Good Sounding Digital – Reviews and Commentaries

The Best Pressings of Brothers in Arms Are Not Hard to Recognize

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

We try to be upfront with our customers that the Hot Stamper pressings of Brothers in Arms on our site have many nice qualities, but some of the best qualities of analog recordings from the 50s, 60s and 70s are not among them.

It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. We want our customers to know what to expect when they buy a modern recording, and, having played copies of this album (as well as Love Over Gold) by the score, we are qualified to tell them what even the best pressings do not do as well as we might like. In a recent listing we introduced one of the best sounding pressings from our last shootout this way:

  • Tonally correct from start to finish, with a solid bottom and fairly natural vocals (for this particular recording of course), here is the sound they were going for in the studio
  • Drop the needle on “So Far Away” – it’s airy, open, and spacious, yet still rich and full-bodied
  • We admit that the sound may be too processed and lacking in Tubey Magic for some
  • When it comes to Tubey Magic, there simply is none — that’s not the sound Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who won the Grammy for this album, was going for
  • We find that the best properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, when played at good loud levels on our system, give us sound that was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, glorious, powerful and exciting — just not Tubey Magical

The notes you see below catalog the qualities of our 2025 Shootout Winner.

Side One

Track One (So Far Away)

  • Meaty guitar and bass
  • Big, weighty and present

Track Two (Money for Nothing)

  • Wide, full and weighty
  • Lots of punch

Side Two

Track One (Ride Across the River)

  • Tight, deep and weighty [bass]
  • Vocals are sweet and present
  • Most space yet
  • Rich too

Note that the person doing the listening confined himself to what the record was doing right. In the case of this Shootout Winning Top Shelf 3/3 pressing, there really wasn’t any aspect of the sound to find fault with. As far as we were concerned, the record was doing what the record was trying to do, and doing it better than any of the other copies we played, hence the high grades.

If you have five or ten early domestic pressings of Brothers in Arms, you can judge them accurately by limiting yourself to the qualities the best of them have. For any copy you might play, you could ask:

  • How big is it?
  • How weighty is it?
  • How present is it?
  • How wide is the soundstage?
  • How full-bodied is the sound?
  • How punchy is it?
  • How tight, deep and weighty is the bass?
  • How sweet and present are the vocals?
  • How much space does the recording have?
  • How rich is the sound?

If your equipment, room, electricity, etc. are good enough, and your front end is properly set up, all these questions can be answered with relatively little effort. You could even create a checklist of them after playing a few copies and hearing what the best of them did well.

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On Security, Robert Ludwig Let Us Down, Big Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

All the copies we had in our shootout were pressed domestically, and none of them were mastered by the legendary Robert Ludwig except for the one whose stampers you see below.

We awarded both sides of RL’s cutting a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+, which means the sound is passable at best, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning it would probably not even earn that single plus.)

We do not sell records with 1+ grades. We figure you can find those on your own. The world is full of them, as are most audiophile record collections.

1+ is actually a fairly good grade for many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today. Some of the ones we’ve reviewed can be found in our Heavy Vinyl mediocrities section.

Any version of the album we sell will be noticeably — and probably dramatically — better sounding.

If you own any of those titles and didn’t pay much for them, you didn’t get ripped off too badly. You got something for your money. Not much, but something, and it would surprise us no end if any of them have been played much. Mediocre records tend to spend most of their lives sitting on record shelves. They’re not good enough sounding to bother with.

If you have any of these specific Heavy Vinyl pressings, something is wrong somewhere and it would be a good idea for you to figure out what before you flush any more money down the drain.

General Advice

On this title, forget the Brits. Every British pressing we played was badly smeared and veiled.

This took us somewhat by surprise because we happen to like the British PG pressings. However, So on British vinyl is awful too, so it’s clear (to us anyway) that the later PG records are bad on British vinyl and the early ones are better.

We are limiting our comments here to albums up through So. Anything after that is more or less terra incognita for us simply because we don’t care for any of the music he was making after 1986.

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The Best Pressings of Love Over Gold Have Surprisingly Natural Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

This modern album (1982) can sound surprisingly good on the right pressing.

On most copies the highs are grainy and harsh, not exactly the kind of sound that inspires you to turn your system up good and loud and get really involved in the music. I’m happy to report that the best pressings have no such problem – they rock and they sound great when playing loud.

We pick up every clean copy we see of this album, domestic or import, because we know from experience just how good the best pressings can sound.

What do the best copies have?

REAL dynamics for one.

And with those dynamics you need rock solid bass. Otherwise the loud portions simply become irritating.

A lack of grain is always nice — many of the pressings we played were gritty or grainy.

Other copies that were quite good in most ways lacked immediacy, and we naturally took serious points off for that.

The best copies of Love Over Gold are far more natural than the average pressing you might come across, and that’s a recognizable quality we can listen for and give weight to in our grading.

It’s key to the sound of the better pressings, which means in our shootouts it’s worth a lot of points. Otherwise you might as well be playing the CD.

Domestics or Imports?

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Testing for Life-Size Images and Living Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

On the song Blackbird Paul moves the microphone, scraping it along the floor, which causes a huge wave of bass to spread through the room.

I was over at one of my customer’s houses a while twenty years ago, doing some testing with electronics and tweaks, and I remember distinctly that the microphone stand was shrunken and lean sounding in a way I had simply never heard before.

Now this customer, whose system was in the $100K range, had no idea what that microphone stand could really do. I did, because I’ve been hearing it do it for years.

Some speakers can’t move enough air down low to reproduce that sound properly.

And some speakers, usually those with woofers under 12 inches, shrink the size of images.

These are many things to test for for in a given system, dozens and dozens in fact, but two of the important ones are these: if it doesn’t have a solid foundation (read: a big bottom end), and it doesn’t have correctly-sized images for the instruments, that’s a system that is failing in fundamentally important ways. 

If you close your eyes, you’re not in the presence of full-size musicians. Ipso facto, the fidelity to the live event has been compromised.

That’s precisely what makes this a good test disc. The band is right there.

To the extent that you can make them sound live in your living room, you are getting the job done.

The last bit of resolution is not the point. Full-sized live musicians in your living room is the point. Either Paul and his band are in front of you, or they’re not.

When they’re not, it’s time to get to work and find out what part of the system is not doing its job.

Hint: you can be pretty sure it’s the speaker. Most audiophile speakers are not very good at moving enough air. You need multiple large dynamic drivers with plenty of piston area to do the job correctly. Speakers of that design are usually large and expensive. I recommend the original Legacy Focus (not the current model) as the best sounding, most affordable full-size speaker on the used market.

Make Me Better

The bulk of this commentary was written in 2006. Most of it is based on what we had learned from the shootout we’d just done, our first for the album.

I bought my first copy of Unplugged upon its release. I credit it with helping me advance in this hobby of ours. Back in those dark days of the 90s, although I was completely clueless at the time about pretty much everything having to do with vinyl and equipment, I can take some solace in the fact that everybody else appeared to be as clueless as I was.

This blog is dedicated to sharing some of what I’ve learned — with the unflagging help of my staff of course — about records and audio over the last fifty years.

Testing with Unplugged

This record is good for testing all of the following areas, and here are some links to other titles that will also make good test records for those of you looking to improve the quality of your analog playback:

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Graceland, Where Clarity Is King

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

We regularly do shootouts for Graceland. Having played so many copies over the years we’re become quite familiar with the range of sound on the album, what constitutes good, better and best, and we understand precisely what qualities the premier copy must have in order to win one of our shootouts. 

Above all the thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It has many other good qualities as well: It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals.

The better copies have all these qualities to some degree, but the one thing a good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s especially good about the sound of Graceland. (more…)

Here’s How You Know You Have a Hot Stamper of Songs in the Attic

joelsongs600Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

It’s the side you play through to the end.

When the sound is right you want to hear more.

Since the opening track of this record is one of the keys to knowing whether it’s mastered and pressed properly, once you get past the sibilance hurdle on track one, the next step is to find out how the challenges presented by the rest of the tracks are handled on any given pressing. Some advice follows.

Actually, what you really want to know is how good each song can sound — what it sounds like when it’s right.

Once the quality of the mastering has been established, the fun part is to play the rest of the album, to hear it really come alive.

Side One

Miami 2017

This is usually the brightest cut on the first side, commonly found with some sibilance problems. On the high-res copies the sibilance is lessened, and the sound of the sibilance itself is much less transistory and spitty, with more of a silky quality, which is simply another way of saying it’s less distorted.

Of course one wouldn’t want the sibilance to be lessened by having a dull top end, but few of these pressings are dull. Most of them suffer from a brightness problem. The best copies keep the sibilance under control and balance the upper mids with extended highs. Without extension on the highs the sound will tend to be aggressive.

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Listening in Depth to Famous Blue Raincoat

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Leonard Cohen Available Now

I’m a huge fan of this FBR. It’s the only album Jennifer Warnes ever made that I would consider a Must Own recording or a Desert Island Disc. Without question this is her Masterpiece.

Key Test for Side One

Listen to the snare drum on Bird on a Wire. On most copies it sound thin and bright, not very much like a real snare. Let’s face it: most copies of this record are thin and bright, and that’s just not our sound here at Better Records. If the snare on Bird sounds solid and meaty, at the very least you have a copy that is probably not too bright, and on this album that puts it well ahead of the pack.

While you’re listening for the sound of that snare, notice the amazing drum work of Vinnie Colaiuta, session drummer extraordinaire. The guy’s work on this track — especially with the high hat — is genius.

Key Test for Side Two

Listen to the sound of the piano on Song of Bernadette. If it’s rich and full-bodied with the weight of a real piano, you might just have yourself a winner. At the very least you won’t have to suffer through the anemically thin sound of the average copy.

Side One

First We Take Manhattan

Don’t expect this song to be tonally correct. It runs the gamut from bright to too bright to excrutiatingly bright. Steve Hoffman told me that he took out something like 6 DB at 6K when he mastered it for a compilation he made, and I’m guessing that that’s the minimum that would need to come out. It’s made to be a hit single, and like so many hit single wannabes, it’s mixed brighter than we audiophiles might like.

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The Nightfly on Heavy Vinyl – Rhino Plays Us All for Suckers Once Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now

We just finished a big shootout for The Nightfly, our first in nearly three years. There is a Hot Stamper pressing on the site as I write these words.

Since we do shootouts throughout the day on four out of the five days of the work week (the fifth is devoted to shopping for records locally by our main listening guy, Riley), there is nothing special about any of that.

It takes us about three years to find enough clean copies of an album like The Nightfly to get a shootout going these days, a marked depature from earlier in the 21st century when common domestic pressings were everywhere, and usually for cheap. Those days are gone and we will never see their like again.

These days we find a lot of Heavy Vinyl pressings mixed in with the vintage stuff we buy, and if the price is right, sometimes we pick up a copy of whatever album we plan to shootout down the road.

In this case it turned out to be the 2021 Rhino remaster on Heavy German vinyl, mastered by Chris Bellman. Or was it?

We of course found it to be awful, as we so often do with Mr. Bellman’s records. It’s lean and recessed. Over the 42 years I have been playing the original Robert Ludwig pressings of the album, I have heard some that sounded that way. I wrote about it many years ago, trying to make the point that when you hear a copy that sounds lean and bright like a CD, what you are hearing is a bad pressing.

The good ones are not like that. They are rich and smooth and even, gulp, kind of analog sounding.

Glossy and artificial, sure, and much too heavily-processed for my taste, but I can live with that sound, even though it’s hardly my idea of hi-fidelity.

Hold Your Horses

Somebody pulled a fast one it appears, as the pressings without the initials CB in the dead wax are not cut by him, even though he is credited on discogs and one assumes on the jacket or inner sleeve as well. The copy we played had no CB in the dead wax.

Even the Heavy Vinyl crowd can hear how bad this “MS” recut is, and that is really saying something considering how fawning most reviewers are when writing about these remastered records. Some samples follow:

A few points to make about this screwup.

  • Thank god that Chris Bellman is off the hook for this disastrous piece of vinyl trash. He’s made a lot of very bad sounding records, but at least he didn’t make this one.
  • Anyone who thinks this is the best sounding record they’ve ever played (see some of the comments above and below) is setting a low bar for sound quality. It’s enjoyable enough, but the best ever or top ten? Yikes.
  • And, last but not least, Rhino stops using the CB cutting and just keeps pressing out the record with dodgy mastering by somebody else, so inferior it can even be heard by the guys who review records on Discogs? That is some shady business, that is.
  • To be fair, the record labels who made all the vintage records we sell were every bit as dodgy when it came to the quality of their releases, especially considering that most of the reissues they churned out were of dismal quality.
  • There is one difference though. The major labels never made any claims regarding sound quality, possibly because they had no way to judge the sound of the records they released. They left those judgments to the reviewers, assuming any of them were so inclined. But these new Heavy Vinyl pressings are supposed to be of superior quality.
  • Our judgment is that they are not. They’re mostly just awful, and this one fits right in with its sub-par brethren. Doubtful any clean Robert Ludwig mastered pressing wouldn’t sound quite a bit better.
  • Whether the Robert Ludwig mastered pressings are better than the real Chris Bellman pressings is a question we cannot answer at this time.

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Unplugged – Sonic Pros and Cons

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

The best pressings of this album convey the immediacy of a live show, one which just happens to be fronted by one of the greatest performers in the history of popular music, Paul McCartney.

On the best copies, the sound is warmer, richer, and sweeter, or in a word, more ANALOG sounding. You get more extension up top, more weight down low, and more transparency in the midrange.

It’s surprising just how veiled and two-dimensional so many copies sound, considering this is a live recording with not a lot of processing.

As a digital recording, some of that processing is baked into the tape. Unplugged will  never sound as good as this McCartney album, but that’s to be expected.

The bulk of the recordings from 1991 are simply not competitive with those from 1970, not by a long shot. There were hundreds of great records recorded or released in 1970. There are 19 Hot Stamper pressings of them on the site as I write this. I would have a hard time finding even a half-dozen from 1991.

Stick with the Early Pressings

This isn’t your typical rock record that sounds like crap on eight out of ten copies. Most early pressings of Unplugged sound pretty good. The later reissues are terrible, which should come as no surprise. Rarely are late reissues of rock and pop albums any good.

We did hear quite a few copies that had a somewhat brittle quality to the top end, with no real extension to speak of. It wasn’t ever a dealbreaker, but the copies with a silky openness up there are much more enjoyable — and, unfortunately, not all that common.

There are copies that lack warmth, copies that never fully come to life, and copies that are a bit dark.

Some that we auditioned didn’t seem to get the breath in the vocals, and others lacked weight to the piano.

Again — not one of the early pressings we played sounded BAD, but many of them definitely sounded dry, boring and lifeless.

It’s nice when the copy in hand has all the transparency, space, layered depth and three-dimensionality that makes listening to records such a fundamentally different experience than listening to CD playback, but it’s not nearly as important as having a richer, more relaxed tonal balance.

A little smear and a lack of resolution are not the end of the world on this album.

Brightness, along with too much grain and grit, can be.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and grain
  2. Midrange tonality
  3. Lower midrange richness
  4. Upper midrange brightness

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “I really thought that was a nice repress until I heard yours.”

Hot Stamper Pressinsg of the Music of Jennifer Warnes Available Now

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

  Hey Tom,   

So that Jennifer Warnes blew the repress away, absolutely wiped the floor with it. I couldn’t believe the difference, sigh. I really thought that was a nice repress until I heard yours.

Bloody Hell. Lol.  

Thanks as always.

T.

T.,

Some Heavy Vinyl records sound good enough to fool you.

Up against a properly-mastered, properly-pressed LP — our handy name for such an animal is “Hot Stamper” — the differences become much more obvious.

That’s why we say that the only way to find a Hot Stamper pressing is through the shootout process.

Any record can sound good, but up against five or ten others? That’s a test that only the best pressings can pass.

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