Radio-Friendly Pop

A lot of great music got played on the radio, and we don’t hold that against them.

Stevie Wonder – Signed, Sealed and Delivered

More Stevie Wonder

  • With a shootout winning side one and a better than Double Plus (A++ to A+++) side two, this copy is killin’ it 
  • Much more natural and relaxed, this is what finding the right mastering with the right EQ is all about – it’s the only way to hear tonally correct, distortion-free sound for the album
  • Has anyone ever done a better cover of a Beatles’ tune than “We Can Work It Out” here?
  • Christgau noted that the album was “still the most exciting LP by a male soul singer in a very long time, and it slips into no mold, Motown’s included.” 
  • Rolling Stone said that the album “holds more creative singing than you’re likely to find in another performer’s entire body of work.”

Those of you who are familiar with this record will not be surprised to learn that these shootouts are TOUGH. Very few copies are any better than mediocre.

Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these. (more…)

James Taylor – Greatest Hits, Now with Aphex Aural Excitement!

More James Taylor

More Personal Favorites

  • JT’s superb Greatest Hits collection finally returns to the site with solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides  
  • Outstanding size and weight with rich, clear sound and good space up top, thanks to Lee Herschberg’s engineering skills
  • Three tracks are unique to this pressing, and those three make it a Must Own for JT fans
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… examples of Taylor’s undeniable warmth and facility for folk/country-tinged pop… a good sampler of Taylor’s more popular early work.”

From the opening acoustic guitar notes, you can tell this Hot Stamper pressing is a lovely sounding record. Believe me, it took us a long time to find a pressing this good – most copies of this record sound like CARDBOARD. (more…)

Dionne Warwick / Soulful – Our Shootout Winner from 2008

There’s a reason this record is on the TAS list, but you’d never know it by playing the average pressing. Most copies of this record just sound like an old Dionne Warwick record. You would never even know how magical this recording is by playing a copy that for all intents and purposes appears to be the pressing that Harry Pearson is recommending on his Super Disc list. The catalog number is the same; the sound is not. Unless you have at least half a dozen copies of this record — and we had more than double that — you have very little chance of finding even one exceptional side.

This has always been the problem with the TAS list. The pressing variations on a record like this are HUGE and DRAMATIC. There is a world of difference between this copy and what the typical audiophile owns based on HP’s list. I’ve been complaining for years that the catalog number that Harry supplies has very little benefit to the typical audiophile record lover. Without at least the right stampers, the amount of work required to find a copy that deserves a SuperDisc ranking is daunting, requiring the kind of time and effort that few audiophiles could ever devote to such a difficult and frustrating project.

Beyond all that, Scepter vinyl is quite problematic. A sealed copy that we cracked open for our shooutout was so noisy, it didn’t even make it past the first round. It takes a lot of work to find a copy of this (or ANY) album that’s truly a Super Disc; just picking up the titles from Harry’s list certainly can’t guarantee good sound. (more…)

Dionne Warwick – Make Way for Dionne Warwick – Our Shootout Winner from 2011

 

AMAZINGLY GOOD White Hot Stamper sound on side two – WOW! I cannot recall ever hearing Dionne sound better than she does on this side two. Her voice is so clear and present, so natural and real, the truest way to describe the sound here is simply to say that the sound is natural, natural in a way that not three out of a hundred female vocal recordings sound. 

But side one is a DISASTER — veiled, smeary and murky, with noisy vinyl thrown in for good measure.

Thank goodness we are the kind of record dealers / audiophiles who know that the two sides of a record often sound vastly different, otherwise why would we ever have bothered to play side two?

We recently reviewed a Dionne Warwick record for the site and had this to say, comments that apply equally well to this album.

Just played a Linda Ronstadt album that she did with Nelson Riddle earlier today and I can tell you one thing, the sound of that album and this one are on opposite sides of the recording spectrum in terms of naturalness. On a scale of one to a hundred, Linda scores about a two, and Dionne scores 90, maybe more. It’s a JOY to hear a record with this kind of sound.

Play this one for your audiophile friends who own and respect the recordings of Dianna Krall, Patricia Barber and the like. Be sure to repeat the phrase “boy, they don’t make ’em like they used to” whenever there is a pause in the music or conversation.

You might also want to ask them if they think the invention of digital reverb was such a good idea after all.

If they’re good analog buddies that you want to keep being your buddies you might not want to say anything at all. Just keep quiet and let their own ears shame them. This is the record that can do it. (more…)

The Everly Brothers – The Hit Sound Of The Everly Brothers

More Everly Brothers

More Sixties Pop Recordings

  • The engineering team of Eddie Brackett and Lee Herschberg provide the exceptional recording fidelity – they would go on to win the Best Engineering Grammy for Strangers in the Night the same year
  • “Snow’s I’m Movin’ On rocks, and Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly clearly provided the blueprint for CCR’s cover several years later. While they may not make you forget the Animal’s version of the House of the Rising Sun, they do a fine version themselves. They were still struggling to find where they belonged on this LP, but they take us on enough highs through the trip to make it a worthwhile 37 minutes.

For those who may not know the man’s work, Eddie Brackett is the engineer behind the best sounding Dean Martin record ever made, Dream With Dean. His credits run for days.

This Gold Label Stereo original pressing (skip the mono by the way) has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern pressings cannot BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back. (more…)

Dionne Warwick – Dionne!

Compiling the strongest material from the first four albums — all produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David — somehow, against all odds if you stop to think about it, this Columbia record club exclusive pressing ended up being mastered exceptionally well, obviously from superb tapes.

This Double Allbum 2-pack is the first of its kind here at Better Records. One copy we played had three amazingly good sides out of four, with a very weak fourth side, and another copy had three no-better-than-decent sides with a shootout winning White Hot side 4. Together the four LPs have the four best sides we have ever listed, with 2 White Hot sides and 2 Super Hot sides. You would need a VERY big stack of copies to find four sides with anything close to the sound of this set.

We’ve played more than our share of bad sounding Dionne Warwick compilations over the course of the last thirty years, so imagine our surprise when so many tracks here were competitive with the best originals we’ve heard.

Which means that the future owner of these records will get to hear classics such as Anyone Who Had a Heart; Don’t Make Me Over ; Wishin’ and Hopin’; and Make It Easy on Yourself, not to mention the nineteen other songs on the album, all of them with SUPERB SOUND.

Of course the pressings we played were all over the map; they always are. You know right away if you’ve got a bad one on the table: The voices get screechier as they get louder (somewhat of a problem on even the best copies), the overall image is small, flat and opaque; the midrange dark, veiled and smeary.

We are of course including all the bad sides so that you can hear how bad the average side really is. Side four of the first set and side three of the second set were two of the worst sides we heard in the entire shootout. They’re positively painful.

There’s plenty of Tubey Magic on these recordings. The good pressings show you a rich, breathy, unbelievably emotional Dionne Warwick. The bad ones dry up her vocals, smear away her breath and take the heartache right out of her voice. (more…)

Roy Orbison – Orbisongs

More Roy Orbison

  • Excellent sound throughout with Double Plus (A++) or BETTER on both sides
  • This superb pressing is especially Analog Sounding – lively, warm, with rich bass and breathy, clear vocals 
  • Features one of Orbison’s greatest legacies, “Oh, Pretty Woman,” in stereo no less, and it sounds amazing here
  • While this isn’t the quietest copy we’ve ever heard, it’s clearly one of the best sounding
  • “…every track is strong and showcases Orbison’s immense talent both as a vocalist and a songwriter of effective and poignant lyrics… if you are looking at Orbison at his best you need look no further.”

(more…)

Elvis Presley – Fun In Acapulco – Our Shootout Winner from 2015

Finding clean real Elvis records — not those crappy compilations and vault-leftovers, but real Elvis albums from his golden period when he was the true King of Pop (sorry Michael) — has never been a walk in the park. We do the best we can.

Fortunately there are some reissues from the ’60s and ’70s that have the potential for excellent sound. This is clearly one of them. The originals we see are a lost cause; they’re practically always scratched and full of groove damage. We’d be lucky to find a clean one every five or ten years nowadays.

Side One

Breathy vocals and very full sound make this a top quality side.

For a kick check out the great sounding percussion on the third track.

Side Two

Rich and smooth on the first track, more like an old Elvis record, but the next tracks sound better, tubier and livelier. (more…)

Bread / On The Waters

More of the Music of Bread

Hot Stampers have finally been discovered for the most consistent and BEST SOUNDING of the Bread albums (not counting the Best of Bread compilation, one of our long time favorites here at Better Records, but a compilation nevertheless). This is the record that put their heavily Beatles-inflected Pure Pop on the map, and at the top of the charts with their Number One hit single Make It With You.

We used to think that only the Best of Bread album could get that song to sound as luscious and Tubey Magical as it does when we hear it in our heads, but it seems we were wrong — it sounds positively amazing on the best copies of On The Waters. To hear the vocal harmonies that these guys produced is to be reminded of singers of the caliber of the Everly Brothers or The Beatles. (more…)