Demo Discs for Big, Clear and Lively Choruses

Heart – Little Queen

More of the Music of Heart

  • A Little Queen like you’ve never heard, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this original Portrait pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • “Barracuda” and “Love Alive” are bar none two of Heart’s best songs and they are guaranteed to blow your mind on a copy with sound like this
  • It’s the rare copy that has the energy, dynamics, deep bass, punchy drums and meaty guitars that you get on this pressing
  • A Rock and Pop Top 100 album with Demo Disc sound on a very special pressing such as this – it will rock your world
  • 4 1/2 stars: “After acquiring a substantial following with Dreamboat Annie, Heart solidified its niche in the hard rock and arena rock worlds with the equally impressive Little Queen.”

 

This is a Classic Rock Demo Disc to beat practically anything you could throw at it. “Love Alive” and “Barracuda” on this copy will deliver the full Rock and Roll Power your system is capable of. If you’ve got The Big Sound, this is the pressing that will truly show it off.

There are plenty of commentaries that discuss the sound of this recording and what it can really do when you get hold of a good pressing… and have the system that can play it… and turn up the volume good and loud. We proudly present here a copy with the kind of Big Sound that we think backs up every claim we make.

We’re huge Heart fans here at Better Records, and we’re not ashamed to say so. These ladies can really rock, and on the right pressing their music can and will sound absolutely amazing. Here’s a copy that will allow you to hear that magic at home — the sound is super punchy with incredible energy and wonderful clarity. You’ll have a very hard time finding another copy that rocks any harder than this one.

What The Best Sides Of Little Queen Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

  • The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
  • The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1977
  • Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
  • Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments (and effects!) having the correct timbre
  • Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Wide and Tall

A key quality we look for in Hot Stamper copies of Little Queen is Wide and Tall Presentation. What exactly does that mean, you ask? The best copies, the ones that really jump out of the speakers, tend to present some (usually high frequency) information higher and more forward than others. This is not hard to miss.

When you’re playing ten or fifteen copies of the same side of the same album and suddenly a cymbal crashes higher and more clearly than all the others did in the part of the track you are testing, you can’t help but notice it. Wow! How did that get there? Once you hear it you start to listen for it, and sure enough the next copy won’t do it, nor will the next. Maybe the one after that one gets about halfway there, the cymbal crashes higher than normal but not as far as the one that really showed you how high was up.

If you’ve been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, maybe all the Little Queen pressings do it now. They might all do something they never did before, and in fact they should be doing things better now.

Our last shootout was a while back; many, many parts of the chain have undergone improvement. During this shootout we heard things in the recording we never heard before. This is the point of all this audio fooling around. It pays off, if you do it right. You have musical information waiting to be unlocked in your favorite recordings. It isn’t going to free itself. You have to do the work to set it free. Do it our way or do it some other way, but do it. You, more than anyone else, will be the one to get the benefit.

What We’re Listening For On Little Queen

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
  • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
  • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
  • Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
  • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Track Commentary

The Tracklist tab above will take you to a select song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What to Listen For advice.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found here.

Side One

Barracuda

One of the little tricks I used toward the end of my marathon Little Queen tweaking session from a few years back (which lasted more than six hours one Saturday evening, leaving me euphoric but exhausted) was to listen to the ending of Barracuda. Some of the big guitar chords at the end of the song are louder than others, and the more the differences in level among them can be heard, the better the stereo and the room must be doing.

You can’t make the guitarist play some of the notes at the end louder than others, you can only reveal the fact that he indeed must have. This is what is meant by FIDELITY, the higher the better.

Love Alive

This is as good as it gets for Heart. They really rock on this track –the sound of the drums and the guitars are perfection! This may sound heretical, but I would put Love Alive right up there with some of my favorite Led Zeppelin tunes. It ROCKS. The band is on fire; give them their due. The rhythm section on the early Heart albums is Top Notch and then some. Maybe not Bonham and Jones Quality but pretty darn good in their own right.

The beginning section has so many subtle details (such as the autoharp and tabla) that simply disappear on a run-of-the-mill system. On the best copies the autoharp sounds rich and chimey and the tabla has a fair amount of low end extension. All this gets lost in the sauce if you’re listening to an average copy, or an average stereo.

Sylvan Song
Dream of the Archer
Kick it Out

Side Two

Little Queen
Treat Me Well
Say Hello
Cry to Me
Go On Cry

AMG  Review

After acquiring a substantial following with Dreamboat Annie, Heart solidified its niche in the hard rock and arena rock worlds with the equally impressive Little Queen. Once again, loud-and-proud, Led Zeppelin-influenced hard rock was the thing that brought Heart the most attention.

But while ‘Barracuda’ and ‘Kick It Out’ are the type of sweaty rockers one thought of first when Heart’s name was mentioned, hard rock by no means dominates this album. In fact, much of Little Queen consists of such folk-influenced, acoustic-oriented fare as ‘Treat Me Well’ and ‘Cry to Me.’

Anyone doubting just how much Heart’s ballads have changed over the years need only play ‘Dream of the Archer’ next to a high-volume power ballad like ‘Waiting for an Answer’ from 1990’s Brigade.

Talking Heads – Little Creatures

More of the Music of the Talking Heads

  • Here is an original Sire pressing with an INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one – this one has the Big Beat sound we love, and fairly quiet vinyl too
  • I ask you, what record from 1985 sounds better than Little Creatures?
  • These sides are rockin’ on tracks like “Stay Up Late,” “Road To Nowhere,” “And She Was,” “Creatures of Love” and more
  • Surprisingly big, punchy and open sound for this 85 pop classic – a Top 100 album and longtime Better Records favorite
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Ear Candy …a pop album, and an accomplished one, by a band that knew what it was doing.”
  • We used to think that this album was the best sounding one the band had produced, but recently we came across some phenomenally good sounding pressings of their debut, and they now hold the Talking Heads’ crown for best sound
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Ear Candy …a pop album, and an accomplished one, by a band that knew what it was doing.”

We’re huge fans of Little Creatures, and when you hear a copy like this you’ll know exactly why. Not many records from this era sound as amazingly rich as this one, not in our experience anyway.

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Elton John – Self-Titled

More of the Music of Elton John

  • With two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this copy was giving us the sound we were looking for on Elton’s sophomore release – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • These sides are huge, and the music positively jumps out of the speakers – accept no substitutes!
  • A vintage British DJM pressing with sound this good is a Must Own for all right thinking music lovers of the audiophile persuasion – this is a very special recording, one that will reward countless plays for as long as you live
  • Some of the most remarkable string arrangements (and Tubey Magical string sound) ever recorded for a pop album
  • Top 100 and 4 1/2 stars: “Even with the strings and choirs that dominate the sound of the album, John manages to rock out on a fair share of the record. …Elton John remains one of his best records.”
  • A permanent resident of our Top 100 rock and pop list — this album is a Must Own from 1970
  • 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. Elton John is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but would certainly benefit from getting to know better.

Folks, if you’re looking for classic popular music that still appeals to sophisticated adults fifty-plus years after it came out, this is the album for you. It’s one of the four classic Elton John records (five if you count GYBR) that belong in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection.

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James Taylor – Sweet Baby James

More of the Music of James Taylor

  • An early Green Label pressing with seriously good sound for this inarguable JT Masterpiece, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • All that lovely echo is a dead giveaway that side one of this pressing has resolution far beyond that of the others you may have heard (and of course the Rhino Heavy Vinyl), and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • Richness and body and Tubey Magic are every bit as important – when those big choruses kick in, you want the sound of all those singers to be as big as life without the strain that accompanies their voices on so many copies
  • Finding early pressings without marks or groove damage is no mean feat these days, but here’s one to prove it can be done
  • Top 100 and 5 stars: “Sweet Baby James launched not only Taylor’s career as a pop superstar but also the entire singer/songwriter movement of the early 70s that included Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and others…”
  • If you’re a James Taylor fan — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this title is clearly one of the best albums released in 1970 and a true Must Own for the singer-songwriter-loving audiophile

Vocal reproduction is key to the better sounding copies of Sweet Baby James, as it is on so many singer-songwriter albums from the era.

To find a copy where Taylor’s vocals are front and center — which is exactly where they should be — but still rich, sweet, tonally correct and Tubey Magical is no mean feat. Only the better copies manage to pull it off.

Out of the dozen or more Green Label early pressings we play every year, relatively few have the full complement of Midrange Magic we know the best copies can have. As a rule of thumb, the hotter the stamper, the better the vocal reproduction on that copy.

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The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • With two solid Double Plus (A++) sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage UK Parlophone LP – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Huge, spacious and detailed, with the Tubey Magic of a fresh tape, this is the way to hear Sgt. Pepper in all its analog glory, not remixed and not remastered (and ruined, of course)
  • Most pressings – especially the new ones – have nothing approaching the resolution, Tubey Magic, space and energy of this LP
  • A Better Records Top 100 – “It’s possible to argue that there are better Beatles albums, yet no album is as historically important as this.”
  • It’s hard to conceive of any list of the best rock and pop albums of 1967 that would not have this record on it, and there is a very good chance it would be perched right at the top of that list
  • Quite a few customers have written us letters telling us how much they enjoyed the Hot Stamper pressing of Sgt. Pepper we sent them

The sound here is so big and rich, so clear and transparent, that we would be very surprised, shocked even, if you’ve ever imagined that any pressing of Sgt. Pepper could sound this powerful and REAL. (more…)

Supertramp – Crisis? What Crisis?

More of the Music of Supertramp

  • This UK import copy was doing most everything right, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides
  • Lots of quiet passages make this title one of the most difficult to find in audiophile playing condition, but here one is!
  • Most pressings are painfully thin and harsh, but this one had much more of the richness and smoothness we were looking for, miles away from the painfully bad original domestic pressings we know to avoid
  • Credit the man behind the board, Ken Scott (Ziggy Stardust, Honky Chateau, Crime of the Century, A Salty Dog, Magical Mystery Tour, America and more), who knows a thing or two about Tubey Magic
  • A Desert Island Disc for TP, from all the way back in 1975 when I first gave it a spin on my Ariston RD 11 turntable
  • “Even simple tracks like ‘Lady’ and ‘Just a Normal Day’ blend in nicely with the album’s warm personality and charmingly subtle mood. Although the tracks aren’t overly contagious or hook laden, there’s still a work-in-process type of appeal spread through the cuts, which do grow on you over time.”

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Fleetwood Mac – Self-Titled

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

  • This vintage copy of the band’s self-titled release boasts very good Hot Stamper sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • It’s richer and fuller than the average copy, with notably more presence, and that will be especially true when you compare it to whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing may be currently available
  • This is true of even our lowest-priced, lowest-graded copies – they are guaranteed to sound much better than any pressing you can find on the market today, as well as any pressing you may already own
  • A Rock and Pop Top 100 title – their best recording bar none
  • 5 stars: “Fleetwood Mac is a blockbuster album that isn’t dominated by its hit singles, and its album tracks demonstrate a depth of both songwriting and musicality that would blossom fully on Rumours.”

Until we started doing these shootouts, I had no idea this album was recorded so well. There are layers and layers of subtle instrumental textures and recording effects throughout this album that I never even knew were there.

We wish more copies in our shootout had that “jump out of the speakers” sound we knew was possible from our previous shootouts of the album. When finally one did, boy did it ever. 

Many of the notes you see below are the same as the ones we made for the last two shootouts we did. If you have a big speaker system and have taken advantage of the audio revolutions we discuss throughout the site, this is the kind of record that can help you chart your progress. When a record like this blows everything you’ve ever heard out of the water, you are definitely on the right track.

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David Bowie – Let’s Dance

More of the Music of David Bowie

  • With two excellent sides, this vintage pressing can rock with the best of them – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • It’s all here: huge amounts of solid bass, clear guitar transients, breathy, natural vocals, and jump out of the speakers presence and energy
  • A real Demo Disc on the right system – “Modern Love,” “China Girl” and the title track are knockouts when you play them good and loud
  • On a Hot Stamper pressing that sounds as good as this one does, Omar Hakim’s drumming will rock your world like nothing you have heard
  • Top 100, of course – Let’s Dance is one of the best sounding Bowie albums ever recorded – this superb pressing is proof
  • One of the best releases of 1983, although that may not be saying much, since by 1983 popular music was definitely headed downhill — Bowie himself would never again release an album as good as Let’s Dance

Bowie is without question one of the all time great frontmen and producers. This is his last good album and a Must Own for audiophiles, especially if you have big dynamic speakers. Like we say, with this one you are in for a treat.

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Ambrosia / One Eighty

More of the Music of Ambrosia

  • Boasting two INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this copy of Ambrosia’s 4th studio album could not be beat – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is lively, punchy, and powerful – with all due respect, it should murder whatever copies you may have
  • Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live
  • “The ballads are the album’s redeeming feature. They are all lovingly crafted and boast strong, often complex melodies that keep them from getting too sappy or sentimental… The album’s finale, ‘Biggest Part of Me,’ is the best… It combines rich Beach Boys-styled harmonies with a heartfelt lyric to create a rich slice of blue-eyed soul that gave the group a number two hit single…”
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for One Eighty.  Click on this link to see other titles with a single set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

This is smooth, rich analog at its best. Easy on the ears as we like to say.

This is clearly the poppier side of Ambrosia, containing two of their highest-charting mainstream hits, “Biggest Part of Me” (#3) and “You’re the Only Woman” (#13). I, myself, of course prefer the proggy first two albums, falling as they do into the broad category of Art Rock where my favorite albums by Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music, Supertramp, 10cc, later-period Beatles, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Traffic and so many others from the last forty-plus years can be found.

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Queen – The Game

More of the Music of Queen

  • This copy of Queen’s hit-filled release from 1980 boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish
  • One of our top picks for amazing Queen sound – few of their recordings can touch it for energy and size
  • Plenty of hits here, including “Another One Bites The Dust” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” which both sound incredible here
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… the striking difference with this album is that it finds Queen turning decidedly, decisively pop, and it’s a grand, state-of-the-art circa 1980 pop album that still stands as one of the band’s most enjoyable records.”

On this killer copy you get solid bass, Tubey Magic, breathy vocals and big, bold sound!

Compared to a lot of the copies we played, these sides have more energy, bigger bass and even more present and breathy vocals.

This is without a doubt some of the best sound we have ever heard for Queen, no ifs, ands or buts about it.

The quality of bass on this record is often superb. The best copies were Demo Discs in that regard. You have probably never heard Queen sound this good.

Take it from us, the guys who play nothing but vintage vinyl all day: not many Queen records sound as good as The Game.

The Game Rocks

The Game rocks. It’s everything we want in a good Queen record. Credit must, of course, go to their engineer, a fellow who goes by the name of Reinhold Mack. This is his first album for Queen and he really nailed it. Mack also worked with Electric Light Orchestra and those are some wonderful sounding Big Production Rock recordings.

We’re big dynamic speaker guys here at Better Records and we love the “big sound.” (Wish we could find more clean, top quality copies of ELO’s albums. With few exceptions, most of their titles are hard to come by. You don’t see many on our site for precisely the same reasons that you don’t see much Queen on our site.)

The Game is clearly one of the two best sounding records Queen ever made. Do you see a lot of Queen albums going up on the site? The demand is there, but where is the supply?

There’s a good reason for their scarcity as Hot Stampers. As much as people might love to hear some top quality pressing of Queen on vinyl, we just can’t seem to find many that do their brand of multi-layered Big Production Rock justice.

No need for Brit vinyl on The Game, thank goodness. This domestic pressing has the sound of a Master Tape, no doubt about it. The sound is superb throughout, not a claim we can make for many Queen records.

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