Strengths/Weaknesses

On the listings linked below we have taken great pains to highlight the various strengths and weaknesses of the pressings under discussion.

Here are some of the most important qualities you should be listening for when comparing different pressings of these titles.

Pros, Cons and the Celebration of a Milestone

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2022

In 2012, according to some old notes we had from an early shootout, perhaps our first, we auditioned a copy of Massenet’s Le Cid with what we thought was a suboptimal side two, a side two that we thought suffered from screechy string tone.

Since that time we’ve made a number of improvements to our cleaning regimen and playback system, and the result has been that our last couple of shootouts went off without a hitch, showing us string tone that was virtually free of screechiness.

(The Greensleeves reissues never had a “screechy strings” problem as they tended to be mastered with a smoother EQ. They are more forgiving of second-rate playback in that respect, but they can also never win shootouts with that overly smooth sound.) [1]

Problem solved! The records were fine, we just couldn’t play them back then as well as we can now.

Our Review from 2012

In 2012, twelve years ago, I had been selling records to audiophiles professionally for 25 years. I had owned what I considered to be a State of the Art system for 37 years.

But I knew I still had plenty to learn, and I kept at it.

After a decade’s worth of tweaking and tuning, the strings of this recording started to sound the way Stuart Eltham and his fellow engineers undoubtedly wanted them to.

This is how you chart your audio progress, by challenging yourself with difficult to reproduce recordings and building on the improvements you continue to make as the years and decades go by.

If you’re in the market for records that can show you that there is still plenty of work left to be done in this crazy audio hobby we’ve chosen, we have scores of them on the Better Records site for sale .

If we can get them to sound better, so can you.

[1] Our latest preoccupation here on the blog is to point out as often as we can that the Modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is too often just too damn smooth.

The remastered box sets of The Beatles (see: Pepper, Sgt.., etc.) are the poster boys for making records sound more “analog” by boosting the bass and smoothing the treble, like your old 70s system used to do. (Those of you who were in the hobby back then know exactly the sound I am talking about. For those who would like to know more, we wrote this overview.)

The Beatles records that we sell as Hot Stampers have nothing in common with that absurdly artificial approach. Mid-Fi systems may benefit from more bass and less top end, but Hi-Fi systems worthy of the name will not, hence our distaste for this kind of EQ overreach. More examples of overly smooth modern records can be found here, with more to be added as time permits.

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Celebrate Me Home – Notes from a Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Loggins and Messina Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our first Shootout Winning pressing went up in 2011.

One thing we learned in that shootout was that only the copies mastered by Robert Ludwig have any hope of sounding good, and that is still true. We wasted our money on a few later pressings and they were hopeless against the best we played, one of which was a barely passable White Label Promo pressing (!).

White Label Promos are for collectors, not music loving audiophiles.

This WHITE HOT Stamper side one shows you just how good this record can sound, which is surprisingly good, considering how many copies of the album are just plain awful. Finally, most of the grit, grain and transistory opacity have fallen away, leaving in its place the rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical 70s sound one would expect. 

As obvious as it may sound (especially to anyone on this site), the master tape is a whole lot better than the average copy of the record would have you think. This side one is proof positive. And side two is nearly as good, earning a solid Super Hot stamper grade of A++. Without a doubt this is by far the best copy of the album we have ever heard.

It’s also the only Loggins solo album that I’ve ever liked; it was actually a favorite of mine back in the day. I’ve owned this very copy for more than twenty years (bought it in 1988 according to the price sticker). Seems like a good time to send it on its way to find a new home.

Side One

A+++, taking top honors for its rhythmic energy and real frequency extension both high and low. (Most copies have no real top end; if you own one give it a listen and we think you’ll agree with us.) Great bass, plenty of Tubey Magic, clarity and richness — no other copy in our shootout could do what this one was doing.

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The Said and the Unsaid – The Firebird on Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

For our shootout years ago of The Firebird we had three minty, potentially hot copies of the Mercury with Dorati, as well as our noisy ref. (We have a noisy reference copy for just about every major title now. We have been doing these shootouts for a very long time. After thirty years in the record business we have accumulated a World Class collection of great sounding records that are just too noisy to sell.)

UPDATE 2024 

This is no longer true. Our customers seem to be able to put up with surface noise on the records we offer if the price is low enough. Not actually low, just low enough. We have a section for records with condition issues, and there are 175 entries in it as of today, which turns out to be more than a quarter of all the Hot Stamper pressings on the site as a matter of fact.

We had one FR pressing and two of the later pressings with the lighter label, the ones that most often come with Philips M2 stampers. This is how we described the winner:

So clear and ALIVE. Transparent, with huge hall space extending wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Zero compression.

Lifelike, immediate, front row center sound like few records you have ever heard.

Rich, sweet strings, especially for a Mercury. This side really gets quiet in places, a sure sign that all the dynamics of the master tape were protected in the mastering of this copy.

What we didn’t say — and what we never say in the listings — is what the second tier copies didn’t do as well as the shootout winner.

We used to. When you read the older entries, most of the time they mention the shortcomings that caused one side or another to be downgraded by some amount, usually something like a half to a full plus.

Not all the top end, not all the bass, not as present, slightly smeary, slightly congested — the list of potential faults for any given pressing is long indeed. These are all the problems we listen for and it’s the rare copy that doesn’t suffer from one or more of them.

We decided years ago that it was better just to let you hear the two sides of the record for yourself and make your own judgments about the sound, rather than make clear to you what areas we felt needed improvement.

Consider this example. If on our system the bass was lacking compared to the very best, perhaps on your system the bass was fine, not an issue, good enough. Without the top copy to compare yours to, how would you know how much better the bass could possibly be?

A classic case of “compared to what?”

Shootouts are the only way to answer that question, which, as we never tire of saying, is THE most important question in all of audio. This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Click on the following link to see more records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific copy.

What We Heard on The Firebird

With all that in mind, only the Triple Plus (A+++) copy, as described above, did everything right.

There were two Double Plus (A++) copies, and each of them fell short in different ways.

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Haydn / Symphonies 59 & 81 – The Best on Record

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

These notes are taken from the first shootout we did many years ago.

These are THE BEST HAYDN SYMPHONIES I have ever heard on disc. Folks, until I heard Dorati and the Festival Chamber Orchestra perform these pieces I never knew there could be this much FIRE in Haydn’s music. (Please excuse the pun; the 59th Symphony is entitled “Fire”.)

The producers and engineers for Mercury bring the kind of recording energy and presence to this music that I have frankly never heard before. Credit must go to both Dorati and his players.

His tempi are fast and sprightly throughout, and the smaller orchestra allows the players to zig and zag with the musical changes much more quickly than would be the case with a larger and more inertia-bound group.

The FCO are so technically proficient and so light on their feet that Dorati was able to push them to dizzying heights of performance. For the first time I can honestly say that Haydn’s music really works — it’s wonderful!

(If you’ve ever heard Previn conducting Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony with the L.A. Phil from 1990 you will know what I mean. In his (their) hands the work is so lively it’s hard to hear it performed by anyone else. Bad digital sound but it’s worth it to hear the piece played with such gusto.)

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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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Side One Had Tubey Colorations Missing from Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

An undiscovered gem from 1967 on the 360 Columbia label.

Side two of this record blew our minds with its White Hot Stamper sound.

Musically and sonically this record is nothing short of wonderful.

Who knew? You could play fifty vintage piano recordings and not find one as good as this.

Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart — these shorter pieces and excerpts were composed by those with the greatest gift for melody, men who’ve produced works that have stood the test of time, enchanting audiences over the centuries with works of such beauty and charm.

Here at Better Records we have never been fans of Columbia classical LPs. To be clear, the fault more often than not has to be in the mastering, not the recording. We’ve raved about so many great copies of titles in the past, only to find that the next three or four LPs we pick up of the very same titles sound godawful.

There are some amazing Bernstein recordings out there, but the amount of work it takes to find the one that sounds good is overwhelming — how can such great recordings be mastered so poorly so often?

Side One

A++, with a huge, rich, sweet, natural sounding piano. The more you listen, the more apparent it becomes that, as natural as it may seem at first blush, there are still some old school tubey colorations that make the sound not quite as lifelike as one might wish.

And the confirmation of that finding comes as soon as you flip the record over.

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Why Did Suite No. 2 Sound Better than Suite No. 5?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:

An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.

The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.

I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)

Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

  • Present
  • Rich and sweet
  • Great texture and space all around
  • So lively too

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

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Three Top Copies Make for One Tough Shootout

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing three Hot Stamper pressings of Mona Bone Jakon, two of which were our new favorite imports (hence the shootout winning grades) and one domestic LP that came close to them in sound  quality. Close, but no cigar.

At the bottom of the post you can see the notes for one of the knockout copies he bought.

Hi Tom,

Well, I’ve been going at it for about an hour and a half.

3 Hot Stamper copies… NWHS US 2.5/2.5… WHS UK 2.5/3… WHS UK 3/2.5.

Using both UK 3+ White Hots, I went back and forth and back and forth again with side one. The 3+ side one is definitely the winner. That is also my favorite side.

The more I listened, the more the 2.5+ side one sounded like a wanna-be 3.0! It was straining to get there, but simply could not. Everything really dialed in with the 3+ side.

There seemed to be less vocal strain on the sound with the 3+.

The amazing openess, clarity, warmth, natural tonality, extended bass that reverberates throughout my house and beyond are simply phenomenal. These ever so deep reverberating bass notes are simply divine on this 3+.

What a pleasure to listen to. I don’t think I own many records that can produce the sound that this one does.

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The Best Reissue Pressings of Way Out West Are Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

When it comes to Contemporary recordings, sometimes the originals are the best sounding pressings. Other times, regardless of how good the originals may be, the best reissues, which is to day the right reissues, somehow manage to beat them.

This is undeniable — at least it is to those of us who audition records without regard to preconceived notions of which pressings are sure to have the best sound, based on attributes such as who mastered them, what label they have, what country they’re from, as well as a host of other things that collectors tend to look for.

We hold a different view. Foundational to understanding the nature of the vinyl LP is the idea that rules were made to be broken — the rules I just mentioned and others just like them.

The winners cannot be predicted. They can only be discovered.

Which is precisely why we do shootouts: to find out which pressings have the best sound, not which ones should have the best sound, or used to have the best sound, or might have the best sound, or were told will have the best sound.

Not only do we not care what anybody else thinks is the best pressing. It’s worse than that. We don’t even care what we used to think was the best pressing.

The current best evidence is the best evidence and that’s all there is to it. When new evidence overturns our previous understanding, then we naturally change our views. It’s the main reason we have no qualms about admitting our mistakes. If you let the evidence guide you in your search for the best sounding pressings, one thing you can be sure of is that you will get a lot of things wrong, and we have.

Not long ago we came across a Shootout Winning pressing of Way Out West with absolutely amazing sound. You can see the notes we took below. We described it this way:

This copy has superb 1957 Contemporary stereo sound – big, open and natural throughout. It’s one of our favorite Rollins records – one listen to this copy and you will know exactly why we love the recordings engineered by Roy DuNann.

Side One

Track One

  • Weighty and rich
  • Very 3-D and warm sax
  • Deep note-like bass

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Listening for Side to Side Differences on Beethoven’s Quartets

Hot Stamper Pressings of Violin Recordings Available Now

This RCA White Dog pressing of the Quartet in C-Sharp Minor contains what many consider to be Beethoven’s greatest string quartet, with SUPERB better than Super Hot Stamper sound on BOTH sides, each of which rated grades of A++ to A+++.

The reason we held back on the full Three Plus White Hot Stamper designation is simple: each side had slightly more of a fairly important quality that the other side lacked.

When you play this record at home see if you don’t agree with us that this is an AMAZING sounding chamber music record, with minor, albeit recognizable and appreciable differences in its strengths on each side.

We’ve always found it odd that reviewers of audiophile records (and records in general for that matter) never seem to notice these sonic differences from side to side. The differences seem quite obvious to us, as I’m sure they do to you, dear reader, or you wouldn’t be on this site.

After all, most of the records we offer have different grades for their two (or four or six and sometimes even eight) sides, different sonic grades as well as different surface grades.

Having played vintage records by the tens of thousands, to us this is to be expected.

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