • Noticeably more warmth,
  • Noticeably more sweetness,
  • Noticeably more delicacy,
  • Noticeably more transparency,
  • Noticeably more ambience,
  • Noticeably more energy,
  • Noticeably more size (width and height),
  • Noticeably more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).

in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.

The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.

A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.

By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.

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Is So Far Really Just a Waste of Money?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

The All Music Guide considers So Far to be a waste of money (on CD) because it was a slapped together effort to capitalize on CSN’s success, combining material from only two albums and then adding two unreleased tracks.

Their attitude boils down to the idea that the first two records are essential, so why buy this album for two songs?

I’ll tell you why.

Because finding good sounding pressings of either of the first two albums is practically impossible for the average audiophile record collector.

I mean that literally: as a practical matter, it is very, very difficult to find Hot Stamper versions of the band’s first two releases. This is especially true for the self-titled album from 1969, which sounds best in our experience on a later reissue that we have a devil of time finding and therefore rarely have in stock.

Both the first two albums and So Far are records we credit with helping us dramatically improve the playback quality of our system.

A Few Words About Deja Vu

Deja Vu is a special album for me, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

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Shelly Manne & His Men – At The Black Hawk, Vol. 3

More of the Music of Shelly Manne

  • A vintage Contemporary stereo pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from first note to last
  • This is West Coast Jazz at its best, and if anyone can capture the feeling of jazz in a small club, it’s the engineers and producers at Contemporary
  • The sound is superb – airy, open, and spacious with a solid bottom end – the depth and definition are out of this world (particularly on side one)
  • “Considering how much music was documented, it is fortunate that trumpeter Joe Gordon, tenorman Richie Kamuca, pianist Victor Feldman, bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Shelly Manne were in top form for this enjoyable gig. The music is high-quality straightforward and uncomplicated bebop.”

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Johnny Cash / Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

More of the Music of Johnny Cash

  • Both sides of this early 360 Stereo pressing have killer sound for Cash’s 1968 live album, earning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • It ain’t easy to find great sounding Johnny Cash records, but this copy had the sound we were looking for
  • This one is richer, smoother and sweeter than practically all others we played, with lots of body and excellent transparency
  • Cash’s vocals sound right on the money here – present, full and natural with virtually none of the hardness, strain and edge you get on the typical copy
  • It literally takes us years to find a handful of copies worthy enough to put on the site, so don’t miss out on this one if you’re a fan!
  • 5 stars: “…At Folsom Prison is the quintessential Johnny Cash album, the place where his legend burns bright and eternal.”

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Does Year of the Cat on Mobile Fidelity Have Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Stewart Available Now

Our answer, judging by the copy we played not long ago, would be solidly in the negative. The final grade we awarded both sides was No, our way of saying the record is Not Good.

Below is a description for what a top copy of the album sounds like, based on our most recent shootout:

Incredible sound throughout this vintage Janus pressing of Stewart’s 1976 Masterpiece. With engineering by Alan Parsons, the top pressings are every bit the audiophile Demo Discs you remember. The best sides have sweet vocals, huge amounts of space, breathtaking transparency, and so much more.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

But if you own the wrong Mobile Fidelity pressing — this one was reissued in 1981, the original came out in 1978, so there may be some other pressings that sound better than this one — you would never know how good sounding the album can be. We put a copy we had laying around in a shootout recently and the results were, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty painful.

As the notes make clear, the Mobile Fidelity pressing, with the stampers you see on the sheet above, is:

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Muddy Waters – Hard Again

More of the Music of Muddy Waters

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish, this vintage Blue Sky pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in four years) will be very hard to beat – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides are big, lively and jumpin’ out of the speakers – just right for this down and dirty music
  • A Grammy Winner, an AllMusic Five Star album – simply a superb recording and one of our favorites for 70s blues
  • 5 stars: “Christgau attributed the record’s intense quality to ‘the natural enthusiasm of an inspired collaboration,’ and remarked on its standing in Chicago blues, ‘except maybe for B.B. King’s Live at the Regal and Otis Spann’s Walking the Blues… I can’t recall a better blues album than this.'”

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Procol Harum – Broken Barricades

More Art Rock

  • Both sides of this vintage copy were giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
  • Looking for some Proggy music that falls somewhere between Jethro Tull and Supertramp, with sonic credentials to match the recordings of those very well-recorded bands? Well, look no further
  • This original UK pressing is full of the Tubey Magic and studio space that makes the band’s recordings the joy they are to play on a heavily-tweaked audiophile rig
  • 4 stars: “‘Simple Sister’… is truly glorious, with Robin Trower’s frightening lead guitar work juxtaposed nicely against a wonderful string arrangement.”
  • If you’re a Prog Rock or Art Rock fan, this is a classic from 1971 that belongs in your collection.
  • This is best sounding recording by the band we have ever heard. Other albums of that nature can be found here.

We loved playing this album, both for the music and the sound. These guys don’t get the respect they deserve among audiophiles, but we’re doing our best to try to change that.

Side one kicks off with the hit track “Simple Sister,” and you won’t believe how hard it rocks. Some copies are overly clean — they have the kind of clarity you might hope to find, but lacked the richness and fullness that makes 70s analog so involving. Those ‘clean’ copies simply do not earn very high grades from us. We leave that sound to the Heavy Vinyl and CD crowd; they seem to like it.

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