Desert Island Discs – rev/com

Listening in Depth to Abbey Road

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles 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 Abbey Road.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

For all you record collectors out there, please note that no pressing from 1969 (and even for a number of years after) has ever won a shootout.

If you have an Apple UK first pressing and you think it would be hard to beat, we would love to send you one that sounds better than yours, if you can justify the kind of bread we charge for the privilege of owning a musical Masterpiece such as this.

This is the final statement from The Beatles. To take away the power of their magnum opus by playing it through inadequate equipment makes a mockery of the monumental effort that went into it. As you may recall, the original title for the album was Everest. That should tell you something about the size and scope of the music and sound that the Beatles had in mind. A dozen more letters, reviews and commentaries for the album can be found here.

Side One

Come Together

This track and I Want You are both good tests for side one. They tend to be smooth, but what separates the best copies is deep, punchy bass. Without a good solid bottom end, these songs simply don’t work.

Something

When the choruses get loud on this song, most copies will be aggressive. You’ll want to turn down the volume. With Hot Stampers, the louder the better. The sound stays smooth and sweet.

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

Probably the toughest test on side one. The loud banging on the anvil can be pretty unpleasant if you don’t have a well-mastered pressing.

Also, this track has a tendency to be a bit lean and upper midrangey on even the best copies.

Oh! Darling
Octopus’s Garden
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

Listen to Paul’s bass on this track. When you have a good copy and the bass notes are clearly defined, you can hear him doing all kinds of interesting things throughout the song. I remember playing the MoFi not long ago and noticing how that pressing’s lack of bass definition robbed Paul of his contribution to so many of these songs. When the bass is blubbery, it’s difficult to follow his parts.

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Listening in Depth to JT

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

There are at least five or six James Taylor records that I would happily nominate as Desert Island Discs.

His albums set a standard that few other singer/songwriters’ albums can meet. Joni Mitchell comes to mind, and, like our friend James here, she explored many different styles of music throughout her career, the mark of a true artist.

After her, though, I would be hard pressed to name anyone with a body of work as extensive as Mr. Taylor’s.

And just to be clear, this would include all pop and rock artists from the 60s right through to the present. He is one of the greats in my book, and many of his albums are Must Owns.

And this is especially true for us audiophiles. The sound quality of the better pressings of most of his albums is consistently superior to the work of others from that time. Peter Asher deserves most of the credit for that.

Don’t try to start with the first album, which we can’t find for you because only the British pressings sound good and they are just too hard to find in clean condition [even though we did manage to do the shootout in 2022].

Instead go right to Sweet Baby James and JT.

The next group to pursue would contain Mud Slide Slim, Gorilla and In the Pocket.

Follow that up with One Man Dog and Dad Loves His Work (so underrated!).

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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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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 Fleetwood Mac You Don’t Know – Kiln House (Now with Video)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

We 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 less accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

The list is purposely wide-ranging. It includes some famous titles (Tumbleweed Connection, The Yes Album), but for the most part I have gone out of the way to choose titles from talented artists that are less well known (Atlantic Crossing, Dad Loves His Work), which simply means that you won’t find Every Picture Tells a Story or Rumours or Sweet Baby James on this list because Masterpieces of that caliber should already be in your collection and you don’t need me to recommend them.

Which is not to say there aren’t some well known Masterpieces on the list, because not every well known record is necessarily well known to audiophiles, and some records are just too good not to put on a list of records we think every audiophile ought to get to know better.

Out of the thousands of records we have auditioned and reviewed, there are a couple hundred that have stood the test of time for us and we feel are deserving of a listen. Many of these will not be to your taste, but they were to mine.

Kiln House is one of the all-time great Fleetwood Mac albums. It’s the first album they recorded after Peter Green left. With Green gone, Jeremy Spencer’s influence came to the fore. He was apparently quite a fan of Buddy Holly. His songs are straightforward and rapturously melodic.

The co-leader here is Danny Kirwan and he rocks the hell out of this album. Three of the best songs the band ever did, regardless of incarnation, are here: Tell Me All The Things You Do, Station Man and Jewel Eyed Judy, all written by Kirwan (with the help of others). His guitar work on these three songs is blistering.

Any Fleetwood Mac greatest hits collection would be a joke without these tracks.

Of course they are consistently missing from all such compilations, at least the ones with which I am familiar. The sad fact is that few people miss them because few people have ever heard them.

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The Glorious Big Speaker Sound of Wind of Change

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Frampton Available Now

A while back we discussed the kind of sound that Glyn Johns managed to get for the likes of Humble Pie and The Who:

But oh what a glorious sound it is when it’s working. There’s not a trace of anything phony up top, down low or anywhere in-between. This means it has a quality sorely at odds with the vast majority of audiophile pressings, new and old, as well as practically anything recorded in the last twenty years, and it is simply this: The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

Chris Kimsey knew how to get the Big Rock Sound onto tape about as well as anybody who ever lived. His work on this album set me on a path I would would follow for the next fifty years.

Wind of Change is the very definition of a big speaker record, one that requires the highest-resolution, lowest-distortion components to bring out its best qualities. If you have a system like that, you should find much to like here.

I bought my first copy in 1972 while still in high school and it quickly became one of my favorite records.

All these years later it still is.

It’s records like this that shaped my audio purchases and pursuits. It takes a monster system to even begin to play this record right, and that’s the kind of stereo I’ve always been drawn to.

A stereo that can’t play this record, or The Beatles, or Ambrosia, or Yes, or the hundreds of other amazing recordings we put up on the site every year, is not one I would want to own.

This is Peter Frampton’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.

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Our 2024 Shootout Winner of Mac’s Greatest Hits Was Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

With a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, this vintage British import is doing practically everything right.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “big and tubey and weighty”…”lots of space and detail”…”sweet and breathy vox”…”jumping out of the speakers.”

Big, rich, energetic, with an abundance of analog Tubey Magic, this original Orange Label UK pressing has exactly the right sound for this music.

“Oh Well, Parts One and Two,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Man of the World,” and the surprise Number One single “Albatross” are all here and guaranteed to blow your mind.

Peter Green is hands down our favorite British Blues Guitarist of All Time – play this record and you will surely see why we feel that way.

This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, this copy is guaranteed to blow your mind. Like all the best vintage British pressings, the sound is smooth, rich and full.

This is Old School ANALOG, baby. They don’t make ’em like this anymore because they don’t know how to.

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Poco Produced Their Masterpiece of Country Prog Rock in 1970

More Country and Country Rock

Poco’s second album is an unusual blend of country-rock, with some long, jazzy instrumental breaks that center around Rusty Young’s pedal steel, which doesn’t sound like any pedal steel guitar you’ve ever heard. It’s played with a wah-wah pedal and, if that wasn’t enough, the resulting sound is sent through a Leslie organ speaker.

We know it sounds crazy, but it really works. There is nothing else like it on record, nothing that we’ve ever heard anyway.

Country Prog Rock

Most of side two is taken up by a single track, Nobody’s Fool / El Tonto de Nadie, Regresa. It’s a suite in which the band stretches out instrumentally in a somewhat proggy way, although one could make the case that Bluegrass music is all about “stretching out instrumentally.” (more…)

Michel Legrand / After the Rain – A Personal Favorite

This album is PURE MAGIC! I know of no other jazz album like it. It’s lyrical and moody, yet comes to life at a moment’s notice when the horn players start to feel the spirit. If you’re familiar with the music he wrote for The Thomas Crown Affair (he won an Academy Award for “Windmills of Your Mind”), you may have a good feel for subtle, impressionistic, often moody quality of After the Rain . Or check it out on youtube (while trying to imagine the sound being at least one million times better).

Michel’s idea was to assemble a group of his favorite musicians, especially those who were ordained in the lyrical persuasion, to record his next album.

With Zoot Sims and Phil Woods trading off stylistically opposed solos within the gentle, subtly “French” atmosphere, aided by guitar, trumpet, Michel’s piano, and rhythm, you have something new, even unique.

Phil Woods doubles on clarinet, and his lead work on Martina is the one of the finest examples of jazz clarinet I’ve ever heard. (Art Pepper is another guy who can really swing on the clarinet without sounding dated.) (more…)

Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – Our First Shootout Winner

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

This copy is ALIVE! The drums and percussion are powerful and punchy with lots of room around them, and the bass is PERFECTION. There’s plenty of whomp and lots of extension on the top end.

This side two really conveys a sense of the amazing performances of these great musicians. It’s rich, full, smooth, sweet, open, spacious — everything you’d expect from an A+++ / A+++ record.

Funky Brazilian Music For Audiophiles

This is one of my favorite albums, one which certainly belongs in any Audiophile’s collection. Better sound is hard to find — when you have the right pressing. Unfortunately those are pretty hard to come by. Most LPs are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled and full of compressor distortion in the louder parts: this is not a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.

But we LOVE this album here at Better Records, and have since Day One. One of the first records I ever played for my good audio buddy Robert Pincus (Cisco Records) to demonstrate the sound of my system was Sergio’s syncopated version of Day Tripper off this album. That was close to twenty years ago [now more than 30], and I can honestly say I have never tired of this music in the intervening decades.

We’re glad to see that our customers share our enthusiasm for the band; note that there is not a single good sounding used Mendes record on the site at present (September ’08). They all seem to have sold, and most of the Hot Ones flew out of here.

[We do regular shootouts for the band’s albums, but their debut is tough to find in clean shape and it’s been years since we’ve had enough to play for a shootout.]

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