Rock-Pop Collection

These titles should make up the core of any serious collection of rock and pop albums. The emphasis here is on higher quality recordings.

Frank Zappa / Hot Rats

More of the Music of Frank Zappa

More Jazz Fusion


  • Hot Rats returns to the site for only the second time in years on this original Bizarre pressing with two killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • The overall sound here is musical, natural and balanced with an abundance of Tubey Magical that only these better early pressings can offer
  • If you know the album well, and I know it very well, having played it literally hundreds of times, the Classic is positively unlistenable and will never come close to the big, rich analog sonics of the real deal we’re offering here
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Hot Rats still sizzles; few albums originating on the rock side of jazz-rock fusion flowed so freely between both sides of the equation, or achieved such unwavering excitement and energy.”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1969, one that should have a place in any audiophile’s collection

It takes us years to find copies that sound like this one. Bernie’s version for Classic beats a lot of copies out there, but it can’t hold a candle to this one.

I’ve been listening to Hot Rats since I was in high school. It’s still remarkably fresh and original, even now. This is not music for the faint of heart. Audiophiles who prefer a steady diet of Patricia Barber and her like will find little of interest here. But for those of you who want to explore something completely original and a bit “out there,” this should be right up your alley — and be sure to check out Waka Jawaka, too.

Reading in the liner notes today, I see that one of the engineers on this album is Jack Hunt, the famous half-speed mastering engineer who cut records for Mobile Fidelity and Direct Disc Labs. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

(more…)

George Harrison – All Things Must Pass

More George Harrison

More of The Beatles

  • With superb sound on all six sides, this early British box set of All Things Must Pass will be very hard to beat
  • If you’ve struggled with domestic pressings and later imports or Heavy Vinyl reissues, your troubles are over – here is the sound you were looking for
  • This is a tough record to play, but if you devoted plenty of time and money into your system, and you have big dynamic speakers and the power to drive them to fairly loud levels, you are really in for a treat with this set
  • 5 stars: “Without a doubt, Harrison’s first solo recording is his best. Drawing on his backlog of unused compositions from the late Beatles era, Harrison crafted material that managed the rare feat of conveying spiritual mysticism without sacrificing his gifts for melody and grand, sweeping arrangements.”
  • This is clearly George Harrison’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist can be found here.
  • This is a Must Own title from 1970, an exceptionally good year for rock and pop music
  • Ken Scott used a great deal of tube compression in the mixing and mastering of the album, which of course makes the sound exceptionally Tubey Magical. No modern reissue we’ve ever played has been able to capture that sound
  • The flip side is that it is also one of the most difficult to reproduce, requiring the highest quality, most transparent, least distorted, most highly-tweaked equipment in order to cut through the layers and layers of sound

(more…)

Elton John / Honky Chateau – A Must Own Classic

More Elton John

Reviews and Commentaries for Honky Chateau

  • This vintage UK import pressing boasts superb Tubey Magical British Rock sound, with excellent Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides
  • A monster Demo Disc – the bottom end is huge, the top is open and extended, and the overall tonality rich and balanced
  • An amazing recording and a founding member of our Top 100 – it’s a shame we rarely find them with sound this good and audiophile quality surfaces (DJM see-through vinyl being what it is)
  • 5 stars: “The most focused and accomplished set of songs Elton John and Bernie Taupin ever wrote.”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1972, one that deserves a place in any audiophile’s collection
  • Honky Chateau is also one of those albums with one set of very special stampers that consistently win shootouts.

If you doubt that Elton John was an unusually gifted Pop Music Genius for much of the ’70s, just play this record. These eleven tracks should serve as all the proof you could possibly need. There’s not a dog in the bunch, and most of these songs are positively brilliant. Drop the needle on any track, you simply can’t go wrong.

Honky Chateau has to be one of the best sounding rock records of all time — certainly worthy of a prized spot on our Rock and Pop Top 100 List. It’s a shining example of just how good High-Production-Value rock music of the ’70s can be.

The amount of effort that went into the recording of Honky Chateau is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and far too many others to list. It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.

The sides that had sound that jumped out of the speakers, with driving rhythmic energy, worked the best for us. They really brought this music to life and allowed us to make sense of it. This is yet another definition of a Hot Stamper — it’s the copy that lets the music work as music.

Big Production Tubey Magical British Rock just does not get much better than Honky Chateau. (more…)

The Band – Music From Big Pink

More of The Band

More Roots Rock LPs

  • Both sides of this vintage copy of The Band’s 1968 masterpiece boast superb Double Plus (A++) sound
  • Forget all those vague, veiled, lifeless, ambience-free Heavy Vinyl pressings – this is the Big Pink that The Band recorded!
  • Remember when you used to play the same record over and over, never taking it off the turntable for days at a time?
  • Well here it is – this pressing captures the music in a way that will make repeated plays the joy they are meant to be
  • 5 stars: “…as soon as ‘The Weight’ became a singles chart entry, the album and the group made their own impact, influencing a movement toward roots styles and country elements in rock. Over time, [the album] came to be regarded as a watershed work in the history of rock, one that introduced new tones and approaches to the constantly evolving genre.”
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Music from Big Pink is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but would be well advised to get to know better.

We guarantee you have never heard Music from Big Pink sound as good as it does on this very copy. There’s plenty of the all-important Tubey Magic and real weight to the bottom. You’ll have a VERY hard time finding one that sounds this good, if our experience is any guide.

This copy has the kind of sound we look for in a top quality Band record: immediacy in the vocals (so many copies are veiled and distant); natural tonal balance (most copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; ones with the right balance are the exception, not the rule); good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful); spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space); and last but not least, transparency, the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this sophisticated recording. (more…)

Boston – Self-Titled

More Boston

Hot Stamper Albums with Huge Choruses

  • With big, bold, hard-rockin’ Double Plus (A++) sound, this pressing will show you just how good Boston’s debut album can sound
  • The multi-tracked, multi-layered guitars are as big as life on this copy and guaranteed to rock your world — on big speakers at loud levels this is a Demo Disc with few peers
  • 4 1/2 stars and a Top 100 title: “Nearly every song on Boston’s debut album can still be heard on classic rock radio today due to the strong vocals of Brad Delp and unique guitar sound of Tom Scholz. Boston is essential for any fan of classic rock, and the album marks the re-emergence of the genre in the 1970s.”
  • This is clearly Boston’s best sounding album. Roughly 100 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist or group can be found here.
  • In our opinion, this is the only Boston record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call one and done

Boston’s first (and only good) album is a long-time member of our Top 100, and on a great pressing like this it’s easy to see why. It’s an incredible recording when you can hear it right, and this is about as right as it gets!

It’s obvious why the first Boston album became a Multi-Platinum Record. Practically every one of its songs still gets heavy radio play on every rock station in town. Consummately well-crafted music like this is almost impossible to find nowadays. I guess that’s why they call it Classic Rock.

More Guitar

The multi-tracked layers of guitars really come to life on the better copies. The not-so-great pressings tend to be congested and compressed, thickening the sound and diffusing the layers of multi-tracked harmonies. Tom Scholz’s uniquely overdriven, distorted leads have near-perfect timbre. On the top copies, you can really hear how much power that sound adds to the music.

As is the case for better pressings of Aqualung, when the guitar sounds this good, it really makes you sit up and take notice of the guy’s playing. When the sound works the music works, our seven word definition of a Hot Stamper copy.

Tubey Magical guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Our killer copies have sweetness and tubey warmth we didn’t expect to hear. Better yet, the best copies have jump-out-of-the-speakers presence without being aggressive, no mean feat.

The good ones make you want to turn up the volume; the louder they get the better they sound. Try that with the average copy. When playing mass-market pop-rock music like this, more level usually means only one thing: bloody eardrums.

The typical Boston EQ is radio-friendly, not audiophile-friendly. But some were cut right, with the kind of richness, sweetness and smoothness that we fondly refer to here at Better Records as The Sound of Analog.

Choruses Are Key

The production techniques used on the late Brad Delp’s powerful vocals had to be implemented with the utmost skill and care or they would never have made the album the smash success that it is. His vocals are one of the great strengths of the album. You can be sure the producers and engineers knew that they had a very special singer in Brad and lavished their time and energy on getting his voice just right in the mix, making use of plenty of roomy analog reverb around both his multi-tracked leads and the background harmonies as well.

After hearing plenty of copies, one thing became clear — if the vocals don’t have good presence and breathy texture, you might as well be listening to the radio. Toss it onto the trade-in pile and move on. Brad really belts out those high notes; the right blend of clarity and weight is what lets his soaring vocals work their chart-topping magic.

The richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality is most apparent on Boston where you most always hear it on a pop record: in the biggest, loudest, densest, most climactic choruses.

We set the playback volume so that the loudest parts of the record are as huge and powerful as they can possibly grow to be without crossing the line into distortion or congestion. On some records, Dark Side of the Moon comes instantly to mind, the guitar solos on “Money” are the loudest thing on the record. On Breakfast in America the sax toward the end of “The Logical Song” is the biggest and loudest sound on the record, louder even than Roger Hodgson’s near-hysterical multi-tracked screaming ‘Who I am’ about three quarters of the way through. Those, however, are clearly exceptions to the rule. Most of the time it’s the final chorus that gets bigger and louder than anything else.

(more…)

The Doors / Waiting For the Sun

More of The Doors

More Psych Rock

  • With two seriously good Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Gold Label pressing
  • The sound is present, lively and tonally correct, with Jim Morrison’s baritone reproduced with the palpable weight and presence that the reissues barely begin to reproduce
  • It’s tough (not to mention expensive) to find these early pressings with this kind of sound and reasonably quiet vinyl, but we found this one, and it blew our mind
  • “Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore were never more lucid… This was a band at its most dexterous, creative, and musically diverse …”
  • If I were to make a list of my favorite rock and pop albums from 1968, this album would definitely be on it, close to the top I should think
  • Our review detailing the somewhat surprising shortcomings of the DCC pressing can be found here, and the story of how long it took me to figure out The Doors on vinyl (30 years or so!) can be found here

Here is THE BIG SOUND that makes Doors records such a thrill to play. Morrison’s vocals sound just right — full-bodied, breathy and immediate. The transparency makes it possible to easily pick out Bruce Botnick’s double tracking of Morrison’s leads.

For a thrill just drop the needle on Not To Touch The Earth. Halfway through the song the members have sort of a duel — Robbie Krieger wailing on the guitar in one channel, Ray Manzarek pounding on the keyboards in the other, and John Densmore responding with drum fills behind them.

On the average copy, the parts get congested and lose their power, but when you can easily pick out each musician, their part will raise the hair on your arms.

It’s absolutely chilling, and it will no doubt remind you why you fell in love with The Doors in the first place. Who else can do this kind of voodoo the way that they do?

Check out the piano on Yes The River Knows on side two (such an underrated song!) or the big snare thwacks on Five To One to hear that Hot Stamper magic.

The overall sound is airy, open, and spacious — you can really hear INTO the soundfield on a track like Yes The River Knows. The opaque quality that so many pressings of this album suffer from is nowhere to be found here.

Not only that, but you will not believe how hard these sides rock. (more…)

Harry Nilsson / Nilsson Schmilsson – A True Masterpiece

More Harry Nilsson

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Harry Nilsson

  • Outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound brings Harry Nilsson’s indisputable masterpiece of Bent Rock to life on this vintage copy (only the second to hit the site in over three years)
  • Both sides are remarkably good sounding, thanks to the brilliant engineering skills of Phill (That’s Two L’s) Brown
  • A Better Records favorite (we give it Five Stars) that really comes to life on a superb pressing such as this one
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…it’s a near-perfect summary of everything Nilsson could do; he could be craftier and stranger, but never did he achieve the perfect balance as he did here.”
  • If I were to compile a list of my favorite rock and pop albums from 1971, this album would definitely be on it

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies we played during our most recent shootout, and the scores w’ve suffered through before. Let’s face it: “Jump Into The Fire” will never be smooth and sweet; neither will “Down” on side one. But other tracks on this album have Demo Disc sound.

Nilsson Schmilsson is an album we think we know well. It checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

One of His Best

Son of Schmilsson and the album simply titled Harry are two other superb Nilsson records that both come highly recommended. Harry is my favorite of them all, perhaps because it was so different from anything that I’d ever heard up to that point (I was 15 at the time). A Little Touch… is also a personal favorite, with the great American songbook done in Nilsson’s inimitable style.

By the way, if you get a chance to see the documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?),” you should definitely check it out. Most of us here have seen it by now and it’s a ton of fun.

(more…)

Steely Dan – Aja

More Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Aja

  • Killer sound for Steely Dan’s magnificent Jazzy Pop breakthrough album, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Punchy, full and smooth, with the kind of rhythmic energy that brings out the jazzy funk in the music
  • A Better Records rock and pop Top 100 album and a true Demo Disc on a pressing that sounds as good as this one does
  • If I were to make a list of my favorite rock and pop albums of 1977, this album would definitely be right at the top
  • Considering how dismal the releases by Cisco Music and Mobile Fidelity were, it seems that no one outside of Bernie Grundman has managed to get Aja sounding right on vinyl, and that was 47 years ago
  • The sound is as heavily processed, artificial and overly glossy as practically anything produced in the 70s, which means that its Mid-Fi appeal is all but assured
  • For those of you on the Higher Fidelity end of the spectrum, our best Hot Stampers get everything sounding as right, balanced and natural as Aja can possibly sound
  • Unfortunately for those of you who don’t like paying our prices or doing your own shootouts, Bernie’s new UHQR leaves a lot to be desired. With mediocre-to-bad sound on all four of its sides and a price tag of $150, what else can you call it but another Analogue Productions rip-off?

Folks, there’s not much I can tell you about this copy of Aja that’s going to make you want this record, other than to say this: If you’re in the market for a superb pressing of what’s gotta be the most beloved Steely Dan record they made, look no further. It’s right here. (more…)

Jethro Tull – Thick As A Brick

More Jethro Tull

Reviews and Commentaries for Thick as a Brick

  • Thick As A Brick is back on the site for only the second time in sixteen month hiatus, here with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this early Reprise pressing
  • We had only one summarizing thought for this amazing side two: “Top detail.”
  • One of the few copies we’ve found lately with this kind of sound, but marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • A Top 100 title and the best sounding album Jethro Tull ever recorded – allow us to make the case
  • A stunning Demo Disc to rule them all – sure to be the best you’ve ever heard Tull sound if you have the system for it
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A masterpiece in the annals of progressive rock – a dazzling tour de force, at once playful, profound, and challenging, without overwhelming the listener.”

Accuracy

The kind of tonal accuracy you hear on the better copies of this album practically disappeared from records over forty years ago, which explains why so many of the LPs we offer as Hot Stampers were produced in the 70s and before. That’s when many of the highest fidelity recordings were made. In truth this very record is a superlative example of the sound the best producers, engineers, and studios were able to capture on analog tape during that very decade.

Which is a long way of saying that the better copies of Thick As A Brick have pretty much everything that we love about vinyl records here at Better Records.

Furthermore, I can guarantee you there is no CD on the planet that will ever be able to do this recording justice. Our Hot Stamper pressings — even the lowest-graded ones — have a kind of Analog Magic that just can’t be captured on one of them there silvery discs.

(more…)

The Band – Self-Titled

More of The Band

More Roots Rock LPs

  • A killer copy of an absolutely essential album with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • One of the most difficult albums to find great sound for, but the music makes it worth all the time and trouble we spent finding this outstanding copy
  • Huge amounts of deep bass (something that only the best Robert Ludwig-mastered original pressings can offer), meaty guitars and silky vocals make this pressing of The Band’s second album a very special listenng experience indeed
  • Problems in the vinyl, especially for this title, are sometimes the nature of the beast with vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of analog is important to you
  • 5 stars: “As had been true of the first album, it was the Band’s sound that stood out the most… The arrangements were simultaneously loose and assured, giving the songs a timeless appeal…”

The lucky person who takes this record home is in for quite a shock. This very pressing is proof positive that this album is much better recorded than the audiophile community gives it credit for being. How could anyone judge the sound of the record without a great copy such as this one to play?

This vintage pressing has no trace of phony sound from top to bottom. It’s raw and real in a way that makes most pop records sound processed and wrong. These two sides have plenty of the qualities we look for in an album by The Band. Energy, presence, transparency, Tubey Magic… you name it, you will find it here. Its biggest strength — and the biggest strength of the album as a whole — is its wonderful, natural midrange.

And the bass is huge. On the better copies it always is.

Drop the needle on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” or “King Harvest Has Surely Come” and get ready for some serious Analog Magic. This is The Band’s second album like you have never heard it before.

Overview

This copy has superb space in the midrange — it was wider, deeper and clearer than practically all of the Robert Ludwig originals we played (which are, of course, the only way to go on this album). Few copies were this full-bodied, solid, meaty and rich, yet clear. It was so tubey, never dry, unlike more copies than we care to remember.

Despite what anyone might tell you, it’s no mean feat to find good sounding copies of this record. There are good originals and bad originals, as well as good reissues and bad reissues. Folks, we’ve said it many times — the label can’t tell you how a record sounds, but there’s a sure way to find out that information. You’ve got to clean ’em and play ’em to find out which ones have Hot Stampers, and we seem to be the only record dealers who are doing that, in the process making unusually good pressings like this one available to you, the music-loving audiophile.

(more…)