Focus-R/P/S

Here you will find rock, pop, soul, etc. albums we think we know well, having cleaned and played them by the score over the course of many decades.

There are currently 160 or so entries, but the number could easily exceed 1000 considering how many records we play every week in our shootouts.

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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Taking Tiger Mountain – Peak Art Rock

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now

This is Brian Eno’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.

On the right pressing, Taking Tiger Mountain is a twisted pop Big Speaker Demo Disc like nothing you have ever heard.

If you have a big speaker and the kind of high quality playback that is capable of unraveling the most complicated studio creations, with all the weight and power of live music at practically live levels, this is the record that will make all your audio effort and expense worthwhile.

That’s the kind of stereo I’ve been working on for forty fifty years and this album just plain KILLS over here.

Art Rock

That being said, it may not be the kind of thing most music loving audiophiles will be able to make sense of if they have no history with this kind of arty rock from the 70s. I grew up on Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Ambrosia, Supertramp, Yes and the like, bands that wanted to play rock music but felt shackled by the chains of the conventional pop song.

This was and still is my favorite kind of music. Experts who study these things say that the music you discover between the ages of 17 and 23 stays with you for your entire life. For me that’s the music I fell in love from 1971 to 1977. I was 20 when this album came out.

When it comes to the genre, I put this album right at the top of the heap, along with several other landmark albums from the period: More Songs About Buildings and Food, Siren, The Original Soundtrack, Crisis? What Crisis?, Ambrosia’s first two releases, The Yes Album, 801 Live, A New World Order and plenty of others, many more than I have room to describe here.

It should be noted that most of these album don’t sell all that well. We do shootouts for them anyway, partly in the hopes that at least some of our more adventurous customers will get turned on to this music and have their lives changed in the same way mine was.

One difference I could be forgiven for pointing to in this regard is that I had available to me random copies of unknown quality, unlike our customers who get offered nothing but great sounding pressings.

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London Calling – A Killer Bill Price Recording

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Clash Available Now

What sets this album apart sonically is The Clash’s use of reggae and dub influences. You can really hear it when you tune in to the bottom end. Your average late-70s punk record won’t have this kind of rich and meaty bass, that’s for sure.

Drop the needle on The Guns Of Brixton (last track on side two) to hear exactly what I’m talking about. On a Hot Stamper copy played at the correct levels (read: loud) the effect is positively hypnotic.

Nobody in 1979 would have accused The Clash of being an audiophile-friendly band, but the best pressings will make you think twice about that.

Bill Price engineered and, as we never tire of saying about recordings with the potential to sound as good as this one does, he knocked it out of the park. The best sounding record from 1979? Probably not, but one of the best for sure.

1979

1979 sure was an interesting year for pop/rock music.

The Wall, Breakfast in America, London Calling, Off the Wall, Get the Knack, Damn the Torpedoes, Armed Forces, Spirits Having Flown, Reggatta de Blanc, Fear of Music, Tusk, The B-52s, Lodger, Rust Never Sleeps, Rickie Lee Jones, Candy-O — the variety is remarkable.

Even more remarkable is the number of albums recorded in 79 that sound fresh and engaging to this day, more than 40 years after they were released. I could sit down in front of my speakers today and play any one of them all the way through. Try that with your ten favorite albums from 1989, 1999, 2009 or 2019 (assuming you can find ten. I sure couldn’t). (more…)

The Yes Album – What a Recording!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Yes Available Now

At its best, this album is a Big Speaker Prog-Rock opus with tremendous power and dynamic range, but it takes a special pressing to really bring the album to life. 

These guys — and by that I mean this particular iteration of the band, the actual players that were involved in the making of this album — came together for the first time and created the sound of Yes on this very album, rather aptly titled when you think about it.

With the amazing Eddie Offord at the board, as well as the best batch of songs ever to appear on a single Yes album, they produced both their sonic and musical masterpiece — good news for audiophiles with Big Speakers!

Drop the needle on a top copy and you will find yourself on a Yes journey the likes of which you have never known.

And that’s what I’m in this audiophile game for.

The Heavy Vinyl crowd can have their dead-as-a-doornail, wake-me-when-it’s-over pressings that are typically cheap to buy and tend to play quietly.  Here’s one I couldn’t sit through with a gun to my head.

The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, ELP, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and far too many others to list.

It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted. Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn’t get any better.

Obsession

Yes, we admit to being obsessed with The Yes Album.

It is our belief that to reach the most advanced levels of audio,you have to do two things:

  1. You must become obsessed with getting your favorite albums to sound their best, and,
  2. You must then turn your obsession into concrete action.

What kind of action?

Finding better sounding pressings and improving your stereo and room.

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Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

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

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but listening for the details in a recording can be a trap we too easily fall into unless we are on our guard.

Tonal balance is the key.

Without correct tonal balance, no judgments about the details of the recording have any real value. 

A case in point: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic Records pressing gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar lacks the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word “detail,” since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful detail. Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind, along with scores of audiophile pressings. 

The MoFi guys and the CD guys are constantly falling into the trap of being impressed by the phony detail in some recordings.

The solution is to get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is have systems that are sure to fall apart at louder levels. If the sound of your system on your best pressings doesn’t get better as it gets louder, you are failing one of the most important tests in all of audio, the turn up your volume test.

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On Brighter Days, The Best Pressings Have Choruses that Really Soar

Hot Stamper Pressings with Big, Clear and Lively Choruses Available Now

A recent White Hot Stamper pressing of L&M’s fourth release demonstrated pretty convincingly just what an amazing Demo Disc this album can be.

At about the 1:15 mark (and again at 3:10), the song’s chorus is a great test for weight, resolution, dynamic energy, and freedom from strain in the loudest parts.

When the whole band is really belting it out, the shortcomings of any copy will be exposed, assuming you are playing the album at good loud levels on big dynamic speakers.

It was a key test every pressing had to pass. That’s what makes it a good test disc.

When the music gets loud you want it to get better, with more size, energy and, especially, emotional power, just the way that song would be heard in concert.

Any strain or congestion in the choruses we hear in our shootout results in the pressing being downgraded substantially.

Hot Stampers are all about the life of the music, and when this music gets lively, it needs to be clear and clean.

This is of course one of the biggest issues we have with Heavy Vinyl.

Heavy Vinyl almost never gets up and almost never gets going the way vintage records do.

“Lifelss and boring” are the adjectives we most commonly use to describe those we audition, and who wants to listen to lifeless, boring records?

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On Trust, the Bass Is (Almost) All

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Notes from a Hot Stamper shootout we did quite a while back.

There’s a TON of low-end on this record. Regrettably, most copies suffer from either a lack of bass or a lack of bass definition. I can’t tell you how much you’re missing when the bass isn’t right on this album. (Or if you have the typical bass-shy audiophile speaker, yuck.) 

It’s without a doubt THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT of the sound on this album. When the bass is right, everything falls into place, and the music comes powerfully to life. When the bass is lacking or ill-defined, the music seems labored; the moment-to-moment rhythmic changes in the songs blur together, and the band just doesn’t swing the way it’s supposed to.

On the best pressings, you get the full-on bottom end WHOMP you paid for, with no loss in control. You can clearly follow Bruce Thomas’s bass lines throughout the songs, a real treat for any music lover. (He and Elvis don’t get along, hence the end of the Attractions as his backing band. I guess we should be thankful for the nine albums on which they were together; many of them are Desert Island Discs for me.)

Not only that, but the drums have real body and resonance, a far cry from the wimpy cardboard drum sound you’ll hear on most copies.

Hey, these are The Attractions: the pro’s pros. You can’t ask for better, and as expected they deliver big time on this album. But the mastering and pressing problems of most British copies typically make them sound half-hearted and uninspired, which is certainly nothing like what they sound like on the master tape. On the master tape, they play GREAT. You need a very special copy of the LP to hear them play that way, and that’s all there is to it. 

The better the pressing, the better the band.

A Must Own Title

This, along with My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, is as good as it gets for Elvis on LP.

All three are absolute Must Owns that belong in any serious rock collection. This is that rare breed of music that never sounds dated (especially considering the era in which it was produced). Music with real depth such as this only gets better with the passage of time. The more you play it, the more you appreciate it, and love it.

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This Is Why We Love Hippie Folk Rock from the 60s and 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.

If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums? — you should much to like on Down in L.A.

Here is how we described our most recent shootout winner:

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”vox and guitar jumping out of the speakers”…”big and tubey and weighty”…”HTF [hard to fault]” (side one)…”serious bass and energy”…:”rich and 3D and lively.”

Both of these sides have the smooth sweet analog sound we were listening for – they’re rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear that make it the best of both worlds.

The notes for the top copy from our most recent shootout can be seen below. It us six years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort.

Side one was HTF – Hard To Fault.

Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island Disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre.

It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars.

The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul.

All three are built on the same folk pop sensibilities. Tarkio, album number three, is clearly the duo’s Masterpiece, but this record comes next in my book, followed by Weeds, their second album and first for Kama Sutra. After Tarkio it’s all downhill.

“Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome, strident qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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Gorilla – A Soft Rock Favorite from 1975

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This is soft rock at its best, primarily made up of love songs, and helped immensely by the harmonically-gifted backing vocals of Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Rolling Stone notes that “With Gorilla, Taylor is well on his way to staking out new ground. What he’s hit upon is the unlikely mating of his familiar low-keyed, acoustic guitar-dominated style with L.A. harmony rock and the sweet, sexy school of rhythm and blues.”

If you are not a fan of the mellow James Taylor, this is not the album for you.

I happen to be just such a fan. Taylor’s sixth album contains consistently engaging, well-produced, well-written, memorable, singable (or hummable) songs that hold up to this day.

After enjoying it for more than 45 years I can honestly say now it actually sounds good. The recording finally makes sense, now that I have the stereo that can play it and the cleaning system that could get the record truly clean. And it only took 35 years — nice!

At Better Records that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about progress. Make no mistake, it is very REAL. When we take a recording that, on copy after copy, never sounded much better than passable, and actually get it to sound musical and involving, that’s not an illusion. It’s the result of the countless revolutions in audio that we’ve participated in. Without the hundreds of changes we’ve made to our stereo, room and cleaning systems, old records would just sound like old records.

The average copy is so flat, lifeless and hard sounding that you might just wonder if there isn’t something wrong with your stereo when the needle hits the Gorilla groove. Most copies are awful, and the same goes for the albums that came before it and after it, Walking Man and In the Pocket, respectively.

This record does not sound like just any old record, not the best copies anyway.

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Find a Copy with Drums that Punch Through the Mix on Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many pressings are compressed, murky, veiled and recessed. To find one that is transparent, clear, present and punchy is no mean feat.

Proper cleaning is essential. The early Orange label CBS pressings (the only ones that have the potential to win shootouts) too often just sound like old records until they have been properly cleaned.

There are two tracks to play to hear how well the drums punch through the mix.

Mick Fleetwood is banging the hell out of his toms on Black Magic Woman. If it doesn’t sound like he’s really pounding away, you need a better copy.

Or a better stereo; one must always be open to the possibility that the system may not be up to reproducing the punchiness of the drums.

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