Albums in Focus

Yet Another James Taylor Desert Island Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Musically this is one of Taylor’s best. Every track is good and many are wonderful. (More on that here.)

There are five or six James Taylor records that are Desert Island Discs for me. I know they probably wouldn’t let me take six of the same artists’ records to my island, but I would hope they would make an exception for James Taylor’s LPs, because they really do set a standard that few other popular performers can meet.

JT is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Proper VTA Is Essential to Getting the Sound of Benny’s Muted Trumpet Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are enchanting. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1959 All Tube Analog recording can sound, this killer copy will do the trick.

The sound of the muted trumpet on side two is out of this world.

It has exactly the sonic signature of good tube equipment — the ability to make some elements of a recording sound shockingly real. There are tradeoffs with tube mastering to be sure, a subject we discuss in some depth here.

The trumpet is also a very good test for turntable setup, tracking, as well as arm and cartridge compatability. You’ve got to be set up properly for every aspect for a difficult-to-reproduce instrument like the trumpet to sound right.

Accurate VTA adjustment is critical to the record reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may even be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound of your records once you have learned to precisely adjust the VTA for each and every one of them.

VTA is not a corner anyone should be cutting.

Careful adjustment of VTA is critical to getting good sound.

Of course, so are anti-skate, azimuth and tracking weight.

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What to Listen For on My Favorite Things

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

An album like this is all about its Tubey Magical stereoscopic presentation.

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1961 All Tube Analog sound can be — thanks to legendary engineers Phil Iehle and Tom Dowd — an outstanding pressing of this album is just what the doctor ordered.

What to listen for you ask?

A solid, full-bodied, clear and powerful piano. As we focused in on the sound of the instrument, we couldn’t help but notice what a brilliant player McCoy Tyner is.

This may be John Coltrane’s album, but Tyner’s contribution is critically important to the success of My Favorite Things.

(We rarely care much for Tyner as a leader, which is why you see so few of his albums on the site. Most of his Milestone recordings are terrible, so caveat emptor on those especially.)

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.
  • Some of the other records we’ve discovered with top jazz piano sound can be found here

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Red Clay Is a RVG/CTI Masterpiece

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Freddie Hubbard Available Now

Red Clay is one of our favorite CTI albums – Red Clay (the song and the album) is Hubbard’s soul jazz masterpiece, and it’s a record that belongs in every audiophile’s jazz collection.

Lenny White drums up a storm on this album – on this copy he is playing right in the room with you.

If you’re a Hubbard fan, or perhaps a fan of early-70s soulful jazz, this title from 1970 is surely a Must Own.

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 more of an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Red Clay is a good example of a record most audiophiles may not know well but would benefit from getting to know better.

Hubbard was a master of funky jazz, and the song “Red Clay” is arguably the funkiest jazz track he ever committed to tape. At 12 minutes in length it is a transcendentally powerful experience — and the bigger your speakers and the louder you turn them up the more moving that experience is going to be!

The intro to “Red Clay” begins with a stylized free-form jam, sounding like a bop-jazz band of old, then takes form and solidifies into a groove of monstrous proportions. Ron Carter’s bass playing is stellar! It’s big and lively with tons of presence and energy.

5 stars: “This may be Freddie Hubbard’s finest moment as a leader, in that it embodies and utilizes all of his strengths as a composer, soloist, and frontman. [It] places the trumpeter in the company of giants such as saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Lenny White… This is a classic, hands down.”

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Two Key Tracks for Testing Rubber Soul

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

Rubber Soul is one of the most difficult Beatles records to get to sound right. The individual tracks seem to vary drastically in terms of their tonality. Some (What Goes On) sound sweet, rich and near perfect. Others (You Won’t See Me) can be thin and midrangy. What’s a mother to do?

I think what we’re dealing with here are completely different approaches to the final mix. The Beatles were experimenting with different kinds of sounds, and their experiments produced very different results from track to track on this album more than practically any other I can think of besides The White Album (which was recorded in multiple studios by multiple producers and engineers).

Is Your Rig Up To It?

One final note: this is the kind of record that really rewards a good cartridge/ arm/ table combination. You do not want to play this record with a lean or bright sounding cartridge, or a front end that does not track sibilances well. (I could name some equipment that I would not want to play this record on, but rather than insult the owners of such equipment, let’s just say they will have a tough time with this record.)

The Toughest Test on Side One

“Nowhere Man.” Unless you have an especially good copy this song will sound VERY compressed, much too thick and congealed to be as enjoyable as we know it can be. The best copies manage to find the richness in the sound as well as the breathiness in the vocals that others barely hint at.

Play this track on whatever copies you own (more than one I hope) and see if it doesn’t sound as compressed, thick and congested as we describe.

The Toughest Test on Side Two

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Every Picture Tells a Story Is a Big Speaker Recording Par Excellence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with Demo Disc sound.

If you have a system with big dynamic speakers and can drive them to seriously loud listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.

You know what album this one has the most in common with? Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Every Pictures Tells a Story is the Nevermind of its day, twenty years earlier.

It has that kind of power in the bass and drums. Off the charts energy too.

But it also has beautifully realized acoustic guitars and mandolins, something that virtually no recording for the last twenty years can claim. In that sense it towers over Nevermind, an album I hold in very high esteem. 

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 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.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. Got big dynamic speakers? A concrete foundation under your listening room? You are going to have a great time playing this one for your audiophile friends who have screens or little box speakers. Once they hear what big well-recorded drums can sound like on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.

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The Real Eagles Sound Comes From the Real Eagles Master Tape

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This commentary may be roughly twenty years old, but we think it holds up just fine.

At one time this was my single favorite Demo Disc.

A customer who bought one of these once told me it was the best sounding record he had ever heard in his life. I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s certainly as good as any rock record I have ever heard, and I’ve heard an awful lot of very good ones.

There’s an interesting story behind this album, which I won’t belabor here. One listen to a later reissue or Heavy Vinyl pressing or Greatest Hits and you’ll know I speak the truth when I say that the tape used to cut this pressing was never used again to cut another.

It is GONE. LOST FOREVER. Most copies of this album are mediocre at best, and positively painful to listen to once you’ve heard the right pressing, the one cut from the real tape.

Which mostly explains why I never had any respect for this first album. The average copy sounds so bad that the musical values just aren’t communicated to the listener. Isn’t this why we have all this fancy equipment in the first place, to allow the musicians to communicate with us the way they intended? And when the record is a poor reproduction of the artist’s work, it prevents this communication from taking place. (And don’t get me started about CDs.)

Accidental Discoveries

Those poor reproductions are probably the ones you have, if you even have a copy of the album at all. I’ve been buying Eagles records for more than 30 40 years and I only discovered my first hot stamper pressing around 2001. Of course I found it entirely by accident, with no inkling beforehand that the album could possibly sound remotely as good as that amazing copy was sounding all those years ago. I played Train Leaves Here This Morning for anyone who wanted to hear the system at its best (back when I had the monstrous Whisper system in my living room).

Before that I had heard a number of flat sounding versions and concluded, as most audiophiles would, that the album must be poorly recorded. I stopped thinking like that soon after, which is one of the main reasons you can find amazing sounding pressings of albums on our site that aren’t supposed to sound any good. (Do a quick Google search and see if any audiophile has anything good to say about the album. We came up empty-handed.)

If you own one of those bad later pressings, it’s a record you might have played once or twice, gotten little out of, and put it back on the shelf, wondering why those stupid Eagles couldn’t get their act together and record their music better.

But they did! They were recorded brilliantly. Glyn Johns, the recording engineer, is a genius. The sound is smooth, rich, sweet and Tubey Magical beyond belief.

I would say it’s as good a pop/rock recording as any I have ever heard, and better than 99.99% of the competition.

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This Pressing of Highway 61 Was Off the Charts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

In 2024, Dylan’s landmark 1965 release returned to the site after a hiatus of almost two years.

In the same way Sgt. Pepper changed popular music less than two years later, Highway 61 Revisited left all of Dylan’s contemporaries behind, scrambling to keep up with the standard he set.

Our 3/3 copy was a knockout. It sold for an enormous amount of money directly to one of our best customers, never making it to the site, and was worth every penny in our estimation, and surely in the estimation of the fellow who now has it in his collection.

Dylan’s records are almost never awarded notes like these. It was an amazing find, the kind of record we live for here at Better Records. I hope you can read our writing.

Highway 61 Boilerplate

When looking for a top copy, in our shootouts we are paying special attention to the qualities listed below. We noted:

Here are some of the things we specifically listen for in an electric folk rock record from the sixties, even one as uniquely groundbreaking as Highway 61 Revisited.

This Hot Stamper copy is simply doing more of these things better than other copies we played in our shootout. The best copies have:

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Specific Critiques of All Four Sides of 4 Way Street

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this copy will let you do it. It’s not easy to find good sound on even one side of this album, let alone all four.

Three Shootout Winning White Hot Stamper sides out of four! These three sides handily blow other copies out of the water, with the size, space, presence and energy that only the finest pressings are capable of. If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this is the only copy that will let you do it. No other copy we’ve ever played rocked the way this one rocked! For three quarters of the “concert”, YOU ARE THERE.

If the singers get hard and shrill in the louder passages, then what you have is a pretty typical pressing. Add grit and grain, smeared transients, opacity, surface noise and a lack of weight down low and you’ll know why it takes us years to find enough copies to shoot out — because this is what most pressings sound like.

As you have surely read on the site by now, this band has put out more bad pressings of good recordings than practically any I can think of. Here is an excerpt from our review of their first album that discusses the issue in more depth.

Wrong Sound

95% of all the pressings of this album I’ve ever played have been disappointing. They’re almost always wrong, each in their own way of course. Some are dull, some are shrill, some are aggressive, some have no bass — every mastering fault you can imagine can be heard on one copy or another of this record. The bottom line? If you want to buy them and try them from your local record store, plan on spending hundreds of dollars and putting in years of frustrating effort, perhaps with little to show for it in the end. This is one tough nut to crack; it’s best to know that going in.

Sound So Real

The song “Triad”, for example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and acoustic guitar. It’s as real sounding as anything I’ve ever heard from this band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded significantly relative to what the original microphones picked up.

This live album gives you the “naked” sound of the real thing — the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that would never happen again. (Later CSN albums are mostly dreadful. Fortunately later Neil Young albums, e.g., Zuma, are often Demo Discs of the highest quality.)

More records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific shootout copy.

Side One

Big, clear, present, dynamic — what’s not to like? It shows you what few copies can: how well-recorded the album is. Halverson did a great job but you have to work your tail off to find a copy that does his brilliant engineering justice. Sad, isn’t it?

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After 40 Years, Waiting for the Sun Comes Full Circle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

This commentary was written in 2008, shortly after playing an amazingly magical Gold Label pressing in a shootout.

My favorite of the first three Doors album, Waiting for the Sun is imbued with more mystery and lyricism than previous efforts. The album shows them maturing as a band, smoking large amounts of pot and preparing for the wild ride of their next opus, the ambitious, controversial The Soft Parade.

Actually, as I listen to this album, it reminds me more and more of that one. Now that it sounds as good as The Soft Parade, I find I’ve gained a new respect for Waiting.

More to Come

I started playing these albums in high school on my 8-track tape player. My older stepbrother had the records and I probably played those too.

When I seriously got into audio sometime in the ’70s, I tried every kind of record I could get my hands on — Brits, Germans, Japanese, originals, reissues — but no matter what I did, I couldn’t find good sounding pressings of their albums. Everything I played sounded terrible and I just assumed the band, like so many other ’60s artists, had been poorly recorded.

Then in the early 80s, the MoFi pressing of the first album came out. It sounded amazing to me at the time.

Ten or so years later the DCC pressing on Heavy Vinyl came along and showed me how wrong I — and it — were.

Now we’ve come full circle — back to the right originals. (The operative word there is “right”; some early stampers are terrible. We know, we’ve played them.)

With better cleaning technologies and much better playback equipment, the tables have turned.

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