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Eric Clapton’s First Album – A Personal Favorite from 1970

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

We had a killer pressing many years ago that sounded a whole lot better than I ever thought the album could sound.

Man, what a revelation to hear an old favorite sound so amazingly spacious and sweet.

As good as the best Atco pressings can be, the early British pressings simply capture more of the Eric Clapton magic than they do. They are dramatically less gritty. Richer and sweeter too. (We’ve included some moderately helpful title-specific advice down below.)

I’ve been playing this album since I bought it in 1970, the year it came out. During my high school years (1970-1972, my rather limited record collection was made up of albums by The Beatles, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, America, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Chicago, James Taylor, Spirit, The Band, Loggins and Messina, Peter Frampton, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Blind Faith, Bread, and no doubt more than a few others that are lost to time.

This was the music of my youth, and although many other artists and styles of music have been added to the playlist in the ensuing decades, classic rock still makes up a substantial portion of the music I play and enjoy today.

This is no doubt the case for many of you. It’s why Classic Rock is the heart and soul of our business. Finding quiet, exceptionally good sounding pressings of Classic Rock albums is probably the hardest thing we do around here. It’s what we devote most of our resources to, and if we can be indulged a self-compliment, it’s what we do best.

Of course, having no competition to speak of is no little help in this regard. No one is even attempting to conduct the kind of record shootouts we find ourselves immersed in all week long.

And who can blame them? It’s hard to put together the layers and layers of resources necessary to pull it off. There are a great many steps a record must go through before it finds itself for sale on our site, and that means there are ten copies sitting in the backroom for every one that’s available for purchase.

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Listening in Depth to Please Please Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

The Beatles’ debut, Please Please Me, is an amazing sounding recording.

It’s clearly the best sounding title of their first five releases, if you have the right pressing.

Naturally, it’s a founding member of our Top 100 Rock and Pop List, along with five other Beatles classics: Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road.

Please Please Me (in awesome twin-track stereo no less) captures more of the live sound of these four guys playing together as a rock and roll band than any record they ever made again. (Let It Be gets some of that live quality too and makes a great bookend for the group.)

If you are interested in digging deeper, our listening in depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums that have gone through a number of shootouts.

For most of the major titles by The Beatles, scores of shootouts have been done, with our earliest efforts stretching all the way back to 2005.

Side One

I Saw Her Standing There

Like any of the boys’ most radio-ready singles, this song tends to be a bit bright. If this track sounds at all dull, there’s probably no hope for the rest of this side.

Misery

This track should sound lively and punchy. The best copies have excellent bass definition and superb clarity, allowing you to appreciate how the wonderful bounce of the rhythm section really energizes the song.

Anna (Go to Him)

Does it get any better? This is the real Beatles magic baby!

Chains

Note that the vocals on this track are not as well recorded as they are on the track above. As a rule they’re a bit edgier and not as transparent.

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Listening in Depth to Deceptive Bends

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

If you are interested in digging deeper, our listening in depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done multiple shootouts for.

Side One

Good Morning Judge

There’s a wonderful guitar duel in this song, but notice how the guitar in the right channel is softer than the one in the left. It’s the same way on every copy we played, so it must be that way on the tape. The guitar in the left channel is louder so it wins.

The Things We Do for Love

A big hit for the band on both sides of the pond, and as such, there’s always a touch of radio EQ to the lead vocals on this track. If you have an suitably transparent copy you’ll be able to hear that the background vocals actually sound much more natural. They’re tonally correct, assuming your copy is right enough in the first place to let you hear it.

Marriage Bureau Rendezvous

This track has wonderful Tubey Magical Tillermanesque guitars. They sound out of this world on a copy with the kind of clarity and sweetness found on the best pressings.

People in Love
Modern Man Blues

Side Two

Honeymoon With B Troop

Amazing DEMO DISC SOUND on the best copies! Some of the punchiest sound we have ever heard, bar none.

I Bought a Flat Guitar Tutor

This track has a richer, more relaxed sound than most of the rest of the album. The sparse instrumentation allows the various elements more room to breathe. On a Hot Stamper copy even the whistling will sound full-bodied.

This is Analog Magic at its best. The sound is effortless, completely natural, and totally free from any hint of hi-fi-ishness. Not one out of a hundred rock records has a track this well recorded.

As long as it’s not too bright. If it is it will spit like crazy.

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Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti – A Personal Favorite from 1985

If you’re a fan of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson and a few other lesser-knowns from this era, Squeeze is the band for you. I put them right up there with Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel in the pantheon of Best British Pop Music Bands of All Time.

Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti has long been a favorite album of mine, a Desert Island Disc if you will, with some of the most powerfully produced, intelligently written and passionately performed songs in the entire Squeeze canon.

There’s plenty of Tubey Magical richness and smoothness on the best British pressings — such as this one — qualities the domestic pressings are sorely lacking, having been mastered from dub tapes. If you want to hear this music right on vinyl, it’s British or nothing, and with one of our Hot Stamper pressings it’s British and everything — everything that’s good about this recording is captured on these sides.

What to Listen For

The overall sound needs to be rich and tubey, not dry, thin or modern.

Clarity and space are nice but not if they come at the expense of the smooth, rich, natural sound of tubes (whether there are tubes in the chain or not).

For more What to Listen For advice on other titles we have auditioned, please click here.

This record sounds best to us this way:

For more modestly helpful title-specific advice, click here.

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Extracting the Midrange Magic of Buffalo Springfield Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

So many copies of this album sound so bad and play so poorly that most audiophiles have given up by now and written it off as a lost cause.

But we didn’t. We kept at it. Our main motivation? The music.

Extracting the midrange magic from a album like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good sounding copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records such as this one is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.

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Listening in Depth to Retrospective

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield 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 Retrospective.

Here are some albums on our site you can buy with similar track by track breakdowns.

Extracting all the midrange magic from a legendary album and Desert Island Disc like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good-sounding clean copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records like this is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we will have to do.

We’ve never heard a copy of this album that truly qualifies as a Demo Disc, but some of the songs can sound superb — Kind Woman and I Am A Child come immediately to mind. The recording, like so many from the ’60s, may not be perfect, but it’s so full of midrange magic, ambience and sweetness that the musical values of the recording are communicated effortlessly and completely — assuming you have a good copy.

Side One

For What It’s Worth

Almost all copies have surface noise issues at the start of this song.

Mr. Soul

The aggressive quality of the screaming crowd at the beginning of this track is a dead giveaway of the poor sound found on most pressings. When the screaming is clean, undistorted and extends well up high, you have a contender. Add bass, some tubey magic to the midrange, and then you can call it a Hot Stamper.

How hot is another question entirely, but if you get this far, you are definitely in the majors. The typical pressing of this album is strictly bush league.

Sit Down, I Think I Love You

On the best copies the tape hiss is clearly audible and tonally correct; this is the first thing you will notice if you have a Hot Stamper.

The second thing is how much the guitars “ring.”

On the higher rez copies the guitars have some of the loveliest tone you can find on any Springfield album.

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Buffalo Springfield / Retrospective – Our 2021 Shootout Winner

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides, this original Atco pressing is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • 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 just two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments
  • And the Pysch stuff – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – is guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard it
  • 5 stars on Allmusic – this is Must Own Music from one of the most groundbreaking and accomplished groups of the late-60s (even though they never cracked the Top 40 Album chart)

Midrange Magic Is Key

Extracting all the Midrange Magic from a legendary album and Desert Island Disc like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile. Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc list? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it. And if the only way to find good-sounding clean copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records like this is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we will have to do.

It takes us years to find enough good clean copies to shoot out. You folks who don’t live in big cities with lots of used record stores are really out of luck when it comes to albums like these. We must look at twenty for every one we buy.

As I’m sure you know, it’s exceedingly difficult to find good sound for this band anywhere. Great copies of the second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, are out there and sound amazing, but we don’t have much luck finding them in clean condition.

Our last shootout was about four years ago, which to my mind is just a sin. We need to find more copies so we can regularly shootout the album, it’s such a classic. Most of the copies we see are beat to death and no amount of cleaning can bring them back to life.

We’ve never heard a copy of this album that truly qualifies as a Demo Disc, but some of the songs can sound superb — “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” come immediately to mind. The recording, like so many from the 60s, may not be perfect, but it’s so full of Midrange Magic, ambience and sweetness that the musical values inherent in these heartfelt songs are nevertheless communicated completely — if you have a copy that sounds as good as this one does.

Those are pretty darn hard to find, and quiet ones are even harder to find. There was a lot of bad mastering and bad vinyl going around when this record and thousands just like it were made. If you don’t believe us just pick up a few (for cheap, otherwise forget it) and see for yourself.

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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…)

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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Another Passenger – A Personal Favorite

More of the Music of Carly Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Carly Simon

This is my personal favorite of all of Carly’s albums. In terms of singing and songwriting it’s her most consistent, highest quality work. Nothing too heavy, just well crafted and enjoyable Singer Songwriter pop. If you like the kind of albums Paul Simon used to make before Graceland, or middle period James Taylor, you should find much to like here.

Another Passenger checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

Some of her albums can be badly overproduced, with monstrously reverberating drum thwacks courtesy of Richard Perry and his minions. Thankfully this is not one of them, so it tends to wear well over time. I can personally attest to that fact because I used to have a tape of the album in my car that I’d be willing to bet I’ve heard more than two hundred times (!)

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