Author: humorem

Listening in Depth to Help

Hot Stamper Pressings of Help Available Now

More of the Music of The Beatles

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series.

Much like we said about the Please Please Me Hot Stampers, on the top copies the presence of the vocals and guitars is so real it’s positively startling at times.

Drop the needle on You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away and turn up the volume — on the best copies it will be as if John and Paul were right there in your living room.

The best import copies of this album sound AMAZING, but the typical one is pretty mediocre. Most tend to be dull, with not enough extension up top, as well as thin, lacking weight and body from the lower midrange on down.

Side One

Help! (A Number One Hit)
The Night Before

One of the biggest problems we found with this album is that the top end tends to be somewhat lacking. On the better copies, the cymbals on this track will sound correct and lively.

You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

One of the reasons this song sounds so good is that there are only acoustic instruments being played. There’s not an electric guitar to be found anywhere in the mix, one of the few tracks that can make that claim. We love the Tubey Magical guitars and voices found on early Beatles albums, and this song is a good example of both.

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Letter of the Week – “I was truly beside myself. I felt like I was in the studio.”

More of the Music of Stephen Stills

Reviews and commentaries for Stephen Stills’ debut

One of our good customers had this to say about Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hi Tom,

I need to write you about the Stephen Stills LP I just listened to. I picked up a copy one day long ago in the past, and it never wowed me.

So later, following the crowd, I purchased the Classic. I remember cranking Black Queen. It sounded audiophile-ish. But I was not taken aback by the sound, filed it, and then virtually never listened to it.

Down deep I knew that it was no good, but I figured it was the music, not so much the pressing.

Now for BR. So once again my mind is totally blown with no wiggle room.

For me this album is really about the last 3 songs on both sides. I have never heard this music how it was intended to sound, ever!

But now I have.

Church was better than phenomenal. Old Times Good Times — the organ on this one is through the roof good and Go Back Home — the guitars and the vocal had such beautiful tones… simply amazing.

Black Queen — Holy Cow… I am just speechless… the guitar tones, the grit in it along with the grit in the vocal… so raw and powerful I found myself making faces… I was truly beside myself. I felt like I was in the studio. Truly an amazing experience for me as I have loved this song for a very long time but never liked how it sounded on my LPs.

But wait there’s more.

Cherokee… Massive instant major warm bass filled the air and the room expanded from the super boomy tubey horns etc… I was screaming (yelping) with joy! What an unbelievable experience for me…. truly amazing. Words just don’t do the experience justice.

You can take that Classic Records copy and chuck it! Some ‘audiophile’ dude will be very happy to buy it when I start selling LPs again which I need to do since they are piling up.

Once again…. so many thanks to all at BR as these sounds are some of best joys in my life.

Michel

Dear Michel,

I’m with you. I never liked the Classic Records pressing on the album and said so in my review for their remastered Manassas:

The Classic pressing was a disaster. Can you imagine adding the kind of grungy, gritty sound that Bernie’s mastering chain is known for (around these parts, anyway) to a recording with those problems already?

It was a match made in hell.

Back in the day when I was selling lots of Classic Heavy Vinyl, this was one of the titles I refused to have anything to do with. This and Stephen Stills’ first album — both were personal favorites of mine and both were awful on Classic Records.

Later in my review I added:

As a general rule, Manassas, like most Heavy Vinyl pressings, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

My question to the Vinyl True Believers of the World is this: Why own a turntable if you’re going to play records like these?

You bought the Classic of Stills’ first album, thought the music wasn’t as good as you remembered it, and proceeded to file it on the shelf where it sat collecting dust for the next twenty years.

This is the heart of the problem with many of the Heavy Vinyl releases that have been coming out since the nineties:

They don’t communicate the joy of the music.

They in fact ruin the music with their lousy sound.

There is no joy to be had by playing them.

They’re a bore and a waste of time.

Why go into detail about their faults? Just recognize that they don’t live and breath the way vintage records do and stop buying them.  Getting rid of the ones you have is also a good idea.

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Dave Brubeck Quartet – When Less Is More

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Reviews and Commentaries for Time Further Out

Fred Plaut is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

His work on Time Further Out speaks for itself — we think it’s the best sounding Brubeck recording of them all. 

We could find no information about the venue for this recording. It might be the Columbia Studios known as “The Church” — that would explain the amazing sound quality of the album — but it may just be Plaut’s engineering prowess in another location that makes this some of the best sound to be found on any Brubeck record.

Frederick “Fred” Plaut was a recording engineer and amateur photographer. He was employed by Columbia Records during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, eventually becoming the label’s chief engineer.

Plaut engineered sessions for what would result in many of Columbia’s famous albums, including the original cast recordings of South Pacific, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, jazz LPs Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, Time Out by Dave Brubeck, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty by Charles Mingus.

Wikipedia

Mark Wilder was interviewed about the recording of these Fred Plaut sessions and noted [bold added by me]:

Fred Plaut and Frank Laico were two of Brubeck’s recording engineers. Plaut is a true balance engineer; he’s my idol. I don’t know how he could pull off what he did in three hours.

He continued:

It’s amazing how well-recorded the group was back then. The sound is so three-dimensional, bigger than life.

Yet it’s amazing how little the engineers did to get that sound. They just put one mic a few feet from each instrument, and mixed live to 3-track—for left, center, and right. Then they edited the tape and mixed down to 2-track.

The old stuff sounds better than what we’re doing now. We’ve been going in the wrong direction sound-wise for many years. The layout of the stereo stage was more realistic then, too. Drums were on the left, piano on the right, sax and bass in the middle.

It’s easy to hear what each musician was playing because they were separated spatially. These days, you hear each instrument in stereo, on top of each other. The drums spread all the way between the speakers, and so does the piano.

In one Brubeck recording (Castilian Drums, not on this set), the stereo perspective changes radically within the recording. It starts with drums hard left and piano hard right. But when the drum solo starts, there’s an edit and suddenly you hear the drum set spread out in stereo.

At the end of the solo, you’re back to drums left and piano right. These effects are on Brubeck’s albums Countdown (Columbia CS 8575) and Time Further Out (Columbia CS 8490).

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The Band – Music From Big Pink

More of The Band

More Roots Rock LPs

  • Both sides of this vintage copy of The Band’s 1968 masterpiece boast superb Double Plus (A++) sound
  • Forget all those vague, veiled, lifeless, ambience-free Heavy Vinyl pressings – this is the Big Pink that The Band recorded!
  • Remember when you used to play the same record over and over, never taking it off the turntable for days at a time?
  • Well here it is – this pressing captures the music in a way that will make repeated plays the joy they are meant to be
  • 5 stars: “…as soon as ‘The Weight’ became a singles chart entry, the album and the group made their own impact, influencing a movement toward roots styles and country elements in rock. Over time, [the album] came to be regarded as a watershed work in the history of rock, one that introduced new tones and approaches to the constantly evolving genre.”
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Music from Big Pink is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but would be well advised to get to know better.

We guarantee you have never heard Music from Big Pink sound as good as it does on this very copy. There’s plenty of the all-important Tubey Magic and real weight to the bottom. You’ll have a VERY hard time finding one that sounds this good, if our experience is any guide.

This copy has the kind of sound we look for in a top quality Band record: immediacy in the vocals (so many copies are veiled and distant); natural tonal balance (most copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; ones with the right balance are the exception, not the rule); good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful); spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space); and last but not least, transparency, the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this sophisticated recording. (more…)

Boston – Self-Titled

More Boston

Hot Stamper Albums with Huge Choruses

  • With big, bold, hard-rockin’ Double Plus (A++) sound, this pressing will show you just how good Boston’s debut album can sound
  • The multi-tracked, multi-layered guitars are as big as life on this copy and guaranteed to rock your world — on big speakers at loud levels this is a Demo Disc with few peers
  • 4 1/2 stars and a Top 100 title: “Nearly every song on Boston’s debut album can still be heard on classic rock radio today due to the strong vocals of Brad Delp and unique guitar sound of Tom Scholz. Boston is essential for any fan of classic rock, and the album marks the re-emergence of the genre in the 1970s.”
  • This is clearly Boston’s best sounding album. Roughly 100 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist or group can be found here.
  • In our opinion, this is the only Boston record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call one and done

Boston’s first (and only good) album is a long-time member of our Top 100, and on a great pressing like this it’s easy to see why. It’s an incredible recording when you can hear it right, and this is about as right as it gets!

It’s obvious why the first Boston album became a Multi-Platinum Record. Practically every one of its songs still gets heavy radio play on every rock station in town. Consummately well-crafted music like this is almost impossible to find nowadays. I guess that’s why they call it Classic Rock.

More Guitar

The multi-tracked layers of guitars really come to life on the better copies. The not-so-great pressings tend to be congested and compressed, thickening the sound and diffusing the layers of multi-tracked harmonies. Tom Scholz’s uniquely overdriven, distorted leads have near-perfect timbre. On the top copies, you can really hear how much power that sound adds to the music.

As is the case for better pressings of Aqualung, when the guitar sounds this good, it really makes you sit up and take notice of the guy’s playing. When the sound works the music works, our seven word definition of a Hot Stamper copy.

Tubey Magical 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).

Our killer copies have sweetness and tubey warmth we didn’t expect to hear. Better yet, the best copies have jump-out-of-the-speakers presence without being aggressive, no mean feat.

The good ones make you want to turn up the volume; the louder they get the better they sound. Try that with the average copy. When playing mass-market pop-rock music like this, more level usually means only one thing: bloody eardrums.

The typical Boston EQ is radio-friendly, not audiophile-friendly. But some were cut right, with the kind of richness, sweetness and smoothness that we fondly refer to here at Better Records as The Sound of Analog.

Choruses Are Key

The production techniques used on the late Brad Delp’s powerful vocals had to be implemented with the utmost skill and care or they would never have made the album the smash success that it is. His vocals are one of the great strengths of the album. You can be sure the producers and engineers knew that they had a very special singer in Brad and lavished their time and energy on getting his voice just right in the mix, making use of plenty of roomy analog reverb around both his multi-tracked leads and the background harmonies as well.

After hearing plenty of copies, one thing became clear — if the vocals don’t have good presence and breathy texture, you might as well be listening to the radio. Toss it onto the trade-in pile and move on. Brad really belts out those high notes; the right blend of clarity and weight is what lets his soaring vocals work their chart-topping magic.

The richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality is most apparent on Boston where you most always hear it on a pop record: in the biggest, loudest, densest, most climactic choruses.

We set the playback volume so that the loudest parts of the record are as huge and powerful as they can possibly grow to be without crossing the line into distortion or congestion. On some records, Dark Side of the Moon comes instantly to mind, the guitar solos on “Money” are the loudest thing on the record. On Breakfast in America the sax toward the end of “The Logical Song” is the biggest and loudest sound on the record, louder even than Roger Hodgson’s near-hysterical multi-tracked screaming ‘Who I am’ about three quarters of the way through. Those, however, are clearly exceptions to the rule. Most of the time it’s the final chorus that gets bigger and louder than anything else.

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The Pretenders – An Open Soundstage Is Key

More of the Music of The Pretenders

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Pretenders

Take it from us, it is the rare pressing that manages to get rid of the harshness and congestion that plague so many copies.

Look for a copy that opens up the soundstage — the wider, deeper and taller the presentation, the better the sound, as long as the tonal balance stays right.

When you hear a copy sound relatively rich and sweet, the minor shortcomings of the recording no longer seem to interfere with your enjoyment of the music. Like a properly tweaked stereo, a good record lets you forget all that audio stuff and just listen to the music as music. Here at Better Records, we — like our customers — think that’s what it’s all about.

And we know that only the top copies will let you do that, something that not everyone in the audiophile community fully appreciates to this day. We’re doing what we can to change that way of thinking, but progress is, as you may well imagine, slow.

What To Listen For

The best copies have superb extension up top, which allows the grit and edge on the vocals to almost entirely disappear.

Some of it is there on the tape for a reason. That’s partly the sound they were going for. This is, after all, a Bob Clearmountain mix and a Jimmy Iovine production.

Heavy handed processing is what you hire them to do. You want a hit album, don’t you?

But bad mastering and pressing add plenty of extra grit to the average copy, enough to ruin it in fact.

You can test for that edgy quality on side one very easily using the jangly guitar harmonics and breathy vocals of “My Baby.”

If the harmonic information is clear and extending naturally, in a big space, you are very likely hearing a high quality copy.

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Frank Sinatra / Only The Lonely

More Frank Sinatra

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this vintage Stereo Capitol pressing will be hard to beat
  • It is the rare vintage pressing of Only The Lonely that can play quiet enough to earn our Mint Minus Minus grade
  • An amazingly good sounding recording, easily one of his five best, and it would be hard to think of one that sounds better
  • We would love to find you some original stereo pressings from 1958 in audiophile playing condition, but we find about two or three over the course of five or ten years
  • Early 60s reissues are usually the only game in town until we happened upon this superb copy from 1959
  • Frank’s vocals sound present, breathy, and full (particularly on side two), and not many copies can deliver that sound
  • According to John Rockwell’s book, Sinatra: An American Classic, when asked at a party in the mid-1970s if he had a favorite album among his recordings, without hesitation, Sinatra chose Only the Lonely
  • 5 stars: “Sinatra never forces emotion out of the lyric, he lets everything flow naturally, with grace. It’s a heartbreaking record, the ideal late-night album.”

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – CSN

More David Crosby

More Stephen Stills

More Graham Nash

  • This copy of CS&N’s “comeback” album boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a superb Double Plus (A++) side two
  • The sound is big and relatively rich, the vocals breathy and immediate, and you will not believe all the space and ambience – which of course are all qualities that Heavy Vinyl records have far too little of, and the main reason we have lost all respect for the bulk of them
  • Includes CS&N classics “Dark Star,” “Just A Song Before I Go,” and “Fair Game”
  • 4 stars: “It has held up remarkably well, both as a memento of its time, and as a thoroughly enjoyable musical work.”

Most copies of CSN are unbelievably flat, harsh, thin and opaque, which means simply that our approach is the only one that offers any hope of success in finding good sound on this album.

With a large enough batch of copies, cleaned using the best fluids, on the best machines, it is possible to find two sides this good. Without a pretty big batch of well-cleaned pressings, your chance of success is hardly worth calculating. Even with the best intentions, frustration is likely to set in long before a Hot Stamper has much chance of being found.

Most copies have a tendency to sound dry, so look for one that’s rich and full-bodied. Most copies are opaque and flat so look for those with transparency and ambience. Most copies are lean down low and dull up top; try to find the ones with bass and real top-end extension.

And of course you need to find a copy that gets the voices right. CS&N’s albums live or die by the quality of their vocals, a subject we have discussed on the site at length.

You think the first CS&N album has problems in the sound department? Of course it does; in 1969 lots of rock records had recording problems. But CSN was released in 1977. By 1977, there were scores of talented rock engineers producing top quality multi-track recordings. Our Top 100 is full of their best work.

One would have thought that CS&N, the ultimate perfectionists (according to their press accounts), would have hired the best and sweated out every detail in the studio in order to produce a recording the equal of Rumours or The Cars debut (even if the songs themselves, to be honest, weren’t quite the equal of their earlier work).

Alas, CS&N chose the Albert brothers, whose most famous album is Layla. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Laylas — we’ve done the shootout many times — and of course, there are better and worse CSNs.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side, some songs have the breath of life and some don’t. That’s a recording problem. It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like “Shadow Captain” and “Dark Star,” among others.

But “Just a Song Before I Go” on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best do well and the rest do poorly and grade accordingly, on the curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got.

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Jethro Tull – A Top Test for System Accuracy

More of the Music of Jethro Tull

Reviews and Commentaries for Thick as a Brick

From 2009 to 2010 this was our single go-to record for testing and tweaking our system.

Although we now use an amazing copy of Bob and Ray (the big band version of The Song of the Volga Boatmen located therein has to be one of the toughest tests we know of), we could easily go back to using TAAB.

Artificiality is the single greatest problem that every serious audiophile must guard against with every change and tweak to his stereo. cleaning system, room, electricity and everything else.

Since TAAB is absolutely ruthless at exposing the slightest hint of artificiality in the sound of the system, it is clearly one of the best recordings one can use to test and tune with. Here are just some of the reasons this was one of our favorite test records back in the day:

Dynamics

The better copies are shockingly dynamic. At about the three minute mark the band joins in the fun and really starts rocking. Set your volume for as loud as your system can play that section. The rest of the music, including the very quietest parts, will then play correctly for all of side one. For side two the same volume setting should be fine.

Bass

The recording can have exceptionally solid, deep punchy bass (just check out Barrie “Barriemore” Barlow’s drumming, especially his kick and floor toms. The guy is on fire).

Midrange

The midrange is usually transparent and the top end sweet and extended on the better pressings.

Tubey Magic

The recording was made in 1972, so there’s still plenty of Tubey Magic to be heard on the acoustic guitars and flutes.

Size and Space

The best copies can be as huge, wide and tall as any rock record you’ve ever heard, with sound that comes jumping out of your speakers right into your listening room.

Tonality

Unlike practically any album recorded during the 80s or later, the overall tonal balance, as well as the timbre of virtually every instrument in the soundfield, is correct on the best copies.

Gone, Gone, Gone

That kind of accuracy practically disappeared from records about thirty years ago, which explains why so many of the LPs we offer as Hot Stampers were produced in the 70s. That’s when many of the highest fidelity recordings were made. In truth this very record is a superlative example of the sound the best producers, engineers, and studios were able to capture on analog tape during that time.

Which is a long way of saying that the better copies of Thick As A Brick have pretty much everything that we love about vinyl here at Better Records.

Furthermore, I can guarantee you there is no CD on the planet that will ever be able to do this recording justice. Our Hot Stamper pressings – even the lowest-graded ones – have a kind of analog magic that just can’t be captured on one of them there silvery discs.

Want to find your own top quality copy of this Jethro Tull classic?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

In our experience, this record sounds best this way:

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Holst – Testing with Mars and Saturn

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

Mars on the first side and Saturn on the second present serious challenges to any recordings of the work you may own, especially if you own the overrated Mehta recording on the TAS List.

Generally speaking, the White Hot copies stand apart from the pack with more top end extension, and/or more lower end weight. Our notes will typically say “extended highs and lows,” and those are hard to come by, on any record.

Let’s get to the specifics of the two movements we feel are the best test for The Planets as a whole.

The War Test — Side One

War, the first movement, has the string players “bouncing” their bows upside down to create the effect you hear. It’s not fingers plucking the strings; it’s the wood of the bows bouncing on the strings. The quality of that technique is so obvious and correct sounding on the good copies and so blurry and indistinct on the bad ones that you could almost judge the whole first side by that sound alone. When it’s right it’s really right. 

And of course the players are spread out wider and the soundfield is so much more transparent when these types of sonic qualities are brought out. This bouncing bow test makes it easy to separate the better copies from the also-rans when it comes to smear, resolution, transparency and the like.

The Saturn Test — Side Two

This was the real revelation in our recent shootout (2013). We had on hand performances by Steinberg on DG, Previn and Boult on EMI, as well as Mehta and Karajan on London — well known and highly regarded Golden Age recordings one and all. (I gave up on the Solti with the London Phil years ago; that opaque later London sound just won’t cut it on the more resolving stereo we have now.) None of the above could match either the performance or the sound of Saturn on the EMI by Previn and the LSO.

The brass is so BIG and POWERFUL on EMI’s recording that other orchestras and recordings frankly pale in comparison. Until I heard one of our top EMI pressings show me brass with this kind of weight and energy, I simply had no idea it was even possible to play the work this powerfully. The lower brass comes in, builds, gaining volume and weight, then calms down, but soon returns and builds relentlessly, ever and ever louder. Eventually the trumpets break out, blasting their way forward and above the melee the heavier brass has created below.

Quite honestly I have never heard anything like it, and I heard this work performed live in late 2012! In live performance the members of the brass section, being at the back of the stage, were at least 100 feet away from me, perhaps more. When playing the best EMI pressings, the brass were right there in front of me, eight to ten feet away. This is of course unnatural and unrealistic, but that should take nothing away from the subjective power of the experience.

Only the conductor can stand at the podium, but the EMI producers and engineers (the Two Christophers in this case, Bishop and Parker) have managed to put the listener, at least in this movement, right there with him.

The EMI Sound

EMI’s are usually recorded with the aim of of producing more of a mid-hall perspective, which is somewhat distant for our taste. That’s just not our sound. We prefer the Front Row Center seats (especially at the prices we charge).

That said, when an EMI from the 70s is recorded, mastered and pressed properly, it actually sounds more like the real thing actually does, more like a live performance of orchestral music in a concert hall.

It’s uncanny how real the best copies of this record sound. For a recording of The Planets it has no equal in our experience.

The Performances

For audiophiles who love the work but are disappointed by most performances (a group that includes us to be sure), the good sound found on this copy is coupled with a superb performance. The best pressings of this record truly deserve their place on the TAS List. This 1974 release is widely considered one of the great recordings of The Planets. Previn is simply outstanding throughout. He’s not going after effects, he’s making all the pieces fit.

Of course it trounces the Mehta recording that many audiophiles, HP included, are seemingly enamored with. We certainly never have been. EMI knows how to make an orchestra sound like a seamless whole, unlike the Decca recording engineers who appear to take perverse pride in awkwardly spotlighting every section. (Was it a Phase 4 experiment gone wrong? That’s my guess.)

And the average London or Decca pressing of The Planets is lackluster, so opaque and smeary it’s barely second-rate, a fact that most audiophile record collectors have failed to appreciate since it first appeared on Harry’s Super Disc list.

VTA

Accurate VTA adjustment for classical records is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may even be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound of your classical records once you have learned to precisely adjust the VTA for each and every one of them. We heard the improvement on this record, and do pretty much on all the classical LPs we play. (All records really.) VTA is not a corner you should be cutting. Its careful adjustment is critical. Of course, so are anti-skate, azimuth and tracking weight. Our making audio progress section has a fair amount on turntable setup which might be worth checking out.

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