CD Advice

This Is the Most Amazing Record the Dregs Ever Made

dixiedregsHot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

This is the band’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.

It’s also a clear case of one and done, at least when it comes to vinyl. (The live album, Bring ‘Em Back Alive, shown below, is only available on CD, but it comes highly recommended as well. I listen to it regularly.)

If you want to hear what happens when five virtuoso instrumentalists manage to combine their talent for Jazz, Rock, Classical and Country (thanks god there aren’t any vocals) into a potent mix that defies classification and breaks all the rules, this is the one. It reminds me of Ellington’s famous line that there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. This is the kind of music you may have trouble describing, but one thing’s for sure — it’s good. In fact it’s really good.

This is the most AMAZING album the Dregs ever recorded, and now this wild amalgamation of rock, jazz, country, prog and classical music has the kind of sound I always dreamed it could have. It’s rich and smooth like good ANALOG should be. It’s also got plenty of energy and rock and roll drive, which is precisely where the famous half-speed falls apart.

Few audiophiles know this music, and that’s a shame. This record is just a delight from beginning to end.

I’m apparently not the only one who noticed how good the album is. In 1980 Dregs of the Earth received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

The notes for our recent shootout winner are shown below:

More amazing finds like this one can be found here.

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Which Album by The Who Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

We think Tommy has the best Who sound.

I don’t know of another Who album with such consistently good sound — song to song, not copy to copy of course. Just about every song on here can sound wonderful on the right UK pressing.

If you’re lucky enough to get hold of a killer copy, you’re going to be blown away by the Tubey Magical guitars, the rock-solid bottom end, the jumpin’-out-of-the-speakers presence and dynamics, and the silky vocals and top end.

Usually the best we can give you for The Who is big and rockin’ (Who’s Next, Live at Leeds), but on Tommy, we can give you 60s analog magic you will rarely find in the decades to follow.

Killer Acoustic Guitars

Acoustic guitar reproduction is key to this recording, and on the best copies the harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard in every strum.

What do high grades give you for this album? Silky, sweet vocals; huge weight to the bottom end; “you are there” immediacy; BIG drums, off the charts rock and roll energy, and shocking clarity and transparency.

No other Who album in our experience has all these things in such abundance.

The Tubey Magic Top Ten

You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amount of Tubey Magic that exists on this recording. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Tommy.

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Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

This review was written many years ago, shortly after the release of the album in the early-2000s.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino bills their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they did starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.” If this is what vinyl sounds like I’d switch to CD myself.

And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them! I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine, thank you very much. I find this very, very sad. More proof, as if we needed it, that the audiophile record collecting world has lost its mind.

Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard. The Yes Album sounds like a cheap cassette as well, a ghost of the real thing.

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Siren on Import Vinyl? Not So Fast

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Roxy Music Available Now

Siren is one of our favorite Roxy albums, right up there with the first album and well ahead of the commercially appealing Avalon.

After reading a rave review in Rolling Stone of the album back in 1975, I took the plunge, bought a copy at my local Tower Records and instantly fell in love with it.

As is my wont, I then proceeded to work my way through their earlier catalog, which was quite an adventure. It takes scores of plays to understand where the band is coming from on the early albums and what it is they’re trying to do. Now I listen to each of the first five releases on a regular basis.

Somehow they never seem to get old, even after more than forty years.

Of all the Roxy albums (with the exception of Avalon) this is probably the best way “in” to the band’s music. The earlier albums are more raucous, the later ones more rhythmically driven — Siren catches them at their peak, with, as other reviewers have noted, all good songs and no bad ones.

Imports? Not So Fast

The British and German copies of Siren are clearly made from dub tapes and sound smeary, small and lifeless.

To be fair, Siren has never impressed us as an exceptionally good sounding recording. Like other middle period Roxy, records such as Country Life and Manifesto (the albums just before and after), it simply does not have Demo Disc analog sound the way Avalon, Stranded or the Self-Titled albums do (the latter two clearly being the best sounding in their catalog).

One would be tempted to assume that the import pressings of Siren would be better sounding, the way the imports of the first four Roxy albums are clearly better sounding. (There has never been a domestic Hot Stamper pressing of any of those titles and, since we never buy them or play them, there probably never will be.)

But in the case of Siren it’s the imports that are made from dubs. It may be a British band, recorded in British studios with a British producer, but the British pressed LPs are clearly made from sub-generation tapes, whereas the domestic copies sound like they’re made from the real masters.

Go Figure. And another thing: when it comes to records, never assume anything.

The typical domestic pressing is flat, bass-shy and opaque, sounding more like compressed cardboard than analog vinyl.

Unsurprisingly, the CD, whether imported or produced domestically, is clean and clear and tonally correct but lacks the warmth and richness of the better vinyl pressings.

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Letter of the Week – “…the look on his face when I dropped the needle on my record was absolutely priceless!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,  

I really wanted to thank you for The Cars. What a sweet-sounding record! Everything about that one is so right; the guitars, the bass, the drums, the vocals, everything sounds completely natural.  

I have a good friend whose favourite band are The Cars. He has an expensive high-end system, but doesn’t want the “hassle” of vinyl.

Swears blind that nothing beats the DCC gold CD of ‘The Cars’, so I invited him round at the weekend and asked him to bring his DCC CD with him to compare on my relatively modest system.

After we had heard his CD, the look on his face when I dropped the needle on my record was absolutely priceless! A big thank you for the heads-up on that one.

Owais M.

Thanks, Owais, for writing to us. We enjoy hearing that our records are a shock to the system for some audiophiles. Think how much better off your friend would be if he could put up with the hassle of vinyl. He could hear The Cars sound better than he ever imagined.

He imagined that his Gold CD was sonically as good as it gets, but now that he knows just how much better the sound can actually get, courtesy of Better Records, do you think there is any chance the superior sound will help him get over his reservations about vinyl? My intuition says that such a thing is unlikely.

It seems that some aspects of audio are just too much work for a certain group of audiophiles. They pretend their oh-so-convenient CDs sound great, and they get away with believing it because most of them have no way of discovering disconfirming evidence like the kind you supplied your friend.

Unsurprisingly, Gold CD owners and Heavy Vinyl owners are often one and the same. For most of these CD guys, the Heavy Vinyl in this case can only confirm how much better the Gold CD sounds!

And given the choice between the excellent CDs Steve Hoffman (and others) have mastered and the typical Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, who can be blamed for giving up on vinyl?

The DCC Gold CD is indeed excellent, as are most of Steve’s work. I own one and it sounds right to me. It might even beat most vinyl pressings. It will definitely beat this ridiculously bad sounding Heavy Vinyl pressing, the one ruined by Kevin Gray. (Nothing new there.)

And the MoFi is surely a joke, since all their records are a joke. How this company is still in business is a question we often ask ourselves after playing one of their albums.

And if you are a hard-of-hearing audiophile record reviewer with four copies of the album sitting on your shelves, it will beat at least three of them, and maybe even the fourth, especially if they haven’t been cleaned properly, which is a pretty safe bet for a one man band. I used to be one, so I know whereof I speak. The amount of work required to clean and then shootout the four records you see would take at a minimum two hours, and maybe three. Who can find the time?

But no need to bother. Do a quick needle drop and just tell your readers how great one of the audiophile pressings is, because that’s all they are interested in hearing anyway. Give them the answer and try to make it a record that is still in print so they can afford it. They’ll buy whatever you tell them to buy and they will like it because they don’t know any better, just like Owais’s friend.

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City To City on Gold CD

More of the Music of Gerry Rafferty

The DCC gold CD sounds very respectable; Hoffman did his usual excellent job.

But it’s still a CD, and no CD has the kind of warmth, sweetness and Tubey Magic that can be found on a properly-mastered and -pressed LP.

As we’ve noted in our listings, “Here you will find the kind of rich, sweet, classically British Tubey Magical sound that we cannot get enough of here at Better Records.”

A list of Must Own rock and pop albums from 1977 would have to have this album on it, somethere near the top I would think.

In our opinion, City to City is Rafferty’s best sounding album, and probably the only Rafferty solo release you’ll ever need.

Click on this link to see more titles we like to call one and done.

Night Owl (1979), Snakes and Ladders (1980) and Can I Have My Money Back (1971) strike us as weak albums, strictly for hardcore fans.

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Saxophone Colossus – Why Not Try the DCC CD or LP?

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Our last White Hot gold label mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for?

Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a decent enough record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings from that era, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

(We have many reviews of OJC pressings for those who are interested. We created two sections for the label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the bad sounding ones.)

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer DCC’s CDs to their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-rez, modern-sounding (in the worst way) transistor cutting system, a subject we discuss in some depth here.

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This Is Not a Cheap Hobby If You Want to Get Very Far

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. McCartney’s first album is one of them.

(We have a section for records that tend to be noisy, and it can be found here.)

Rick sent us a letter recently after having played his first Hot Stamper, the first record he ever bought from us. At $300 it wasn’t exactly cheap, but the best things in life never are, and certainly there is little in the world of audio that’s cheap and of much value.

This is not a cheap hobby if you want to do it right, and even tons of money doesn’t guarantee you will get good sound. It’s far more complicated than that. To quote Winston Churchill, you must be prepared to offer your  “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Churchill went on to say “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs… Victory, however long and hard the road may be…”

Now, he wasn’t talking about audio, but he could have been, and I certainly am. It takes the serious commitment of resources — money and labor — to get the sound you want. That is the victory I am talking about.

On our Hot Stamper McCartney album, Rick no doubt heard the sound he was looking for — and then some — judging by his letter.

Hi Tom,

Well, I knew you guys were serious upon receiving the LP in 4 layers of wrapping and padding but when I put the disc on I was pretty stunned. Virtually everything was popping and so musical and rich sounding. Nothing like the 3 other pressings I’ve had of this recording in the past, the last of which I actually sailed out the window after 2 minutes of playing.

Every Night just sounds incredible, especially when he drops the bass an octave. And Maybe I’m Amazed gave me goosebumps for the first time since I bought it the week it came out. Also heard something on that track I never did (or could hear) before. During the guitar solo there’s a single high pitched vocal kind of buried in the background. Almost sounds like a mistake, making me think it could be Linda and Paul did what he could. Pretty wild.

My only very slight criticism is there is some surface noise but this is very overshadowed by all the positives. Overall it is superb. Can I give you guys a short list of LPs I’m looking for?

Thanks so much!

Best
Rick M.

Rick, we are so happy to hear you loved that record as much as we did. We have been touting McCartney’s first solo album for more than a decade. Ever read a word about it in an audiophile context elsewhere? Of course you haven’t! The audiophile world doesn’t know and doesn’t care about great albums like this one, but we at Better Records LIVE for  sound and music of this caliber.

It’s a permanent resident of our rock and pop Top 100 list for a reason: no other solo album by a Beatle can touch it.

As for surface issues, we wish we could find quietpressings of the album, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus is roughly what yours was graded and that is certainly not dead quiet by any stretch. As we said:

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Storyteller on SACD

More of the Music of Donovan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Donovan

The review you see here was written in 2003.

This is an Audio Fidelity Dual Layer Hybrid SACD (playable on any CD player) with superb sound.

One of the best sounding CDs I’ve ever heard! I can’t play the SACD layer anymore — my SACD player broke and I decided the medium was not for me. I’m a record guy and don’t want to invest the time and money to find a player that gets the SACD layer right. My CD player tells me that this is some of the best digital around and that’s good enough for me.

This disc is so rich and sweet you would swear it was an LP. Hoffman did an AMAZINGLY good job with this title. Same with The Searchers. Both come highly recommended.

The chances of the Heavy Vinyl sounding as good as the CD on this title are nil, or very close to it.

I mention on this blog that many Heavy Vinyl releases of this kind had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system. We discuss that subject on the blog in more depth here.

“Donovan first emerged as part of the ruling class of 1960s singer-songwriters. More than just roots into something truly unique and has endured the test of time. It encompasses a full blend of social commentary, introspective trippiness and, yes… cosmic sounds. This collection showcases the talents of the artist and his art. Combining Donovan’s Pye/Hickory recordings and his Epic label releases, this musical collection is a journey into the world of a musical poet….the world of a storyteller….the world of Donovan.” — Audio Fidelity

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What Willie and Nat Can Teach Us about Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Willie Nelson Available Now

This letter came to us many years ago. Updates have been added as of 2024.

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he had purchased:

Hello team,

I’ve been a little distracted here, I got married over the weekend! So, haven’t done as much listening over the past couple of weeks. However, I did have a chance to listen to Stardust and Love Is The Thing. They were both different than their Classic Records and Analogue Productions counterparts. Willie sounded a little smoother, more organic, and more integrated.

The strings on Love Is The Thing were very different, more pronounced and emotional, but Nat’s voice, and the sound overall, sounded a little strident, maybe “too” hot.

I’d like to send them both back to you, and if you have a chance to send back the discs I sent to you I’d very much appreciate it. All told, the two big sets of Better Records are really incredible, and only serve to make my want list grow. Here’s to you and the next set!

Doug,

We now have the update for those two titles.

I, along with the two other guys in our listening panels, sat down to play the Heavy Vinyl you sent us, and the long and short of it is that we were astonished that records that sound as bad as those two actually were approved for release.

Nat is wrong six ways from Sunday, and Willie is not so much wrong as just not very good.

Nat: “F,” one of the worst heavy vinyl disasters of all time, and Willie: “D” sound, more like a CD than a record. There are many pressings of this album that are not good, but this version is probably worse than most of them, hence the D grade.

The old Classic pressing is probably better, and it would earn about a C grade. [I honestly do not remember exactly what pressing Douglas sent us. All I remember is that it was on Heavy Vinyl.]

I suspect the CDs of both these pressings are much better sounding than this vinyl.

The DCC gold is definitely better by a long shot, and the plain old Willie CD is probably a step up as well. 

A Further Update

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