Genre – Rock – British Blues Rock

The Faces – Glyn Johns Lets It Rip

More of Glyn Johns’ Best Recordings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Glyn Johns

This album was produced by one of our very favorite engineers around here, Mr. Glyn Johns, the man behind tons of Better Records faves — Sticky Fingers, The Eagles’ 1st, Who’s Next, and many, many more.

The proper sound for a band like this is RAW AND ROCKIN.’ Any phony EQ or overproduction would really make a mess of what the band does here, which put simply is kickin’ out the jams. It would be fair to call these guys a bar band, but they’re the best darn bar band I’ve ever heard!

The best Faces pressings have amazing live-in-the-studio sound that somehow manages to convey the power of one of the hardest rockin’ bands of all time. What more can you ask for?

You won’t get a minute into this record before you’re blown away by all the ambience and echo. You can really hear the sound of the big room around these guys as they rock out. The vocals sound Right On The Money — smooth, but with all of the raspiness that Rod Stewart is famous for.

The drums are big and punchy and the guitars sound grungy and right.

The sound on both sides is open, spacious, and transparent — nothing like the muddy, congested sound we heard on most of what we played (all green label domestic originals – no reissue or import has ever won a shootout and we don’t really bother much with them anymore).

Here you will find none of the glossy artificiality you might hear on many of the rock records we sell — there’s nothing wrong with that sound, mind you, but this recording captures much more of what the real instruments sound like in the studio.

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play a Record Like This?

Yet Another Album that Comes Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

And One We Recently Added to Our Rock & Pop Top 100 List

Do they have what it takes? Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

Live Is the Way to Hear the Band

This is one of the best — if not THE best — rock concert albums we have ever heard. Can you imagine if Frampton Comes Alive sounded this good?

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton grungy power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound? None that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

To play this record right, you should have, at a minimum:

  • Big dynamic speakers, and they should be pulled well out into the room to create a three-dimensional presentation, in this case of a live rock concert. If they are too big for the room, and stuck in the corners, you haven’t got a chance.
  • A large room — our new studio has a 12 foot ceiling, a big help with recordings such as this.
  • Strong walls with no windows, and a concrete floor to keep the bass from leaving the room (if at all possible).
  • Seating for a single listener far from any boundary, especially the back wall (a common problem with small-ish rooms).
  • Extensive room treatments to deal with the loud levels required by this music.
  • Enough power to move all the air in the listening room with authority.
  • And, finally, high quality electricity, a heavily tweaked front end and all the rest of the audio stuff we discuss so often on this blog.

Without all of these things, it’s hard for us to imagine any audiophile record reviewer being able to hear this record sound the way the artists and engineers wanted it to. Playing a record like this in a small room and moderate levels practically guarantees that the listener will not be able to hear what makes the best copies of this album so special.

Our system evolved over the decades to play these kinds of records, primarily for two reasons:

  1. We love music and want to hear our favorite recordings sound their best, and
  2. With this much money on the line, to stay in business we have to be right about the superior sound of the vintage Hot Stamper pressings we offer

Old Times, Good Times

And when was the last time you read about a record that hadn’t just been reissued on Heavy Vinyl?

There was a time when audiophile reviewers wrote about exceptionally good sounding vintage pressings, records they’d stumbled across while wandering through the world of vinyl. We’ve discovered our share and then some.

Harry Pearson comes immediately to mind, but there were many others back in those day following his lead. Now it seems few if any can be bothered. These days the money is in Heavy Vinyl. That’s what gets the clicks and the ad dollars.

Neither of which have anything to do with better records. Better records are physical objects that live or die by the quality of their sound. They are not advice or opinions or theories or recommendations. They are records you can play in your home to prove — to yourself and anyone else with an open mind and open ears — that vintage pressings are vastly superior to modern ones, once you’ve figured out how to clean and find them.

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Jethro Tull – This Was

More Jethro Tull

More British Blues Rock

thiswas

  • An outstanding copy of Tull’s debut album with Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides
  • We’ve only had a handful of copies go up since 2013 – it’s tough to find these vintage UK pressings in clean condition with this kind of sound
  • Guaranteed to soundly trounce any Pink Label Island original you may have heard – these are the Hot Stampers
  • Melody Maker thoroughly recommended the album in 1968 for being “full of excitement and emotion” and described the band as a blues ensemble “influenced by jazz music” capable of setting “the audience on fire.” — Wikipedia
  • If you’re a fan of Ian and his band, this UK reissue originally recorded in 1968 belongs in your collection
  • More reissue pressings that, in our experience, handily beat the best originals can be found here. Skeptical of that claim? Please order this record so that you can play if for yourself. If it does not beat your original (or any other pressing you may have), we will pay the domestic shipping to return it and happily refund 100% of your money. What have you got to lose?

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Led Zeppelin – Presence

More Led Zeppelin

xxx

  • This outstanding pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • Here is a pressing with the power, the dynamic contrasts, the low end whomp, as well as the in-the-room midrange presence (pun only slightly intended) you’ve been waiting for
  • Featuring a stripped down, harder rock sound, Presence really benefits from the killer bottom end found on this early LP
  • “Presence has more majestic epics than its predecessor, opening with the surging, ten-minute Achilles Last Stand and closing with the meandering, nearly ten-minute Tea for One.”

We just finished a massive shootout for this album and were reminded just how HARD this album rocks. Achilles Last Stand, For Your Life and Nobody’s Fault But Mine are KILLER on a Hot Stamper pressing like this one. (more…)

Chad Has Served Poor Jethro Tull Most Barbarously

More of the Music of Jethro Tull

Reviews and Commentaries for Stand Up

With a nod to our old friend, John Barleycorn.

We were finally able to get our hands on Analogue Productions’ newly remastered Stand Up, a record we know well, having played them by the score. Our notes for the sound can be seen below.

If ever a record deserved a “no” grade, as in “not acceptable,” this new 45 RPM pressing mastered by Kevin Gray deserves such a grade, because it’s just awful.

But let’s put that grade in context. The last time a good sounding version of Stand Up was released, as far as we can tell, was 1989, and that version was the Mobile Fidelity Gold CD. I bought mine soon after it came out. I wasn’t even planning on buying a CD player when the Compact Disc was first invented, but then Mobile Fidelity played a dirty trick on me. Instead of releasing Loggins and Messina’s first album on vinyl, they put it out exclusively on CD as part of their Silver MFCD series.

As a die-hard MoFi fan, that sealed the deal: now I had to buy a CD player. I picked up a cheap Magnavox player, I think it ran me less than $100, and played my new Sittin’ In CD, which, as I recall, sounded pretty good. (One of my other early CD purchases was Tumbleweed Connection, the regular label release, and it was not good at all.)

I still own Stand Up on Gold CD, and I still find it superb in every way. (Many of the MFSL Gold CDs from this era are excellent and worth seeking out.)

It sounds nothing like this new vinyl release, and that’s a good thing.

On vinyl, Stand Up has rarely been given the care it deserved. The last version of Stand Up to have sound we would want to listen to was pressed in the UK in the early ’70s. That was close to fifty years ago.

We sold some domestic pressings of the album back in the early 2000s, describing them at the time as made from dub tapes with all the shortcomings that entails, but mastered very well from dub tapes. The best domestic pressings are rich, smooth, tonally correct and natural sounding. They’re too dubby to sell as Hot Stampers, but they are not bad records. Some later Chrysalis pressings are big and open, but often they are too thin and bass-shy for the music to work. We’ve never taken them seriously.

It wasn’t long before we’d eliminated everything but the early UK pressings for our shootouts, and we quickly discovered that the earliest of the UK pressings on the older Island label were not good at all. We wrote about the problem with some originals more than ten years ago.

What was surprising about the shootouts we had done in past years was how disappointing most of the early British pressings we played were. They were flat, lacked energy and just didn’t rock the way they should have.

We learned the hard way that most British Pink label pressings aren’t especially rich, that some are small and recessed, and some are just so smeary, thick and opaque that they frustrate the hell out of you as you’re trying to hear what any of the musicians other than Ian Anderson is doing.

So when a reviewer comes along and says something positive about the new pressing compared to some unidentified original, we appreciate the problem that is at the root of his mistaken judgments:

Here’s the deal: if the goal was to duplicate the original pink label Island sound, this reissue misses that, which is good because this new double 45 reissue is far superior to the original in every possible way.

The tape was in great shape, that’s for sure. Clarity, transparency, high frequency extension and especially transient precision are all far superior to the original. Bass is honest, not hyped up and the mastering delivers full dynamics that are somewhat (but only slightly), compressed on the original. Ian Anderson’s vocals are naturally present as if you are on the other side of the microphone. Most importantly, the overall timbral balance sounds honest and correct. But especially great is the transient clarity on top and bottom.

If you’re fortunate to have an original pink label Island, at first you might think the sound is somewhat “laid back”, but that’s only because the mids and upper mids are not hyped up as they are on the original. That adds some excitement, but it clouds the picture and greatly obscures detail.

If you scroll down to our notes, you will see what we thought of the “laid back” sound this reviewer talks about. (Keep in mind that we first read the above review mere moments ago.)

We think “smaller, thick and stuck in the speakers” may be someone’s idea of “laid back,” but, just so there is no misunderstanding, it’s our idea of “awful.”

None of these are good things. Our Hot Stamper pressings are never small, thick or stuck in the speakers. They’re the records with the opposite of those qualities. Our records are big, transparent and open. That’s why we can charge so much money for them and have people lining up to buy them.

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Led Zeppelin / III – We Needed to Do More R&D in 2008

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Letters and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin III

A classic example of Live and Learn.

In 2008 we simply had not done our homework well enough. I had been an audiophile for at least 33 years by then, and a professional audiophile record dealer for 21.

Sure, by 2008 we had auditioned plenty of the pressings that we thought were the most likely to sound good: the original and later domestic pressings, the early and later British LPs, some early and later German pressings, maybe a Japanese import or two. In other words, the usual suspects.

We already knew the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl was unbelievably bad; no need to put that in a shootout. It earned an “F” right out of the gate for its bright and harsh sound.

The result? We were roughly in the same position as the vast majority of audiophiles. We had auditioned a number pressings of the album and thought we knew enough about the sound of the album to pick a clear winner. We thought the best original British Plum and Orange label pressings had the goods the no other copies could or would have. (Years later we would get hold of another one, clean it up and put it in a shootout.)

But of course, like most audiophiles who judge records with an insufficiently large sample size, we turned out to be completely wrong.

Logic hadn’t worked. None of the originals would end up winning another shootout once we’d discovered the right reissues.

But in 2008, we hadn’t stumbled upon the best pressings because we hadn’t put enough effort into the only approach that actually works.

What approach is that? It’s trial and error. Trial and error would eventually put us on the path to success. We had simply not conducted enough trials and made enough errors by 2008 to find out what we know now.

We hadn’t made the breakthrough we needed to make in order to know just how good the album could sound.

We reproduce below the commentary for the 2008 listing that gets it wrong.

The best British originals are good records, but none of them would win a shootout these days up against the superior import pressings we discovered around 2015 or so.

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Eric Clapton – Backless

More Eric Clapton

More British Blues Rock

  • Backless returns to the site with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this early British pressing
  • Rich, smooth, clear sound throughout – listen to the grungy guitars on “Walk Out In The Rain” – that’s the way they should sound all right
  • Clapton comes to life on the traditional blues “Early In The Morning” – it also has the best sound on the album
  • “Backless is a seductive record, if you’re attracted to the interplay of Clapton’s dolorous voice and Marcy Levy’s raspy backup vocals, George Terry’s slide guitar and Glyn Johns’ pristine production.” – Rolling Stone

The typical pressing of Backless, much like the typical pressing of Slowhand, is just too thick, dull, compressed and veiled to be much fun. At the very least you need to turn this album up good and loud to get it to do anything.

The copies that are solid and weighty love getting loud; the copies that are thin and bright only get worse as the level goes up, a sign that they leave a lot to be desired. This is a rock album after all.

We had top quality copies on both domestic and British vinyl. Both were cut here in L.A. It makes sense that either can be good.

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The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers

More Rolling Stones

  • A Sticky Fingers like you’ve never heard, with superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – reasonably quiet vinyl too, about as quiet as we can find them
  • If this price seems high, keep in mind that the top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1100, and the vinyl was no quieter
  • If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is
  • A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto)
  • Q magazine said this was “the Stones at their assured, showboating peak … A magic formula of heavy soul, junkie blues and macho rock.”
  • 5 stars: “With its offhand mixture of decadence, roots music, and outright malevolence, Sticky Fingers set the tone for the rest of the decade for the Stones.”

This is the best record the Stones ever made, with Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet right up there with it but just a half-step behind.

The sound is exactly what you want from a Stones album, with deep punchy bass and dynamic, grungy guitars. This record is to be played loud like it says on the inner sleeve and the surface noise is to be ignored. The louder you play it, the less bothersome the noise will be. This album ROCKS and it was not made to be listened to in a comfy chair while sipping wine.

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Black Sabbath / Self-Titled

More Black Sabbath

Reviews and Commentaries for Black Sabbath

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this excellent copy ROCKS like nothing you’ve heard
  • MASSIVE, powerful and spacious throughout – this original pressing is big, rich and solid like you won’t believe
  • This is one of the few copies we’ve found in a long time that has no bad repeating marks – many of the copies we buy are close to unlistenable on a modern audiophile turntable
  • The best copies are stunning Demo Discs – crank it up good and loud and if you have the right system for it you can be sure your audiophile friends will never forget it
  • 4 1/2 stars on Allmusic and one of the best sounding hard rock recordings from the era, or, to be honest, from any era
  • 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 of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Red Clay is a good example of a record most audiophiles may not know well but should.
  • If you’re a Sludgy Rock fan, this debut album from 1970 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1970 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here
  • We think this is the band’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Sounding Album by an Artist or Group (sounds like a Grammy Awards category, doesn’t it?) can be found here.

Top 100

Back in 2018 we wrote:

This title will surely make the cut next time we update our Top 100 Rock and Pop List. I would go so far as to say that the best copies of this album have sound as good or better than anything I’ve heard all year, and that’s an awful lot of great sounding records, hundreds and hundreds of them.

It did in fact make the Top 100, but to what end? We never have this title in stock! They are just too hard to find in audiophile playing condition.

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Jeff Beck – Truth

More Jeff Beck

More Rod Stewart

  • An excellent reissue LP with Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Easily – and by a wide margin – the best sounding record Jeff Beck ever made – thanks Ken Scott!
  • This pressing embodies the Big Rock Sound that we go crazy for here at Better Records (particularly on side two)
  • Really fun music – it’s a blast to hear Rod Stewart fronting such a heavy rock band
  • 5 stars: “…almost as groundbreaking and influential a record as the first Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Who albums.”

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in clean shape. Most of them will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG, and it will probably be VG+. If you are picky about your covers please let us know in advance so that we can be sure we have a nice cover for you.

This is a SHOCKINGLY good sounding pressing of Truth, Beck’s As-Heavy-As-I-Can-Make-It Rock debut, the kind of record that would define Classic Rock for the next forty plus years.

The soundstage is absolutely HUGE, while the presence and transparency of this copy go way beyond most pressings. Great rock and roll energy too of course — without that you have nothing on this album.

Note how spacious, big, full-bodied and DYNAMIC both sides are. That’s why they’re Super Hot. I am pleased to report that the whomp factor on these sides was nothing short of MASSIVE. With tons of bass these sides have what it takes to make the music ROCK. (more…)