Art Rock – Reviews and Commentaries

Listening in Depth to Hot Rats

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Zappa Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series.

Hot Rats was mastered by Jack Hunt, a man we know to be responsible for some of the thickest, dullest, most dead sounding MoFi recuts found in their shameful catalog.

We have to admit that he did a good job cutting this album though.

Of course, not cutting at Half Speed was a big help, because Half Speed mastering is just a bad idea that ends up making some of the wackiest sounding records we have ever played.

Side One

Peaches En Regalia

This track tends to be a bit dull and could use a little sweetening on the top end on almost any copy you find. 1 or 2 dB at 10k might be just what the doctor ordered.

Willie the Pimp

This is one of the two extended tracks on the album; the second track on each side is “the long one,” and they both suffer from the same slight upper midrange boost. This song and The Gumbo Variations on side two are both difficult to turn up due to their tendency to be slightly aggressive.

Son Of Mr. Green Genes

One of the best sounding tracks on the album, and probably the best sound to be found on side one.

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Does Year of the Cat on Mobile Fidelity Have Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Stewart Available Now

Our answer, judging by the copy we played not long ago, would be solidly in the negative. The final grade we awarded both sides was No, our way of saying the record is Not Good.

Below is a description for what a top copy of the album sounds like, based on our most recent shootout:

Incredible sound throughout this vintage Janus pressing of Stewart’s 1976 Masterpiece. With engineering by Alan Parsons, the top pressings are every bit the audiophile Demo Discs you remember. The best sides have sweet vocals, huge amounts of space, breathtaking transparency, and so much more.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

But if you own the wrong Mobile Fidelity pressing — this one was reissued in 1981, the original came out in 1978, so there may be some other pressings that sound better than this one — you would never know how good sounding the album can be. We put a copy we had laying around in a shootout recently and the results were, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty painful.

As the notes make clear, the Mobile Fidelity pressing, with the stampers you see on the sheet above, is:

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To Find the Most Elusive Hot Stamper Records, “Press On!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Calvin Coolidge

If you substitute “finding Hot Stamper pressings” for the words “the human race” you will better appreciate the point we are trying to make with this commentary.

ambrosiasomewhereOur story today revolves around the first Hot Stamper listing we had ever done for Ambrosia’s second — and second best — album. It took us a long time to find the right pressing.

Do you, or any of the other audiophiles you know, keep buying the same album over and over again year after year in hopes of finding a better sounding copy?

We do — and have been for more than twenty years as a matter of fact. Here’s why.

Around 2007 I stumbled upon the Hot Stampers for this record — purely by accident of course, there’s almost no other way to do it — and was shocked — shocked — to actually hear INTO the soundfield of the recording for the first time in my life, this after having played copy after frustratingly opaque copy for roughly thirty years.

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Leftoverture – “…a certain ‘squawky, pinched’ sound to the guitars…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Arty Rock Albums Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity.

This copy of Kansas’ most consistent album, their masterpiece I might venture to say, has an OFF THE CHARTS A+++ side two! This copy shows you the ROCK album they actually recorded. The average copy of Leftoverture only hints at the power of the band.

Side two just KILLED from start to finish, with the deepest, punchiest bass, moving up the frequency ladder to the clearest sweetest mids, and following it all the way to the top with the most extended grain-free, silky highs.

Most copies, like so many rock records from the era, are veiled and smeary. Often they lack extension at one or both ends of the frequency spectrum, more often than not up top, which results in harshness and shrillness, not the sound you want on a Kansas record.

But copies such as this one show you the kind of sound that is possible with Leftoverture. It is, in a word, SMEAR-FREE, with superb transients, textures and clarity that are the natural result of getting every last bit of musical information into the grooves.

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On A Day at the Races, Which Side Lacked Space?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

We described our 2025 White Hot Shootout Winner this way:

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “tubey and silky vox”…”very transparent and present”…”3D and sweet and tubey”…”big bass!” (side two)…”very full bodied and 3D.”

We shot out a number of other imports and the midrange presence, bass, and dynamics on this outstanding copy placed it well above almost all the other pressings we played.

As you can see from the notes, side one was killer in every respect, and the way we know that with a high degree of certainty is that we played a bunch of copies and nothing could touch it.

Side two was every bit as good in virtually every area, but in the final analysis we determined it fell a bit short in one. We discovered that fact when we came across a side two that was slightly better in one aspect of its sound than the side two you see described in the notes below.

When we played the two best copies back to back, something we do for each side as a final test in every shootout, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+. However, the side two of another pressing showed us there was even more space to be heard surrounding the music than we’d noticed the first time around.

With another copy earning a better grade for having even more space and ambience, we felt the right grade for this side two was 2.5+, Nearly White Hot.

Will the owner of this copy be able to tell?

That seems unlikely. It would be the rare listener indeed who would be able to detect anything missing on this amazingly good side two.

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Letter of the Week – “It is in a whole different league to the best I have ever managed to find…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

I want to thank you so much for the Diamond Dogs I received from you.

It is in a whole different league to the best I have ever managed to find and it is so satisfying to hear something how I always thought it should sound and at a very reasonable price. This is my favourite Bowie album.

Interestingly I bought a Hunky Dory recently that is out of this world. I know one is not supposed to give away stamper numbers and such (blame my compulsive honesty on my Aspergers!) and you probably know this already but the pressing is German RCA International with E 0014A -2 II and E 0014 B 1 II. It is seriously one of the best records I have and by far the best Bowie.

Thanks again Tom and everyone at Better records!

Cheers, Peter

Peter, glad to hear you liked our Diamond Dogs! Those are indeed very special pressings.

Best, TP

P.S.

We happen to know the German pressing of Hunky Dory referenced above. It can be good but not great. They are not competitive with the copies we sell. We do not buy them nor do we sell them. Ours get rave reviews like this one.

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Remain In Light Is One Tough Title to Reproduce

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

Remain in Light is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the listener, 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 (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles neglect).

A word of caution: 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 recording ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

It took a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be.

It’s not easy to find a pressing with the low end whomp factor, midrange energy and overall dynamic power that this music needs, and it takes one helluva stereo to play one too.

As we’ve said before about these kinds of recordings — Ambrosia; Blood, Sweat and Tears; The Yes Album; Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin II — they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees.

If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound .

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Nursery Cryme on Classic Records – What System Can Make It Sound Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Genesis Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing from 2000 is a smeary, lifeless mess next to the best early tan label British pressings. No Classic pressing of any of the Genesis albums that we’ve played sounded right to us.

The Peter Gabriel albums they remastered were just as bad. All of them earned a grade of F. We made no effort to do listings for most of them because they all were bad sounding, and bad sounding in the same way.

If I were to try to “reverse engineer” the sound of a system that could play this record and compensate for its many faults, I would look for a system that was thick, dark and fat, with added richness and a heaping portion of euphonic tube colorations.

I know that sound. I had a stereo in the 90s with many of those same shortcomings, but of course I hadn’t a clue about any of that. Back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I needed to put together a system with a lot more “Hi-fi” and a lot less “My-fi,” a process that took many years and a great deal of effort.

I’m glad to say things are different now.

What to Listen For

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

Further Reading

The sonic signature of the modern Heavy Vinyl Classical reissue in five words: diffuse, washed out, veiled, and vague.

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Helpful Stamper Information You Can Use – Episode 108

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

British Pressing? Check.

Pink Label? Check.

Sound Quality?  Side One:: 1+ (dubby). Side One of another copy: NFG (no good).

Apparently something went wrong, but exactly what, nobody really knows.

And if for some reason somebody actually believes they know what went wrong, we tell them that that kind of thinking is detrimental to whatever success they hope to achieve in finding better sounding records, if our experience over the last fifty years has any bearing.

We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended to. All our knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.

If somehow we did know it all, there would be no need for the two hundred entries in our live and learn section about all the mistakes we’ve made over the years trying to understand record pressings at the sonic level.

We take a different approach to searching out better sounding pressings. Instead of reading about them — who made them, how they were made, where they were made, all that sort of thing — we instead devoted our efforts to cleaning and playing them, so that we could make our own judgments about the sound and the music we heard.

Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed over the course of the last twenty years, produce all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the rankings for all the records in-between.

Free Stamper Info

By my count this is the 108th stamper sheet we have posted on The Skeptical Audiophile.

In the case of this title, these are what we would call bad stampers for Genesis’s 1973 prog album Selling England by the Pound (a record we rarely have in stock because the best stampers are just too hard to find, at least they are on copies in audiophile playing condition).

If you are looking for top quality sound — and seriously, what else would you be looking for if you are reading this blog? —  then make sure not to buy just any old early Pink Label UK pressing of the album. You may end up with one that sounds as bad as this one did.

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I Don’t Care What Anybody Says, One Eighty Is a Great Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This is smooth, rich ANALOG at its best.

Easy on the ears as we like to say.

One Eighty is clearly the poppier side of Ambrosia, containing as it does two of their highest-charting mainstream hits, Biggest Part of Me (#3) and You’re the Only Woman (#13). 

I myself of course prefer the proggy first two albums, which fallinto the broad category of Art Rock, where my favorite albums by Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music, Supertramp, 10cc, later-period Beatles, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Traffic and so many others from the last forty-plus years can be found.

These artists’ recordings tend to be big, powerful and exceedingly hard to reproduce, which, probably more than anything else, accounts for my becoming a serious stereo enthusiast right out of my teens.

(My mother had to co-sign the loan I needed to purchase the currently-state-of-the-art ARC SP3A-1 preamp I coveted. I remember it being $600+ at a time, back when I was earning roughly $2 an hour. That had to hurt, but I did it. Bought a D-75 amp after I paid it off too.)

The Music

One Eighty (recorded on 1/80, get it?) kicks off with a real rocker: Ready, which is a great name for an opening track and really gets the album off to a high-energy start. Side two opens with my favorite track on the album, Livin’ On My Own. I actually used to demonstrate my system with it: the bass is huge, way up in the mix and really punchy. Additionally there are powerful multi-tracked vocal harmonies in the chorus that are wall-to-wall, surprisingly dynamic, yet sweet (all things considered; this is a modern recording after all).

One Eighty has an excellent mix of rock and softer pop ballads. The last track, Biggest Part Of Me, no matter how many times you’ve heard it, on the radio or elsewhere, is an exceptionally well-produced (designed?) piece of songcraft that will tug at anyone’s heartstrings, anyone who has a heart that is (if I may quote the title of the best song Burt Bacharach ever wrote). On a big audiophile system it should be both powerful and emotional. (more…)