More of the Music of The Byrds
Sonic Grade: D
We can’t recommend this title. It’s thin, flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, like most of the Sundazed records we played back when we were selling Heavy Vinyl.
I don’t think we carried this title but we might have, and, obviously, we shouldn’t have. Nobody should have. It’s terrible.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Byrds Available Now
Sonic Grade: B
We haven’t played a copy of Mr. Tambourine Man on Sundazed in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.
This is probably the best of all the new [1999] Sundazed mono reissues. I never thought I would hear a Sundazed record with this kind of richness and sweetness. It reminds me of a good 360 pressing, and that has virtually never happened before. Side one is a tad better than side two, which is slightly brighter than it should be. But both sides are exceptionally good considering the modern mastering.
This album also has my favorite Byrds song of all time: I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better. (Notice that Gene Clark’s vocals all sound better than Roger McGuinn’s. For some reason they tend to brighten up McGuinn’s vocals, and the last thing you ever want to do with a Byrds recording is make it brighter. But having said that, almost all the reissues are too bright compared to the good originals.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now
Notes from our first shootout, 2007.
Trouble sounds OUT OF THIS WORLD here — it’s rich and sweet with a lovely delicate quality to the acoustic guitar. Just listen to all that room around Cat’s voice!
I Wish I Wish sounds off the charts as well. It’s lively, musical and super transparent with tight bass. It’s rich and full with a wide soundfield.
There are at least 3 original stampers for both sides one and two.
We’ve spent countless hours on different occasions playing them against each other. It’s very time consuming when you have multiple copies of the same stampers that don’t sound the same. Add to that that we have a couple of nice Import original Sunray pressings, and you have quite a project.
But it was all worth it because I’ve learned a lot, and I’m happy to share with you what I discovered.
To make judgments about the relative merits of each of the pressings, you have to find the right tracks that are the most revealing of the particular side’s strengths and weaknesses.
None of the later pressings I have ever heard sound remotely as good as the right originals. The original British & German imports, of which I have had a few over the years, are decent, but they don’t sound as good as these original domestic copies. They tend to be either too smooth, or too bright and therefore spitty on the vocals.
UPDATE 2023
There are good import pressings of this album. One of them won a shootout a few years back.
In fact, now that I think about it, the best stampers for this record are simply the ones that have the most correct tonal balance from top to bottom. For whatever reason, this record was obviously very difficult to master. (And press for that matter.)
This is the only explanation I have for why it is so difficult to find good sounding copies of this album. There are lots of good copies of Tea and Teaser. Many of them have been put on the site and we still have many more to list.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now
Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
Here is our review from 2012 for this amazing sounding breakthrough pressing.
It’s records like these that aer the payoff for all the money, time and effort you’ve put into your system.
This White Hot Stamper side one of our beloved Tarkio, Brewer and Shipley’s Folk Rock Masterpiece, is without a doubt the BEST SOUND we have ever heard on any pressing bar none. This side sets a standard that no other copy on any side could touch. True, we awarded a Triple Plus grade to an amazing side two copy, but this side one is still the better of the two. We could easily have called it Four Pluses but chose to go with the simpler A+++ and this explanation.
However you frame it, this side is OFF THE CHARTS in a big way. It’s amazingly rich, yet clear and transparent as any we played — what a combination!
This, like Dark Side and so many other White Hot Stamper records we offer to the discriminating audiophile, is ANALOG at its finest. To our knowledge there hasn’t been a single record mastered in the last thirty years with this kind of sound, and we know whereof we speak: we’ve played them by the hundreds.
A Desert Island Disc for me with wonderfully NATURAL sound. This copy had the ULTIMATE Side One (A+++) and a very competitive Side Two (A++), making it the King of our Shootout. If you love this record as much as you should, this is the copy to own. I would love to keep it for my desert island, but we know there is surely a deserving soul out there who will treasure it as much as I do, and probably play it a lot more often, so if you know the album at all this is your chance at greatness. (And I still haven’t found a desert island I’m all that partial to anyway.)
Not Really One Toke Over the Line
Please don’t assume that this album has much in the way of uptempo country rockers like One Toke Over the Line, Flying Burrito Brothers style. Nothing could be further from the truth. Practically every other song on the album is better, almost all of them are taken at a slower pace, with none of them having the “poppy” arrangement of that carefully calculated Top Forty hit. The rest of the music on the album, the music you probably don’t know, is much better than the music that you do know if what you know is that song.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
In 2018 we described our Shootout Winner this way:
Amazing sound throughout for Neil’s self-titled debut – shootout winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides. Both sides are rich, full and Tubey Magical with a big bottom end and excellent resolution.
Surely one of Neil’s toughest to find with top quality sound – and only these early pressings with the original mix have the potential to sound as good as this one does.
Six years later, in 2024, we had acquired enough copies of Neil’s debut to do the shootout again. (Yes, it seems that you may have to wait until 2030 for a chance to buy a Hot Stamper pressing of the album from us. However, feel free to use the stamper information provided in the blog listing linked here to help you avoid some of the worst sounding stampers of them all, the earliest ones.
To be clear, some of the later label reissues that come in the second cover are even worse sounding than the first mix stamper pressings that come in the first cover.
(A great deal more on the superior sound of some reissues can be found at the bottom of this listing.)
UPDATE 2024
In our latest shootout, the original mix on multiple copies we played did poorly.
We were wrong and for that we apologize. Please ignore what we wrote about the album below back in 2018. The old mix definitely does not beat the new mix.
The Old Mix Beats the New Mix
We’ve always felt that this album was not nearly as well recorded as the albums that followed. Why that would be the case we do not pretend to know. It was a long time ago. Who on earth has the arrogance to think they know precisely what went wrong? (I could actually name a few people but the less said about them the better.)
It turns out the remixed pressings we’d been selling for years were not the way to hear this album at its best. Neil wanted his voice to sound clearer and more present than the first mix, but the approach the engineers took to increase the clarity and presence was simply to boost the middle and upper midrange, a boost that seriously compromises the wonderful Tubey Magic found in the rich lower midrange of the original mix.
Neil may have liked the sound of his voice better on the new mix, played back on whatever mediocre-at-best stereo he was using at the time, but we here at Better Records are of a decidedly different opinion. On a modern, highly-resolving system Neil’s voice will not sound the least bit “buried” on the original mix, not on the best pressings anyway. Of course, the best ones are the only ones we sell.
If you want to hear this album sound right, we strongly believe that the original mix is the only way to go. And if you want to hear this album sound really right, better-than-you-ever-thought-possible right, you need a copy that was mastered, pressed and cleaned properly, and that means a Hot Stamper from Better Records. (more…)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now
This post was written in 2016 or so. It’s the story of the breakthrough pressing we discovered in our shootout.
Here are some others from that year.
Wonderful sound — rich, full, warm, and sweet. The vocals are full-bodied and breathy. The acoustic guitars area actually fairly natural for a pop recording from 1975.
Play Jesse on side two to hear the lovely space of the studio, as well as more harmonic extension on the acoustic instruments.
Watch out for track two. The EQ on the vocal is always a problem.
Our full Hot Stamper commentary can be found here.
More of the Music of Richard Thompson
This is one of R&L Thompson’s best albums, their second release, following the luminous I Want to See the Bright Lights Shine from a year earlier. Rich and full-bodied, with big bass and gobs of studio ambience, this is the way this music was meant to be heard.
Wikipedia on Hokey Pokey
Hokey Pokey is the second album by the British duo of singer Linda and singer/songwriter/guitarist Richard Thompson. It was recorded in the autumn of 1974 and released in 1975.
Listeners keen to try to find connections between the albums by the Thompsons and their personal lives may be confused by the delays between writing, recording and release of the early albums. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight was conceived and recorded prior to the Thompsons’ embracing of Islam, but the album’s release was substantially delayed. By the time that album was released the Thompsons were living in an Islamic commune in London.
In the meantime the Thompsons had toured as a trio with Fairport Convention guitarist Simon Nicol. Nicol recalls that period: (in Patrick Humphries’ biography of Richard Thompson)
We did the folk clubs as a trio … It was just after they got married, and it was lovely. I look back on that period with great affection … It was really powerful. You could hear a pin drop at most of those gigs. Rapt attention. Two acoustic guitars, and the bass pedals went through a little backline combo amp, we’d use house microphones … It was stuff from Bright Lights … and Hokey Pokey, in the process of creation, Hank Williams’ songs …
So much of the material on the Hokey Pokey album was written sometime before the album was recorded and even predates the conversion to Islam. To add to the confusion the release of the eventual album was again delayed and so the song and the themes of the album lagged behind the development of the Thompsons’s personal lives.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now
This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.
If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums — you should much to like on Down in L.A.
Side One
Truly Right
The drumming on this first track is out of this world — it relentlessly propels this track forward, and you can thank top studio drummers for bringing this kind of energy to the song. Also the fuzzed out guitar that comes in toward the end is pure ’60s pop, exactly the kind of thing we love.
She Thinks She’s A Woman
I love the studio chatter at the opening of this song. The transparency should be striking. When the vocals come in they should be smooth and sweet, better than the first track by a wide margin. And I love this song — it’s one of the strongest on the album.
Time And Changes
Another one of the better sounding songs. This one has exceptionally nice bass. (more…)