Country and Country Rock – Reviews and Commentaries

Most Domestic Pressings of On The Border Suck, and We Know Why

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

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

The domestic copies of On The Border have many tracks in reversed absolute phase, including and especially Midnight Flyer, a lifelong favorite of mine. The front and center banjo will positively tear your head off; it’s bright, sour, shrill, aggressive and full of distortion. Don’t look at me — that’s what reverse polarity sounds like!

I’ve known for some time that domestic pressings of On The Border have their phase reversed — just hadn’t gotten around to discussing the issue because I wasn’t ready to list the record and describe the phenomenon.

A while back [January 2005, time flies] I happened to play a copy of One Of These Nights and was appalled by the dismal quality of the sound. Last night I put two and two together. I pulled out both Eagles records and listened to them with the phase reversed. Voila! (On The Border is a favorite record of mine, dismissed by everyone else, but loved by yours truly.)

[I don’t think One of These Nights has its polarity reversed anymore, although some copies may.]

I’m of the opinion that only a very small percentage of records have their absolute phase reversed. Once you’ve learned to recognize the kind of distortion reversed polarity causes, you will hear recordings that may make you suspicious, and the only way to know for sure is to switch the positive and negative, wherever you choose to do so. 

With the help of our EAR 324 Phono Stage, the phase is reversible with the mere touch of a button, a wonderful convenience that we have grown to love, along with the amazingly transparent sound of course. (Hard to imagine living without either at this point.)

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Buffalo Springfield – These PR Stampers Are NFG and Then Some

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of the music of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young performing are about the best we can do for the fans of this groundbreaking band at present.

We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites and have been since they were released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around).

We love the album but not when it sounds like this!

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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Old Ways – After The Gold Rush This Ain’t

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Notes from an early shootout.

I may be stating the obvious here, but After The Gold Rush this ain’t.

If you’re looking for a big and bold Neil Young rock record, this is not the one for you. This is Neil heading out to the sticks with friends including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other authentic country music figures, doing what Neil loves to do — making the music that HE wants to make, not the music that anyone else wants him to. Old friend Ben Keith (a huge part behind the sound of Harvest) shows up with his pedal steel guitar on a couple tracks.

Side one has big, open sound with exceptional presence, something we didn’t hear on too many copies. The overall sound is warm, smooth and sweet.

Side two is even better, with all of those same qualities and more. There’s an extra degree of energy here and the clarity is off the charts.

This probably wasn’t anyone’s favorite Neil Young album, but when it sounds like this it sure makes a lot more sense than it did when we heard it on the average pressing.

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Ranking The First Seven Albums by The Eagles

More of the Music of The Eagles

Without question the first Eagles album is still their best sounding release.

Hotel California is a classic, no argument there, but even the best sounding copies are a little “modern” for our tastes. I prefer both the music and the sound of On The Border to Hotel CA, but that should clearly be seen as a minority opinion. De gustibus and all that.

Let’s call them their second and third best, we’ll leave the order to you.

The third tier would have One of These Nights, followed by Desperado, The Long Run and Eagles Live.

The less said about any of their albums after 1980 the better.

You know the first album. You know Hotel California. The best Eagles album you don’t know is On The Border.

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 accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. On the Border is a good example of a record most audiophiles don’t know well but would most likely benefit from getting to know it better.

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American Beauty – Barncard Knocked It Out of the Park with This One

More of the Music of The Grateful Dead

The crowning glory of the Grateful Dead, this is their MASTERPIECE. Albums like this come along once in a band’s life — if they’re lucky. This is the zenith of the Grateful Dead. Workingman’s Dead is a good album. American Beauty is a great one.

If you don’t have a killer copy yet, it’s time to get on the bus. Stephen Barncard is the recording engineer responsible for this album, Deja Vu, Brewer and Shipley’s Tarkio, and a host of other amazingly rich, sweet and natural, mostly acoustic recordings that stand head and shoulders above the bulk of their contemporaries. American Beauty is one of them.

All the Elements Come Together for Once

All of the elements necessary to take this music to an entirely new level are here, my friends: smooth, sweet vocals; rich, meaty bass; an open and airy top end; top-notch presence and so forth. The sound is so spacious and transparent that you can easily pick out each of the instruments and follow them over the course of the songs.

The acoustic guitars sound magical on this one, and I can’t believe how wonderful these guys’ voices sound. The Tubey Magic and immediacy on this copy are going to STUN you.

You could choose any track you wanted to and find lovely sound here, but I’d recommend Ripple and Attics Of My Life for starters.

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Listening in Depth to Heart Like a Wheel

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on precisely what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Heart Like a Wheel.

A key test on either side was to listen to all the multi-tracked guitars and see how easy it was to separate each of them out in the mix. Most of the time they are just one big jangly blur. The best copies let you hear how many guitars there are and what each of them is doing.

Pay special attention to Andrew Gold’s Abbey Road-ish guitars heard throughout the album. He is all over this record, playing piano, guitar, drums and singing in the background.

If anybody deserves credit besides Linda for the success of HLAW, it’s Andrew Gold.

Our In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

You’re No Good

Right from the git-go, if the opening drum and bass intro on this one doesn’t get your foot tapping, something definitely ain’t right. Check to make sure your stereo is working up to par with a record you know well. If it is, your copy of HLAW belongs on the reject pile along with the other 90% of the copies ever pressed.

It Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Amazing acoustic guitars! Lots of tubey magic for a mid-’70s pop album. And just listen to the breathy quality of Linda’s voice. She’s swimming in echo, but it’s a good kind of echo. Being able to hear so much of it tells you that your pressing is one of the few with tremendous transparency and high resolution.

Faithless Love

Another superb arrangement with excellent sound. The banjo that opens this track is key — the picking should have a very strong plucky quality, with lovely trailing harmonics, even some fret buzz.

So many copies are veiled or blunted sounding; this clearly demonstrates a lack of transient information.

The copies without the trailing harmonics lack resolution.

Once you hear either of these problems on the banjo, you can be sure to find them on the voices and guitars throughout the side.

That the Cisco pressing doesn’t do a very good job reproducing the banjo should be clear for all to hear. If you want the sound of the real thing, only the best Capitol pressings are going to be able to give it to you.

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Old Ways – Another Anadisq Disaster

More of the Music of Neil Young

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country Albums Available Now

Some time in the 2000s we reviewed this pressing from 1996. We did not care for it much.

The MoFi is a muckfest, as was to be expected from a record mastered by this awful label during the Anadisq era, the darkest chapter in the disgraceful history of Mobile Fidelity.

We guarantee any Hot Stamper LP will make your MoFI pressing sound like the bad joke it was even as far back as 1996, the stone age in audio, or your money back including shipping.

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

As of 2015, this label may have entered a new and even more disgraceful era, but considering how bad their records have been from the very start, (something that should be obvious to any audiophile with a high quality playback system, the kind of system that should have no difficulty exposing the manifold shortcomings of their remastered pressings), how much lower can they possibly fall?

Only time will tell!

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Extracting the Midrange Magic of Buffalo Springfield Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

So many copies of this album sound so bad and play so poorly that most audiophiles have given up by now and written it off as a lost cause.

But we didn’t. We kept at it. Our main motivation? The music.

Extracting the midrange magic from a album like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good sounding copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records such as this one is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.

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The Glorious Sound of the SYL Pressing of On The Border

More of the Music of The Eagles

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Eagles

This commentary was written about fifteen years ago, prompted by the discovery of an amazingly good sounding British original pressing. We wrote:

‘You Never Cry Like A Lover’ is breathtaking on this copy — Glyn Johns is a genius I tell you!

We’re HUGE fans of the album here at Better Records; it’s some of the most sophisticated, well-crafted, heartfelt music these guys ever made, and that’s saying a lot. Many of you have probably forgotten how good this album is (assuming you were ever familiar with it in the first place) probably because the typical domestic copy you would have played back in the day is fairly hard on the ears. Most pressings, even the British ones, barely hint at the kind of sound you’ll hear on this Hot Stamper LP!

You Never Cry Like A Lover and The Best Of My Love have SUPERB Glyn Johns Demo Disc Sound on this copy. The LIFE and ENERGY of this pressing are going to knock you right out of your seat. Most copies leave you with a headache, but this one will have you begging to turn up the volume!

Let’s talk about the Eagles’ records from an audiophile perspective.

The Last Of The Glyn Johns Eagles Records

For their debut the Eagles recorded what we consider to be one of the Ten Best Sounding Rock Records in the history of recorded media. (We sometimes have some in stock. Click here to see.)

Wait a minute, the Eagles didn’t record anything, Glyn Johns did. He deserves all the credit for turning that first album into a Demo Disc of the highest order. Partway through this album, their third, they fired him. (The British ran Winston Churchill out of office after the war, so go figure.) Johns is credited with only two tracks, and as would be expected, those two are the real Demo Disc tracks on the album.

But as I way playing various copies of these original British SYL pressings (the SYL of Desperado is the one on the TAS List, don’t you know), I could easily recognize the fully-extended, harmonically-rich, super-low distortion, Tubey Magical, Unbelievably Sweet Glyn Johns ANALOG Sound everywhere in the soundfield I happened to look.

Almost every track has some of it.

Some Is Better Than None

Maybe not the full measure you hear on You Never Cry Like a Lover, the standout track from side one, but enough to make you realize that even half of a Glyn Johns recording is quite a bit better than what was to follow.

One of These Nights, recorded by Bill Szymczyk, his replacement, is clearly a step down in sound quality, but it has some very strong material that got played on the radio incessantly. Of course it went right to Number One.

Say what you want about Hotel California — a long in the tooth FM radio staple but not a bad recording by any means — it can’t begin to compete sonically with the likes of the first three Eagles albums that Johns did. (And now that you’re familiar with the two main guys who recorded this band, check the dead wax of your Eagles Greatest Hits pressings for a laugh.)

As good as it may be sonically, Desperado is still a fairly weak concept album that lacks consistency in the songwriting department. With two good songs and lots of filler, the album bombed commercially as well as critically.

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Listening in Depth to Retrospective

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series, with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Retrospective.

Here are some albums on our site you can buy with similar track by track breakdowns.

Extracting all the midrange magic from a legendary album and Desert Island Disc like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good-sounding clean copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records like this is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we will have to do.

We’ve never heard a copy of this album that truly qualifies as a Demo Disc, but some of the songs can sound superb — Kind Woman and I Am A Child come immediately to mind. The recording, like so many from the ’60s, may not be perfect, but it’s so full of midrange magic, ambience and sweetness that the musical values of the recording are communicated effortlessly and completely — assuming you have a good copy.

Side One

For What It’s Worth

Almost all copies have surface noise issues at the start of this song.

Mr. Soul

The aggressive quality of the screaming crowd at the beginning of this track is a dead giveaway of the poor sound found on most pressings. When the screaming is clean, undistorted and extends well up high, you have a contender. Add bass, some tubey magic to the midrange, and then you can call it a Hot Stamper.

How hot is another question entirely, but if you get this far, you are definitely in the majors. The typical pressing of this album is strictly bush league.

Sit Down, I Think I Love You

On the best copies the tape hiss is clearly audible and tonally correct; this is the first thing you will notice if you have a Hot Stamper.

The second thing is how much the guitars “ring.”

On the higher rez copies the guitars have some of the loveliest tone you can find on any Springfield album.

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