Album Favorites, Masterpieces, Discoveries, and More

Listening in Depth to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Taking Tiger Mountain.

Taking Tiger Mountain is all about sound, pure sound itself if you will: the sound of the instruments, their textures, and the textures of the soundscapes Eno has created for them.

With the subtle harmonics of Eno’s treated sounds captured on to vinyl intact, the magic of the experience far exceeds just another batch of catchy songs with clever arrangements. It truly becomes an immersive experience; sounds you’ve never heard in quite that way draw you into their world, each sound more interesting than the next.

Only these British originals sound like they are made from fresh master tapes on rich, sweet tubey-magical, super high resolution cutting equipment.

Side One

(Which, by the way, is BRILLIANT from the opening guitars of Burning Airlines to the never-ending chirping crickets of The Great Pretender. I mean that literally: on these early British pressings the run-out groove has the sound of the crickets embedded in it so that the crickets chirp until you pick up the arm, much in the same way that Sgt. Pepper has sound in the run-out groove at the end of A Day In The Life.)

Burning Airlines Give You So Much More

Pure Pop for Now People. Listen to all those multi-layered harmonies! They’re sweet as honey, and only the best British copies get them to sound that way. You can make out practically every voice. This is what we mean by Midrange Magic.

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Thelonious Monk / Brilliant Corners

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

  • Boasting STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish, this vintage MONO recording pressed on fairly quiet OJC vinyl was giving us the sound we were looking for on Monk’s 1957 release
  • Rich, full-bodied and present yet still clear and spacious – we guarantee this copy sounds better than any pressing you’ve heard, and should beat the pricey originals hands down
  • With masterful horn playing from Sonny Rollins and Clark Terry, and a rhythm section that can actually keep up with Monk – made up of Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford and Paul Chambers – this is a Must Own for any music loving audiophile
  • 5 stars: “Brilliant Corners may well be considered the alpha and omega of post-World War II American jazz. No serious jazz collection should be without it.”
  • If you’re a fan of Mr. Monk, this All Tube Recording from 1957 belongs in your collection.
  • 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,” but with the accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Brilliant Corners is a good example of a record most audiophiles probably don’t know well but would benefit from getting to know better

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1957 All Tube Analog recording can be, this superb copy should be just the record for you. Talk about Tubey Magic! The liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is of course a CD of the album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable could care less.

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Our First Shootout for Crime of the Century Was a Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Those of you who’ve watched the site over the years may know this, but it bears repeating — it was rare for us to have Hot Stamper copies of Crime of the Century to offer our customers back in the early days of shootouts.

The first White Hot Stamper copy went up in 2008 and the next one didn’t go up for another three years. Even though we had learned what many of the best stampers for the album were, finding them in good shape turned out to be a lot harder than we imagined it would be.

Here’s what we had to say about the album in 2008.

We actually attempted an all-day shootout late in 2007 that we had to abandon after every copy we played — without exception, mind you — either sounded bad or was too noisy to sell. We must have tried at least ten good-looking British pressings,only to come up empty-handed at the end of the day.

The Speakers Corner pressing beats the average original, I can tell you that without fear of contradiction.

Of course, all Speakers Corner copies are going to sound different — perhaps our review copy is one of the Hot ones.

By 2011 we had gained more perspective.

The bit about the Speakers Corner pressings sounding different has now been proven beyond any doubt. The copy we cracked open for one of our later shootouts didn’t sound nearly as good as the one we played in 2007.

UPDATE 2026

It’s important to remember that the stereo, our cleaning technologies, and, most importantly, even our ears were different 15 years ago.

And, during our formative shootout years, lots of audio progress was made, especially from 2007 to 2011.

2007 is when we discovered the 324p phono stage and the Prelude Record Cleaning System, and those two pretty much changed everything for us.

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The Faces – A Nod Is As Good As A Wink…

More British Blues Rock

  • Two amazing WB Green Label sides, both with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish – The Faces are rockin’ their asses off on this copy
  • Punchy, solid and rich through and through, with driving energy like nothing you’ve ever heard from the band
  • There’s a reason you almost never see this title on the site — it’s a lot of trouble to find enough clean copies to do a shootout
  • We send back, or trade in, 80% of what we buy, and that means the hassle factor for a title like this is jsut way off the charts
  • 5 stars: “[It] doesn’t feel cobbled together and it serves up tremendous song after tremendous song… It’s another classic — and when you consider that the band also had Long Player to their credit and had their hands all over Every Picture in 1971, it’s hard to imagine another band or singer having a year more extraordinary as this.”

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Fleetwood Mac – The Original Fleetwood Mac

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

  • Here is an original UK import pressing with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Most of the time this album sounds like Fleetwood Mac is playing live in the studio, which they probably were, and on big speakers at loud volumes that is a glorious sound
  • 4 stars: “An undeniably strong collection culled primarily from the band’s first incarnation, featuring John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, and Jeremy Spencer.”
  • If you’re a Fleetwood Mac fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this Peter Green era title from 1971 is one of their best sounding

The music on this album was recorded when they were still a blues band — tracks left off their early albums for one reason or another.

As is so often the case with unreleased material, these songs do not have that overproduced, too-many-generations-of-tape sound. This sounds like Fleetwood Mac live in the studio most of the time. In other words, awesome.

If the drum sound on the first track isn’t enough to convince you this is an amazing sounding record, I don’t know what would.

These British imports are the only way to go. The domestic copies are definitely made from dub tapes. They can sound good, but they sure don’t sound this good! (more…)

Carly Simon – Self-Titled

More of the Music of Carly Simon

  • An early Elektra pressing that was doing practically everything right, with both sides earning INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
  • Impossibly quiet vinyl too – it’s the rare Butterfly Elektra pressing that can play quiet enough to earn even our Mint Minus Minus grade
  • Can you believe that the producer and engineer of Carly’s debut is none other than Eddie Kramer?!
  • “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” is the killer track here and it sounds fantastic on this copy
  • These sides really brought this big production to life and allowed so many elements to work in harmony
  • It’s a good example of what a truly Hot Stamper pressing is supposed to do – let the music work as music

The richness and the sweetness of the midrange on the better copies are exactly what you’d be looking for on this heavily-produced pop album, and this copy gives you that sound like no other copy you’ve ever heard.

Credit must go to Eddie Kramer, legendary producer and engineer for the likes of Hendrix and Zeppelin. He knows how to get good sound all right, although Female Singer Songwriter albums in his catalog are fairly light on the ground.

(Richard Perry became the go-to guy for those productions as the 70s wore on.)

This may, in fact, be the only one Eddie ever did. But he knows Big Production Rock, and that’s what most of this album is about.

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Two Qualities Are Hard to Come By on Dad Loves His Work

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

As usually happens in one of our shootouts, we learned that there’s so much more to this album than just great songs.

What really made this music work on the best copies was the result of two qualities we found were in fairly short supply:

Correct Tonality

Most copies have a phony MoFi-like top end boost in the 10k region that we found irritating as hell. The longer we listened the less we liked the copies that had that boost, which adds a kind of “sparkle” to cymbals and guitars that has no business being there.

Now if you’re a MoFi fan, and you like the boosted highs that that label is famous for, don’t waste your money buying a Hot Stamper copy from us. Our copies are the ones with the correct and more natural-sounding top end. The guitars will sound like real guitars and the voices will sound like real voices.

Lower Midrange and Bottom End Weight

When the vocals sound thin, bright and phony, as they do on so many copies of this album (partly no doubt the result of the grainy crap vinyl Columbia is infamous for) that hi-fi-ish sound takes all the fun out of the music.

Many tracks have background vocals and big choruses, and the best copies make all the singers sound like they are standing in a big room, shoulder to shoulder, with the full lower midrange weight that that image implies.

The good copies capture that energy and bring it into the mix with the full-bodied sound it no doubt had live in the studio. When the EQ or the vinyl goes awry, causing Taylor and crew’s voices to take on a lean or gritty quality, the party’s over.

This is one of our favorite Taylor albums here at Better Records.

It’s the last album by the man that bears any resemblance to the genius of his early work. It’s steeply, steeply downhill after DLHW. (Case in point: His specials for PBS of the last few years [make that twenty or more] are a positive cure for insomnia, with every song slowed down and all the energy drained from the material.)

But he still had fire in his belly when he made this one — one listen to Stand and Fight is all the evidence you need; the song rocks as hard as anything the guy ever did. (And it’s got plenty of cowbell, always a good sign.)

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“Soul” on OJC Is Yet Another Bad Gary Hobish Recut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on a copy of the album you see pictured 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 just a couple of copies, “Soul” is not an album that would be worth the trouble and costs 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 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.

Perhaps you have a pressing of the record you like. If so, please tell us more about it. You can email me at tom@better-records.com

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Tears for Fears – The Hurting

More  of the Music of Tears for Fears

  • Very good sound for TFF’s debut album, with both sides earning Hot Stamper grades – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Classic tracks like “Mad World,” “Pale Shelter,” and “Change” have stood the test of time – they’re played in TFF’s concerts to this day (we saw them not that long ago)
  • We guarantee there is more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back – it’s as simple as that
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…powerful pieces of music, beautifully executed in an almost minimalist style…an exquisite sonic painting sweeping the listener up in layers of pulsing synthesizers, acoustic guitar arpeggios, and sheets of electronic sound…”

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Kind of Blue on a Killer 70s Red Label Pressing

More of the Music of Miles Davis

  • With two solid Double Plus (A++) sides or close to them, this Red Label pressing has Demo Disc sound – sound that’s guaranteed to make you want to take all of your remastered pressings and dump them off at the Goodwill
  • After auditioning a Hot Stamper Kind of Blue like this one – a pressing that captures the sound of this amazing group like nothing you have ever heard – you may be motivated to add a hearty, “Good riddance to bad audiophile rubbish and the audiophile reviewers who can’t hear the difference!”
  • KOB is the embodiment of the big-as-life, spacious and timbrally accurate 30th Street Studio sound Fred Plaut was justly famous for (particularly on this side two)
  • Space, clarity, transparency, and in-the-room immediacy are some of the qualities to be found on this pressing (also particularly on side two)
  • It’s guaranteed to beat any copy you’ve ever played, and if you have the new MoFi pressing, please, please, please order this copy so that you can hear just how screwy the sound of the remaster is
  • Marks 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
  • 5 stars: “KOB isn’t merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it’s an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence.”
  • If you’re a fan of the music Davis, Adderley and Coltrane were playing circa 1959, this album clearly belongs in your collection

The Labels of Kind of Blue

The 6 Eye label domestic stereo pressings win our shootouts, in the case of Kind of Blue without exception.

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