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.

Led Zeppelin on Prestigious Japanese Limited Edition Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. In 2006 I finally woke up to how ridiculously bad these Japanese pressings I was selling back in the 90s actually were.

It’s what real progress in audio is all about, in this case about ten years’ worth. Those are ten years that really shook my world, and by 2007 we had discovered much better cleaning technologies and given up on Heavy Vinyl and audiophile bullshit pressings such as these, whew!

Our story from 2006:

I used to sell the German Import reissues of the Zep catalog in the 90s. At the time I thought they we’re pretty good, but then the Japanese AMJY Series came out and I thought they were clearly better.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I now realize those Japanese pressings are bright as bright can be. Now, not-too-surprisingly, the German pressings sound more or less right (on some of their titles).

They tend to be tonally correct, which is more than you can say for most Zep pressings, especially some of the Classics [linked here], which have the same brightness issue (as well as many other problems).

UPDATE 2024

Only one of the German-pressed Zeppelin records is good enough to win shootouts, the only title of theirs on German vinyl that we buy these days. Of course we tried them all, at no small expense I might add, because there were a great many pressings cut by many different engineers over the course of decades that were pressed in Germany, and the only way we could judge them was to buy them and have them shipped over. In the end only one had the big, bold, dynamic sound we were after.

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Room Treatments Bring Out The Big Speaker Whomp Factor

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The first Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 album is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback.

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to grant the listener the privilege of hearing all the elements laid out clearly, each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. 

With recent changes to some of our room treatments, we now have even more transparency in the mids and highs, while improving the whomp factor (the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp) at the listening position.

There’s always tons of bass being produced when you have three 12′ woofers firing away, but getting the bass out of the corners and into the center of the room is one of the toughest tricks in audio.

For a while we were quite enamored with some later pressings of this album — they were cut super clean, with extended highs and amazing transparency, with virtually none of the congestion in the loud parts you hear on practically every copy.

But that clarity comes at a price, and it’s a steep one. The best early pressings have whomp down below only hinted at by the “cleaner” reissues. It’s the same way super transparent half-speeds fool most audiophiles. For some reason audiophiles rarely seem to notice the lack of weight and solidity down below that they’ve sacrificed for this improved clarity. (Probably because it’s the rare audiophile speaker that can really move enough air to produce the whomp we are talking about here.)

But hey, look who’s talking! I was fooled too. You have to get huge amounts of garbage out of your system (and your room) before the trade-offs become obvious.

When you find that special early pressing, one with all the magic in the midrange and top without any loss of power down below, then my friend you have one of those “I Can’t Believe It’s A Record” records. We call them Hot Stampers here at Better Records, and they’re guaranteed to blow your mind. (more…)

The Fox Touch Is Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

The review reproduced below was written in 2010. More recently (2015 or so) I have played copies of these Crystal Clear organ recordings and been much less impressed.

The ambience is a fraction of what it should be, and the reason I know that is that the vintage organ recordings we play these days have dramatically more size and space than these audiophile pressings do. (We wrote about it here.)

A classic case of live and learn.

As we like to say, all these audiophile records sound great sitting on the shelf. When you finally pull one out to play it, you may find that it doesn’t sound the nearly as good as you remember, and that’s a good thing.

It’s a sign you are making progress in this hobby.

Ten years from now, if during that time you’ve worked hard on your stereo system, room, electricity and all the rest, your Heavy Vinyl pressings will also have plenty of flaws you never knew were there.

Our customers know what I am talking about. Some have even written us letters about it.

Linked here are some other records that are good for testing orchestral depth, size and space.

Our old review — way off the mark it seems!

White Hot on both sides, a DEMO DISC quality organ Direct to Disc recording.

Full, rich, spacious, big and transparent, with no smear.

The size and power of a huge church organ captured in glorious direct to disc analog.

We’ve never been fans of Crystal Clear, but even we must admit this recording is Hard To Fault.

Are we changing our tune about Audiophile records? Not in the least; we love the ones that sound right.

The fact that so few of them do is not our fault. 

The methods used to make a given record are of no interest whatsoever to us. We clean and play the pressings that we have on hand and judge the sound and music according to a single standard that we set for all such recordings. Organ records, in this case, get judged against other organ records. If you’ve been an audiophile for forty years as I have, you’ve heard plenty of organ records.

Practically every audiophile label on the planet produced at least one, and most made more than one. Some of the major labels made them by the dozen in the ’50s and ’60s, and many of those can sound quite wonderful.

Who made this one, how they made it or why they made it the way they did is none of our concern, nor in our mind should it be of any concern to you. The music, the sound and the surfaces are what are important in a record, nothing else.

Richter was making recordings of this caliber for London in the ’50s. Clearly the direct to disc process is not revelatory when it comes to organ records (or any other records for that matter), but finding vintage Londons with quiet vinyl that sound as good as this disc does is neither easy nor cheap these days, so we are happy to offer our Bach loving customers a chance to hear these classic works sounding as good as they can outside of a church or concert hall.

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There’s a Very Good Chance We Were Wrong about Mulligan Meets Getz

More of the Music of Stan Getz /More of the Music of Gerry Mulligan

This is an album that we were probably wrong about in 2021 when the following Hot Stamper two-pak pressing went up for sale on the site. (The pressings we liked at the time are long gone by now.) Here is what we wrote back then:

Mulligan and Getz’s 1957 collaboration arrives on the site with this superb 2-pack offering Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner

Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory

Practically impossible to find in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces – it took two different pressings to get two good sides, and they are very good indeed

The reissues we discovered in 2025 trounced the originals (in both stereo and mono) as well as the early reissues (on the Verve T Label) we played in our shootout, as you can see from the stamper sheet notes below:

Our mistaken judgment is simply the result of ignorance. In 2021 we simply had no idea just how good this recording could sound on vintage vinyl. We hadn’t done our homework properly, and because of that we came up with the wrong answer.

We only discovered the right pressings, with the right stampers, pressed in the right era, and mastered by the right guy, sometime in 2024 or so. We bought a bunch of those and in 2025 did the shootout with all kinds of copies, just to keep everybody honest.

That was the year much better sounding reissue copies that look like the one you see on the left came along. As we noted in the listing:

  • Leave it to Better Records to figure out a complicated title with a long history such as this one – originals, reissues, monos, stereos, we had to play them all to find a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory.

Some quick notes:

Bowtie Label Stereo

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Living and Learning Is How the Game Is Played

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

A classic case of live and learn.

Scroll down to read more about what we learned from a big shootout we did many years ago for the Self-Titled album.

To illustrate how the game is played, we’ve copied some of the previous commentary into this listing to clarify how our understanding had changed from 2004 to roughly 2010, which is when all the comments you see below were written.

Live and Learn, Part One

These domestic original pressings have the very same stamper numbers as the British pressings. It appears that the metalwork was produced in England and shipped to America for pressing on domestic vinyl. What’s strange is that the American pressings are consistently brighter than the British pressings. Why this should be is a mystery, but I have a theory to explain it. The British stampers are used to make British LPs on that lovely see-through purple vinyl, and I’m guessing that that compound is a little smoother sounding than the vinyl that Uni uses. Either that or there is some other way that Uni produces their records so that they end up being brighter, even using the exact same stampers as the British ones.”

Partly true.

We have five British copies in stock, and the reason they don’t sound as good probably has less to do with British vinyl and more to do with the fact that the British ones we have are not the stampers we like the best. The domestic pressings with our favorite stampers have more highs and better highs and just plain sound better to us now.

Notice how I completely contradict myself below, yet both listings were up on the site all this time and nobody, especially me, seems to have noticed.

Live and Learn, Part Two

These original British pressings, with the lovely see-through purple vinyl, are the only good sounding versions of this album that I have ever heard. As you can imagine they are extremely difficult to come by in clean condition.

What is there to say about such a bald-faced turnabout?

Simple. We make our judgments based on the records we have on hand to play. When better pressings come along, or our equipment has improved to the point where we can appreciate other pressings, we will happily and unhesitatingly report what we hear.

The Best Version?

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In 2004 We Mistaked Finlandia on VICS for a Demo Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sibelius Available Now

UPDATE 2024

We played a 4S/1S copy of this record, VICS 1069, and thought it sounded terrible.

It was flat and bright with splashy cymbals and crude brass.

Even if we assume the copy we played many years ago could have been much better than this latest pressing — which is doubtful but certainly possible — there is no reason to pursue this version of the album when there are known top quality pressings of this very same performance on Decca.

Our Old Review

DEMO QUALITY SOUND and quiet surfaces too.

I don’t know when I’ve heard this album with better sound. This one may be better than the best Shaded Dog for all I know — it’s that good.

You’ll notice that there is a copy of this very same record on the website for $1.99. That one sounds dull. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a better sounding copy of this record than the pressing we are selling here, because it really is an exceptionally good sounding record. If it weren’t, it would be more like $1.99.

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Grossman & Renbourn Direct to Disc – Updated

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

Many years ago we described the East World Direct-To-Disc Japanese import LP you see pictured this way:

Lovely acoustic music; the best cuts are the first two tracks on side two. They sound like a classic Vanguard recording from the 60s. One of the best East World titles.

UPDATE 2025

In preparation for a possible shootout, we got another copy of the record in and were much less impressed in 2025 than we were in 2010, which was probably the last time we had played the record.

It was somewhat veiled and dry. The sound wasn’t bad, it was actually fairly good, but that’s a long way from amazing. If we’re going to offer you an acoustic guitar recording, it’s going to have to be amazing sounding because there are a lot of amazing sounding vintage acoustic guitar albums from the 50s to the 70s to compete with.

And to compare it to a classic Vanguard recording is just ridiculous.

Vanguard produced some the most natural recordings in the history of the recorded music. East World produced some decent, modern and somewhat artificial-sounding recordings of mostly forgettable music in the 70s. We had no business comparing the two of them.

We obviously had a long way to go in audio before we got straightened out on that point. We’re always banging on about making audio progress so that you can recognize and collect better sounding records, and this East World pressing is the perfect example of us taking our own advice.

Our stereo had improved so much over that span of fifteen years that it was now obvious to us how second-rate this Japanese Direct-to-Disc actually was.

If you have any Direct-to-Disc recordings still sitting on your record shelf, pull some of them down and see how well the sound — and the music — hold up. Chances are good that a number of them might soon be finding a new home in the trade-in pile, in order to clear more space for better records.

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Don’t Skip the OJC, Put It in a Shootout

Of the three early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound we played recently, only one met our standards. At 2+/1.5+, the sound was good, not great.

One copy earned grades of 1+/1+, which means the sound was passable. The last copy had an NFG side two, which means it was just awful.

(Many of the Heavy Vinyl disasters we’ve been cataloging lately have earned that notorious grade. The unacceptably lo- to mid-fi sound even the better ones offer doesn’t seem to bother the audiophiles who rave about them, however.)

So does side two of the OJC pressing have fairly good sound, merely passable sound, or is the sound hopelessly bad?

In the case of this Shelly Manne album, all three, and the only way we were able to discover that is by cleaning up three of them and playing them head to head with real Contemporary pressings in a blinded experiment.

Obviously we were hoping for better results from our OJCs — only one of the copies we played will turn out to be saleable.

Why did we bother? That old bugaboo the profit motive was all that was needed to make us give the OJC pressings a try. We thought we could make money on them but it turns out that the opposite will happen. Oh well, nothing ventured, noting gained.

More importantly, we are not the least bit shy about coming clean and sharing the results with our readers and customers, especially the part about three identical looking copies with the same stamper numbers all sounding very diffferent from each other.

An added bonus is that side two was worse than side one most of the time. That happens often enough, but nobody but us ever seems to want to talk about it.

If we had had ten OJC pressings to play, we probably would have be able to find at least one or two with a grade of 2+/2+, meaning that George Horn probably did a creditable job mastering the album back in 1984 when he cut it for Fantasy, to sell for the very affordable price of $5.98. It’s most likely the pressing plant that let listeners down.

Needs Tubes

The problem here is that this title needs tubes, or, at the very least, the sound of tubes, and George apparently did not have them, or enough of them, in his mastering chain.

Our specific notes can be seen on the left. We mention that the first track has the best sound (1956 dates), the rest falling short for being darker and more crude (“old school,” some dating from 1953).

The West Coast horn players are the reason to buy this title, with horns that are “sweet and tubey,” but of course to hear that kind of sound you will need a real Contemporary pressing, not an OJC — or anything made in the modern era for that matter.

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Now, There Was A Song! Sounds Bad to Us Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Johnny Cash Available Now

UPDATE 2024

We got a couple of nice copies of this record in recently and they sounded terrible.

We suspect we were being too generous with our previous review. Buy this one for the music of you like, but don’t expect it to have audiophile quality sound.

This very nice looking original Columbia Stereo 360 Label LP has that authentic early Johnny Cash sound. We put this through our cleaning process and took a listen. The EQ on his vocals is a little bit brighter than we like but overall the album has LOTS OF TUBEY MAGIC!

“This is an outstanding album of covers of old country songs, from the familiar (Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, George Jones) to lesser-known gems. ” AMG

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

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Longstanding customers know that we have been relentlessly critical of so-called “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.

(Old) 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 they’re making?

If you have midrangy transistor equipment, go with the 180 gram version (at twice the price).

If you have good equipment, go with this one.

UPDATE 2015

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?

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