Author: humorem

Today’s Bad Heavy Vinyl Pressing Is… Aqualung!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock LP badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

By the time the guitars at the end of the title track fade out you will be ready to take your heavy vinyl Classic Record pressing and ceremoniously drop it in a trashcan. (Actually, the best use for it is to demonstrate to your skeptical audiophile friends that no heavy vinyl pressing can begin to compete with a Hot Stamper from Better Records. Not in a million years.)

We Was Wrong on All Counts

Over the course of the last 25 years we was wrong three ways from Sunday about our down-and-out friend Aqualung here.

We originally liked the MoFi from the early 80s. Wrong. Proof positive that in the early 80s I didn’t have good reproduction or know much about records — but I sure thought I did!

When the DCC 180g came along in 1997 we liked that one better. Wrong again. It didn’t have MoFi’s usual midrange suckout and sloppy bass, but it was bad in so many other ways that it is hard for me to believe I ever liked it. But I did, to some degree anyway.

Back then I was a DCC believer, a mistake I would come to recognize once a few more years had passed. See here and here.

And a few years back I was briefly enamored with some original British imports. Wrong for the third time.

After playing more than two dozen pressings of Aqualung in our recent [circa 2010] shootout, it’s pretty clear that the right early Reprise pressings KILL any and all contenders. Forget all the Green Label Chrysalis pressings. Forget the reissues. Forget the imports. It’s original domestic Reprise or nothing when it comes to Aqualung.
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Shorty Rogers – The Swingin’ Nutcracker

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We wrote the commentary you see below about 15 years ago.

We liked the record back then just fine. However, we recently got another couple of copies in and they sounded OK, not great, but what really had aged badly was the music, which was corny and, worst of all, contra the album’s title, definitely did not swing. Don’t waste your money on this one the way we did.

There are many jazz pressings we’ve discovered with audiophile quality sound and enjoyable music, but we reluctantly had to admit that this title should no longer be considered one of them. Live and learn, right?

We hope we can be forgiven for our mistaken bias in favor of a Golden Age title with a cool vintage cover. (And it wouldn’t be the first time.)

Another source of mistaken thinking: The Swingin’ Nutcracker came out in 1960, a year known for a great many other exceptionally good sounding titles produced during the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording. After playing so many wonderful recordings on that label, from that era, we were primed to like it regardless of whatever shortcomings it might have had.

This is why we recommend audiophiles pull titles off their massive shelves and give them a spin from time to time. Some records have simply not stood the test of time as well as others. Some will be better than we remember, some worse.

A wall full of records, most of which have not been played in years, even decades, is not a record collection worthy of the name. It’s better understood as a pile of vinyl that has been doing nobody any good for a very long time and, according to Newton’s Laws of Motion, will continue doing nothing for nobody forever.

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Dr. John – Dr. John’s Gumbo

More Roots Rock

  • Here is an original Atco pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Full, lively, and solid (particularly on side one), this copy has just the right sound for this collection of quintessential New Orleans Rhythm and Blues tracks
  • The superbly talented Keith Olsen engineered – just one year later he would record Buckingham-Nicks, and two years after that Fleetwood Mac
  • 4 1/2 Stars: “Dr. John’s Gumbo bridged the gap between post-hippie rock and early rock & roll, blues, and R&B… that sly fusion of styles makes Dr. John’s Gumbo one of Dr. John’s finest albums.”

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Goodbye Cream Has Some of the Best Live Rock Sound Ever Recorded

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

When you get a good side one of Goodbye Cream you’ll hear exactly why we are calling it one of the best sounding live rock albums of all time.

Goodbye has the Big Rock Sound that we go crazy for here at Better Records. The top copies just plain ROCK HARDER than all the others. Yes, they’re bigger. Yes, they have more weight and whomp down low. Yes, they are smoother and more natural up top. But what really sets them apart is the tremendous Energy they contain in their grooves. The music EXPLODES out of the speakers and comes to life on the best copies like practically nothing you have ever heard.

This link will take you to some of the hardest rockin’ albums we currently have in stock.

All the titles that have earned a place on our none rocks harder list can be found here.

It’s clearly one of  Bill Halverson‘s engineering triumphs, along with Deja Vu and Steve Stills’ first album (now that’s a trio!). Live rock music on record just does not sound better than a White Hot Stamper side one of Goodbye.

When it’s all working, you’re front and center for a fiery Cream concert with these guys delivering one heckuva performance. And where else are you gonna get that these days?

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“I started leaving notes and assessments which I frequently check later and often correct, since I keep learning more and more what to listen for.”

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

One of our customers wanted to give us his reactions to the first year’s worth of Hot Stamper pressings he had purchased, starting in 2022 and hitting 31 by 2023. (He has since put in more than 200 additional orders. Turns out he really likes our records.)

What you see below is just a small excerpt from the longer letter he sent. Apologies for not having posted it sooner. (Emphasis added.)

Dear Tom

I learned already a lot from your website by constantly following your new entries and digging into older ones.

I listen to my records at a far louder level than I used to and can appreciate the advantages of bringing the music really to life (while hopefully not hurting my not very young ears :-).

More importantly, I listen to my large collection more than I ever did.

I started leaving notes and assessments which I check frequently later and often correct, since I keep learning more and more what to listen for. I never did this before and it is great fun. And I keep scribbling a list of records which I may be interested in to buy from you.

There are also lots of reissues I bought and never really compared to originals, taking for granted the kudos they receive frequently in the press. Some are good, some are respectable, some are really bad, and none was as good or even better than a good original or one of your SH stampers at hand for comparison.

The One step Mofi Michael Jackson is almost a bad joke compared to your Super Hot stamper. So I stopped buying reissues and started putting aside still sealed reissues which should sell well anytime in the future.

To sum it up: I never had more fun listening to my collection and to your records thanks to you guys. Keep up the good work.

Christian

Christian,

Thanks for your letter. We love to hear from customers who actually take the time to read what we say about records and, even better, follow our advice (wherever possible) regarding their playback.

When you listen critically to records, taking the time to compare pressings and actually making notes about what you are hearing, you will certainly end end up understanding and enjoying the music you play on a much deeper and more emotionally powerful level. As you put it so well:

“I never did this before and it is great fun.”

Which means you get what we have been saying for more than twenty years:

When you do the work needed to get good sound, and the work it takes to find better records, the effort you make is work, but much more importantly, it is fun.

If it wasn’t fun, who would do it?

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Los Lobos – How Will The Wolf Survive?

More Roots Rock

  • With INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides, this early Slash pressing is certainly as good as we’ve ever heard
  • Big, rich (for 1984), present and lively, with good weight to the bottom end, this is clearly the right sound for this music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… the band’s exemplary taste, musical smarts, and road-tested maturity [is] in evidence on every cut. While rarely flashy, even a casual listen offers all the proof you might need that Los Lobos were a band of world-class musicians…”

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It’s Official – The Audiophile World Has Lost Its Mind

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

  • Nasal, upper midrange boost
  • No real space
  • Hard and smeary
  • Sizzly rain intro
  • Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

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Bonnie Raitt / Sweet Forgiveness

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

  • Sweet Forgiveness returns to the site for the first time in over two years, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades from top to bottom
  • These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “rich and weighty vox”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”tubey drums and bass”…”big and rich and 3D”…”dynamic and relaxed”
  • Full-bodied and warm, with harmonically rich guitars as well as real immediacy to Bonnie’s heartfelt vocals, this is the classic sound of the Seventies
  • The sound is big, bold, clear, rich and dynamic, which wouldn’t mean anything if the music weren’t good, but this actually happens to be Bonnie’s best album in our opinion, with Home Plate a close runner-up

I learned recently that John Haeny is one of the two engineers on this album, which goes a long way toward explaining the excellent 70s analog sound. He worked on The Pretender, Don’t Cry Now, and many of the early and quite wonderful sounding albums Judy Collins did for Elektra in the earlier part of the decade. This guy knows sound. (more…)

The Robert Cray Band – Strong Persuader

More Electric Blues 

  • Both sides of this original Mercury pressing were giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • A tough shootout, as no other copy earned a 3+ grade on either side, which simply means that when you find a top copy, it sets such a high standard that everything else ends up getting marked down
  • This is the album that propelled Cray into the mainstream, earning him a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest albums of the 80s, 5 stars on AMG, and endless accolades from critics and fans alike
  • Clear and open, but still fairly analog sounding, this copy has the right sound for the kind of electric blues Cray brought back from the dead in the 80s
  • 5 stars: “The set that made Cray a pop star, despite its enduring blues base… his innovative expansion of the genre itself that makes this album a genuine 1980s classic.”

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“Traction in the Rain”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

I discovered If Only I Could Remember My Name sometime in the 90s, probably from reading about it in The Absolute Sound. When I was in my twenties and buying records regularly, the album was already out of print; I know because I went looking for it an nobody seemed to stock it.

The (awful sounding) Super Saver came out in 1975 and probably was deleted before long due to a lack of demand.

Once I had heard the record, it quickly became a go-to Test and Demo Disc, mostly for the song Traction in the Rain. The autoharp on that track is one of the most amazing things I have ever heard, on any album. The exceptional resolution and harmonic coherency of the multiple electrostatic arrays I was using for the mids and highs of my speaker system were perfectly suited to reproduce that instrument, as well as the complete track with Crosby’s delicate, breathy vocal being another key element to the sound.

I listened intently for the notes that got louder and softer as the autoharp was strummed. The more different each note sounded, the more micro-dynamics I knew I was reproducing. I tweaked and tested my system for months, even years with this track. (Nowadays I might put it on the list of records that sound so good they’re not actually ideal for testing, but that’s another story for another day.)

I didn’t know enough to buy other copies and compare them to mine. I just knew it was a great sounding record that I could blow people’s minds with in a demo.

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