Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now
This Stax British Import is a Better Records highly recommended recording. If I had to choose one Otis Redding record to keep, this would be the one! As good as his studio albums are, the guy was MAGICAL live.
If you’re an Otis Redding fan, this live album released in 1992 surely belongs in your collection.
The complete list of titles from 1992 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now
About fifteen years ago (2010) we played an original pressing of this title that we really liked. It’s the one with the rare cover you see pictured, and might have actually been the first one we had ever found in audiophile playing condition. We had a devil of a time finding more copies, but we were convinced that the early pressings were clearly the best.
More recently we were able to acquire quite a variety of different pressings for an upcoming shootout and were fortunate to be able to include one of the stereo originals for the first time in many years.
We started out with high hopes, but once the early pressing began to play, our hopes were dashed fairly quickly.
Our notes for the original pressing read:
In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.
Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.
Were we wrong years ago? Hard to say. That copy from many years ago is gone.
Three things we always keep in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound the way we remember it did, or think it should:
The sound here is lively and energetic with plenty of low end weight. These sides have the whomp that you don’t hear on too many Blue Note LPs! The sound of the saxophone is captured beautifully — it’s breathy with clearly audible leading-edge transients.
The bluesy version of “Willow Weep For Me” on side one is wonderful. “Scrapple From The Apple” (also on side one) has a silky top end anchored by deep, well-defined bass.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Atkins Available Now
This album is a little more lively than some of Chet’s other recordings, which can be criticized for being a little too laid back. For example, try side 2, cut 2, where Chet actually jams.
The last track on side 2 where Chet is joined by a trumpet player is my favorite on the album. That guitar-trumpet combination is pretty magical on that song. And you’ve got to love the kind of sound Bill Porter gets for a trumpet. That’s the kind of sound we audiophiles drool over. I do anyway.
More Hot Stamper Pressings We Only Offer on Import Vinyl Available Now
Porky cut the original British pressings of this Squeeze album, one of countless personal favorites of yours truly. They are records (and cassettes and CDs) I have played hundreds of times and still listen to regularly to this very day, in this case more than forty years after I purchased my first copy. (Good albums age well.)
I would have picked the record out of the bin at my local Tower Records, probably based on the radio play Tempted was getting.
That copy undoubtedly would have been domestic and made from a sub-generation tape, although I’m quite sure I could not have recognized what constituted dubby sound back then. In 1981, what I understood about the importance of different record pressings would have fit comfortably in a thimble.
I had my MoFi’s, and although I hate to admit it, that’s about as far as I had gotten in my quest for superior sounding pressings. You could add Nautilus and a few other Half-Speeds to the list of what pressing I thought were impressive, leaving plenty of room in that thimble unfilled.
Thankfully those bad old days are gone, and the music can now, finally, live and breath on the best of these imports from the UK. Of course they are the only ones we buy these days for our shootouts. The others are what are known around these parts as “mistakes.”
Sometimes the imported pressings are mastered by Porky and sometimes they are not. The ones that are not tend to have a lot of problems, as you can see from our stamper sheet below.
When Porky is not on side one, that side will tend to be hard, lean and bright. Side two of that copy had decent sound, earning a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Zappa Available Now
Second question: This pressing of Hot Rats is analog?
You could’ve fooled me.
And somebody’s been messing around with the drums on the new version — a certain Mr. Frank Zappa no doubt. He really did the album a disservice. If you know the album well, and I know it very well, having played it literally hundreds of times, the Classic is positively unlistenable. (The reworked CD of Ruben and the Jets is even worse.)
Bernie’s version for Classic beats a lot of copies out there — the later Reprise pressings are never any good — but it can’t hold a candle to a good one.
What’s wrong with the Classic?
Well, to my ears it just doesn’t sound natural or all that musical. Sure, it’s a nice trick to beef up those drums and give them some real punch, but does it sound right? Not to these ears.
The other quality that the best copies have going for them and the Classic has none of is Tubey Magic. The Classic is clean, and at first that’s a neat trick since the originals tend to be a bit murky and congested.
But it’s clean like a CD is clean, in all the wrong ways.
The overall sound of the best originals is musical, natural and balanced. The Classic has that third quality — it’s tonally correct, no argument there — but musical and natural? Not really.
The Last Record Album is one of our favorite Little Feat albums. The recording, by the estimable George Massenburg (working with Dave Hassinger), has many outstanding qualities. Among them is amazing bass; the bass goes really deep in places (“Long Distance Love”) and it’s big, punchy, rich and well up in the mix throughout the album.
The problem has always been an overly smooth top end, combined with congestion, smear, and a serious lack of presence. The good news is that if you clean enough copies with the advanced cleaning techniques we’ve developed, and you make enough improvements to your stereo, room, etc, with the right copy you can actually get this album to sound clear and rich.
Yet another impossible-to-find record in clean condition with good sound has made it to the site, and those of you who are fans should scoop it up because it takes us about four years to find enough copies to do this shootout. Check back with us in 2024 if this one is sold by the time you get to the end of this sentence!
We had poor luck with the second and third label copies on this AC title. It seems that, unlike so many records we play, the originals are the only way to go on School’s Out. (more…)