*Hey, What’s the Big Idea?

Thoughts on The Big Picture from someone who has been playing records for almost 60 years. I bought a copy of She Loves You on Swan in 1964 and still own it. The disc may be cracked but the picture sleeve is in pretty good shape, just in case you were wondering.

Why Can’t Anybody Remaster As Well As Dave Ellsworth Nowadays??

More of the Music of Marty Paich

More Jazz Recordings of Interest

If you large group swinging West Coast Jazz is your thing – think Art Pepper Plus Eleven – you will really get a kick out of this one.

Albert Marx was the producer of the original sessions back in 1957. Fast-forward to the ’80s and Marx is now the owner of his very own jazz label, Discovery Records. Who would know the sound of the original tapes better than he? Working with Dave Ellsworth at KM, Marx has here produced one of the best jazz reissues we’ve heard in years.

We finally got hold of an original, and sure enough, it had some of the qualities we might have guessed it would have.

It was big and rich, as expected, but it was also crude and gritty, like a lot of old jazz and pop vocal records from the ’50s are.

The reissue not only got rid of those problems, but because it was cut properly on much better mastering equipment, it was also more open and resolving of studio space and detail.

If you want to know what a properly remastered record sounds like, this pressing will show you. It should also make clear that the second-rate pressings being made today are a disgrace, pure and simple, a drum we have been beating on for at least the last fifteen years.

If only these modern engineers could put together the quality mastering chain that Albert Marx had available, as well as Dave Ellsworth and his team, not to mention the knowledge of how to use it, and the critical listening skills required to get it right and to recognize when it was right.

Practically all of the qualities missing from modern records are found right here on this budget Discovery pressing. If more reissues sounded like this, we seriously might have to rethink our business model.

But modern reissues don’t sound like this. They practically never do. Which makes the service we offer more necessary than ever.

And if you can’t afford our records, we tell you how to find your own Hot Stampers.

(more…)

Extreme Record Collecting – There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records

What You Can Learn from Experimenting with Records

A while back, Richard Metzger posted on the Dangerous Minds website a story recounting his lifelong search for better sounding pressings of his favorite albums.

By the third paragraph, it was clear that Richard had the right perspective on this hobby of ours, as he understood all too well how few people are interested in finding great records:

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you. Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

The story of my life! You could say the same about this blog. Why should anyone care about any of this stuff?

Just because I’m obsessed with records and their sound — even a record as completely forgotten as this one — doesn’t mean that anyone else in his right mind, dangerous or otherwise, should be.

On this subject, it’s best to let Richard speak for himself. Part One of his record obsession can be found here.

Gadzooks – Now there’s a Part Two!

After reading Richard’s post, I contacted him and offered to send him a Hot Stamper pressing of a record of his choosing, about which he was of course free to say anything he liked.

That record turned out to be Aja. It seems he was pretty pleased with the copy we sent him.

Speaking of Aja, I’ve been playing the band’s fifth album since the day it came out in 1977. (I’d been a huge fan for years by then.)

We started doing shootouts for it around 2006, and in the ensuing years a great deal has been written about the album, by us as well as our customers.

(more…)

Music Does the Driving

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

As a budding audiophile I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the ’70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists from the era, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.

And here I am — here we are — still at it, forty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.

That kind of progress is proof that we’re doing it right. It’s a good test for any audiophile. If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year.

As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some of them will no doubt become more apparent. For the most part, however, with continual refinements and improvements to your system and room, as well as cleaning techniques, vintage pressings will continue to sound better the longer you stay active in the hobby.

That’s what makes it fun to play old records: They just keep getting better!

(more…)

The Restorative Power of Classical Music on Vinyl

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We often mention the benefits to be gained from regularly listening to classical music. Once a week would make a good rule of thumb for playing a classical record or two I should think.

We all love our rock, jazz, folk and the rest, but there is something about classical music that has the power to restore a certain balance in your musical life that, for whatever reason, cannot be accomplished through other music. Perhaps it grounds your listening experience in something less immediately gratifying, something that grows deeper and more enriching over time. Once the effect has taken hold, the changes in one’s mood are easy to recognize.

Of course it should be pointed out that the average classical record is at best a mediocrity and more often than not a sonic disaster. There are many excellent pressings of rock and jazz, but when it comes to classical music — by its nature so much more difficult to record (and reproduce!) — the choices narrow substantially.

Most of what passed for good classical sound when I was coming up in audio — the DGs, EMIs, Sheffields and other audiophile pressings — are hard to take seriously when played on the modern high quality equipment of today.

We probably audition at least five records for every one we think might pass muster in a future shootout, and we’re pulling only from the labels we know to be good. We wouldn’t even waste our time playing the average Angel, Columbia or DG, or EMI for that matter. The losers vastly outweigh the winners, and there are only so many hours in a day. Who has the time to hunt for so few needles in so many haystacks?

Commitment of Resources

With the above in mind, it should be clear that assembling a top quality classical collection requires much more in the way of resources — money and time — than it would for any other genre of music.

We are happy to do some of that work for you — our best classical pressings are amazing in almost every way — potentially saving you a lifetime of work. But we do so at a price; the service we provide is labor-intensive. And, as you may have noticed, vintage classical records are not getting any cheaper or easier to find.

On the positive side, every Hot Stamper we sell is 100% guaranteed to satisfy in every way: music, sound, and playing condition. Ideally this means less work for you and more time for listening enjoyment, weekly or more if you can manage to carve it out of your schedule.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 38 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.

This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better records that works. If you know of one, please write me!

We are not the least bit interested in records that are “known” to sound the best.

Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of records?

I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature. The audiophile experts and reviewers I’ve encountered on the web seem hopelessly lost to me.

UPDATE 2024

Woops, I take that back. I have met one, a certain Mr. Robert Brook. He has been conducting his own shootouts for a few years now and has made his findings available on his blog, The Broken Record. You can trust the information he posts there.

(more…)

After The Gold Rush – Why So Expensive?

More of the Music of Neil Young

We built our reputation on finding Demo Disc Quality pressings like this. Who else can offer you a copy of After the Gold Rush that delivers this kind of Tubey Magical Analog sound?

The reason a record like this needs to sell for the kind of serious bread we charge is that there just aren’t that many clean copies that have survived; there aren’t that many copies with the right stampers; and there aren’t that many copies that were pressed just right, the way this one was.

I’ve been picking up originals of this record for 20 years. Nowadays we pick up every clean original copy that we see. People loved this album and played it to death. Who can blame them; it’s Young’s masterpiece. It’s actually a better album than Harvest, and Harvest is an awfully good album.

Most original copies of this album leave a lot to be desired. Some are clean but lack Tubey Magic and warmth. Others are thick, dull, and compressed sounding. And almost all of them are pressed on dubious vinyl or have been treated poorly.

Subtracting all the problematical copies, you’re left with only a handful of real contenders, copies that are good enough to go into a shootout with the potential to win it. If you would like to spend a couple of years finding, cleaning, and playing original pressings of After The Gold Rush, the chances are very good that you would eventually come across one like this.

Anyone can do it. But do you want to? Would you rather spend your free time searching for an amazing copy of Neil Young’s masterpiece or enjoying it?.

(more…)

Sometimes the Most Fundamental Questions in Audio Are Simply Overlooked

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

This post was written circa 2005.

This commentary is about two things — knowing the kind of music you like, and getting the kind of sound you want.

If you believe what you read on the various sites where audiophiles freely dispense advice about everything under the sun regarding music, recordings and equipment, you are asking for trouble and you are surely going to get it.

You will encounter an endless supply of half-truths, untruths and just plain nonsense, more often than not defended tooth and nail by those with impressive typing skills but not much enthusiasm for the tedium of tweaking and critical listening. 

big_speakersWhat kind of equipment are these people using?

How deep is their experience in audio?

Truth be told, I was pretty misguided myself during the first ten (or twenty, gulp) years I spent in audio, reading the magazines, (I still have my Stereophiles and Absolute Sounds from the 70s in boxes in the garage), traipsing from stereo store to stereo store, trying to figure out what constituted Good Sound so that I could manage to get my own equipment to produce something closer to the best of what I was hearing.

Questions

I sympathize with those who have trouble making sense of this hobby. It can be very confusing, especially to the neophyte. It takes a long time (with plenty of effort and money expended along the way) to be able to answer some of the most fundamental (and most often overlooked) questions in audio:

1.) What kind of music do you like?

2.) What aspects of sound quality are the most important to you?

Armed with answers to the above two, the next question to be asked is:

3.) What equipment will best be able to give you the sound you want on the music you like, within the limits of your budget, room, WFA (Wife Acceptance Factor), etc.

If you haven’t been doing this audio stuff for at least ten years, you probably don’t know the answers to those last two questions. In other words, you still have a lot to learn.

I may not have all the answers, but after being in audio for more than thirty years [now close to 50], about half of that full-time (full-time being sixty to seventy-plus hours a week), I can say without embarrassment that I have some of them.

And for the most part I got them the old-fashioned way: I earned them.

Do You Like Rock Music?

Then make sure you buy speakers that can play rock music.

Don’t buy screens, panels or little boxes. With subs or without, don’t buy them.

(more…)

A Random Walk Through Heavy Vinyl

Heavy Vinyl Production And the Unpredictability of Random Processes

Those in the business of producing the highest quality remastered recordings on LP are crashing smack into a problem endemic to the manufacturing of the vinyl record — randomness.

Record producers can control many of the processes (variables) that go into the making of a high quality record. But they cannot control all of them. The word for such a situation, one with random, uncontrollable aspects, is “stochastic.”

Taking the liberty to paraphrase Wikipedia liberally, we would explain it this way.

A stochastic, or random, process, is the counterpart to a deterministic process. Instead of dealing with only one possible way the process might develop over time, in a stochastic or random process there is some indeterminacy described by probability distributions. This means that even if the initial condition or starting point is known, there are many possibilities the process might go to, but some paths may be more probable and others less so.

In other words, although some of the variables can be controlled, there will always be some element of randomness that makes the final result predictable within limits, but not predictable precisely.

bellcurve500A thought experiment related to the classic Drunkard’s Walk is illustrative here. Imagine a drunkard walking down the sidewalk. On his right is a wall, on his left a gutter. He can’t walk very well, being drunk, so there is a good chance he will bump into the wall. Bouncing off the wall he will probably not be stopped but instead be able to continue on his way. However, if he falls into the gutter he will very likely not be able to get back up and will end up stuck there.

We know very well how the wall works, and we know very well how the gutter works, but we simply cannot predict how far down the street the drunkard will get before he falls into the gutter because of the unpredictable nature of his path. The average distance can be determined experimentally easily enough. But each time he starts his walk there is really no telling how far he will get.

Record making is like that.

We can put new shoes on the drunkard so that he stumbles less. Likewise we can sweep the sidewalk of debris that might cause our drunkard to slip and fall.

What we can’t do is specify the path the drunkard will take, just as we can’t insure that those pesky vinyl molecules will align themselves in the grooves of the finished record the way we want them to.

Which means that a small portion of the pressings will contain something approaching 100% of the musical information originally inscribed on the acetate. Most will contain a smaller amount, and that group will be followed by a very small group that will contain a much smaller amount. These groups will all be distributed in the classic bell curve fashion.

Part two of this discussion of randomness can be found here.

Further Reading

Wired Investigates the World of Hot Stampers

Check out our Wired interview.

Why Audiophiles Are Paying $1,000 for This Man’s Vinyl

Collectors of so-called “Hot Stamper” LPs think a thousand bucks is a bargain to hear a classic rock opus sound better than you’ve ever heard it before—stoned or sober.

Go to the comments section and read the 300 plus postings that can be found there. The writers of these comments appear to be offended by the very idea of Hot Stampers.

They also decry the obvious shortcomings of analog vinyl itself, as well as the ridiculously expensive equipment some credulous, misguided audiophiles are using to play it, as if you didn’t know already!

Further Reading

Home Plate – Better Sound than the Master Tape?

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

This original WB Palm Tree label LP has THE BEST SIDE ONE we have ever heard here at Better Records. “A+++” sound means you’re probably hearing the album better than they did when they played back the master tape in the control room, studio monitors being what they are. 

Since this is one of my three favorite Bonnie Raitt albums — the others being Sweet Forgiveness and Nine Lives — and quite possibly the best sounding album she ever made, it goes without saying that this is THE Must Own Bonnie Raitt Hot Stamper Pressing of All Time.

What about the Capitol albums she recorded with Don Was?

Man, they sure don’t sound like this! That stuff is way too digitally-processed and modern sounding for my taste.

The first two she did for Capitol are fine albums in their own right, but she was already out of gas by the time she got accepted by the record buying public and the Grammy Award committee. That was 1989; this album is from 1975 when she still had her groove on. You may gain a lot of wisdom as you age from thirty-six to fifty, but you don’t gain a lot of rock and roll energy (or any other kind, for that matter).

Her Best Material

What sets this album apart from others made around this period is the strength of the material. Every song on side one would fit nicely on a greatest hits album, they’re that good. The reason side one has always been a personal favorite is the last on the side, the lovely ballad My First Night Alone Without You. If this one doesn’t hit you hard, something ain’t workin’ right.

Side two has five more top tracks, and perhaps this is the mark of quality that her other WB albums can’t match: consistency. Everything works on this album.

The Big Sound

This a big production, with horns and strings and lots of wonderful sounding instruments thrown into the mix such as tubas, mandolins and autoharps to name just a few.

Getting all these sounds onto the vinyl of the day is a tough challenge, but some copies had the goods, and this is one of them.