Records by Label

Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans – How Does the 80’s OJC Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cannonball Adderley Available Now

This is a very old commentary about a favorite record of ours here at Better Records, one I have been selling since the late 80s, first as a sealed, in-print title for about ten bucks, and later, after learning to how to clean records and do shootouts, as Hot Stampers.

After hearing nothing that could compete with the right OJC pressing for more than a decade, we recently discovered an even better sounding pressing of the same music.

Live and learn, we say. It’s what makes record collecting fun. The future is not yet written.

George Horn was doing brilliant work for Fantasy all through the ’80s. This album is proof that his sound is the right sound for this music.

The DCC Gold CD of the album is also excellent. As with many of the better DCC CDs, it’s proof that Steve Hoffman’s sound is also the right sound for this music. I recommended that Steve consider doing the title on Gold CD — you can see my credit below — and I am glad he found it to his liking. In general, I much prefer the sound of the DCC Gold CDs to the sound of the records they released.

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Blow-Up Soundtrack on Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Years ago, probably sometime in 2002 when this remastered record was released, we wrote the following:

TOP RECOMMENDATION from Better Records. What an amazing discovery! I can’t take credit for it, the credit belongs to Four Men with Beards.

Herbie Hancock manages to get a lot of different jazz artists to play some of the most interesting jazz I’ve ever heard. I have no idea who all is playing but each of the different songs involved different players playing in different groupings: sometimes it’s guitar and organ, sometimes it’s saxophone-led quartet; it pretty much runs the gamut of jazz. And the amazing thing is every track is great. And the sound is great.

If you want a jazz primer that introduces you to the different ways jazz groups are arranged, I can hardly think of a better record.

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Sorry, This Is Just Not Our Sound and Never Will Be

coltranegiant45x

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The sound of the 45 RPM 2 disc version of Giant Steps cut by Bernie Grundman did not exactly tickle our fancy.

It sounded thick, dull, and entirely too smooth.

It reminded us of the awful Deja Vu Bernie remastered years ago for Classic Records.

As is the case with so many of the Heavy Vinyl reissues released these days, the studio ambience you hear on these pressings is a pitiful fraction of the ambience the real pressings have encoded in their grooves.

Real pressings like, you know, the ones mass-produced by Atlantic, original and reissue alike. What’s Bernie’s excuse?

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50 Years Later and What, If Anything, Has Changed?

Audiophile Quality Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

In 1975 Klavier licensed and reissued some well-regarded EMI recordings with mastereing by one of our favorite mastering engineers, Doug Sax. They were to be produced here in the states for the domestic audiophile market.

I wrote a long piece many years ago about how ridiculously bad these records sounded. You can find it here.

I just happened to look up the album today to find out what year it had come out (1975) and discovered that back in 2015, when I first wrote about the record, I had somehow ignored the fact that not all the pressings were produced the same way. There was a special version made for a company called Eastern Pacific Sounds, no doubt serving the Asian audiophile market. It differed in ways that will be familiar to the audiophiles of today, even though it came out 50 years ago.

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 1,000 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality. Klavier records are used by many manufacturers and audio specialty shops for demonstrating their equipment.

For the Klavier release of Offenbach Overtures with Fremaux, our current favorite, they managed to produce even fewer pressings per stamper:

Single Step processing was used for this “Limited Edition” release. The stamper was made from the first generation master and not more than 500 were pressed from each stamper. This process allows all records to be of “test pressing” quality.

The problem with this way of thinking about records has always been a lack of evidence to support any of the supposed gains in sound or pressing quality. As with so much of audio and records, no doubt confirmation bias is at the heart of the problem

We did some testing ourselves years ago for the 45 RPM “Very Limited Edition” of Rumours, in which we demonstrated fairly conclusively that no two records sound the same, no matter how few you press from a stamper. (You can read all about it here.)

We discussed the conventional wisdom of buying promos so that you can get “test pressing” quality or something close to it. This also has proven to be of little value.

And now we have “one-step” pressings, some of which have been reviewed on this blog, either by me, Robert Brook or my customers. (This might be a good place to start to learn more about their sound quality, which, as far as we can tell, is consistently dismal.)

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Today’s Bad Heavy Vinyl Pressing Is… Aqualung!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock LP badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

By the time the guitars at the end of the title track fade out you will be ready to take your heavy vinyl Classic Record pressing and ceremoniously drop it in a trashcan. (Actually, the best use for it is to demonstrate to your skeptical audiophile friends that no heavy vinyl pressing can begin to compete with a Hot Stamper from Better Records. Not in a million years.)

We Was Wrong on All Counts

Over the course of the last 25 years we was wrong three ways from Sunday about our down-and-out friend Aqualung here.

We originally liked the MoFi from the early 80s. Wrong. Proof positive that in the early 80s I didn’t have good reproduction or know much about records — but I sure thought I did!

When the DCC 180g came along in 1997 we liked that one better. Wrong again. It didn’t have MoFi’s usual midrange suckout and sloppy bass, but it was bad in so many other ways that it is hard for me to believe I ever liked it. But I did, to some degree anyway.

Back then I was a DCC believer, a mistake I would come to recognize once a few more years had passed. See here and here.

And a few years back I was briefly enamored with some original British imports. Wrong for the third time.

After playing more than two dozen pressings of Aqualung in our recent [circa 2010] shootout, it’s pretty clear that the right early Reprise pressings KILL any and all contenders. Forget all the Green Label Chrysalis pressings. Forget the reissues. Forget the imports. It’s original domestic Reprise or nothing when it comes to Aqualung.
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It’s Official – The Audiophile World Has Lost Its Mind

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

A little more than a year ago, back in June of 2023, we reviewed The Cars first album Rhino released on Heavy Vinyl. Here is our review.

We didn’t see the point in pulling our punches — when a record sounds as bad as that Cars album, somebody should stand up and say so, so we did.

We said it was possibly the worst version of the album ever made, its only competition being the Nautilus pressing from 1980, one of those bottom-of-the-barrel I-hope-we-all-learned-our-lesson Half-Speeds from back in the salad days of the remastered audiophile record craze.

(Yes, I admit I bought plenty of that crap back then, and I can’t even say for sure that I could tell how awful the remastered Nautilus pressing sounded. I believed what I was told — that the original pressings needed the ministrations of some guys with a lathe who thought they knew more than the engineers at Sterling when it came to cutting good sounding records. I must have been completely clueless to believe any of it, and now that I look back on those days, it’s obvious I was.)

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the hack who cut this godawful record. If you will allow me to quote myself from my Cars review:

Kevin Gray has struck again. He’s a modern one-man demolition crew, taking exceptionally well recorded analog albums and turning them into the vinyl equivalent of CDs, and bad CDs at that.

What we heard on side one of the new Black Sabbath remaster can be seen from our notes as reproduced below.

  • Nasal, upper midrange boost
  • No real space
  • Hard and smeary
  • Sizzly rain intro
  • Vocals are very present in a harsh and unpleasant way

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A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Record Reviewing

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Allow me to respond to a comment left by a fellow named Ian Malone.

It was left in the comments section for the interview Steve Westman did with me.

He wrote:

Quite happy for you to promote your business Tom, but surely you are a better person than doing it in this way. I know that other people in the industry have said unkind things about you but you can rise above these insults.

My response:

I never say that the people making these modern records, as well as those reviewing them, are malicious or evil. I say they make or review bad sounding records and are simply misguided and, more than anything else, incompetent.

Am I being unkind? If Michael Bay makes one bad movie after another, are we unkind to point that out? I don’t know whether or not he is a bad person, but I do know that he is a bad filmmaker, and gets called out regularly for putting out a bad product.

Everyone understands that this is a matter of taste. If you always wished The Beatles albums had more bass, more compression and a smoother tonal balance overall, you can buy the new Heavy Vinyl pressings and get the sound you prefer on every title The Beatles ever released.

However, I hope you know that the sound I have just described does not exist on the master tapes.

UPDATE 2026

I would amend the above statement to say “that the sound I have just described is very unlikely to exist on the master tapes,” since all of the pressings of The Beatles’ music that we think sound more correct do not have that sound. Where that “more correct” sound came from is a matter of speculation, but we sure know it when we hear it, as do our customers. More on that subject here.

I have no way of actually knowing that for a fact, but since no mastering engineer before 2014 had ever put that sound on an actual record, I think we can safely say that the evidence supports the idea that a completely “new sound” was specifically created for The Beatles when their catalog was remastered early in this century. [1]

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Three Great Violin Concertos / Milstein

       More Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

  • Three Great Violin Concertos debuts on the site with roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on all SIX sides of these vintage Blue Angel Stereo pressings – just shy of our Shootout Winner (sides two and five actually won the shootout)
  • Exceptionally spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence
  • The immediacy of Milstein’s violin is simply in a league of its own, with some of the sweetest, richest, most “rosiny” violin tone we’ve had the good fortune to hear

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Another Fine Entry for Our Heavy Vinyl Hall of Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It just so happens that I had the time to listen to this work from start to finish twice just last night, 2/11/2026. Saw it performed live just a few months back at Atlanta Symphony Hall.

This wonderful work never gets old.  Next time we do a shootout for the performance we like with Muti on EMI I hope you will see your way to picking up a copy. You won’t regret it.

The Classic Records repressings of Pictures at an Exhibition — whether at 33, 45, or any other speed, on one disc or four –are all godawful sounding.

(Yes, we have auditioned both versions, for as long as we could stand them, which wasn’t long as the sound was painfully bad. The details can be found below.)

Everything that was bad about the worst original Shaded Dog pressings not only hasn’t been fixed, it’s been made even worse!

Yes, we admit to having played a good pressing of LSC 2201 in 2024, but there are just too many bad pressings of the album to bother doing a shootout for it. It’s hard to justify the cost when so few have the sound we are looking for.

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my head hurt and my skin crawl. After a minute or two of listening to sound this bad I’ve had it.

And can you believe that HP put this miserable remastered pressing on his TAS Super Disc List? Sad but true.

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Fandango! Is Yet Another Hoffman/Gray Mediocrity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of ZZ Top Available Now

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play against it?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring.

Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)