Pure Pop – Reviews and Commentaries

Botnick and Levine Knocked Equinox Out of the Park

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

The music is of course wonderful, but what separates Sergio from practically all of his ’60s contemporaries is the AMAZING SOUND of his recordings. Like their debut, this one was engineered by the team of Bruce Botnick and Larry Levine.

Botnick is of course the man behind the superb recordings of The Doors, Love and others too numerous to mention. 

Levine is no slouch either, having engineered one of the best sounding albums on the planet, Sergio Mendes’ Stillness.

Just play the group’s amazing versions of Watch What Happens, Night and Day, or Jobim’s Wave to hear the kind of Mendes Magic that makes us swoon. For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. (Well, almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but Equinox is right up there with it.)

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to let the listener hear all the elements laid out clearly, with each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. When you hear one of those copies, you have to give Botnick and Levine their due. These guys knew what they were doing like few that have come along since.

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Thinking About the Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars of Bread and Cat Stevens

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written years ago in an effort to promote the mostly forgotten and certainly overlooked qualities of Bread‘s superb recordings.

We are rarely able to do shootouts for their albums these days, due to a lack of interest on our customers’ parts, at least at the prices we tend to charge for great sounding pressings of their classic releases. More’s the pity.

Although we were able to do Manna in 2024, and The Best of Bread in 2025, our last shootout for On the Waters was way back in 2012.

Instead, we recommend you pick up some early pressings of Bread’s albums at your local record store and see if the wondeful analog sound Armin Steiner achieved in the studio makes you a fan of the band the way it did me.

More on Armin Steiner and Bread here.

In many ways On the Waters is a Demo Disc recording.

Listening to the Tubey Magical acoustic guitars on the best copies brings back memories of my first encounter with an original Pink Label Tea for the Tillerman. Rich, sweet, full-bodied, effortlessly dynamic — that sound knocked me out thirty-odd years ago, and here, on an album by the largely-forgotten band Bread, is that sound again.

Looking back, 1970 turned out to be a great year for rock and pop, arguably the greatest.

I’ve always been a sucker for this kind of well-crafted pop. If you are too, then a Hot Stamper copy of any of their releases will no doubt become a treasured Demo Disc in your home as well. 

Audiophiles with high quality turntables literally have an endless supply of good recordings to discover and enjoy.

No matter how many records you own, you can’t possibly have even scratched the surface of the vast recorded legacy of the last sixty years. 

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Room Treatments Bring Out The Big Speaker Whomp Factor

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The first Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 album is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback.

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to grant the listener the privilege of hearing all the elements laid out clearly, each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. 

With recent changes to some of our room treatments, we now have even more transparency in the mids and highs, while improving the whomp factor (the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp) at the listening position.

There’s always tons of bass being produced when you have three 12′ woofers firing away, but getting the bass out of the corners and into the center of the room is one of the toughest tricks in audio.

For a while we were quite enamored with some later pressings of this album — they were cut super clean, with extended highs and amazing transparency, with virtually none of the congestion in the loud parts you hear on practically every copy.

But that clarity comes at a price, and it’s a steep one. The best early pressings have whomp down below only hinted at by the “cleaner” reissues. It’s the same way super transparent half-speeds fool most audiophiles. For some reason audiophiles rarely seem to notice the lack of weight and solidity down below that they’ve sacrificed for this improved clarity. (Probably because it’s the rare audiophile speaker that can really move enough air to produce the whomp we are talking about here.)

But hey, look who’s talking! I was fooled too. You have to get huge amounts of garbage out of your system (and your room) before the trade-offs become obvious.

When you find that special early pressing, one with all the magic in the midrange and top without any loss of power down below, then my friend you have one of those “I Can’t Believe It’s A Record” records. We call them Hot Stampers here at Better Records, and they’re guaranteed to blow your mind. (more…)

Abandoned Luncheonette – Remembering the Glorious Sound of Tubes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hall and Oates Available Now

This record has the sound of TUBES. I’m sure it was recorded with transistors, judging by the fact that it was made after most recording studios had abandoned that “antiquated” technology, but there may be a reason why they were able to achieve such success with the new transistor equipment when, in the decades to come, they would produce nothing but one failure after another.

In other words, I have a theory.

They remember what things sounded like when they had tubes. Modern engineers appear to have forgotten that sound. They seem to have no reference for Tubey Magic. If they use tubes in their mastering chains, they sure don’t sound the way vintage tube-mastered records tend to sound.

Transistor Audio Equipment with Plenty of Tubey Magic

A similar syndrome was then operating with the home audio equipment manufacturers as well. Early transistor gear by the likes of Marantz, McIntosh and Sherwood, just to name three I happen to be familiar with, still retained much of the smooth, rich, natural, sweet, grain-free sound of the better tube equipment of the day.

I once owned a wonderful Sherwood receiver that you would swear had tubes in it. In fact it was simply an unusually well-designed transistor unit. Anyone listening to it would never know that it was solid state. It has none of the “sound” we associate with solid state, thank goodness.

Very low power, 15 watts a channel. No wonder it sounded so good.

Stick with the 4 Digit Originals (SD 7269)

If you’re looking for a big production pop record that jumps out of your speakers, is full of TUBEY MAGIC, and has consistently good music, look no further. Until I picked up one of these nice originals, I had no idea how good this record could sound. For an early ’70s multi-track pop recording, this is about as good as it gets (AGAIG as we like to say). It’s rich, sweet, open, natural, smooth most of the time — in short, it’s got all the stuff we audiophiles LOVE.   

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This Is the Kind of Thing You Notice When You Play Scores of Copies of the Same Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hall and Oates Available Now

If you have a copy or two laying around, there is a very good chance that side two will be noticeably thinner and brighter than side one. That has been our experience anyway, and we’ve been playing batches of this album for well over a decade. To find a copy with a rich side two is rare indeed.

Most copies lack the top end extension that makes the sound sweet, opens it up and puts air around every instrument. It makes the hi-hat silky, not spitty or gritty. It lets you hear all the harmonics of the guitars and mandolins that feature so prominently in the mixes.

If you’re looking for a big production pop record that jumps out of your speakers, is full of TUBEY MAGIC, and has consistently good music, look no further.

Until I picked up one of these nice originals, I had no clue just how amazing the record could sound. For an early 70s multi-track pop recording it’s about as good as it gets.

It’s rich, sweet, open, natural, smooth most of the time — in short, it’s got all the stuff audiophiles like you and me LOVE.

Side One

On the better copies practically every track on this side will have killer sound.

When the Morning Comes
Had I Known You Better Then
Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)
She’s Gone
I’m Just a Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man)

Side Two

Abandoned Luncheonette

In our experience, only the best copies (and the best stereos) can make sense of this track.

Lady Rain

Wall to wall, floor to ceiling multi-track ANALOG MAGIC.

Laughing Boy

Everytime I Look at You

The FUNKIEST Hall and Oates track ever. Bernard Purdie on the drums! And who’s that funky rhythm guitarist with the Motown Sound? None other than John Oates hisself. If you hear echoes of Motown throughout this record, you’re hearing what we’re hearing. Who doesn’t love that sound? (If we could only find real Motown records that sound like this one…)
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I Ask You: What Album from 1985 Has Better Sound than Little Creatures?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

We’re huge fans of Little Creatures here at Better Records. When you hear one of our Hot Stamper copies you’ll know exactly what we love about it.

Not many records from this era sound as amazingly rich as this one, not in our experience anyway. (As I write this there are four Hot Stamper pressings from 1985 on the site, and one of them is Brothers in Arms, hardly anyone’s idea of audiophile quality sound I venture to say.)

[I was being much too harsh to Brothers in Arms above. The best pressings have superb — albeit modern — sound.]

The recording is simply outstanding — punchy, smooth & so ANALOG, with an especially beefy bottom end, the kind a good Big Beat Pop Album record needs. (For a reference think Get The Knack or Parallel Lines.)

The best copies boast the kind of tight, punchy, surprisingly deep note-like bass that absolutely makes or breaks the sound on Little Creatures. Without the proper bass foundation this funky beat-crazy Talking Heads album can’t BEGIN to do what it’s trying to do: get your feet tappin’ and your body rockin’ to the music.

Top Sound from 1985 – Yes, It IS, or WAS, Possible

The best pressings are amazingly dynamic, with a sweet, often silky top end. The drums are very well recorded throughout — you can really hear the room around that big kit.

On the best copies such as this one David Byrne’s vocals have the presence and breathy texture they need. The overall sound is open, spacious, and sweet, even three-dimensional.

Mastering and Pressing

You would never know how good this album can sound by playing the average pressing you might pick up for five bucks at your local used record store. [Make that $25-40 based on what I see in my local shops.] The typical copy of this record is pretty average sounding – smeary, a bit grainy, lacking in richness and weight, with no real top end.

Let’s face it: Every mastering mistake that can be made will be made sooner or later with mass-produced domestic vinyl like this. There’s no getting around some copies just weren’t pressed properly, or the vinyl was bad that day, or who knows what else might have gone wrong.

We try and find the copies with the least number of problems, the copies that sound the most like Master Tapes and the least like Old Records.

The Last Great Talking Heads Album

The first four and this one give you all the Talking Heads music you’ll ever need. Each of them is brilliant in its own way.

One of the ways this one is especially brilliant from our admittedly skewed point of view is that it’s the best sounding record the Talking Heads ever made.

UPDATE 2025

I would no longer agree with the statement I made above. Yes, it sounds amazing, but the Talking Heads were hard to beat in 77 too.

If I had to choose between them, at good loud levels the first album sounds raw and real the way live music sounds.

Their album from 1985 sounds good more in the way a record sounds good.

Both put to shame 99% of the pop and rock that was released that year. Both are members of the core collection of well recorded rock & pop albums.

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Gorilla – A Soft Rock Favorite from 1975

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This is soft rock at its best, primarily made up of love songs, and helped immensely by the harmonically-gifted backing vocals of Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Rolling Stone notes that “With Gorilla, Taylor is well on his way to staking out new ground. What he’s hit upon is the unlikely mating of his familiar low-keyed, acoustic guitar-dominated style with L.A. harmony rock and the sweet, sexy school of rhythm and blues.”

If you are not a fan of the mellow James Taylor, this is not the album for you.

I happen to be just such a fan. Taylor’s sixth album contains consistently engaging, well-produced, well-written, memorable, singable (or hummable) songs that hold up to this day.

After enjoying it for more than 45 years I can honestly say now it actually sounds good. The recording finally makes sense, now that I have the stereo that can play it and the cleaning system that could get the record truly clean. And it only took 35 years — nice!

At Better Records that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about progress. Make no mistake, it is very REAL. When we take a recording that, on copy after copy, never sounded much better than passable, and actually get it to sound musical and involving, that’s not an illusion. It’s the result of the countless revolutions in audio that we’ve participated in. Without the hundreds of changes we’ve made to our stereo, room and cleaning systems, old records would just sound like old records.

The average copy is so flat, lifeless and hard sounding that you might just wonder if there isn’t something wrong with your stereo when the needle hits the Gorilla groove. Most copies are awful, and the same goes for the albums that came before it and after it, Walking Man and In the Pocket, respectively.

This record does not sound like just any old record, not the best copies anyway.

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Bones Howe Knocked Windy Right Out of the Park

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Tubey Magical Rock Recordings Available Now

We describe the 2-pack currently on the site (as of 4/2025) this way:

The Tubey Magical sound, the lively, tight playing by The Wrecking Crew, not to mention some killer chart-topping 60s pop, make this THE Association album to own.

With these copies the Sound of the Sixties will fill your room like never before – wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with layers upon layers of analog depth.

These original Gold Label stereo pressings are have the potential to be the best sounding, with the ideal balance of richness and clarity.

Potentially is the key concept when it comes to understanding this and every other record. Again, the label is no guarantee of top quality sound. Only proper cleaning, revealing stereos and careful shootouts make it possible to recognize the best sounding pressings.

As you can see by the notes for a different, but equally good copy below, many aspects of the sound caught our attention on side one of this particular copy. (It turned out to have unacceptable amounts of noise on one of its side, hence the 2-pack.)

I have boldened three that I think did the most heavy lifting to put it over the top:

  • Breathy
  • Spacious and tubey
  • Best bass yet
  • Huge and weighty and tubey
  • No smear or veil
  • Great energy

Side two was every bit as good:

  • Tubey and weighty
  • Vocals up front and sweet and rich
  • Tubey (I tell you!)

The master of Tubey Magical pop recording is, of course, a Mr. BONES HOWE.

 You would be very hard pressed to find a pop or rock recording from 1967 that sounds as good as a Hot Stamper Insight Out. (Sgt. Pepper comes to mind, as well as some of these other Must Own titles, but Insight Out sets a fairly high bar most of them will have trouble getting over.)

Can you imagine the Mamas and the Papas or The Jefferson Airplane with this kind of rich, sweet, open, textured, natural, tonally correct sound quality?

The midrange is pure Tubey Magic. If you have the kind of system that brings out that quality in a recording, you will go wild over this one. In fact, it’s so good it made me appreciate some of the other songs on the album which I had previously dismissed as filler. When you hear them sound this good, you may change your mind about them too.

Hal, Joe and Bones

The real stars of Windy (and the album itself) are Hal Blaine and Joe Osborne, the famous session drummer/ bass player team. It is they who create the driving force behind these songs. Osborne’s website puts Windy front and center as the first track demonstrating what a top rhythm section can do for a pop song. This whole album can be enjoyed simply for the great drum and bass work, not to mention the sound that both of those instruments are given by the pop recording master Bones Howe.

He produced and engineered the show here; Bones is a man who knew his way around a studio as well as practically anybody in the 60s. He’s the one responsible for all the Tubey Magic of the recording. That’s his sound. If you are a fan of that sound, will find much to like here.

Bouncing Tracks

Never My Love is clearly the best sounding track on the album. Those of you with better front ends will be astonished at the quality of the sound. Windy also sounds excellent, but I hear some sub-generation harmonic distortion, probably caused by bouncing down some of the tracks to make room for others.

This is the era of the four track machine, and when four of the tracks are used up they are bounced down to one track, making available three new tracks. Some of the albums from this era — the Mamas and the Papas come to mind — have multiple bounces, three and four deep, which accounts for the distortion that you hear all through their recordings. The two-track finished master might have upwards of five tape generations or more on some instruments or vocal parts.

UPDATE 2025:

In our shootout notes, no mention was made of any problems with the sound of the song Windy.  The harmonic distortion we mentioned above may be an artifact of some of our previous limitations in cleaning and playback. Those of you with a top quality copy may want to listen for yourself and see if you hear the harmonic distortion we describe.

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Pet Sounds: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out between two pressings of Pet Sounds – the Analogue Productions pressing and one of our Hot Stampers.

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for Pet Sounds on this very blog.

PET SOUNDS: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

I have never heard the AP pressing, and have no plans at this time to get one, mostly because not a single one that I have heard on my system was better than mediocre. If your experience has been different, we have some questions for you.

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Uptown Girl Is Often Hard and Harsh in the Midrange

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Dynamic and open, with driving rhythmic energy – the best early pressings really bring this great batch of songs to life.

Jam packed with hits: An Innocent Man, The Longest Time, Tell Her About It, Uptown Girl, Leave a Tender Moment Alone, and more – seven singles in all.

The best sides have the huge soundstage and startling clarity and immediacy that characterizes this album, but they also add an ingredient missing from most of the copies we played — a full, rich, musical midrange!

On many pressings, the vocals can get hard and harsh on the more uptempo tracks.

“Uptown Girl” is a notable offender in this regard, and never sounds quite as good as the other tracks.

A prime example of an album in which the hit sounds worse than the rest of the album.

As you can see from the notes for our our most recent White Hot shootout winning copy, side one was doing everything right, and side two, where Uptown Girl can be found, was doing the best it could, all things considered.

Side One

Jumping out / weighty and rich / very full vocals and kick drum

Side Two

Three-dimensional vocals / jumping out / full and lively / much less hardness

The notes for side two point out that it less hard sounding than the typical pressing, and that, coupled with its many other desirable qualities, put it over the top and made it the winner for side two.

Other records that are good for testing midrange hardness can be found here.

Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?

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

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

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