Favorites – Rock-Pop – rev/com

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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Our First Unplugged Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I don’t recall — it was fifteen years ago and we’ve played a lot of copies since then — but these notes may have been generated for our first shootout of McCartney’s Unplugged album.

Back then we would have been limited to buying them locally in stores, so it might have taken us quite a few years to acquire enough copies in to do the shootout.

By the way, the original wholesale cost to the stores was $7 and change. Most stores were charging $20-25 when the record came out. I knew guys who bought a case or more, knowing that the album was soon to go out of print with a  limited run of 50k. They quickly raised that to 75k because of the demand was so high. They found they could get $50 a pop as soon as that happened, which wasn’t long. (In 1991 music lovers were not being inundated with a ridiculous number of pointless reissues they way they are today. Record Store Day, I’m looking at you.)

I mention below that 8 out of 10 copies sound pretty good, which is not quite true. There are lots of copies that don’t sound very good at all, but if you know the trick to avoiding them, then yes, 8 out of 10 will at least sound “good.”

McCartney Unplugged is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve our playback quality. If you have the time, we encourage you to check out the links at the bottom of this post.

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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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Avoid these Stampers on Buffalo Springfield’s Retrospective Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

In 2025 we finally got around to doing another shootout for Buffalo Springfield’s wonderful Retrospective album, a “greatest hits” compilation for a band that really only had one hit but put out two of my all time favorite albums, Buffalo Springfield Again and Last Time Around. Our Shootout Winning early pressing was described this way:

Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the best pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment. “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments

And the three Psych tracks – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – are guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard them.

But if you somehow ended up with a copy that has the wrong stampers, stampers similar to the ones you see below — on the original label mind you — none of those songs will have the audiophile qualities we describe.

And if you thought you were buying an original pressing of the album on the Yellow Atco label, well, that’s exactly what you were buying.

It’s not really your fault. The good pressings and the bad pressings all look the same. How were you to know your random purchase would only hint at the sound quality of the best pressings?

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Big Drums in a Big Room – Now That’s a Story Worth Telling

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top 100 Titles Available Now

What could be better?

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers, live in the studio sound, this is the album for you.

The opening track on side one of  Every Picture Tells a Story has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded.

The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically. Micky Waller is brilliant throughout. Kenney Jones, who only plays on the showstopping “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” is clearly out of his mind.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. If you have the system for it you are going to have a great time playing this one for your friends, audiophiles and otherwise.

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Letter of the Week – “Owning three other pressings of each LP, all I can say is WOW!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased. As you can judge from the prices quoted below, this was many, many years ago. 

Hey Tom, 

After two or so years, I finally tried my first hot stampers. A Space In Time, a top ten stranded-on-a-desert-island album, and Quadrophenia (my favorite Who album).

Owning three other pressings of each LP, all I can say is WOW !!! The copies I purchased from Better Records live up to your company’s name, especially side two of a Space In Time. At $60.00 and $75.00 respectively, I got quite a bargain. [This is a very old letter!]

I can only imagine what some of the very best copies must sound like.

The joy and pleasure great music that sounds great can bring is priceless. After bill paying this weekend I can only hope that the Blood On The Tracks hot stamper is still there. With the Talisman I just ordered, I have to believe my listening experiences are only going to keep getting better!

Bob N.

Bob, thanks for your letter.

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 99% of the time.

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I Owe a Huge Debt of Gratitude to Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

For me, Crime of the Century worked like a gateway drug to get me addicted to the amazing soundscapes found on so many 70s Prog Rock and Art Rock recordings, although I didn’t know what the term Art Rock meant or whether it even existed yet. I surely never heard anyone use the term.

I just knew I loved Supertramp’s music. Both Crime and Crisis? What Crisis? were in heavy rotation in the cheap apartment I rented three blocks from the beach in San Diego where I was living in the mid-70s.

(It shared no common walls with any other units, which was an absolute necessity for someone who liked to play his music good and loud and often late into the evening. The police came knocking on my door once at two in the morning after I got a bit too carried away with the “running around the airport” song on Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently the next door neighbors were not enjoying it as much as I was.)

MoFi Rocks

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have had to have been Crime of the Century released by Mobile Fidelity in 1978.

It was that label’s first rock release and it showed me the kind of Big Rock Sound I didn’t think was possible for two speakers to produce no matter how big they were, and mine were very big indeed.

In my mind it sounded to me like live music at a concert. I had simply never heard sound like that in my livingroom.

Partly that was because a few years earlier I had upgraded to some very big speakers and some awesomely expensive tube gear in 1976.

When I threw that super Hi-Fi Audiophile pressing on the turntable and turned the volume up good and loud, I thought there could be no question that finally, after all these years and after so many different stereo systems, I had reached the pinnacle of home audio. How could the sound possibly get any better? (Of course, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would devote the next 40-plus years to exploring that question.)

By 1978, Crisis? What Crisis and Even in the Quietest Moments had already come out, and though you couldn’t buy either of those albums on a super-duper disc from Mofi, there was a Half-Speed of Crisis which, I have to admit, sounded great to me at the time and well after it should have. (I don’t know what I thought of the Sweet Thunder pressing of EITQM, but I know what I think of it now: it sucks.)

I became an even bigger fan of Crisis than I had been of COTC, if you can believe such a thing. (None of my friends could.)

Since Crime… is one of those albums that I still listen to regularly, I can say with confidence that it is the better album by a small margin, and one that would come with me to my desert island even if I were limited to as few as ten titles — that’s how good it is.

And I owe a debt of gratitude to a label that comes in for a lot of criticism on this blog, the one that took Supertramp’s best album and made it a Demo Disc the likes of which I had never heard before, Mobile Fidelity.

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Pretzel Logic – Our Four Plus Shootout Winner from 2011

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

This BEYOND White Hot side one (A++++) of Pretzel Logic has nothing less than master tape sound. [Whatever that is!] Our Four Plus ranking is rare enough, but in this case it has the added benefit of conferring upon this very pressing the status of the best sounding Steely Dan recording we have ever heard.

There is no better recording in the Steely Dan catalog, and I don’t think there’s a copy anywhere that’s any better than this on side one. (To see what we consider to be the single best sounding album from two hundred(!) other artists, please click here.)

UPDATE 2026

  • Note that only one side on this pressing was actually any good. Side two earned a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+. We no longer sell records with grades that low.
  • In 2011 we still had a lot to learn about Pretzel Logic, but this copy sure had us fired up at the time, and that’s a good thing, right?
  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it changes our undertanding of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question might have been “How high is up?”

This Beyond White Hot Pretzel Logic has got it all: tons of energy, mindblowing transparency, uncanny presence, and lots of deep bass. We feel Pretzel Logic is the band’s best sounding recording, and here’s a copy that will show you why.

There’s lots of room around the drums, texture to the bass, breath to the vocals, and weight to the bottom end. The clarity is unbelievable and the overall sound is HUGE! The piano sounds AMAZING and the top end is silky sweet. It’s more open and more alive than you could ever imagine.

We’ve been playing this record since it came out in 1973 and this is the first “Four Plus” A++++ grade we have ever awarded it. The sound is Demo Disc quality of the highest order.

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Listening in Depth to Hot Rats

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Zappa Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series.

Hot Rats was mastered by Jack Hunt, a man we know to be responsible for some of the thickest, dullest, most dead sounding MoFi recuts found in their shameful catalog.

We have to admit that he did a good job cutting this album though.

Of course, not cutting at Half Speed was a big help, because Half Speed mastering is just a bad idea that ends up making some of the wackiest sounding records we have ever played.

Side One

Peaches En Regalia

This track tends to be a bit dull and could use a little sweetening on the top end on almost any copy you find. 1 or 2 dB at 10k might be just what the doctor ordered.

Willie the Pimp

This is one of the two extended tracks on the album; the second track on each side is “the long one,” and they both suffer from the same slight upper midrange boost. This song and The Gumbo Variations on side two are both difficult to turn up due to their tendency to be slightly aggressive.

Son Of Mr. Green Genes

One of the best sounding tracks on the album, and probably the best sound to be found on side one.

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Listening in Depth to Pretzel Logic

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

It’s positively criminal how mediocre this amazingly well-recorded album sounds on the average pressing of it. How can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music of Pretzel Logic when it sounds like that?

The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is that we know how hard it is to enjoy good music when it doesn’t sound right.

Bad sound is a barrier to deeper understanding and a more intense listening experience, which is why I spent 50 years building a stereo that could play a record like Pretzel Logic right, or at least as right as I could get it to sound. (Speaking of sound, acquiring this preamp only a few years after discovering the music of Steely Dan changed everything for me.)

I also credit Pretzel Logic, probably more than any other album of theirs, with helping me dramatically improve the quality of my playback.

Side One

Rikki Don’t Lose That Number

By far the biggest hit on this album and one of the biggest for the band, it’s also one of the clearest indicators of Hot Stamper Sound. The Horace Silver inspired intro is at its best when you can easily hear the acoustic guitar in the left channel doubling the piano. On most copies it’s blurry and dull, which causes it to get lost in the mix. Transparent copies pull it out in the open where it belongs.

That’s the first test, but the real test for this track is how well the (surprisingly) DYNAMIC chorus is handled. On a properly mastered and pressed copy, Fagen’s singing in the chorus is powerful and very present. He is RIGHT THERE, full of energy and drive, challenging the rest of the band to keep up with him. And they do! The best copies demonstrate what a lively group of musicians he has backing him on this track. (If you know anything about Steely Dan’s recordings, you know the guys in these sessions are the best of the best.)

Check out the big floor tom that gets smacked right before the first chorus. On the best copies the whomp factor is off the scale.

Shocking as it may seem, most copies of this album are DOA on this track. They’re severely compressed — they never come to life, they never get LOUD. The result? Fagen and the band sound bored. And that feeling is contagious.

Of course few audiophiles have any idea how dynamic this recording can be because they’ve never heard an especially good pressing played back on a big speaker system in a big room.

Only a handful of the copies we played had the truly powerful dynamics heard on the best copies. These are Pretzel Logics with far more life than I ever dreamed possible. Who knew?

As an aside, back in 1976 I had my fifty favorite albums professionally cleaned on a KMAL record cleaning machine at the stereo store I worked at. They would give you a custom record sleeve along with the cleaning, and sure enough I found my original Pretzel Logic with its KMAL sleeve. My copy was pretty good but no Hot Stamper. So, yes, it really did take us thirty years to find the best copy!

(I took the picture of the KMAL sleeve you see to the left partly because it provides a piece of factual evidence that I really didn’t have a clue about records in 1976. I was proud to be the owner of an original British pressing of Led Zeppelin II — which is absolutely the wrong pressing of the album if you are interested in good sound — but of course I had no way to know that back then.  (more…)