Testing Is Key

Experimenting with records is the only way to learn much about them of any real value.

Revolutions in Audio Can Make a Huge Difference on Problematic Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2008 we did our first big shootout for Life Beyond L.A. which allowed us to discover a copy with sound quality we had simply never heard for the album, the kind of sound we had no idea could exist until we heard it.

In 2005 we had attempted the same shootout and abandoned it. The difference between the best domestic pressings and the Nautilus Half-Speed were not big enough to justify the price we would have had to charge for the best copies.

We probably owned an exceptionally good sounding pressing of the Nautilus, something we also had no way of knowing, but the main problem we faced in 2005 was an inferior approach to record cleaning and playback equipment that was not up to the task.

Our ability to do shootouts advanced dramatically from 2005 to 2007.

Life Beyond L.A. is just one example of a shootout that couldn’t be done in 2005 but ended up being a smashing success in 2008.

Our Commentary from 2008

This White Hot Stamper pressing of Life Beyond L.A. from some years ago had the kind of sound you would never expect to find in the grooves of this album. It was a THRILL to hear it, especially at the volumes at which we were playing the record.

The transparency and openness were off the charts, unmatched by any other copy in our shootout. We’re big fans of this band here at Better Records — we love their take on complex, big production arty rock.

It’s also yet another example of the value of taking part in the myriad revolutions in audio.

If you never want your prized but sonically-challenged records to sound any better than they do right now, this minute, don’t bother to learn how to clean them better, play them back better or improve the acoustics of your room.

(more…)

Put Us to the Test! We Can Tell a Good Record from a Bad One, Digital or No Digital

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

And we don’t need to know anything about how it was made in order to judge it!

For those of you who did not follow this story from a few years back, you may want to catch up here.

Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough.

Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.

Back in August of 2022, I wrote what you see below to Geoff Edgers, the reporter who exposed this ridiculous mess. (I toned it down quite a bit. The original version was not suitable for publication.)

Earlier that same year he had visited me at my studio, where I played him the awful Dire Straits first album that MoFi remastered, one of the worst half speeds ever made (review coming, but you can get a good idea of my take on it here).

By August of 2022 he was starting to see just how crazy the world of audiophiles actually is, and the more he learned about some of these people, the crazier they seemed. And he was not wrong about that.

My letter (with a few additions):

Jim Davis (of MoFi) is not one to be trusted and would have loved to cover up this whole thing if he could have figured out how to do it. It got away from him, and as far as I’m concerned, good.

And you heard how shitty their Dire Straits record is. Who cares if it’s digital? The sound is bad. Why bother trying to figure out the reasons this crappy label doesn’t know how to make good records? It’s just a fact. Accept it.

Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums.

Of course they were. I defy you to find me two “audiophile experts” who are wrong more often than these guys!

From the article:

One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.

These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.

The best ears? Are you kidding me? In their dreams. These guys give every indication that they are virtually devoid of critical listening skills. The evidence supporting this reality has been laid out in this very blog in scores of commentaries over the course of more than twenty years.

(more…)

Can a Pile of Different Pressings All Sound the Same?

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Making Progress 

There are certain things we can stipulate as all but impossible. Nobody who says they can levitate should be taken seriously.

But are there aspects of audio reproduction that you’re not familiar with?

Are there stereos that reproduce music at a much higher level than any with which you are familiar?

Are there ways to make your stereo sound better than the ones you know of?

Are there record pressings that sound better than the ones you’ve heard?

The reason I ask is this: There is never been a case in which a person contacted me and told me that they had played a pile of copies of a particular album and that they all sounded the same.

(more…)

Analog Transparency, and that Wonderful Feeling of Being There

 Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Click on the link to see what we would typically have to say about a vintage After the Gold Rush. ATGR is a record, by the way, that we almost never have in stock.

As you might imagine, the right early pressings are tough to find in clean condition and gettng tougher by the day.

I suppose that’s the main reason audiophiles and music lovers buy these ridiculously bad sounding reissues — at least they’re new and quiet. Our advice is to buy the CD. It will have better sound and cost a lot less than a remastered pressing on Heavy Vinyl.

For our review of the Heavy Vinyl After the Gold Rush we noted:

Cleverly the engineers responsible for this remaster seem to have managed to reproduce the sound of a dead studio on a record that wasn’t recorded in one.

This pressing has no real space or ambience. Now the album sounds like it was recorded in a heavily baffled studio, but we know that’s not what happened, because the originals of After the Gold Rush, like most of Neil’s other albums from the era, are clear, open and spacious.

In other words, they are transparent. You can easily hear into the record all the way to the back of the studio.

You hear all the space surrounding the players.

Modern records, like the recent [well, 2009] After the Gold Rush are almost always opaque and airless. We can’t stand that sound. In fact it drives us crazy.

(more…)

Black, Green, Yellow, Orange – Which Contemporary Label Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We’ve learned a lot about this amazing sounding record over the last twenty years. Check out the latest updates.

Our Hot Stamper commentary from a long-ago shootout we’d done for the wonderful Helen Humes album Songs I Like to Sing discusses the sonic characteristics we find most commonly associated with the various Contemporary labels.

This Contemporary Black Label Original LP has that classic tube-mastered sound — warmer, smoother, and sweeter than the later pressings, with more breath of life. Overall the sound is well-balanced and tonally correct from top to bottom, which is rare for a black label Contemporary, as they are usually dull and bass-heavy.

We won’t buy them locally anymore unless they can be returned. I’ve got a box full of Contemporarys with bloated bass and no top end that I don’t know what to do with.

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written a long time ago. There are no boxes full of Contemporary records laying around in the back room. The ones that don’t sound good were sold off years ago.

Like most mediocre-to-bad sounding records we’ve auditioned, they just sit in a box taking up space. All of our time and effort goes into putting good pressings on the site and in the mailings. It’s hard to get motivated to do anything with the leftovers. We paid plenty for them, so we don’t want to give them away, but they don’t sound good, so most of our customers won’t buy them.

(more…)

Question: “Is your stance that all copies of that same pressing, if you had five brand new copies, would all sound the same and superior?:

What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

Patrick wrote to ask us a series of questions recently:

Hello team.

You have vinyls that you consider some degree of a “hot stamp” and this correlates to a very specific pressing of an album, correct?

Is your stance that all copies in that same pressing, if you had five brand new copies, would all sound the same and superior?

Or is it that the one you have is just better than all the others in that same pressing?

Or is it that of the ten different pressings of this album we listened to, this is the best sound period.

Thanks in advance … I hope this makes sense, and any help is appreciated.

Regards,
Patrick L.

Dear Patrick,

Click on this link to see some examples of records with Shootout Winning stampers in which we found out that, after all was said and done, the best sounding stampers could also be the worse sounding stampers.

Knowing the right stampers helps us find good copies, but the most they can do is point the way to good sound.

The listening panel never knows what the stampers are for any of the records that are being evaluated.

We find out what the best stampers are after the records have been played, not before.

Who knows what a record sounds like until it’s been played? No one, not even self-described know-it-all experts such as us.

We run record experiments in order to get actual data that we can rely on to be truthful. We call them shootouts.

The stampers can’t tell us how good the sound of a record is. Only our ears can do that.

Put another way, critical listening doesn’t just play a part in our judgment of a particular pressing.

It is the sole source of that judgment.

Because nothing else counts for anything. (See the Feynman link below for more on that subject.)

(more…)

Cat Stevens Wants to Know How You Like Your Congas: Light, Medium or Heavy?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

During the shootout for this record a while back [the late 2000s would be my guess], we made a very important discovery, a seemingly obvious one but one that nevertheless had eluded us for the past twenty plus years (so how obvious could it have been?).

It became clear, for the first time, what accounts for the wide disparity in ENERGY and DRIVE from one copy to the next. We can sum it up for you in one five letter word, and that word is conga.

The congas are what drive the high-energy songs, songs like Tuesday’s Dead and Changes IV.

Here is how we stumbled upon their critically important contribution.

We were listening to one of the better copies during a recent shootout. The first track on side one, The Wind, was especially gorgeous; Cat and his acoustic guitar were right there in the room with us. The transparency, tonal neutrality, presence and all the rest were just superb. Then came time to move to the other test track on side one, which is Changes IV, one of the higher energy songs we like to play.

But the energy we expected to hear was nowhere to be found. The powerful rhythmic drive of the best copies of the album just wasn’t happening. The more we listened the more it became clear that the congas were not doing what they normally do. The midbass to lower midrange area of the LP lacked energy, weight and power, and this prevented the song from coming to LIFE the way the truly Hot Stampers can and do.

Now I think I understand why. Big speakers are the only way to reproduce the physical size and powerful energy of the congas (and other drums of course) that play such a big part in driving the rhythmic energy of the song.

(more…)

Is So Far Really Just a Waste of Money?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

The All Music Guide considers So Far to be a waste of money (on CD) because it was a slapped together effort to capitalize on CSN’s success, combining material from only two albums and then adding two unreleased tracks.

Their attitude boils down to the idea that the first two records are essential, so why buy this album for two songs?

I’ll tell you why.

Because finding good sounding pressings of either of the first two albums is practically impossible for the average audiophile record collector.

I mean that literally: as a practical matter, it is very, very difficult to find Hot Stamper versions of the band’s first two releases. This is especially true for the self-titled album from 1969, which sounds best in our experience on a later reissue that we have a devil of time finding and therefore rarely have in stock.

Both the first two albums and So Far are records we credit with helping us dramatically improve the playback quality of our system.

A Few Words About Deja Vu

Deja Vu is a special album for me, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

(more…)

Charlie Mingus Asks the Question of the Day for Audiophiles – Compared to What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

We used to think the early Limelight pressing shown here was so amazing sounding that finding better sound for this recording would simply be impossible, but the original Mercury showed us just how wrong we were – the right Mercury pressing takes the recording to another level, one we never imagined it could reach. (In our experience records do that from time to time. We’ve written about some of the ones we’ve played here.)

Here is a small excerpt from our most recent commentary for the album:

The best copies recreate a live studio space the size of which you will not believe (assuming your room can do a good job of recreating their room). (Here are some of the other recordings we’ve auditioned with exceptional amounts of size and space.

The sound is tonally correct, Tubey Magical and above all natural. The timbre of each and every instrument is right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it — so high-resolution too.

If you love ’50s and ’60s large group jazz you cannot go wrong here. Mingus was a genius and the original music on this record is just one more album supporting the undeniability of that fact.

More evidence, if any were needed, that the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?

(more…)

The “Not-So-Golden-Age” of RCA, Mercury, London and Others

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

We ran into a number of copies of this title that had what we like to call “old record sound,” which is surprisingly common on even the most revered Golden Age labels, RCA included.

No top, no real bottom, congested climaxes and a general shrillness to the sound — we’ve played Living Stereos by the dozens that have these shortcomings and many more.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works.

Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start. It does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten, you’re probably setting the bar too low, if our experience is any guide.

(more…)