Hot Stamper Pressings of the Pines of Rome Available Now
We were only slightly impressed with this Speakers Corner pressing of Maazel conducting The Cleveland Orchestra, writing at the time:
The famous TAS List recording. Very good sound. You can do better but it’s not easy. This work is just too difficult to record.
Mostly true. Not sure about very good sound but difficult to record is spot on.
More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66
We were very impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001. We simply could not find a vintage pressing that could beat it. I actually took it over to a good customer’s house so that he could hear how much better the album sounded on Heavy Vinyl when played head to head with whatever vintage pressing he might have had in his collection.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. I could not have been more wrong.
His copy smoked mine right from the get-go. I wiped the egg off my face, wrote down the stamper numbers for his copy, and proceeded to get hold of some good early pressings so that I could find a copy that sounded the way his did — which was awesome, the best it had ever sounded, even on a system (Infinity speakers, Audio Research electronics) that I had never much cared for. (His system is set up in a basement with a low ceiling, a problem that cannot be solved with good equipment, room treatements or anything else for that matter.)
Eventually — eventually in this case being at least five years and maybe more — we felt we had this album’s number and knew which pressings tended to have the goods and which ones didn’t. All that was left was to do was to clean up the stock we had and do the shootout so that we could actually be sure, or sure enough, keeping in mind that all knowledge about records is provisional.
This would have been about 2010, and we would learn a lot, but we would keep learning more about the album with every subsequent shootouts, close to ten by now I should think.
Live and Learn
These kinds of Heavy Vinyl pressings used to sound good on older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.
Some of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.
The Speakers Corner pressing is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination would it ever be able to compete with any Hot Stamper pressing you might see on our site.
Problem Solved?
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing of these works by Shostakovich, but I remember it as nothing special.
Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.
I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a Victrola reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D for below average.
The Classic Records pressing can currently be found on the TAS list, but we don’t think it has any business being there, along with a great many others, far more than we could ever find the time to play and review.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now
Here is our review from 2005.
After doing our next shootout for Who’s Next in 2007, and replaying the Classic afterwards, we changed our minds about Classic’s version of the album.
Apparently, a surprising amount of audio progress was made from 2005 to 2007, reflected in this review as well as dozens of others.
Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records, although we certainly had no idea at the time that such dramatic changes had been put in motion.
For example, later that same year we swore off Heavy Vinyl (prompted by the less-than-enchanting sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time. To accomplish this we eventually ended up doubling the staff.
(Cleaning and playing every record you see on our site turned out to very time consuming. No one man band can begin to fathom the complex and random nature of the vinyl LP, which explains why the audiophile reviewers of the world are right about as often as the proverbially stopped clock.)
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 no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. There is nothing advanced about these deceptively-packaged mediocrities if you have the stereo to reveal their shortcomings. After spending fifty years in audio (1975-2025, we do. )
This is how good Who’s Next sounds these days, when we have them, which is not often.
In 2007 we did a big shootout for Who’s Next, and as is so often the case, the shortcomings of the Heavy Vinyl version were mercilessly revealed when played head to head with The Right Vintage Pressing. (And not the original Track by the way.)
Oddly enough, and contrary to expectation, even the domestic Decca label copies had amazing sound, not just the British Track label pressings I had favored for so long. (To keep from being influenced by biases of any kind, when we do these shootouts the listeners have no idea which pressing they are evaluating.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now
At least some of the thrills are here, and for any record on Chad’s label, that is really saying something.
Sonic Grade: B+ to A-
A few comments for the UHQR have been added since this went up on 4-4-23, now that I’ve had a chance to see the notes in full. I’ve noted the additions in brackets and sectioned some off as well.
Word from the listening panel is in, and they say the new Bernie Grundman mastered UHQR is actually not bad! [Not good, but not bad.]
The tonality is much closer to correct than a lot of the Heavy Vinyl LPs we’ve played recently. Oddly enough, instead of the EQ being overly smooth, in the way that appears to be all the rage these days, the tonality instead errs on the side of somewhat thinner and brighter than ideal. (One could also use the term “correct.”)
This should not be especially surprising. Bernie Grundman has been remastering Heavy Vinyl records since the mid-’90s. Overly smooth titles that he cut are hard to find, on the hundreds of titles he did for Classic Records or anywhere else. The more of his recent work I play, the more I have come to see his disastrously dull Giant Steps as an outlier.
The instruments where these tonality issues are most easily recognized are two that we have written a great deal about on this blog: pianos and snare drums.
The snare sound on the Brothers in Arms that Chris Bellman cut at Bernie Grundman Mastering has the same problem as this new Can’t Buy a Thrill. (Review with specifics coming, sorry for the delay, it has only been two years and I’ve been busy with other things.)
The thin sounding piano on the Cisco pressing of Aja is likewise a common shortcoming we notice on many of the modern recuts we play.
With links to 29 titles to test for a correct piano sound, and 13 for the snare test, the critical listener should be able to find some records in his own collection that will shed light on the problems we heard on Chad’s UHQR.
If your system errs on the side of fat and dark, Chad’s repress has what you need to “fix” the sound of the album. Instead of a murky piano, now you have a clear one. Instead of a too-fat snare getting lost in the mix, now you have a clear snare that you can more easily separate out from the other instruments.
Added 4/5
Note that we did not play all four sides. We felt sides one and three were enough to get an idea of how thrilling this pressing was going to be. We don’t get paid to play Heavy Vinyl pressings. We play them to help audiophiles understand their strengths and weaknesses. We hope that some audiophiles will hear what we have described and perhaps consider that there is a better way. That other way can be found in the bins of their local record store or, for those with deeper pockets, on our site. Either way, settling for the kind of sound found on these modern reissues is the one choice no one should be making.
We played the following four songs, and heard the sonic qualities described below:
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Maurice Ravel Available Now
UPDATE 2025
We just played a Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2271 and thought it was a good sounding record but not a great one. There may be great sounding pressings of available, but at the price clean copies command these days, $100 and up, we have decided not to pursue them anymore.
Classic Records did a passable job with this title, which is about the best they ever do. It’s a far cry from the sound heard on our Hot Stamper pressings, but for those of you who do not want to spend that kind of money, or for those who insist on quiet surfaces, the Classic is not a bad record.
The performance is excellent as well, and of course the Ravel Concerto is a piece of music that belongs in any serious collection.
This record also includes d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air.
What do you get with Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?
Dramatically more warmth, sweetness, delicacy, transparency, space, energy, size, naturalness (no boost on the top end or the bottom, a common failing of anything on Classic); in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, in our experience anyway.
Now if you’re a Classic Records fan, and you like that brighter, more detailed, more aggressive sound, our Hot Stampers are probably not for you. We don’t like that sound and we don’t like most Classic Records. They may be clean and clear but where is the RCA LIVING STEREO Magic that made people swoon over these recordings in the first place?
Bernie manages to clean that sound right off the record, and that’s just not our idea of hi-fidelity.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now
Back when we were carrying a select group of Heavy Vinyl pressings in 2005, Who’s Next on Classic Records was one of the ones we recommended.
We felt the Classic Records pressings of this album and the others mentioned below were a good value for those who had thirty bucks to spend on a record.
By 2007 we had already changed our minds about Who’s Next on Classic — and a whole lot more.
More of the Music of Frank Sinatra
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Sinatra
Sonic Grade: C-
The Rhino 180 gram LP mastered by Kevin Gray is passable, but the real thing is the real thing and just can’t be beat by some wannabe reissue.
There is a richness, a sweetness and a relaxed naturalness on the best early pressings that are virtually never found on modern remasterings.
Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.
Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the analog qualities the better originals have plenty of, most notably Tubey Magic. [1]
In other words, it sounds like a CD.
Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles are looking for on vinyl?
Back in 2007 we put the question this way: Why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?
[1] Some records are so completely lacking in Analog Warmth, Richness and Sweetness that they sound like CDs, and bad ones at that. They have so little Tubey Magic that you might as well peg the figure at ZERO.
This is decidedly not our sound. No Hot Stamper pressing could possibly lack Tubey Magic — it’s one of the things that sets our records apart from the modern mediocrity known as the Heavy Vinyl LP.
More of the Music of The Doors
I recently had a chance to listen again to this DCC pressing for the first time in many years. I was putting it up on ebay to sell and dropped the needle to check the sound. I can’t say I liked what I heard. Knowing the record as well as I do, I could her that the DCC was clearly to be brighter in the midrange.
When I went back to read what I had said about the DCC years ago, I saw that I had described that copy the same way. You can read it for yourself.
Our old review follows.
We rate the DCC LP a B Minus
We used to like the DCC pressing of this Doors album. Now… not so much. It’s a classic case of Live and Learn.
Keep in mind that the only way you can never be wrong about your records is simply to avoid playing them. If you have better equipment than you did, say, five or ten years ago, try playing some of your MoFi’s, 180 gram LPs, Japanese pressings, 45 RPM remasters and the like. You might be in for quite a shock.
Of course the question on everyone’s mind is, “How does this Hot Stamper copy stack up to the famous DCC pressing?” After all, the DCC was the one we were touting all through the ’90s as The One To Beat.
Well, to be honest, the DCC is a nice record, but a really special original copy throws a pretty strong light on its faults, which are numerous and frankly fairly bothersome.
The top end on the copy I played was a touch boosted, causing a number of problems.
For one, the cymbals sounded slightly tizzy compared to the real thing, which had a fairly natural, though not especially extended, top end.
But the real problem was in the midrange. Morrison sounded thinner and brighter, more like a tenor and less like a baritone, with a somewhat hi-fi-ish quality added to the top of his voice. Folks, I hate to say it, but if someone had told me that the record playing was half-speed mastered, I probably would have believed it. I detest that sound, and the DCC pressing bugged the hell out of me in that respect.
Morrison has one of the richest and most distinctive voices in the history of rock. When it doesn’t sound like the guy I’ve been listening to for close to forty years, something ain’t right.
The mid-bass was also a tad boosted — not in the deep bass, but more in that area around 100-200 cycles, causing the sound to be overly rich. None of the originals we played had anything like it, so I’m pretty sure that’s a bit of added EQ Hoffman introduced for reasons best known to him. (Did he like it that way, or was he pandering to some of the audiophile community’s preference for overly rich sound, the kind they confuse with “analog”? Nobody knows.)
Not So Fast There, O Hot Stamper Guru
But wait a minute — don’t all records sound different? Is it really fair to paint his version with such a broad brush on the basis of having played only one copy?
Of course not. Perhaps other copies sound better. It wouldn’t be the first time. (Maybe they sound worse. Think about that.)
So here’s our offer to you, dear customer: We absolutely guarantee our Hot Stamper copies will handily beat the DCC pressing or your money back. We’ll even pay the return domestic shipping if for some reason you are not 100% satisfied with the sound of our Hot Stamper. Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse, for any one of you who love the album and have a wad of money burning a hole in your pocket.
More of the Music of Frank Sinatra
Sonic Grade: C-
Reprise reissued this album on 180 gram vinyl in 2004.
Our advice: skip this Heavy Vinyl mediocrity.
The originals are far better and not that hard to find.
In fact, the good originals are so good that they can be found in our vocal Demo Disc section. I’m pretty sure that this run-of-the-mill reissue is nobody’s idea of a Demo Disc.
Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals are full of.
In other words, it sounds like a CD.
Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles are looking for on vinyl? Back in 2007 we put the question this way: Why Own a Turntable if You’re Going to Play Mediocrities Like These?
Also, skip the orange label reissues. We’ve never heard a good one and we stopped buying them a long time ago.