*Live and Learn

Bad Company – Straight Shooter’s Punchy Drums

More of the Music of Bad Company

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Classics Available Now

This commentary was written in 2009.

In late 2009 we had just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ album, our first since January of ’08, and what we were hearing this time around BLEW OUR MINDS. This record got a whole lot better over the course of the last twenty months or so. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the drum sound on this record is the right up there with the most present, punchy and realistic I have ever heard on record. 

I saw a friend’s band play recently in a small club and remember thinking how amazingly punchy the snare sounded (the sound coming from the live instrument itself and the club’s speakers) and this record has that kind of drum sound!.

There’s nothing like live music — everybody knows that — but good copies of this album get you a whole lot closer than I ever expected to get.

It’s a classic case of We Was Wrong. Last time around we wrote “I don’t think you’ll ever find a copy of this album that qualifies as a True Demo Disc, but make no mistake: on the right pressing there’s magic in the grooves.”

We was wrong: It is a true Demo Disc.

On our system anyway. Our stereo is all about playing records like this, and playing them at good loud levels as nature — and the artists — intended.

We revamped our Top 100 List in 2011 and this sucker is now on it, right next to its older brother, the first Bad Company album.

[We have since revamped our list, removing Straight Shooter but leaving the first album. There are so many contenders for our Top 100 that one Bad Company album — out of the two we like — is probably the right number.]

What You Want

It’s got exactly what you want from this brand of straight ahead rock and roll: presence in the vocals; solid, note-like bass; big punchy drums, and the kind of live-in-the-studio energetic, clean and clear sound that Bad Company (and Free before them) practically invented. (AC/DC is another band with that kind of live studio sound. With big speakers and the power to drive them YOU ARE THERE.)

One of the best cuts on side two is the ballad Anna, and boy does it sound good. This track will show you exactly what we mean by “live in the studio” sound. You can just tell they are all playing this one live: it’s so relaxed and natural and REAL sounding.

Turn It Up and Rock Steady!

If you’re playing this copy good and loud, you’ll feel like you’re in the room with the boys as they kick out the jams. Feel Like Makin’ Love rocks like you will not believe — shocking clarity, tons of ambience, silky sweet highs, and a grungy guitar sound that will blow you away. Who gets better tone than Mick Ralphs? Half the sound of Bad Co. is his guitar and the other half is Paul Rodgers voice. Between the two of them they rocked FM radio in the ’70s as good as any band of their time and far better than most. Check out the lineup on side one. Three out of four of those songs are serious Heavy Hitters that you probably know by heart. (If you listen to a Classic Rock station you definitely know these songs by heart.)

Cleaning

We used to think that “the biggest problem with the average copy of this record was GRIT and GRAIN, no doubt caused mostly by the bad vinyl of the day. You have to suffer through a lot of dry, flat, grainy copies in order to find one that sounds like this.”

That was not our experience this time around. Our Odyssey record cleaning machine, Walker fluids and tons of interim tweaks have taken most of that grain and grunge our of the sound of the records we played. (Uncleaned or improperly cleaned records are a major cause of Old School sound. There really is no hi-fidelity without the use of these revolutionary cleaning methods.)

Engineering

This album was one of Ron Nevison’s first big engineering jobs. He also did Bad Company’s debut, a Top 100 album for us. In 1977 he worked on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffitti.

He went on to do lots of the biggest selling monster rock albums of the ’80s, but The ’80s Sound has never held much appeal for us, which is of course why you find so few recordings from that era on our site, silk purses, sow’s ears and all that.

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Tchaikovsky – Classic Records and the TAS List

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for the 1812 Overture

This is a classic case of Live and Learn.

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now. Our system was noticeably darker and apparently far less revealing when we last auditioned the Classic back in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

If they did few audiophiles would still be paying the top dollar collector prices that the Shaded Dog commands to this day.

Updated Thoughts on the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl Reissue

The Classic on Heavy Vinyl (LSC 2241) is lean and modern sounding. No early Living Stereo pressing sounds like it in our experience, and we can only thank goodness for that. If originals and early reissues did sound more like the Classic pressings, my guess is that few would collect them and practically no one would put much sonic stock in them.

Apparently most audiophiles (including audiophile record reviewers) have never heard a classical recording of the quality of a good original pressing (or good ’60s or ’70s reissue). If they had Classic Records would have gone out of business immediately after producing their first three Living Stereo titles, all of which were dreadful and recognized and identified as such by us way back in 1994.

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, guaranteed. And if for some reason you disagree with us about how good they sound, we will be happy to give you your money back.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

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The Who – Our Old Review of the Classic Records Pressing

More of the Music of The Who

Reviews and Commentaries for Who’s Next

Below you will find our review from 2005. After doing our next shootout for Who’s Next in 2007, and replaying the Classic afterwards, we changed our minds about Classic’s version of the album.

Apparently, a surprising amount of audio progress was made from 2005 to 2007, reflected in this review as well as dozens of others.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a Milestone Year  for us here at Better Records, although we certainly did not know it at the time.

Later that same year, we swore off Heavy Vinyl (prompted by the less-than-enchanting sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time. To accomplish this we eventually ended up doubling the staff. (Cleaning and playing every record you see on our site turned out to very time consuming. No one man band can begin to fathom the complex and random nature of the vinyl LP, which explains why the audiophile reviewers of the world are right about as often as the proverbially stopped clock.)

Much of the review you see below indicates we had a much more limited understanding of Who’s Next than we do now, but we obviously have no problem admitting to it, a subject we discuss in some detail here.

Live and Learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. There is nothing advanced about these deceptively-packaged mediocrities if you have the stereo to reveal their shortcomings. After spending forty plus years in audio (1975-2023, we do. )

Sonic Grade: B-

At one time we did not recommend this record, but now we do!

Without going into the sordid details, let’s just say this record sounds pretty good.

The acoustic guitars are especially sweet and silky for a modern reissue. The sound is better than most of the pressings of Who’s Next I’ve ever played.

Clearly this is is one of the better Classic Records rock records.

(It’s the only Who record they’ve done that we carried. The others are awful.) 

The Best Bass Ever!

In our Hot Stamper commentary for Who’s Next we noted this about the sound of the Classic pressing:

It’s actually shockingly good, better than it has any right to be coming from Classic Records. The bass is PHENOMENAL; no British Track pressing had the bass punch and note-like clarity of the Classic. It shows you the kind of bass you had no idea could possibly be on the tape. It reminds me a bit of the Classic pressing of the first Zep album: in the case of the Zep, it has dynamics that simply are not to be found anywhere else. The Classic Who LP has that kind of bass — it can’t be found elsewhere so don’t bother looking. (Don’t get me wrong; we’ll keep looking, but after thirty plus years of Track Who LPs, we kinda know when we’re beaten.)

Hot Stampers Ain’t Cheap

We’ve found Hot Stampers of Who’s Next in the past, and they are still the ultimate versions. This goes without saying.

But Hot Stamper copies are not particularly quiet, and they are never cheap, which is in marked contrast to Classic Records’ heavy vinyl pressings, which are fairly quiet and also fairly cheap. Some of you may think $30 is a lot of money for a record, but we do not. It’s a fair price.

When you buy Crosby Stills and Nash’s first album or Tapestry or Bridge Over Troubled Water on Classic for $30, you are getting your money’s worth.

Don’t Kid Yourself

But don’t kid yourself. You are not getting anything remotely close to the best pressing available, because the best pressings are hard to find. We do find them, and we do charge a lot of money for them, because they sound absolutely AMAZING in a direct head to head comparison to the Classic version and anything else you may have heard.

A Benchmark

We recommend you use the Classic version as a benchmark. When you find something that beats it, you have yourself a very good record. Until then, you still have a good, quiet record to enjoy. You win either way.

Further Reading

We Get Letters – Do the “Wrong Stampers” Sometimes Win Shootouts?

mendestill_depth_1102533608More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Soren has some questions about shootouts and our White Hot Stamper pressing of Stillness. His questions are indented, our answers are not.

Tom,

Does it ever bug you to realize, maybe one or two years down the road and with (as Tom mentions) better playback/cleaning technology, that stampers which you dismissed in a shootout turn out to win the next one, meaning that you could have let many possible hot stampers go?

Soren,

We talk about that a bit here:

But being bugged by it does no good. It is a reality that must be accepted.

Because we know how easy it is to be wrong, or, more precisely, to not know everything we would like to know, we never stop doing Research and Development for the titles we sell.

We tell people all the time, go play your heavy vinyls and half-speeds that you haven’t played recently. If you’ve made improvements to your system, they will often start to show themselves to be not as good sounding as you remember, and that means you are making progress.

I was actually reaching out to you to inquire whether the super hot Sergio Mendes Stillness that I bought from you a couple of years ago is the version with the phase reversed on side 2?

I ask because I don’t recall a phase issue on this specific title was ever mentioned on your site back when I bought it (i would have remembered, I think) so maybe you only found out recently?

Side 1 on the record sounds better to me than side 2. The matrix on this side 2 ends in “M3”.

Both M2 and M3 are in correct polarity. M3 used to win shootouts by the way. For the longest time, at least ten years, I thought M3 was the ultimate side two.

Having done many, many shootouts since then, along with making many changes to everything involving the cleaning and playing of records, we believe Super Hot (2+) is about the highest grade any M stamper can earn.

The fact that you like an M2 pressing better than the Hot Stamper you bought from us is not a polarity issue. It is most probably a system-dependent issue.

Your stereo is different from ours. Our stereo probably would prefer the M3 we sent you, and your stereo likes the M2 you have. It’s really not much more complicated than that.

Finally concerning this magic Stillness white hot stamper (and don’t worry, I am not going to ask you which one it is because you wouldn’t tell me, and you shouldn’t, because it’s a trade secret that you worked hard for and besides I am probably better off with my own super hot copy where I don’t have to bother about that phase issue on side 2).

But out of curiosity: Has this “magic” stamper/pressing turned out to be great on other Sergio Mendes records also (and thereby defied your previous knowledge and caused you to evaluate your game on those titles also), or was it simply a magical one-off revelation with Stilness?

Part of the reason we were wrong about Stillness is that the best copies broke the rule we tend to use about stampers for A&M albums. In this case, the “wrong” stampers turned out to be the best! The stampers we tend to like for most A&M records, the “right stampers,” are not the ones that currently win shootouts.

But that’s what shootouts are for, so that we take our biases and previous judgments out of the search and just go with what actually does sound the best.

Haha!
How beautiful actually, that the “wrong” stampers turned out to be the best on this one title. Records are nice that way. You must always keep on your toes. Thank you for taking the time to answer my three questions.

Best regards,
Søren

Soren,

Staying on your toes is indeed the name of the game when it comes to records. With every change to your system, the record you used to like the best could turn out to be second-rate compared to the record you used to think was second-rate but is now first-rate.

This, of course, drives most audiophiles crazy, so they ignore or downplay the possibility.

Being in the shootout business means we have no way to avoid these realities, which is why it is so easy for us to accept them.

The amateurs and professionals alike who review records for audiophiles want there to be clear-cut answers for every album they write about. Uncertainty and trade-offs upset them no end.

We recognized twenty years ago that the empirical pursuit of record knowledge, practiced scientifically, must be fundamentally Incomplete, Imperfect, and Provisional, and that is never going to change no matter how upsetting anyone may find it.

Thanks very much for writing.

TP

Stillness checks off a few of our favorite boxes here at Better Records:

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The Sound of the Heavy Vinyl Reissues Doug Sax Mastered in the ’90s

More of the Music of Sonny Rollins

More Records Mastered by Doug Sax

Longstanding customers know that we have been relentlessly critical of most audiophile LPs for years, especially in the case of these Analogue Productions releases from back in the early ’90s. A well-known reviewer loved them, I hated them, and he and I haven’t seen eye to eye on much since.

Newflash!

Just dug up part of my old commentary discussing the faults with the original series that Doug Sax cut for Acoustic Sounds. Check it out.

In the listing for the OJC pressing of Way Out West we wrote:

Guaranteed better than any 33 rpm 180 gram version ever made, or your money back! (Of course I’m referring to a certain pressing from the early ’90s mastered by Doug Sax, which is a textbook example of murky, tubby, flabby sound. Too many bad tubes in the chain? Who knows?

This OJC version also has its problems, but at least the shortcomings of the OJC are tolerable. Who can sit through a pressing that’s so thick and lifeless it communicates none of the player’s love for the music? If you have midrangy bad transistor equipment, go with the 180 gram version (at twice the price). If you have good equipment, go with this one.

[We are no longer fans of the OJC of Way Out West, and would never sell a record that sounds the way even the best copies do as a Hot Stamper. It’s not hopeless the way the Heavy Vinyl pressing is, but it’s not very good either. It’s yet another example of a record we was wrong about. Live and Learn, right?]

The following commentary comes from our catalog from the mid- to late-’90s, back when I could still find great jazz records like Alternate Takes. Note also that the AP records were in print at the time.

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in TAS had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

Anyone who owns a representative sample of records engineered by Roy Dunann knows that the overly sweet, delicate sound of the cymbals on the Analogue Productions Way Out West is unusual — if not positively unheard of — for him. His cymbal sound is lively, aggressive, with much more “splash” — more impact, more presence.

These “live music” qualities have been equalized out on the remastering and other patently euphonic qualities equalized in.

Anyway, the important thing is not the sound I or some reviewer or anybody else likes. It’s what you like that counts.

With that in mind, I’m so sure you’ll prefer the sound of Alternate Takes, that you’ll recognize and appreciate the differences I’m talking about, that I’m willing to make you this very special offer:

If Alternate Takes isn’t about the best sounding jazz record you ever heard, send it back to me and I’ll give you $30 toward anything else in the catalog! If you own any Analogue Productions LP, mail or fax me a copy of your receipt (along with your order) and I will give you a better sounding jazz record free as a bonus!

If you don’t own the AP Way Out West, call Chad up and order it. You really owe it to yourself to hear this mess! What have you got to lose? Acoustic Sounds offers a money-back guarantee. They say “guaranteed better than the original.”

What they don’t say is “guaranteed better than a plain old everyday standard-issue domestic copy which is still available from that pain-in-the-ass Tom Port over at Better Records” — because it’s not (better, although it may be still available)!

Robert Brook discovered a killer Way Out West not long ago which caused the heavens to open up and the angels to sing. I know exactly what he talking about. It’s happened to me more times than I can remember.

His story:

We added some thoughts of our own in this commentary:

We think both are worth reading.

Now Back to Our More Recent Commentary

Hey, here’s a question for you. When was the last time you read a word about those Heavy Vinyl pressings, so incompetently mastered by Doug Sax. With no real presence and bloated bass, they’re pure audiophile “smile curve” trash of the worst kind.

They’ve rather fallen from favor, have they not? I wonder why. Could it be that they were as ridiculously bad as I said they were back in 1995, and it just took the rest of the world a little longer to recognize that fact? Perhaps audiophiles are making progress. It’s just taking them a long, long time. Hey, it took me a long, long time, so who am I to talk?

[This prediction turned out to be way off the mark. If anything, the remastered records being made today sound worse than ever.]

No doubt most audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them think that making records the “right” way should result in better sound, but we have found precious little evidence to back up that theory, and volumes of evidence to refute it.

Yes, those Analogue Productions records sucked, they continue to suck, and they will always suck. The “audiophile” records of that day did lack presence, and the passage of time is not going to change that fact. Play practically any Reference, Chesky or Classic title from 1995 to the present and listen for the veiled midrange, the opacity, the smeary transients, and the generally constricted, compressed, lifeless quality of its sound, a sound that has been boring us to tears for close to two decades, and fundamentally undermining the very rationale for the expense and hassle of analog itself in the modern digital age, a much more serious charge.

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Donovan – Painting with Too Broad a Brush

More of the Music of Donovan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Donovan

Back in 2009 we wrote: “Donovan’s albums are never well recorded so if you’re looking for audiophile sound this is not the record for you. Although the sound varies here from track to track, some tracks do sound quite nice.” 

Although we have yet to play a copy of this particular album that sounds any good to us, we couldn’t have been more Wrong about the rest of his catalog. [As of 2022 we think we may have found a good sounding pressing of this album, so stay tuned, there is more to come for Sunshine Superman as we search for enough copies with which to do a shootout.)

Since 2009 we have found a number of superb sounding Donovan records, the best of which to date is The Hurdy Gurdy Man, surely the man’s masterpiece.

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Alan Sides Likes a Dead Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

More Reviews and Commentaries for Pablo Recordings

Many of Allen Sides‘ recordings suffer from a lack of ambience. The musicians do not seem to have much room around them. In audiophile parlance, his recordings often lack “air.”  I can’t say all his recordings are made in a dead studio, but some of them sure are.

Many audiophile recordings, especially direct-to-disc recordings from the ’70s, are insufferable in this respect, with too much multi-miking and not enough studio space.

This Bach recording on Crystal Clear is a good example of the sound some audiophile labels were going for. Back in the 70s, audiophile producers and engineers were using state-of-the-art high-tech recording equipment, but they seemed to lack experience as well as knowledge of the recordings of the past. They regularly ended up producing records that are not remotely the equal of those that were commonly made only twenty years before.

For Duke is the poster boy for that sound. The instruments are dynamic as all get out, but no one ever imagined that the ideal approach to recording Ellington’s music would be to cram a big group of players into the equivalent of a heavily carpeted and draped livingroom.

Miller and Kreisel created a completely new, strange and inappropriate sound for Duke’s music, and it has been rubbing me the wrong way since I first heard it demoed in the audio showrooms of the 70s I used to frequent.

Sheffield’s first Direct to Disc recording suffered from the same problems to some extent. Lots of multi-miking, lots of instruments in isolation booths, no sense that everyone is playing together in a big room.

When the space in a recording is reduced on one pressing versus another, that is a sign that the pressing is question lacks resolution, and in our shootouts you lose a lot of points for that shortcoming. (Records that are especially good for testing Ambience, Size and Space can be found all over this blog.)

Bob and Ray is a favorite test disc of ours for three-dimensional sound. A big group of guys in 1958 playing live in a reverberant studio with superb acoustics produced our favorite wall to wall, floor to ceiling Large Jazz Group recording of all time. For the last fifteen years it has been invaluable in testing and tweaking the system.

Back to Oscar

For our review for the Oscar Peterson record you see pictured, we noted “Surprisingly spacious and three-dimensional for a recording from 1986.”

But that is setting the bar awfully low. Truth be told, recordings made in 1986 are rarely if ever as spacious or three-dimensional as those produced in the 50s, 60s and well into the 70s.

Two of the Worst

Of course, some of the most ambience-challenged records available today are on Heavy Vinyl. I could link to hundreds of them, but here are two that should get the point across well enough.

This album on DCC, like much of their dubious output, has very little of the breathing space of the vintage pressings we sell.

And the disgraceful label that released this title can be relied upon to press records that no audiophile with a decent stereo and two working ears should want anything to do with.

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Rimsky-Korsakov / Scheherazade – Yes, Sometimes There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

More Stamper and Pressing Information

In 2015 we wrote:

There are certain stampers that seem to have a consistently brighter top end. They are tolerable most of the time, but the real magic can only be found on the copies that have a correct or even slightly duller top. Live classical music is never “bright” the way recordings of it so often are.

It’s rarely “rich” and “romantic” the way many vintage recordings are — even those we rave about — but that’s another story for another day.

We recently did the shootout again, and now with a much more resolving, clear, accurate upper midrange and an even more extended top end, the stampers that we used to find “brighter than ideal” are almost always just too damn bright, period.

We will never buy another copy with those stampers if we can help it.

We was wrong and we don’t mind admitting it. We must be learning something in our shootouts, right?. We ran an experiment, we discovered something new about this album, and that should be seen as a good thing.

If you have been making improvements to your system, room, electricity, etc., then you too own records which don’t sound as good as you remember them. You just don’t know which ones they are, assuming you haven’t played them in a while.

One Stamper to Rule Them All

Which leaves one and only one stamper that can win a shootout. There is another stamper we like well enough to offer to our discriminating customers, but after that it is all downhill, and steeply.

Of course the right stampers are the hardest ones to find too. All of which explains why you rarely see a copy of the album for sale on our site.

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After Years of Searching, We Finally Found an Old Beatles Record that Sounds Really Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles for Sale

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Beatles

Updated 2023 — See Below

On the Yellow and Black Parlophone label! This is best sounding early label pressing we have ever played. Not a Shootout Winner, but a perfectly enjoyable copy of one of the best sounding Beatles albums we play on a regular basis.

NEWSFLASH FROM 2022

We just played another original pressing of For Sale and this copy had a Triple Plus (A+++) side one, mated to a Double Plus (A++) side two. For Sale is still the only studio album with top quality sound on the original pressing that we have ever played, but now we can say with some authority that if you have a bunch of originals, you might just have one with killer sound like the one we had. There was a later pressing that also earned our top grade, a subject we touch on in this commentary for Kind of Blue.

NEWSFLASH FROM 2023

We’ve just played another original pressing of For Sale in a shootout and amazingly it earned Triple Plus (A+++) grades for its sound on both sides. Most original Beatles pressings on the early label do not even qualify to make it into our shootouts. Their mastering is so crude, congested and distorted that the sound simply cannot be taken seriously on a modern hi-fi rig. On a jukebox, maybe. Mine’s in the shop.

Note that this label information, like most label information, is not as helpful as it might seem. The Yellow and Black Parlophone label was used in the UK all the way up until 1969, during which time a lot of copies of For Sale, first released in 1964, were sold. In other words, if you want to find a great sounding pressing of For Sale on the early label, you have your work cut out for you.

This finding about For Sale is precisely why Live and Learn is our motto.

We don’t know it all, and we’ve never claimed that we did. We constantly learn things about pressings in our daily shootouts. That should not be too surprising, as record shootouts are the only way to learn anything about the sound of records that’s actually worth knowing.

Start doing your own experiments and your record knowledge might just take off the way ours has. 99% of what we think we know about the sound of records we’ve learned in shootouts over the course of the last twenty years.

Here is our advice on getting started.

Before this, the only Beatles record we would sell on the Yellow and Black Parlophone label was A Collection of Oldies… But Goldies. That title does have the best sound on the early label. In numerous shootouts, no Black and Silver label pressing from the ’70s was competitive with the best stereo copies made in the ’60s.

Until now, it was clearly the exception to our rule. From With the Beatles up through Yellow Submarine, the best sounding Beatles pressings would always be found on the best reissue pressings.

Here are the notes for the best sounding For Sale on the early label we played in our 2022 shootout.

For those who have trouble reading our writing, the notes say:

Side One

  • Track one is clear enough, a bit recessed.
  • Track two is clear, open and lively, with good space, but not as weighty as the best.

Side Two

  • Track one is relaxed, solid and musical, with good size.
  • Track two is full, solid and musical, with good bass.

We Was Wrong

A very good sounding record, with few of the problems we heard on the other early label Beatles pressings we’ve played in the past. Most of them had the kind of old record sound — compressed, congested, harmonically distorted, bandwidth limited, etc. — that kept them from making the cut.

For Sale here is one we have to admit defied our expectations. A classic case of Live and Learn.

But that’s the reason to play records, not judge them by their labels, right? How else would you possibly learn anything about their sound? And you have to play them head to head against other copies, a normally crude process we’ve refined over the last twenty years into a science we like to call the Hot Stamper Shootout.

The Bottom Line

Will we ever buy another one? Probably not. [Ah, but we did!] The right later label pressings always win the shootouts, and the second tier copies on the later label will tend to be cheaper to buy, in better condition and pressed on quieter vinyl.

If you really must have an early label pressing, like this guy, you will have no trouble finding one in good shape.  Well, maybe not no trouble, because buying records over the internet is a major pain. Let’s just say it can be done.

Cleaning the record is another matter. For that you need a lot of expensive equipment and plenty of time on your hands.

Some Current Thoughts on Old Paradigms

It is our strongly held belief that if your equipment (regardless of cost) or your critical listening skills (regardless of the esteem that you may hold yours in) do not allow you to hear the kinds of sonic differences among pressings we describe, then whether you are just getting started in audio or are a self-identified Audio Expert writing for the most prestigious magazines and websites, you still have a very long way to go in this hobby.

Purveyors of the old paradigms — original is better, money buys good sound — may eventually find their approach to records and equipment unsatisfactory (when it isn’t just plain wrong), but they will only do so if they start to rely more on empirical findings and less on convenient theories and received wisdom.

A reviewer we all know well was clearly stuck years ago in the Old Paradigm, illustrated perfectly by this comment:

It’s not my pleasure to be so negative but since I have a clean UK original (signed for me by George Martin!) I’ll not be playing this one again. Yes, there are some panning mistakes and whatever else Martin “cleaned up” but really, sometimes it’s best to leave well-enough (and this album was well-enough!) alone.

We are not aware that he has subsequently recognized the error of his ways. We can’t imagine how anyone can have a system in this day and age that can obscure the flaws of the original Parlophone pressings of Rubber Soul (or any other Yellow and Black label Parlophone pressing for that matter). The reviewer quoted above apparently does (as do some of our customers, truth be told), but we have something very different indeed. One might even consider it the opposite of such a system.

Our system is designed to relentlessly and ruthlessly expose the flaws of every record we play. Only the best of the best can survive that level of scrutiny. Our system (comprising equipment, set-up, tweaks, room, room treatments, electricity) operates at the Highest Level of Fidelity we are able to achieve. In addition, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system in search of even better sound.

Real Progress

But wait a minute, who are we to talk about being easily fooled? Bear in mind that as recently as 2000-something we were still recommending the DCC and other Heavy Vinyl pressings, records that I can’t stand to listen to these days. My system couldn’t show me how sterile and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

It’s amazing how far you can get in 10 years if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough, and are also willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio. This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we approached this hobby like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are sure to be the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers.

Old thinking and wrong thinking can really slow down your progress.

Follow our advice and you will be amazed at the positive changes that are bound to come your way.

Better ears lead to better stereos, but some stereos make it hard to develop better ears.

That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile. 

Yes, I made a lot of mistakes, but taking an empirical approach to this hobby practically guarantees that that I would eventually find a better way.

Now I know that making mistakes is a key to progress. Thank goodness for that, because I’ve sure made my share of them.

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The Rolling Stones – Valuable Lessons We Learned in 2011 and 2016

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

More Lessons Learned from Record Experiments 

Presenting a classic case of Live and Learn.

We would agree with very little of what we had to say about Goat’s Head Soup as a recording when we wrote about it back in 2011 — and for the previous 35+ years since I first played a domestic original. (Turns out the imports are no good either.)

Having done a big shootout for the album in 2016, we now know that there most certainly are great sounding pressings to be found, because we found some. We broke through.

The data are in, and now we know just how wrong we were.

In our defense, let me just ask one question: Did anybody else know this record was well recorded? I can find no evidence to support anyone having ever taken such a contrarian position.

But we’re taking that position now. All it takes is one great sounding copy to show you the error of your ways, and we had more than one.

Here’s what we had to say back in 2011. After having played dozens of copies and never hearing the record sound more than passable, can you blame us?

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