*Pressing Advice

The advice here should help you in your search for better sounding pressings.

At the very least it may help you avoid some of the worst ones.

The Last Consistently Good Elvis Costello Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis Costello’s Albums Available Now

Some reviewers think that this sprawling album with widely diverse musical styles lacks focus, but that’s precisely what makes it a work of genius.

On Spike, Elvis Costello tries his hand at every style of pop music he can think of and succeeds brilliantly with each and every one of them. This is one of the few compelling albums of the ’80s. I still play mine regularly on CD in the car.

Any King’s Shilling on side two with its authentic Irish instrumentation (fiddle, uilleann pipes, Irish harp, bodhran) has Demo Disc Quality sound of the highest order.

Another song on side two with top audiophile recording quality was Satellite. (For those of you who know Jellyfish, this has to be where they found some of the sound they would put to such good use on Bellybutton and Spilt Milk a few years later.

One side one God’s Comic is Demo Quality — so rich and natural. Where has this kind of sound gone? The way of the Dodo, baby, and it ain’t coming back. Mitchell Froom, the man who gave Crowded House such a polished pop sound, plays some wonderful keyboards here and elsewhere on the album. He’s joined by a slough of notables.

Elvis searched far and wide for this group and managed to find top players for every position on his team. The musicianship is top drawer all the way. Elvis clearly knows talent when he hears it.

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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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Listening for Energy and Rock and Roll Firepower on Bad Company’s Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Classics Available Now

The drums on this album are so solid, punchy and present, they put to shame 99% of the rock records on the planet.

As well as having great drums, the overall sound of the best pressings is raw, real and wonderfully unprocessed.

Here you will find none of the glossy artificiality you might hear on many of the rock and pop 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.

And, if you’re playing this album good and loud, you’ll feel like you’re in the room with the boys as they kick out the jams. “Ready For Love” sounds great here — shocking clarity, tons of ambience, and silky sweet highs.

This album was one of Ron Nevison‘s early engineering jobs.

The year before (1973) he had been behind the board at Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio for Quadrophenia, one of the best sounding Who albums we know of, and a longtime member of our Top 100 (as is this album).

He also knocked it out of the park on Bad Company’s follow-up, 1975’s Straight Shooter.

He worked on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffiti the same year.

Want to find your own killer copy?

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

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Our First Big Shootout for Tommy Took Place Way Back in 2008

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Our notes from 2008. Much has changed since then!

This British Track Black Label pressing DEMOLISHED our expectations for this album. I don’t think I’ve ever heard The Who sound this good.

Three out of four sides rate our top grade of A+++, and side three ain’t far behind at A++. What do such high grades give you for this album? Tubey magical guitars, silky vocals with lots of texture, unbelievable weight to the bottom end, “you are there” immediacy, BIG drums sound, OFF THE CHARTS rock and roll energy, and shocking clarity and transparency.

This is only the second $1000 Hot Stamper we’ve ever listed on the site. We know there’s always a rise in trash talk on the vinyl message boards when we throw this kind of record on the site, but we can’t worry about that silly business. Our job is to find you guys the best of the best, and here’s a record that we’re very proud to put at the very top of our top shelf.

Story Of The Shootout

We’ve never been able to pull off a full Tommy shootout until now. We had played enough copies to figure out that the Track originals are really the only way to go, but who can find even one clean copy these days, let alone enough to do a shootout?

UPDATE

This is long before Discogs got up and running. You can buy Tommy all day long up there, and on Ebay too. You may end up with lots of noisy copies, but at least you can find them.

This is where you come in, loyal customer. The prices we charge on records like this allow us to spare little expense when it comes to acquiring important LPs. So when we saw a $200 Original British pressing on the wall at Amoeba recently, we were able to splurge on it.

How did it turn out? Well, by the time I invested the labor in it to clean it and evaluate it, we definitely won’t be making a dime on that one. (Of course, keep in mind that it inspired us to finally move on this shootout, so in that sense it was well worth it.)

It’s a nice copy, but a hefty price tag and a prime spot on the wall can’t tell you a thing about how a record sounds. Keep that in mind the next time you see an expensive record at your local store or on Ebay that has you hot and bothered. We may charge a lot for our Hot Stampers, but at least when you buy one you are GUARANTEED good sound.

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One of The Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the 70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, Yes, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and too many others to list.

It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted. (Of course, as it turns out, recording technology only got worse as the decade wore on, and during the 80s the sound of most recordings went off the proverbial cliff.)

Big Production British Rock just doesn’t get much better than A Space in Time.

Just listen to the guitar solo on Let The Sky Fall. It comes complete with layer upon layer of guitars, acoustic and electric, with some backwards guitar thrown in for good measure. And that’s just the guitar parts. This kind of dense aural soundscape, presented with so many carefully placed elements from side to side and front to back, makes repeated listenings especially rewarding.

No matter how many times you play the album, you are likely to hear (and hopefully appreciate) something new in the mix. I’ve been playing ASIT for forty fifty years (bought my copy when I was still in high school) and I heard lots of things this time around I never knew were there. This is why we keep improving our systems, right? There is never going to be a time when these nearly forty more than fifty year old recordings have nothing new to offer.

Their Only Essential Album

By the way, this was the first Ten Years After record I bought, and I liked it so much I went out and bought many of their other albums, only to find that none of those albums are anything like this one. None of them sound particularly good; none of them are particularly well produced; and, worst of all, most of the music is fairly forgettable British Blues Rock.

Want to find your own killer copy?

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

As of 2025, shootouts for this album should be carried out:

How else can you expect to hear this record at its best?

Based on our experience, Bad Company sounds its best:

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Elvis Costello – An Overview

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Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Note that the bulk of this commentary was written many years ago. I still feel the same way about Elvis’s albums and play them regularly to this day.

Trust is one of my three favorite Elvis Costello albums, along with his first and third, My Aim Is True and Armed Forces.

All three are Must Owns in my book.

I remember loving the sound of my old Brit copy from twenty years back [now 30], even to the point of agreeing with Michael Fremer when he put it on his top 40 rock album list. Now I know better: that most of them leave something to be desired, especially in the lower frequencies.

Did I have good one? Did he? Who can say? Everything is different, and revisiting old sonic favorites can sometimes be a bit of a shock.

Elvis: Still The King

By the way, we played a domestic copy of this album, just for fun you might say, and sure enough it was a real mess.

Boosted highs (Columbia had a habit of doing that for records mastered from dub tapes), poor bass definition and copious amounts of grit and grain — 70s Columbia at their best. What else is new?

The first album and Spike (far from the best but tolerable) are the only Elvis records I know of that work on domestic vinyl. Forget the rest.

If you love Elvis Costello as much as we do around here, we suggest you do yourself a favor and trash your domestic LPs — you need a British copy to even get in the ballpark on most of his albums, and even that’s far from a guarantee of good sound. Elvis is “Still the King,” but you will never know it without the right pressing.

Trust, along with Armed Forces, is one of the records that helped me make real progress in audio.

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How Good Are the UK Original Unboxed Deccas of Satanic Majesties?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

How good are the original Unboxed Deccas on Satanic Majesties?

They can be very good.

But they are never as good as the right later pressings with the Decca in a box label, the ones produced from about 1970 on.

The Unboxed Decca pressing earned a Super Hot Stamper grade (A++). The later pressing, with the right stamper, showed us just how good the album can sound.

Since the originals are pricey and hard to find, and, as a rule, noisier than the later pressings, we don’t pick them up unless we find them for cheap, which rarely happens. They have not won any shootouts, and that is very unlikely to change.

There is one set of stampers for this album that always wins, and those stampers are not found on the early label.

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Turned Up Good and Loud, Carnavalito Is Glorious

Records that Must Be Turned Up Good and Loud to Sound Their Best

UPDATE 2024

The commentary about Carnavalito you see below was written in 2016. With the 12 foot high ceiling in our new, bigger and quite a bit more spacious studio, I’ll bet this album sounds even more mind-blowing than it did back then.

Ken Perry mastered all the best early pressings — accept no substitutes.

Here in 2024 we’ve just done the shootout again, our first since 2016.

Sky Islands is not an easy record to find as it didn’t sell particularly well, but those of you who treasure the music of Weather Report or Return to Forever or The Mahavishnu Orchestra the way we do here at Better Record (or, to be clear, some of us do) will find much to like here.

Finding customers for music most audiophiles have never heard of, let alone heard, has always been the trick with well recorded, mostly unknown releases such as Sky Islands.

Which means that this is a woefully underrated album that should be more popular with audiophiles.

It’s also one of those difficult-to-reproduce records that I credit with helping me make real progress in audio (along with a great many others.).

Carnavalito is a track that really comes alive when you crank up the volume. I played it full blast on two different occasions for audiophile friends of mine just to show them what happens when a big speaker system meets a recording with absolutely amazing audiophile quality sound — big and bold, wall to wall and then some!

It’s my favorite track not only for the album as a whole but for the band’s entire recorded output. It just doesn’t get any better than this if you have the system for it.

Hearing the megawatt energy in the section when the soprano saxophonist jumps in, right into an ongoing orgy of wild percussion, who then proceeds to blow his brains out — now that is a thrill beyond belief. Played REALLY LOUD it’s about the closest to The Real Thing, the Live Event, that you will ever hear in your living room. (Unless you have a very large living room and lots of latin jazz musician friends.)

Even a year ago there was no way I could get that music to play that LOUD, that CLEANLY, and that CORRECTLY in terms of tonality, from the deepest bass to the highest highs, with the wild swings in dynamics that the recording captures so well.

The audio revolution is alive and well. It’s never too late to join in the fun.

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Thelonious Monk – Underground

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

  • Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this vintage reissue pressing could not be beat
  • Charlie Rouse – featured on many of the tracks here – is particularly wonderful on sax. His saxophone is full-bodied and natural with breathy texture and just the right amount of honk
  • So many copies just sound like an old jazz record, but this one lets you feel like you are right there as the music happens
  • As is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, there are marks that play – those on “Easy Street” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The instantly recognizable stride piano lines are delivered with the same urgency and precision that they possessed over two decades earlier…”

This is an outstanding Monk album from 1968. Thanks to Columbia’s state of the art engineering — still using tubes I’d wager, based on the sound — the recording really comes to life, or at least it does on a copy that sounds as good as this one does.

Monk’s piano has powerful dynamics and real weight, just like a real piano.

So many copies just sound like an old jazz record, but this one lets you feel like you are right there as the music happens. What more could you ask for?

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Reposted in Honor of Ozzy’s Passing — Import or Domestic on Paranoid?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

The domestic copies we’ve played over the years for all the Black Sabbath titles are clearly better sounding than any import we’ve ever auditioned. It may be counterintuitive, but these are exactly the kinds of things you find out when doing blinded shootouts.

We have little use for intuitions (UK recording, UK pressing) and rules of thumb (original = better sound). We call that way of approaching the search for better sounding pressings mistaken audiophile thinking. 

Hard data — the kind you get from actually playing the records — trumps them all.

(We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom, attempting to make the case that, although the most common record collecting approaches are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know when any given approach will work for any given title.)

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice for how to find your own shootout winners.

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