RCA Rock, Pop, etc.- Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “This has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Picked up your SHS of “Ziggy” last week–my daughter is 13 and starting to get into Mick Ronson, and I got this to show her what I think is his best work, not just on guitar, but in essentially creating the overall sound for the “Ziggy Stardust” album.

What I didn’t expect was how fantastic this album sounds. I’ve had other copies and they sound like I’m wearing a blanket over my head. Alongside my HS copy of “Freak Out” (first record I ever bought from you guys, I think), this has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!

Records like this justify Better Records in spades–wow!!

Stephen F.

Stephen, thanks for your letter.

Let’s face it: the average copy is pretty average. We wouldn’t even bother to play the average copy. Who needs it? Audiophiles want something that sounds good and record collectors can find records like these on ebay for under $10 or thereabouts, so no one in either group needs to come to our site to get some run-of-the-mill pressing of a title as common as this one.

Audiophiles come to us for the best, the copies that beat the Remastered Heavy Vinyl Con Jobs, the Half-Speeds, the whatever Audiophile BS pressing may be out there. We take them all on and beat them with ease.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to get a great record from us. It helps — don’t get me wrong, our Top Dollar copies are OUT OF THIS WORLD. But for the price of a good dinner (maybe an especially good dinner), you can have a record that will give you joy and pleasure far out of proportion to its cost.

UPDATE 2023

The bit about the record costing the price of a dinner is no longer true, unless you are in the habit of spending $1000 or more at dinner. Rarely are Hot Stamper pressings of Ziggy priced under that nowadays. Trying to balance the small supply with the high demand has resulted in the price getting somewhat out of hand, at least for those of us in the middle class.

If we could find more of the good pressings and sell them for cheaper, believe me, we would. At under $1000 the record would probably not last a day on the site. At $1500 and up, it’s there for those who love the album enough to pay the admittedly premium price we’re asking.

Stephen, we look forward to finding you more better sounding pressings of your favorite music.

TP

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Ziggy Stardust – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The MoFi pressing is decent, probably better than the average domestic copy I suppose, since those are clearly made from dubbed tapes.

The colorations and limitations of their cutting system would make it far too painful for me to listen to it though, especially the sloppy bass and dynamic compression.

You can do worse but you sure can do a whole lot better, hence the C grade.

MoFi did two of the greatest Bowie albums of all time, Ziggy and Let’s Dance, and neither one of them can hold a candle to the real thing. If you want to settle for a mediocre imitation of either or both of those albums, stick with Mobile Fidelity.

If you want to hear the kind of Demo Disc sound that Bowie’s records are capable of, try a Hot Stamper pressing. It’s guaranteed to blow your mind or your money back.

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Harry Sometimes Has Honky Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

The average copy suffers, most notably, from a honky quality in the vocals. It seems to be an EQ problem, since it affects a very large percentage of copies with earlier stampers and not as many of the later pressings. [Not sure if this true anymore.]

The later copies have problems of their own, though, so you can’t just assume that the copies with high numbers will sound better — they don’t always, and the earlier ones can sound amazing when you’re lucky. It just goes to show that (all together now) you can’t know anything about the sound of a record without playing it, and to take it a step further, you can’t really know much about the sound of an album without cleaning and critically listening to multiple copies.

But that’s a lot of hard work, and who has the time? (Other than us.)

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities:

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Diamond Dogs Is Another Album with Dubby Sound for the Hit

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Both sides are really rich and sweet with especially Tubey Magical guitars. 1984 (a favorite of ours on David Live) sounds great here. In addition to singing, the man handles sax, Mellotron, and Moog duties on the album, and, most surprisingly, plays practically all of the electric guitar parts.

The title song of course sounds quite good. Rebel Rebel unfortunately does not — we get the feeling that the master tape for that song was used for the single and the album version was made from a dub. Still, it’s better here than it would be elsewhere.

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Ziggy Stardust Broke the Price Barrier in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

UPDATE 2024

The following is our 2007 commentary for the best Ziggy Stardust we had ever heard up to that time. Note that for the most part we were playing early British pressings back in those days, a mistake we did not know we were making. (Heroes was the same way, and it took us another ten years to figure out that one.)

In 2007, all we had to go by was the conventional wisdom that the original UK pressings on the RCA orange label should be the best, so that’s mostly what we were playing. I’m not even sure what pressing won this long-ago shootout. 

Looking back in 2024, it’s obvious to us that we had a great deal more research and development to do.

As best as I can tell, it would take us about ten more years to discover the pressings, like this one, that, based on our database going all the way back to 2017, consistently win our shootouts.

This RCA Import has DRAMATICALLY better sound than any Ziggy LP we’ve ever played here at Better Records. Whatever you think you know about the sound of this record, THINK AGAIN. The sound of this copy is so far beyond any expectation I had that hearing it was nothing short of a REVELATION. It’s TWO FULL GRADES better than any copy we played in our shootout.

After hearing this copy we had to lower our grades for every other pressing we had played. This was a completely new standard. (more…)

Avoid the Tan Labels and Non-TML Pressings for Nilsson Schmilsson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Not that we would ever claim that TML in the dead wax guarantees good sound.

Side two of our tan label copy below was passable, but that’s sonically a very long way from the top copies we played, which of course were all TML, with lots of different stampers, none of which we are likely to reveal, now or in the future, for reasons we are sure you understand.

Anyone who buys one of our White Hot Stamper copies will definitely know, but we only find a couple of those every few years, as this is not a shootout that’s been easy to do for a very long time.

Make sure your equipment is tuned up and the electricity is good before you get anywhere near a pressing of this album.

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies I played this week and the scores I’ve suffered through before.

Nilsson Schmilsson is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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What Was Harry Up To in 1969?

More of the Music of Harry Nilsson

This forgotten gem sank like a stone in 1969, but time has treated this album well. It holds up to this very day. The production is superb throughout. Judging by this early album and the one before it, it appears he was already a pro in the studio, as well as an accomplished songwriter, and, most importantly, the owner of one of the sweetest tenors in popular music, then or now.

Harry checks off a few very important boxes for us here at Better Records:

What Were You Doing In 1969?

If the answer is “Recording an album of innocent, touching, and completely unironic pop music,”” well, you could only be Harry Nilsson.

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On Heroes, It Took Us Ages to Break the Sound Barrier

More of the Music of David Bowie

Because the conventional wisdom turned out to be so wrong.

Our intuition that the British originals would sound the best was incorrect.

The experiments we carried out falsified that prediction.

In the audiophile record collecting world, intuitions have a bad track record, but more than a few audiophiles — many of whom are addicted to sharing their “record knowledge” on audiophile forums — seem unaware of this reality.

Taking a page from one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, we’ve opted to use a more scientific approach to discovering the best sounding record pressings, and we encourage you to do likewise. 

We pioneered the evidence-based approach to finding the best sounding pressings, and, like all good scientists, we shared it with everyone. Some in the audiophile community have taken it to heart, but most have chosen to put their faith in reviewers, forum posters, common sense and logic.

None of these produce consistently good results, but those who use these methods are loathe to doubt them and only rarely if ever learn the error of their ways.

Once a decision has been made and a specific pressing acquired — you could call it door number three I suppose — cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias immediately kick in to justify the result, and soon enough the game is over. The prize has been won. It’s the best prize ever. It does everything right, everything you’d hoped for.

But the best sounding copy of the record was not behind door number three.

You don’t have the best sounding pressing (well, you might, but if you did it would be entirely the result of chance, since you have no experimental evidence), but as long as you think you do, and, like most audiophiles, you play records only for yourself, and purely for enjoyment, you have no way of  discovering where on the spectrum of best to worst your record sits.

As long as you think you have the best, you have the best. How could there ever be any evidence offered to the contrary?

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Ryko Released This Disgraceful Bowie Set in 1989

More of the Music of David Bowie

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Bowie

This is the sound of digital mastering at its worst. Best to give this one a pass if you are looking for audiophile quality sound.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.

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Let’s Dance – MoFi Reviewed

More of the Music of David Bowie

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Bowie

Sonic Grade: D

The MoFi pressing is decent, probably better than the average domestic copy I suppose, but c’mon, this album is about punchy bass and drums. Since when does any half-speed mastered LP have punchy bass and drums? Blurry blobby bloated bass and sloppy blurry cardboard drums is more like it. Compressed too.

MoFi did two of the greatest Bowie albums of all time, Ziggy and Let’s Dance, and neither one of them can hold a candle to the real thing. If you want to settle for a mediocre imitation of either or both of those albums, stick with Mobile Fidelity.

If you want to hear the kind of Demo Disc sound that Bowie’s records are capable of, try a Hot Stamper.