Folk Rock, British/Irish – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “…now I’m compelled to listen, it’s just so damned good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

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

Hey Tom,

You bring up several experiences that can happen with listening to Hot Stampers, and I’ve had them all (which has caused me to pay more attention to you than I might have, since you clearly learn as you age, which makes you a rarity.)

I often come up with my own – they don’t count unless there are multiple instances. Here’s one — I’ve been meaning to write you with a list of many, but it’s always in the middle of listening, so it never gets done.

Records that have been forever more or less my least liked of a particular band suddenly become my favorite.

This is really weird, but it happens often enough to notice.

Pretzel Logic is the most obvious.

Never really like it much, but the sound quality of yours is so amazingly better than any other I’ve heard, I just fell into the music, even though I’d heard it for decades. I totally love this record now, and the most it would get from me in the past was a grudging acknowledgement of its existence.

I suppose I should at least mention two, but I’ll have to modify the category, lol. Records where I love the music, but can’t stand to listen, but now with a HS, I can’t get enough.

It’s not just that now I can listen, but that now I’m compelled to listen, it’s just so damned good.

Really, this one is one of my absolute favorites for pure sound quality, and the music is so up my alley I can’t believe I get both on the same record. Okay, Every Picture Tells a Story. Wow, what a record, er, stamper.

There was a time not long ago, a few years, that I thought I could help myself by ignoring the Heavy Vinyl but buying the SACD or whatever from the same companies. Maybe there’re some good ones, but Rod’s Masterpiece certainly wasn’t one of them.

Take Care,

Erich H.

Erich,

Thanks so much for your letter. As you point out, I know exactly what you mean.

However, I fell in love with both of those albums after the first play, so how they failed to impress you the first time around is probably mostly attributable to a fact of record collecting that few audiophiles seem to appreciate: luck.

The first time I played Pretzel Logic I was amazed at the sound quality of the copy I had just bought from Tower Records. That would have been 1974, and the way I would have found out that the album had been released is by going in the store every week and checking out all the newest arrivals.

Obviously they sold me an original — nothing else existed at the time — and although it may not technically have been a Hot Stamper — they didn’t exist either — it was most assuredly a very good sounding copy.

I was already a big Steely Dan fan after playing Countdown to Ecstasy for months on end. This album put them right up there with all of my favorite bands of the day, bands that were dedicated to making their record albums as emotionally powerful a listening experience as possible, and ensuring the quality — sonically and musically — was as high as possible from the first note to the last. (Here are two others that tell that same story.)

The copy I had in 1971 of Every Picture Tells a Story would have been the domestic original as well. The right stampers on that title are amazing sounding — as you now know firsthand, since that’s what we sent you — but of course that is something I would have had no understanding of at the time and wouldn’t come to appreciate for another twenty years or more.

(more…)

Thick as a Brick Is a Top Test Disc for System Accuracy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

From 2009 to 2010 this was our single go-to record for testing and tweaking our system.

Although we now use an amazing copy of Bob and Ray (the big band version of The Song of the Volga Boatmen located therein has to be one of the toughest tests we know of), we could easily go back to using TAAB.

Artificiality is the single greatest problem that every serious audiophile must guard against with every change and tweak to his stereo. cleaning system, room, electricity and everything else.

Since TAAB is absolutely ruthless at exposing the slightest hint of artificiality in the sound of the system, it is clearly one of the best recordings one can use to test and tune with. Here are just some of the reasons this was one of our favorite test records back in the day:

Dynamics

The better copies are shockingly dynamic. At about the three minute mark the band joins in the fun and really starts rocking. Set your volume for as loud as your system can play that section. The rest of the music, including the very quietest parts, will then play correctly for all of side one. For side two the same volume setting should be fine.

Bass

The recording can have exceptionally solid, deep punchy bass (just check out Barrie “Barriemore” Barlow’s drumming, especially his kick and floor toms. The guy is on fire).

Midrange

The midrange is usually transparent and the top end sweet and extended on the better pressings.

Tubey Magic

The recording was made in 1972, so there’s still plenty of Tubey Magic to be heard on the acoustic guitars and flutes.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “Kenney Jones’ drums are absolutely ripping my listening room apart”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

My testimonial on this one is simple: Holy f@#%!

Kenney Jones’ drums are absolutely ripping my listening room apart! They’re so three-dimensional it’s almost scary. That extended riff, with just the tambourine accompanying him, is just extraordinary. It gets going like a railroad train and just keeps building in power … Jeez. Really?

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Bill P.

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I couldn’t agree more. I said as much many, many years ago.

I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with DEMO DISC SOUND. If you have BIG DYNAMIC SPEAKERS and the power to drive them to serious listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.

You know what this album is? It’s the Nirvana Nevermind of the early ’70s. It has that kind of power in the bass and drums.

But it also has beautifully realized acoustic guitars and mandolins, something that virtually no recording for the last twenty years can claim. In that sense it towers over Nevermind, an album I hold in very high esteem.

If you’re a fan of BIG DRUMS, with jump-out-of-the-speakers direct-to-disc sound quality, this is the album for you. The opening track on side one has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded. The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. Got big dynamic speakers? A concrete foundation under your listening room?

You are going to have a great time playing this one for your audiophile friends who have screens or little box speakers. Once they hear how big well-recorded drums sound on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.

(more…)

We Used to Think the 25th Anniversary British Pressing of Mr. Fantasy Was Pretty Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

This is an older review. probably from the early 2000s,so take it for what it’s worth.

This minty looking Island 25th Anniversary British Import LP has SURPRISINGLY GOOD SOUND! I’d have to say it’s the best sounding record from this series I’ve ever heard. (Note that this is the British version and not the Italian one.)

I can’t vouch for other copies of this record — they may not sound as good as this one — but this one has the bass that’s missing from some of the Pink Label copies and is overall tonally Right On The Money (ROTM), with almost none of the transistory grain that you find on domestic pressings. If you don’t want to spend the big bucks for a Hot Stamper, this is probably the next best way to go.

Most of the older reviews you see on the blog are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into an art as well as a business.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide.

Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

(more…)

A Pink Label Island LP Left Us with Egg on Our Face

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

We used to think that The Best of Traffic had better sound than the early pressings of Mr. Fantasy, but in a head to head comparison with a killer copy we played not long ago, we were proved wrong, or, perhaps more accurately, we proved ourselves wrong, something we pride ourselves in being able to do by carrying out regular shootouts for records we’ve been listening to for more than twenty years.

Oddly enough, in our shootouts we often learn new things about records we thought we knew well.

Here is what we had to say about one of the tracks on Mr. Fantasy that we thought sounded dramatically better on The Best of Traffic back around 2005:

Best evidence: Heaven Is In Your Mind, the second track on side one. It is amazing sounding here and such a disappointment on every Pink Label Island original we’ve played.

Once you know how good that song can sound — by playing a Hot Stamper copy of Best of Traffic like this one — going back to the original version of the song found on the album is not just a letdown, it’s positively painful. Where’s the analog magic? The weight to the piano? The startling clarity and super-spaciousness of the soundfield? The life and energy of the performance?

They’re gone, brother. Not entirely gone, mind you, more a shadow of what they should be, but once you’ve heard the real thing it’s not a lot of fun listening to a shadow.

You can be sure that we did not know what we were talking about when we wrote all that.

What we had done is assumed that all the pink label pressings of Mr. Fantasy sounded like the one we played, something we’ve been telling audiophiles for twenty years not to do, because collecting records by label is a fool’s game.

In this case, clearly we are the fools.

It probably — probably, since all the evidence points in the same direction — had the stampers you see below, apparently known as an Orlake Pressing, something I knew nothing about until reading about it on Discogs just now.

  • Matrix / Runout (Side A, stamped): ILPS+9061+A
  • Matrix / Runout (Side B, stamped): ILPS+9061+B

These same stampers would be used to press the Pink Rim Label copy you see below. We put it into a recent shootout and described it as having “hollow, dubby” sound.

Yes, we heard the very same “dubby” sound on a copy we played about twenty years ago, and thought all the early pressings on Island, pink and pink rim alike, had these same mastering shortcomings.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right UK pressings on Island of Mr. Fantasy are dramatically better sounding.

In fact, they handily win our shootouts, something they have been doing for at least the last ten years or so.

We’ve run into so many sonically-flawed Pink label Island pressings by now that hearing one sound lackluster if not actually awful doesn’t phase us in the least.

Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.

But before that, back in the dark days of the early 2000s, we clearly were lacking a comprehensive understanding of the sound of the various UK pressings of the album.

There was a great deal of research and development left to be done. Eventually our efforts led to a breakthrough in 2006.

For more than twenty years, this is the kind of work we have undertaken. Why? Because we get paid to do it.

We may be the most knowledgeable experts on the planet when it comes to the best sounding pressings of audiophile-quality recordings — if we’re not I’d like to know who is, and how they came by that information — but that doesn’t mean we know it all.

If we come across that way, it’s the result no doubt of our enthusiastic responses to the hundreds of amazing records we’ve had the pleasure to hear. For example, here’s one, and of course there are literally hundreds and hundreds of others with similarly over-the-top notes. Allow me to apologize for any misunderstanding our commentary may have caused.

One thing we do know: all knowledge, of records or anything else you care to name, is provisional.

If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section.

We regularly learn from our mistakes — like the record reviewed here — and we hope you do too.

However, we learn things from the records we play — not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our record experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and rankings for all the records in between.

We’ve achieved our results by purposefully ignoring everything there is to know about a record — who made it, how they made it, when they made it — everything, that is, but the sound coming out of the speakers of our reference system.

(more…)

Two of Robin Black’s Engineering Masterpieces

jethrthick_1410_3_1192056381

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Thick As A Brick is quite possibly the BEST SOUNDING ALBUM Jethro Tull ever made. It’s dynamic; has really solid, deep punchy bass; transparency and sweetness in the midrange; Tubey Magical acoustic guitars and flutes; in other words, the record has EVERYTHING that we go crazy for here at Better Records. I can guarantee you there is no CD on the planet that could ever do this recording justice. The Hot Stamper pressings have a kind of MAGIC that just can’t be captured on one of them there silvery discs.

A Real Gem

When we do these shootouts we play quite a few original copies of the record (the reissues are not worth the vinyl they’re stamped on) and let me tell you, the sound and the music are so good we can’t get enough of it. Until about 2007 this was the undiscovered gem (by TP anyway) in the Tull catalog. The pressings we had heard up until then were nothing special, and of course the average pressing of this album is exactly that: no great shakes.

With the advent of better record cleaning fluids and much better tables, phono stages, room treatments and the like, some copies of Thick As A Brick have shown themselves to be simply amazing sounding. Even the All Music Guide could hear how well-engineered it was. At one time this was our go-to record for testing and tweaking the system.

(more…)

Hey Mr. Fantasy – Where’s the Bass?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

For our newest take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy, please click here.

A long, long time ago, probably at the start of the 2000s, we put up this early UK pressing on the Island pink label.

Charged good money for it, too, justified by the fact that the early pink label pressing would be assumed to have the best sound for audiophiles in search of higher fidelity.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right reissues are dramatically better sounding.

In fact, they handily win our shootouts, something they have been doing for at least the last ten years or so.

The pink label pressing we review below is very unlikely to earn a grade high enough to qualify for Hot Stamper status.

Our Old Listing

This pink label original Island pressing has amazingly sweet, open, extended and transparent mids and highs.

It has two major shortcomings: a lack of bass, and a fair amount of surface noise.

If you can add a few — let’s say three — dB around 50 cycles and can put up with some surface noise and scratches, you are guaranteed to hear some wonderful sound in the best tubey Island tradition. 

Side two sounds better than side one. It has more bass and is more tonally correct overall.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are happy to help you do that.)

(more…)

Thick As a Brick on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

Here you will find the same problems as the MoFi Meddle, released the previous year, 1984. Here is what we had to say about it back in the day when we were selling this kind of crap.

The MoFi is TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end will be lush and extended. If you prize clarity, this is the one.

But if you prize clarity at the expense of everything else, you are seriously missing the boat on Meddle (and of course Thick As A Brick too).

The MoFi is all mids and highs with almost nothing going on below.

This is a rock record, but without bass and dynamics the MoFi pressing doesn’t rock, so why would anyone want to own it or play it?

The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.

It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. That’s how they get those audiophile records to sound the way they do.

For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with blurry bass.

The whomp factor on this pressing is Zero. Since whomp is critical to the sound of this album, it’s Game Over for us.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with shortcomings like these and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with records that sound the way this one does.

(more…)

Shoot Out The Lights – Bigger, Taller, Wider, Deeper

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

One of the qualities we don’t talk about nearly enough on the site is the SIZE of a record’s presentation. Some copies of the album don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. Other copies do, creating a huge soundfield from which the instruments and voices positively jump out of the speakers. 

When you hear a copy that can do that, needless to say (at least to anyone who’s actually bought some of our best Hot Stamper pressings) it’s an entirely different listening experience.

With constant improvements to the system, Shoot Out is now so powerful a recording that we had no choice but to add it to our Top 100 list in 2014, but we would go even further than that and say that it would belong on a list of the Top Ten Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time.

The guitars are HUGE — they positively leap out of the speakers on the title cut, freeing themselves from a studio that seems already to be the size of a house.

Not long ago we played an amazing copy of The Sky Is Crying, one of the biggest — and by that we mean tallest, widest and deepest — sounding records we have ever heard. This album is every bit as big. It’s nothing less than astounding.

There is the kind of solid, powerful kick to the drums on every track that only the best of the best rock records ever display, the Back in Blacks and Zep IIs, with deep punchy bass augmenting the drums, just as it does on the Hot Stamper pressings of those two titles.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this record should put to shame 99% of all the rock records you have ever heard.

(more…)

Lee Hulko Cut All the Best Sounding Cat Stevens Albums, Regardless of Label

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written many years ago, circa 2005 I would guess.

Way back then, doing Hot Stamper shootouts was much more difficult than it is now. We didn’t have the right cleaning machine, and we hadn’t discovered the Prelude Record Cleaning System.

Is the Pink Label Island original pressing THE way to go? That’s what Harry Pearson — not to mention most audiophile record dealers — would have you believe.

But it’s just not true. And that’s good news for you, Dear (Record Loving Audiophile) Reader.

Hot Stamper Commentary for John Barleycorn

Since Barleycorn is a Lee Hulko cutting just like Tea here, the same insights, if you can call them that, apply.

Here’s what we wrote:

Lee Hulko, who cut all the Sterling originals, of which this is one, cut this record many times and most of them are wrong in some way. A very similar situation occurred with the early Cat Stevens stuff that he cut, like Tea & Teaser, where most copies don’t sound right but every once in a while you get a magical one.

Lee Hulko cut all the original versions of this album, on the same cutter, from the same tape, at the same time.

(more…)