Digital – CDs, Digital Recordings, etc.

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…)

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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Peter Gabriel / Security

More Peter Gabriel

  • One of the most important records in the Peter Gabriel canon, original and influential on so many levels
  • With the benefit of today’s technology, on a copy this good you hear into the soundfield in a way never possible before, picking out all the drummers and counting all the layers of multi-tracked choruses
  • “Security remains a powerful listen, one of the better records in Gabriel’s catalog, proving that he is becoming a master of tone, style, and substance…”
  • If you’re a Peter Gabriel fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1982 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1982 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.
  • 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,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Security is a good example of a record most audiophiles don’t know well but should.

Man, does this album sound better than I remember it from back in the ’80s when I first played it. Stereos have come a long way since then, along with a host of other things that help records sound better, such as cleaning fluids, room treatments and all the rest.

Now you can really hear INTO the soundfield in a way that simply was never possible before, picking out all the drummers and counting all the layers of PG’s multi-tracked choruses.

On the best pressings, both sides are huge, and the music jumps out of the speakers. The balance is perfection. (more…)

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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Yes – 90125

More Yes

  • A vintage Atco import pressing that was giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from top to bottom – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This side one is spacious, solid and dynamic with huge bass and analog richness that’s hard to find on this album, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • There’s an abundance of life and energy here, and the vocals sound just right (particularly on side one)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A stunning self-reinvention by a band that many had given up for dead, 90125 is the album that introduced a whole new generation of listeners to Yes… there’s nary a duff track on the album.”

I’m pleased to report that we can now add 90125 to our small list of 80s albums that can sound excellent on the right pressing. Drop the needle on “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” and we bet you’ll agree!

So many copies we played were full of that digital grit and grain that we hear on so many records from the era. This one is an entirely different story. It has wonderful analog qualities, with more richness and smoothness than most pressings.

The recording itself is outstanding: punchy and lively with an especially beefy bottom end, the kind a good rock record needs. But you would never know it by playing the average pressing you might pick up for five bucks at your local used record store. The typical copy of this record is pretty average sounding. Let’s face it: every mastering mistake that can be made will be made sooner or later with mass-produced vinyl like this.

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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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Paul McCartney – Unplugged

More Paul McCartney

  • A true Demo Disc and superb sounding import pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • A strikingly intimate document of a live show, fronted by one of the greatest performers in history, Sir Paul McCartney
  • You get more extension up top, more weight down low, and more transparency in the midrange, than on most other copies we played
  • 4 stars: “… it remains one of the most enjoyable records in McCartney’s catalog. McCartney is carefree and charming, making songs like ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ sound fresh.”

Superb sound for this amazing recording! On the better 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 how veiled and two-dimensional so many copies can be, considering that this is a live recording (by the legendary Geoff Emerick himself) with not a lot of “messing around” after the fact.

Finding The Best Sound

This isn’t your typical rock record that sounds crappy on eight out of ten copies. Most copies of Unplugged sound pretty good. We did hear quite a few 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, fairly uncommon.

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 pressings we played sounded bad, but many of them definitely sounded dry, boring and lifeless.

Just for fun, check out Linda’s percussion and tambourine work in the right channel of the first track on side one, “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” Since that’s one of our test tracks, we had the opportunity to hear her ‘contribution’ to the song about twenty times or so, and it became a source of — to be charitable — ‘entertainment’ in its own right as the shootout progressed.

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Robert Brook Revisits a White Hot Stamper Pressing of The Eagles

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is a posting Robert wrote many years ago and has recently updated.

EAGLES: WHITE HOT and SOARING HIGHER!

A quote I rather liked:

You can throw a Hot Stamper onto your rig and hear that it sounds better than your crappy “audiophile” 180g reissue, but when you compare it to your high res digital file, you’re not quite sure which one you like better.

The digital vs. analog debate, perhaps the most enduring in all of audio, persists because only a handful of audiophiles have truly realized the full potential of analog in their systems.

You may be reading this thinking “hey whad’ya mean! My analog system sounds great!.” And it very well may sound great, but I thought and still think that my copy of Eagles sounds great, and let me tell you, the White Hot Stamper is a WHOLE new platter of wax!

The tubey jangle of the guitars, the room filling weight of the drums and bass, the airy, spacious, luscious vocal harmonies, and every last sumptuous element of the mix, unmoored, liberated from obscuration so completely that the music, freed from every conceivable resolution constraint, SOARS to life in the listening room.

That’s what this White Hot Stamper of Eagles sounds like, and that’s what analog is ALL ABOUT!

This record, The Dude be damned, is one of my all time favorites. It’s a delicious recording on even a decent copy. My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Here is our description of a recent copy that is up on the site at this time.

Super Hot and $699 — affordable maybe for some, certainly not cheap, but as Robert makes clear in his review, one of the most amazing sounding recordings in the history of popular music on the right pressing, and the right pressings are the only ones we offer.

The notes for our Shootout Winning copy from 2024 can be seen at the very end of this post. Side two was a “strong 3+, ” which we would have called 4+, Beyond White Hot, way back when, but we stopped doing that many years ago.

Side two was HTF — Hard To Fault. This may have been the side two that Robert is raving about in his review.

My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Can’t argue with any of that! That’s what we heard too.

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The Abbey Road Remix on Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

We got a copy of the Abbey Road remix in, cleaned it and played it. Now we can officially report the results of our investigation into this modern marvel. Imagine, The Beatles with a new mix! Just what it needed, right?

So what did we hear?

The Half-Speed mastered remixed Abbey Road has to be one of the worst sounding Beatles records we have ever had the misfortune to play.

Hard to imagine you could make Abbey Road sound any worse. It’s absolutely disgraceful.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

I will be writing more about its specific shortcomings down the road, but for now let this serve as a warning that you are throwing your money away if you buy this newly remixed LP.

UPDATE 2022

As you may have guessed by now, I have completely lost interest in detailing the abundant shortcomings of this awful record. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy one.

If you did buy one, do yourself a different favor: order any UK pressing from 1970-1986 off the web and play that one head to head with it so you can hear how badly they screwed with and screwed up the new mix.

When the remastering is this incompetent, you do not need a Hot Stamper pressing to beat it. Almost any record will do.

Remastering a well-known title and creating a new sound for it is a huge bête noire for us here at Better Records.

Half-Speed mastered disasters that sound as bad as this record does go directly into our audiophile record hall of shame.

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope. If they target their resources (time and money) well, there is no reason they can’t get to where they need to be, the same way we did. Our audio advice section may be of help in that regard.

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