Live and Learn

Here we discuss the records we think we got, uh, wrong.

It’s not really a problem for us though. We feel no need to cover up our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting previous errors is how we’ve managed to learn so much about records that no one else seems to know.

Gaining knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is always slow, incremental and riddled with errors and bad judgments.

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

By playing the records grouped here, under rigorously controlled conditions, on top quality equipment, we found out just how much better or worse they are than are we thought.

Close to the Edge – A MoFi Winner, Or Was It? We’ll Never Really Know

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Yes Available Now

Sonic Grade: Side One: B to B+ / Side Two: C

Many, many years ago (2005?) we wrote the commentary you see below. We can’t say if we would still agree with the sentiments expressed, so take what you read with a grain of salt, and remember that no two records sound the same. If your copy is better or worse on either side, it will not come as a surprise to us here at Better Records.

This is a great MOFI! (On side one anyway.) I have to admit I was partly wrong about this pressing. I used to think it was mud. Either the copy I have here is much better than the copy I played years ago, or my stereo has changed. I’m going to guess that it’s the stereo that has changed. I used to like the original American copies of this album and now I hear that they are upper midrangy and aggressive. [*] So my stereo must have been too forgiving in that area, which in turn would have made this MOFI sound too dull. [**]

Side one is as good as I’ve ever heard it outside of the best British originals. [We don’t even buy those anymore. Maybe that’s the problem with this comparison.] Since almost none of those have survived in clean enough condition to be played on modern audiophile turntables, there isn’t much of an alternative to this pressing.

And it should be noted that there is distortion on the tape. It’s on every LP copy and it’s on the CD too. There are cacophonous passages that have what sounds like board overload, mike preamp overload, tape saturation or something of the kind.

Eddie Offord, the recording engineer, is famous for complaining that the boys in the band were totally out of control when it came to adding layer upon layer and track upon track to their recordings, running the risk of creating such a dense mix that nothing would be heard above the din. He was always fighting a losing battle trying to rein them in. Although he did his best, it appears his efforts failed in some of the musical passages on this album.

So here’s a MOFI I like, but I only really like side one. Side two, although it’s decent enough, errs a little on the smooth, dull side. I have copies in which the guitars have wonderfully extended harmonics and sweeter tone. Some of them are even domestic pressings! On the MOFI there is a “blunting” of the acoustic guitar transients.

[*] Some pressings are indeed bright and aggressive, but that just shows how little I knew about the album in 2005. The later domestic pressings, and even some of the 4 digit catalog pressings, can indeed sound that way. Eventually I would figure out what the good stampers were and then I would no longer be as ignorant as I so clearly was when I wrote this. As for more stuff we’ve gotten wrong, you can find some of it here, under the heading: live and learn.

[**] My stereo was indeed too dark and forgiving back in those days. The way I know that is that records that are too bright and upper-midrangy to play now played just fine twenty years ago.

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How Good Are the Later Reissues of The Bridge?

When we did a shootout for The Bridge about ten years ago, we thought the reissues with the cover you see to the left actually sounded better than the original pressings, but we were clearly wrong and we have no other option than to admit it, as painful as that may be.

True, we never cared much for the later reissues described below — the tan labels can be passable but fall well short of the standards we set now.

However, even the best orange label pressings from 1975 don’t sound as good to us now as we thought they did ten years ago.

They can be good, but in our experience they can never be great. Great is the sound that can only be found on the best originals, and they win all the shootouts now.

The notes for the AFL pressing with the black label describe it as bright, phony and lean.

This is the kind of sound better suited to the stone age stereos of the past.

I should know. I had a stereo all the way up until the late-90s — not exactly stone age quality, but far from the sound we have now — that prevented me from hearing my records with the highest quality reproduction.

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Shoot Out The Lights – Loud Versus Live Versus The Heavy Vinyl Reissue

thompshoot_1503_1_1282591967Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

Here’s a thought: if 180 gram records are supposed to be an improvement over the original pressings, why is it that they NEVER sound big and bold like our best Hot Stamper pressings?

And I do mean never; I’ve played hundreds of them over the years and have yet to hear this kind of sound on any of them. At this point I would have to conclude that it is simply not possible.

If you have big speakers, a large listening room and like to play your records loud, there is no modern reissue that will ever give you the thrill that a vintage pressing like this can. (Of course, to fully appreciate the effect it obviously helps if you have a White Hot Stamper copy to play.)

Heavy Vinyl

Years ago, about the time that I was becoming disenchanted with Heavy Vinyl in general and Four Men With Beards in particular, that label released a modern reissue of the album. I could never work up the energy to bother to play it. The chances of it sounding like one of our Hot Stamper pressings are slim to none and much closer to none.

UPDATE 2024

I have now played the remastered Shoot Out the Lights and it’s very good!  It might be at best a low level Hot Stamper, maybe 1.5+, but for Heavy Vinyl that is indeed exceptional.

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Can You Believe I Actually Used to Like this CBS Half-Speed?

More of the Music of Boston

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Boston

Sonic Grade: D

Lack of weight down low — or as we like to call it, lack of whomp factor [1] — is the main reason Half-Speed mastered records so often come up short when played against their real-time-mastered competition. The highs can be good, the mids can be good, but the bottom end is almost always lacking, which is exactly the problem here.

You can be sure that Boston would not have wanted, nor would they have ever been willing to accept, the kind of anemic sound that the CBS Half-Speed delivers.

The CBS is cut clean from a good tape, so it easily beats the bad domestic pressings, of which there are many.

But it doesn’t rock.

What good is a Boston record that doesn’t rock? It’s a contradiction in terms; they’re a rock band.

The band, as well as their amazingly well recorded debut album, have no other reason to exist.

Transparency is a nice quality, but when it comes at the expense of the energy and power of the music, especially down low, then it comes at too high a price, especially for those of us who have full-range systems and like to play them loud.

We talk about the shortcomings of transparent audiophile records here:

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Finlandia – Live and Learn

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Years ago we noted how much worse the Classic Records pressing of our then current favorite Finlandia sounded when compared head to head with our best RCA Shaded Dog pressings.

We wrote:

Classic Records ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than our good vintage pressings, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

Woops.

Turns out the RCA pressing we used to like was not as good as we thought, something we discovered to our chagrin in 2014.

Our current favorite pressing is on a Decca reissue label. Go figure.  When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

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We Were So Sure We Had The Pink Floyd’s Ticket, But We Were Wrong

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

In a reply to some questions Robert Brook asked about Revolver and Sticky Fingers — see here and here — I made mention of the advice, found on Hoffman’s forum and other sites, that is commonly offered regarding the superiority of specific pressings of albums discussed by those who post there and purport to know well.

This often-arcane advice includes labels, pressing plants, stamper numbers, specific mastering credits, etc. The practice is so common that audiophiles “in the know” are now expected to share their findings with other members for the benefit of all.

That’s the background for my comment below. I was explaining where I stood with respect to the recommendations I often read, in my typically undiplomatic language:

We do not respect the opinions of those who appear to have little understanding of records and their pressing variations. The faulty conclusions they invariably arrrive at lack evidentiary support because they don’t know how to do what we do and can’t be bothered to learn.

Regardless of what these folks believe, by now we’ve heard dozens and dozens of amazing originals [referring to Sticky Fingers]. This made us extremely skeptical that any other mastering house could compete with the right original’s sound. It was just too good.

Yes, we were skeptical, and it has turned out, at least so far, that we were right to be skeptical. Nothing has come close to the best early domestic pressings of Sticky Fingers, the ones that win shootouts and that we have long known to be the best pressings of the album.

But sometimes we are skeptical and we turn out to be wrong.

Specifically we were wrong about some albums by Pink Floyd (but not the title you see pictured). I wrote:

We’re not always correct about these things. We were dead wrong about a couple of famous Pink Floyd albums from the “wrong” country that we’d heard good things about.

They have been winning shootouts for many years now.

Our judgments concerning the best sounding pressings for any given title must be seen in the light of any information arrived at scientifically: it’s considered provisionally true. (We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.)

I felt it was important to point all this out. The impression I did not want to leave in the reader’s mind is that we know all the answers.

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This Speakers Corner Pressing Had Us Fooled

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

We were very impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001. We simply could not find a vintage pressing that could beat it. I actually took it over to a good customer’s house so that he could hear how much better the album sounded on Heavy Vinyl when played head to head with whatever vintage pressing he might have had in his collection.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. I could not have been more wrong.

His copy smoked mine right from the get-go. I wiped the egg off my face, wrote down the stamper numbers for his copy, and proceeded to get hold of some good early pressings so that I could find a copy that sounded the way his did — which was awesome, the best it had ever sounded, even on a system (Infinity speakers, Audio Research electronics) that I had never much cared for. (His system is set up in a basement with a low ceiling, a problem that cannot be solved with good equipment, room treatements or anything else for that matter.)

Eventually — eventually in this case being at least five years and maybe more —  we felt we had this album’s number and knew which pressings tended to have the goods and which ones didn’t. All that was left was to do  was to clean up the stock we had and do the shootout so that we could actually be sure, or sure enough, keeping in mind that all knowledge about records is provisional.

This would have been about 2010, and we would learn a lot, but we would keep learning more about the album with every subsequent shootouts, close to ten by now I should think.

Live and Learn

These kinds of Heavy Vinyl pressings used to sound good on older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.

Some of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

The Speakers Corner pressing is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination would it ever be able to compete with any Hot Stamper pressing you might see on our site.

Problem Solved?

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After You’ve Played 100 Copies of the Album, What’s Left to Learn?

bloodchildHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary is at least ten years old. We can’t say that a red label reissue like the one discussed below would do as well under the improved shootout conditions in our new studio, but the possibility exists, which is the point of the story we are telling here.

A common misconception of many of those visiting the site for the first time is that we think we know it all.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We definitely do not know it all. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

Not This Title

Case in point: the record you do NOT see pictured above. (The record we recently learned something new about — this, after having played scores and scores of copies over the years — will remain a secret for the time being. At least until we find another one.)

In 2013 we played a red label Columbia reissue of a famous 60s rock record (again, not shown) that had the best side two we had ever heard. Up to that point no copy other than the 360 original had ever won a shootout, and we’ve done plenty. Lo and behold, here was a reissue that put them all to shame.

I’m still in shock from the experience to tell you the truth, but what a blast it was to hear it!

The recording, which I first played more than 40 years ago at the tender age of 16, was now bigger, less murky and more energetic than ever before. Had you asked me, I would have confidently told you not to waste your time with the second pressing, to stick to the 360s on that title, and I would have been wrong wrong wrong.

How Wrong?

But wait a minute. The 360 original will probably beat 49 out of 50 red label reissue copies on side two, and the best 360 original could not be beaten on side one by any other pressing. When you stop to think about it, we weren’t very wrong at all.

Let’s just say our understanding was incomplete.

This is why we prefer to offer actual physical records rather than just advice, although it’s clear for all to see that we happily do both, and, moreover, we certainly feel qualified — as qualified as anyone can be — to offer up our opinions, since our opinions are based on a great deal of experimental data.

Having big piles of cleaned records at one’s disposal is fundamentally important to this kind of operation. In our experience, shootouts using only a small number of pressings have relatively little value. They are best seen as a guide for the next, more comprehensive attempt to find out what might be the truly killer pressings of any given album.

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Domestic Pressings of Clear Spot? Forget ‘Em!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Captain Beefheart Available Now

We did this shootout many years ago, so many years ago that I cannot find a record of it.

I remember we thought the German pressings were perhaps a bit boosted on both ends and not as natural sounding as the domestic pressings.

After a multitude of improvements in our cleaning and playback, we would agree with our previous understanding that the German pressings are often wrong, but now we also know how right the right ones can be.

It turns out tha some German pressings are not particularly good, another piece of the puzzle that fell into place during our most recent shootout, as painful as that turned out to be considering the money wasted on them.

Did we have the bad German stamper pressings last time around? Who knows?

The producer, Ted Templeman, (Doobie Brothers, James Taylor) brought his mainstream talents to bear on this music, and when the Captain’s free-form tendencies smashed into Templeman’s conservatism, the result was this musical supernova — out there, but not too far out there.

(Play Trout Mask Replica sometime if you miss that feeling from your old hippie days of being on acid. With that music, drugs are entirely superfluous.)

I don’t know how many audiophiles like Captain Beefheart, probably not too many, but if you’re ever going to try one of his albums, this is the place to start: his masterpiece.

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The Beatles 10 Copy Shootout – “I was near a nervous breakdown.”

More of the Music of The Beatles

Reviews and Commentaries for The White Album

Our good customer Erik in Germany purchased one of our hottest Hot Stamper White Albums ($700) and decided to do his own shootout with the ten — count ’em, ten — copies he had on hand.  

He makes a point to mention that it’s worth the seven hundred bucks he paid (plus international shipping and customs, let’s not forget, so add another 20-25% on to that figure). Some skeptics may think he’s suffering from Cognitive Dissonance, but we say there’s nothing dissonant about the kind of sound Erik describes hearing in the testimonial he sent us, as follows.

[UPDATE: We should note that for about the last ten years we have preferred the right UK pressings of the album over our previous favorite, the right German pressing. A textbook case of live and learn.]

Hello my friends,

I want to say THANK YOU for the Beatles White Album Hot Stamper. I’m so amazed and lucky – I can’t describe it. You graded it correct (A+/A++/A++/A++ to A+++) and it is worth the price, the sound is exactly “sweet, breathy vocals; well-defined bass; stunning clarity; warmth and richness; immediacy; astonishing transparency and spaciousness; clear transients; loads of ambience and more.”

I’m at the source here in good old Germany concerning the German Apple pressings, collected 10 copies (also a UK first issue and one in a box). 4 were crap, half a dozen had the condition for a shootout. But not one single side reach a rating above A-, I was near a nervous breakdown. Now this problem is solved and I can simply enjoy the album in the future.

Kind regards

Erik

Erik, so glad to hear our copy of the White Album so easily vanquished all comers. We live for letters like yours!

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 99% of the time.

It is not the least bit unusual for our customers to take another listen and become more aware of the superior sound of the Hot Stamper pressings the second time around.

When we do lose a shootout, we promptly refund the buyer’s money and wish him or her a nice day.

What do we do with the record, assuming the customer had no problem with its playing condition?

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