Not long ago we dropped the needle on a copy of the album you see pictured (OJC-039) and thought the sound was not good enough to please the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we charge.
As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, this is not an album that would end up being worth the cost associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.
We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding pressings of the album though. If we happen to hear a good sounding one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout in order to make the better copies available to our customers.
Gary Hobish mastered the record so I suppose he deserves the blame, but who knows how good the tapes were that he had to work with?
Old School
The OJC is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I used to have an old school stereo, and some of the records I thought sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.
Even as late as the 90s and early 2000s, our old system was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one. (Yes, I actually owned the ridiculously slow and colored Mac 30s you see here.) Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from similar afflictions.
Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great.
And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve top quality sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutionary advances in audio had not yet come to pass.
It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until we here at Better Records would have anything like the system we do now.
We Do The Work
We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 39 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.
This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better sounding pressings that actually works. If you know of one, please write me!
We are not the least bit interested in pressings that are “known” to sound the best.
Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of the wealth of pressings available for virtually every title we’ve ever played.
I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature.
UPDATE: 2026
Woops, I take that back. I have met one, a certain Robert Brook. He has been conducting his own shootouts for a few years now and has made his findings available on his blog, The Broken Record. This is information you can trust.
We’re looking for the pressings of albums that do sound the best. You know, when you pull them off your record shelves and play them.
If you’re an audiophile with an ear for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything you’ve ever heard, especially if you have any pressing that was marketed to audiophiles. Those, with few exceptions, are rarely better than mediocre, and a great many are just awful, especially these.
And if we can’t beat whatever LP you own or have heard, you get your money back. It’s as simple as that.