*Experimenting with Records

Experimenting with records is the only way to learn much about them of any real value.

Tchaikovsky / Symphony No. 4 – What Does It Sound Like Now?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we wrote:

This is a 1s/5s RCA Shaded Dog. TAS list (or at least it used to be).

Probably the reason HP likes this LP so much is that it has a very wide soundstage.

It also has good solid weight. A little soft on top, but that comes with the territory.

It’s a very old review, probably from about 15 years ago. I don’t think I could recommend this record today. It probably belongs on this list, but I cannot truthfully say that it does one way or another. As I recall, the copies I’ve played more recently were not impressive.

If I played it today, would I find it to be as bad as this Living Stereo pressing? Who knows?

That experiment has not been run.

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Boy, Was We Ever Wrong About Solti’s Rite of Spring

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is an old and somewhat embarrassing commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Solti’s 1974 recording for Decca.

Here is what we had to say about the album in 2008:

This is an amazing recording, DEMO QUALITY SOUND, far better than the Decca heavy vinyl reissue that came out in the 2000s. [That part is no doubt true.]

This record is extremely dynamic; full of ambience; tonally correct; with tons of deep bass. Because it’s a more modern recording, it doesn’t have the Tubey Magic of some Golden Age originals, but it compensates for that shortcoming by being less distorted and “clean.” Some people may consider that more accurate. To be honest with you, I don’t know if that is in fact the case.

However, this record should not disappoint sonically and the performance is every bit as exciting and powerful as any you will find. The Chicago Symphony has the orchestral chops to make a work of this complexity sound effortless.

Skip forward to the present, roughly ten years later. We had three or four copies on hand to audition when we surveyed the work a couple of years ago in preparation for a big shootout.

The Solti did not make the cut. It was not even in the ballpark.

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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

UPDATE 2024

This letter came to us many years ago. Updates have been added since then.

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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You Won’t Learn Much Playing the Same Record on the Same Setup

More on the Subject of Developing Your Critical Listening Skills 

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written around 2006, about two years after we started to put Hot Stampers on our website.

This is one of the early posts we wrote to help explain what we were up to.

You learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same system.

What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change.

You have to change something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.

How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record.

The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. How hard can it be?

Almost no record has the same sound on both sides, not the records we sell anyway. Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to my knowledge. Because not enough audiophiles and no — and I mean no as in zero — record dealers make the effort to listen critically.

If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following.

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Listening For the Spirit and Enthusiasm of the Musicians

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The discussion below, brought about by a Hot Stamper shootout we conducted for Revolver quite a number of years ago (2007!), touches on many issues near and dear to us here at Better Records.

Some of the things we learned about Revolver all those years ago are important to our Hot Stamper shootouts to this very day, including, but not limited to:

  • Pressing variations,
  • System upgrades,
  • Dead wax secrets,

and the quality we prize most in a recording:

  • LIFE, or, if you prefer, energy.

At the end of the commentary we of course take the opportunity to bash the MoFi pressing of the album, a regular feature of our Beatles Hot Stamper shootouts. We’re not saying the MoFi Beatles records are bad; in the overall scheme of things they are mostly pretty decent. What we are saying is that, with our help, you can do a helluva lot better.

Our help doesn’t come cheap, as anyone on our mailing list will tell you. You may have to pay a lot, but with us you get what you pay for, and we gladly back up that claim with a 100% money back guarantee for every pressing we sell.

The Story of Revolver, Dateline October 2007

(Incidentally, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.)

White Hot Stampers for Revolver are finally HERE! Let the celebrations begin! Seriously, this is a very special day for us here at Better Records. The Toughest Nut to Crack in the Beatles’ catalog has officially been cracked. Yowza!

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Balancing Richness and Tubey Magic with Transparency, Clarity and Speed

More Tubey Magical Rock and Pop Demo Discs Available Now

Manna has the clear signature of Elektra from the late 60s and early 70s. It’s unmistakably ANALOG, but that double-edged sword cuts both ways. Richness and Tubey Magic (the kind you had in your old 70s stereo equipment) often comes at the expense of transparency, clarity, speed and transient information (the things your 70s equipment probably struggled with).

We heard a lot of copies that were opaque, smeary and dull up top, so the trick for us (and for those of you doing your own shootouts) is to find a copy with the resolving power and transparency that will cut through the thickness.

Look for breath on the vocals (reverb too!) and extended vocal and guitar harmonics; if those two qualities are strongly evident you can’t be too far off.

More presence, bigger bass (the bass is HUGE on the best copies!), more size, energy and space: these will help take you to the highest (Super Hot and White Hot) levels.

Speaking of bass, notice how prominent, big and clear the bass guitar is on many of these songs. This is not a sound we hear nearly enough of on popular recordings. During the shootout we were lovin’ it.

The Legacy Focus in our reference system has three twelve-inch woofers per channel. They do a lovely job with this kind of big-bottom-end recording, the kind of recording for which Botnick and The Doors (and Love too, let’s not forget them) are justly famous.

Where is that sound today? We miss it.

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Testing for Whomp Factor with Love Alive

heartlittl_1501_1187219026Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Heart Available Now

Heart’s Little Queen has long been a favorite Test Disc. It works especially well as a test for something we here at Better Records like to call whomp — the energy found at the low end of the frequency spectrum. Some call it slam, we prefer whomp.

The commentary is here to help guide you as you make changes to your system, insuring that you end up with more whomp without sacrificing equally important qualities found in the midrange and top end of your system.

Reality Check Parts One and Two

Take the song Love Alive.

The beginning section is chock full of lovely and quite subtle details (such as the autoharp and tabla) that seem to lose their magic on most systems. The autoharp is rich and chimey, and the tabla has some real low end extension. The recorders and flutes that join them are breathy and sweet, while the acoustic guitars heard throughout display all the tubey-magical harmonic richness found on our favorite Hot Stamper recordings, from the Eagles first album to Teaser and the Firecat. These qualities easily get lost in the sauce if you’re listening to the average copy, or the typical audiophile stereo.

That’s Part One of the test — the opening.

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Every Top Copy of In Through the Out Door Must Pass This Test

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In our review for In Through the Out Door, we debunked the Classic Records pressing of the album using a very simple test which you may want to try using at home.

A copy that makes you want to turn up the volume is likely to be a winner.

The Classic does not pass this test.

We threw one on and just couldn’t deal with the edgy vocals and upper-midrange boost. We wanted to turn down the volume as quickly as we could get our hands on the knob. As far as we’re concerned there’s no substitute for The Real Thing. As hard as it is to find great sounding copies of this album, it’s even harder for us to sit through a sub-par version like the Classic.

And boy were our faces red. We used to think the Classic version was pretty decent, but the best originals SLAUGHTER it! We had never done a shootout for this album before 2007. We didn’t feel up to the challenge, because the typical pressing tends to be miserable — gritty, grainy, and hard sounding, with congested mids, dull up top, and on and on.

But 2007 turned out to be a breakthrough year for us here at Better Records.

Looking back on that year, the discovery of the Prelude Record Cleaning System, along with some system upgrades, allowed us to jump to the next level.

With better cleaning and more revealing and accurate playback, the Zeppelin shootout we conducted in 20o7 made it clear to us that the Classic was all sorts of wrong when played head to head against the best domestic pressings.

Try the Turn Up the Volume Test and see if your copy makes the grade, or makes you want to turn it right back down. I’m guessing the latter, unless you were lucky enough to get one of our Hot Stampers from the last shootout. There sure weren’t enough to go around.

Bashin’ Is a Difficult to Reproduce Jazz Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Jimmy Smith Available Now

In the past we’ve complained about “Rudy Van Gelder’s somewhat over the top echo-drenched brass,” but on a copy such as this there is nothing to complain about!

All that reverb on the brass sounds RIGHT. If you have a top quality front end (and the system that goes with it), this recording will be amazingly spacious, three-dimensional, transparent, dynamic, and open.

Copies of this album are sometimes so sour or dull (or both) that they go right in the trade pile. Add to that the difficulty of finding copies that are scratch-free and not too noisy and you have one tough shootout. Inner Groove Distortion caused by the non-anti-skate-equipped turntables of the day is a chronic problem with vintage jazz records, and this title is typically no exception — except in this case! 

A Must Own Jazz Record

This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Jazz Collection.

It also ranks fairly high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems .

Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process.

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Smooth or Detailed, Which Is the Right Sound for Jackson Browne’s Debut?

Hot Stamper Albums with Choruses that Are Big and Clear

The real trick with this album is striking the right balance between richness and presence.

A White Hot Stamper from years back made me change my mind about this recording.

I used to think it was dull, but I was wrong. I used to think that even the best copies of this recording sounded rolled off on the top end. I no longer believe that to be true. On the best pressings the top end is correct for this music.

It took the right pressing to show me the error of my ways.

Side one of that copy was rich and full and sweet as can be. Playing side two I noticed more transparency and clarity, especially in the guitars and voices. It seemed to have correct highs, highs that were a little soft on the first side.

But the more I listened, the less I liked it. It started to sound more like a record and less like music. Going back and forth between sides one and two, it was obvious that side one had less clarity because it had the kind of richness and fullness that made all the musicians and their instruments sound real in a way that wasn’t happening on side two.

Side two had clarity, it had transparency, but it kept reminding me that it was a recording.

Side one allowed me to forget that I was playing a record.

When the music started, my attention was completely focused on the songwriting and the performing. Aspects of the recording were lost in my enjoyment of the music. I kept thinking what a great album this is, not what a great recording it is. That tells me that both the recording engineer and the mastering engineer did their jobs right. They created a sound that best served this music.

I think if an audiophile label had produced a version of this album that sounded like side two, most audiophiles would love it. They would hear detail that they’d never heard before. (It’s my belief that the original Asylum master tape has been lost, so the details of which we speak can be heard on these good originals and nowhere else.)

But, fooled into listening for details in the music rather than the music as a whole, they would never know how RIGHT the album can really sound.

The best of our Hot Stampers are the ones that have the right sound for this music.