Month: October 2026

Who Can’t Hear Differences in Sound from Side to Side on Most Records?

rimskscheh_2446Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Both the Chesky [1] and Classic reissue pressings of LSC 2446 are just plain terrible. Embarrassingly, the latter is found on the TAS List.

There is a newly [2013, time flies!] remastered 33 RPM pressing of the album garnering rave reviews in the audiophile press. We didn’t like that one either.

It fails the violin test that we wrote about here.

Please note that in many of the reviews for the new pressing, the original vinyl used for comparison is a Shaded Dog pressing. In our experience almost no Shaded Dog pressings are competitive with the later White Dog pressings, and many of them are just plain awful, as we have noted previously on the site.

UPDATE 2024

Now that we know which stampers have the potential to sound the best in our shootouts, the Shaded Dog originals have lately been winning top honors, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good, just not as good.

The “original is better” premise of most reviewers renders the work they do practically worthless, at least to those of us who take the time to play a wide variety of pressings and judge them on the merits of their sound, not the design of their labels.

[A fairly embarrassing example of live and learn.]

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Aerial Boundaries Has Some of the Most Bizarrely Unnatural Digital Sound We Have Ever Heard

Welcome to Better Records, Home of  the Hot Stamper

It sounds as if someone went into the biggest studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls.

Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using?)

And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!

If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.

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Gerry Rafferty – Night Owl

More British Folk Rock

  • The Hot Stamper debut of Rafferty’s 1979 release, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this early British pressing
  • You won’t believe how rich, Tubey Magical, big, undistorted and present this copy is (until you play it anyway)
  • If all you know are the domestic pressings, you should be prepared for a mind-blowing experience with this UK copy
  • In fact, the original domestic pressings, the ones cut by Wally Traugott, had completely unacceptable sound — sound that was so bad you have to wonder how the label and the artists involved approved it
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • “On his second release for United Artists, Gerry Rafferty focuses an equal amount of attention on his lyrics and on the sincerity of the song’s moods to create one his strongest and most heartfelt albums. Delicate, touching, and extremely poignant, Rafferty blankets all of Night Owl’s tracks with a late-night/early-morning earnestness that is highly effective throughout.”

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Why Own a Turntable if You’re Going to Play Mediocrities Like These?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Aja Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Aqualung Available Now

This commentary was posted in 2007 and amended later with the statement that we would no longer be ordering new Heavy Vinyl titles. The thrill was gone and there was no sign of it ever coming back. It took a while to sell off the inventory, but by 2011 we had eliminated them completely from our site.

As it happens, 2007 turned out to be a milestone year for us here at Better Records.

If you bought any Heavy Vinyl pressing from us, ever, please accept our apologies.

Now is the perfect time to find out just how much a Hot Stamper pressing can do for your musical enjoyment. (You might consider taking the enthusiastic advice of these customers regarding that subject.)

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“…the Hot Stamper is a step above the rest”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stamper pressings he purchased a while ago for two of our All Time Favorite Albums: Little Creatures and Armed Forces.

Hey Tom,  

Just wanted to let you know I finally played the Little Creatures Hot Stamper last night for the first time. Very, very nice record.

Admittedly, I have more copies of Little Creatures than any sane person should. Many of these copies sound very good, the Hot Stamper is a step above the rest. Great slam. More space between instruments. Love it. 

I have spent the last month or so collecting various versions of Elvis Costello – Armed Forces for a shootout. It’s a Top Five record for me and with my daughter heading for college soon, a White Hot copy is out of reach at this point.

First press UK’s, later UK “Porky’s” and first run German “Porky’s” have all been gathered.

Honestly, the whole process is a pain in the ass and very time consuming. The results have been interesting and I have acquired what I believe to be a very good record but it probably would have been cheaper to give you a call.

Keep up the good work.

Sean M.

Sean, I would have been happy to save you the work, we do this kind of thing for a living as you well know.

But you can learn a lot by doing your own shootouts and tracking down your own favorite pressings.

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Shoot Out The Lights Is a Four Men with Beards Heavy Vinyl Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

Hey, this is a surprisingly good sounding pressing! Our Hot Stampers are clearly bigger and more lively, but for a Heavy Vinyl reissue this pressing is surprisingly good.

You won’t get the effect we describe below on the Heavy Vinyl pressing that we heard on our best Hot Stamper original pressings, but you will get a very good sounding record.

With constant improvements to the system Shoot Out is now so powerful a recording that we had no choice but to add it to our Top 100 list in 2014, but we would go even further than that and say that it would belong on a list of the Top Ten Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time.

The guitars are HUGE — they positively leap out of the speakers on the title cut, freeing themselves from a studio that seems already to be the size of a house. (more…)

Speakers Corner Peer Gynt Reviewed, with Handy VTA Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the music of Edvard Grieg Available Now

Sonic Grade: C+

The Fjeldstad has long been one of our favorite performances of Peer Gynt here at Better Records. 

This record is handy for VTA set-up as well, a subject discussed below in our listing from 2010.

The sound is excellent for a modern reissue*, but in the loudest sections the orchestra can get to be a bit much, taking on a somewhat harsh quality. (The quieter passages are superb: sweet and spacious.)

So I adjusted the VTA a bit to see what would happen, and was surprised to find that even the slightest change in VTA caused the strings to lose practically all their rosiny texture and become unbearably smeared.

This is precisely why it’s a good heavy vinyl pressing for setting up your turntable.

If you can get the strings to play with reasonably good texture on this record you probably have your VTA set correctly.

VTA

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“One begins to notice what is wrong with them — they sound tinkered with”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased in 2017.

Hey Tom, 

Bless You Tom! Much appreciated! Funny thing is, I never had this album or properly heard it before now. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I too was buying audiophile pressings and Half Speed Masters and at first, I thought they were great! But before too long, one begins to notice what is wrong with them– they sound tinkered with! I think that is exactly what MoFi did.

I tried these again when I came back to vinyl in 2009. That first year I began buying audiophile pressings but when I played them back I found they were not the holy grail nor the sound I was looking for at all! Certainly not even the claimed ‘Sourced from the Original Master Tape’ was true! More like, from the digital master/remasters or a third generation master. I spent a whole lot before I put the brakes on and went for original recordings/early pressings such as ED1 or ED2.

Now, when I want a record for serious listening of something special, I know the only place to get what I want first time and every time for the best sounding records– Better Records, of course!

Michael

Michael,

Thanks for your letter. “Tinkering” with the sound is what these audiophile labels do. They think they know how to “fix” the recordings that the original producers and engineers got wrong.

Like you, I was fooled.

It took me a while but eventually I started to see where I had gone wrong.

And don’t write off all reissues. You can stick to first and second editions, but by doing that you will miss out on the superior sound of these 150+ reissues. (If I had time to really go deeper into it, I could probably list three times that many.)

Even better, these superior sounding reissues can actually be bought.

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