Folk Rock, Hippie – Commentaries

If Only I Could Remember My Name – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?

On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:

  • Noticeably more warmth,
  • Noticeably more sweetness,
  • Noticeably more delicacy,
  • Noticeably more transparency,
  • Noticeably more ambience,
  • Noticeably more energy,
  • Noticeably more size (width and height),
  • Noticeably more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).

in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.

The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.

A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.

By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.

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What to Listen For on Mr. Tambourine Man

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Byrds Available Now

This commentary was written about ten years ago and updated in 2025.

Want to hear what the best copies of Mr. Tambourine Man can do? Play Chimes of Freedom, one of the best sounding tracks on side two, if not THE best. Listen to how breathy Jim (later Roger) McGuinn’s vocals are. Byrds records almost never sound like that.

I Knew I’d Want You is another one that sounds amazingly Tubey Magical on the best pressings.

Years ago we wrote that the 360 Label original pressings were the only ones with the rich, warm sound of tubes:

Looking for Tubey Magic? The best 360 pressings are the only way to go, and even those are often lacking. (Forget most Red Label copies; they have nice qualities but Tubey Magic is not among them.) But the best pressings of The Byrds’ albums — those with truly Hot Stampers — are swimming in it.

This time around we found a Red Label reissue with lovely Tubey Magic. It did not win our shootout — this copy did — but it was very rich and tubey. I had no idea it was a reissue when grading it, because it sure didn’t fit with my idea of what a reissue would sound like. Fortunately I can’t see the labels of the records that I’m grading, which helps make the admittedly subjective evaluation of records somewhat more objective than might otherwise be the case.

UPDATE 2025

We no longer bother with the Red Label pressings of this album. The good ones are too rare, and the time spent finding, cleaning and playing them is just not worth the trouble when the 360 label pressings are often so much better sounding.

Speaking of labels, we have two lists for those who would like to know which Columbia label pressings win shootouts — one for 6-Eye winners and one for 360 Label winners.

Side One

The first track rarely if ever sounds as good as those that follow.

By the time you get to track two you’re hearing one of my favorite Byrds song of all time: I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better. It’s energetic and very present on this copy.

Notice that Gene Clark’s vocals usually sound better than Roger McGuinn’s.

For some reason they tend to brighten up his vocals, and the last thing you ever want to do with a Byrds recording is make it brighter. Most of the reissues are too thin and bright compared to the best originals.

The third track has wonderful space and clarity.

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Robert Brook Compares Different Hot Stamper Pressings of Crosby’s Must Own Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for one of our favorite records, If Only I Could Remember My Name.

In this review he compares two Hot Stamper pressings, one a Super Hot, and one the next grade up from a Super, a Nearly White Hot stamper pressing.

When an amazing recording meets a system that can play it right, inevitably sparks fly, and these two copies were apparently giving off a lot of sparks.

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER MY NAME & The NW HOT STAMPER

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Down in L.A. Sits Fairly High Up on Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brewer and Shipley Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The commentary you see below was originally written about 15 years ago. Minor changes have since been made. At the time of this posting there is a copy of Down in L.A. on the site, one of the first copies we have had to sell since 2019, and before that I think our last shootout was in 2008.

There are a great many wonderful albums we can no longer offer our customers, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but I am glad to say that Down in L.A. is not one of them.

We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce: how the revolutions in audio of the last decade or two have profoundly changed the ability of the seriously dedicated audiophile to get records that never sounded good before to come to life musically in a way previously understood to be impossible.

This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as the commentary below explains.

60s Sound

The problem here is the sound. It’s got a bit of that tinny 60s pop production sound — too much upper midrange, not enough lower midrange and a slightly aggressive quality when things get loud. Still, it’s quite a bit better than recordings by, say, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane from the era, and I have no trouble playing and enjoying their records.

I can also tell you that if you have a modest system this record is just going to sound like crap.

How do I know that?

It sounded like crap for years in my system, even when I thought I had a good one.

Vinyl playback has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you’ve participated in some of the revolutionary changes that we talk about endlessly on this blog, you should hear some pretty respectable sound. Otherwise, I would pass.

On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, the kind of sound I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. The kind of systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.

If you’re a Weekend Warrior when it comes to your stereo, this is not the record for you.

If however you would like to advance in audio in order to hear better sound and enjoy more recordings than you do now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.

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This Is Why We Love Hippie Folk Rock from the 60s and 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.

If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums? — you should much to like on Down in L.A.

Here is how we described our most recent shootout winner:

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”vox and guitar jumping out of the speakers”…”big and tubey and weighty”…”HTF [hard to fault]” (side one)…”serious bass and energy”…:”rich and 3D and lively.”

Both of these sides have the smooth, sweet, analog sound we were listening for – they’re rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear — the best of both worlds.

The notes for the top copy from our most recent shootout can be seen below. It us six years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort.

Side one was HTF – Hard To Fault.

Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island Disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre.

It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars.

The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul.

All three are built on the same folk pop sensibilities. Tarkio, album number three, is clearly the duo’s Masterpiece, but this record comes next in my book, followed by Weeds, their second album and first for Kama Sutra. After Tarkio it’s all downhill.

“Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome, strident qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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The Donovan You Don’t Know – In Concert

Hot Stamper Pressings of Our Favorite Hippie Folk Rock Albums

We discovered a while back just what an excellent recording this is and now we know how magical the best copies can be. Only the very best copies delivered the kind of natural, immediate sound we were looking for.

There are a lot of Donovan records out there, but not a lot of them that sound like this! On top of that you get a great set of songs, including Mellow Yellow, Isle Of Islay, Celeste, and First There Is A Mountain (the song that became the main riff of the Allman Brothers’ famous Mountain Jam).|

Get in touch with your inner flower child and spin a copy of this album full of trippy hippie magic.

Tubey Magical Guitars

Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead-on correct tonality — everything that we listen for in a great record is here. You could certainly demonstrate your stereo with a record this good, even one that’s not nearly this good, because this one is outstanding.

But what you would really be demonstrating is music that the listener probably hasn’t heard, and that’s the best excuse to show off your stereo.

Midrange presence and immediacy are key to the sound. Get the volume just right and Donovan himself will be standing between your speakers and putting on the performance of a lifetime. This early Epic stereo pressing is the only way to hear the Midrange Magic that’s missing from modern records. As good as the best of those pressings may be, this record is dramatically more real sounding.

Donovan’s no longer a recording — he’s a living, breathing person. We call that “the breath of life,” and this record has it in spades. His voice is so rich, sweet, and free of artificiality you cannot help but find yourself lost in the music, because there’s no “sound” to distract you.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with the richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and remasterings).

AMG Review

Flow in a Donovan concert is important, and here, presented as it occurred, listeners can drift right into the tidepool of magic. The band is a quintet with Harold McNair on flute and saxophones, Loren Newkirk on piano, Andy Tronosco on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums, and John Carr on bongos. Donovan plays acoustic guitar throughout.

The hippy mysticism and flower power poet is everywhere here. This isn’t rock star excess at all, but an organic, drenched-in-sunshine concert full of gentleness with a premium on good vibes… (more…)

If Only I Could Remember My Name – Hand Claps Are Key

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

Note how Crosby’s voice is “chesty” on the better sounding copies. Some make him sound like he’s all mouth and no diaphragm. When his voice is full-bodied and solid, that’s when he sounds more like a real person and less like a pop recording of a person.

All credit must go to Stephen Barncard.

Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS List of Super Discs, not exactly a tough call if you ask us. Who can’t hear that this is an amazing sounding recording? 

Listening Test

One of our key test tracks for side one is Cowboy Movie, and one thing that separated the best pressings from the lesser ones was the sound of the hand claps. It’s a dense mix and they are not easy to hear, but on the best copies there is audible echo and ambience around them, with a richer “flesh on flesh” quality to their sound.

Not many pressings had it, and the ones that did tended to do most other things well also.

Which is what makes it a good test! (more…)

Fifth Dimension – More Dead as a Doornail Sundazed Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Recordings Available Now

This review was written probably more than twenty years ago, back in the day when we actually would order up the latest Sundazed title in the hopes of finding something worth offering to our customers. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine a bigger waste of our time. So few were any good and so many were terrible, why were we bothering to fish where there weren’t any good fish?

Through it all, through the worst of those dark days, somehow we managed to learn some important lessons.

The main lesson we learned was that there was no record with sound so bad that it could not be released.

Even worse, there was no record with sound so bad that it would prevent the better known reviewers from raving about it. (If you think anything has changed, just pull up the latest TAS Super Disc list. The bad souding Heavy Vinyl pressings to be found there far exceed the good sounding vintage pressings they’ve nominated for inclusion over the last 50 years. A small sample.)

Our days playing and selling even the best of these kinds of modern reissues are long gone. By 2007 everything had changed.

Our Old Review

The best stereo copies are rich, sweet and Tubey Magical — three areas in which the Sundazed reissues are seriously lacking.

If anyone still cares, anyone besides Michael Fremer, that is. He seems to like some of their remastered records. We can’t be bothered with mediocrities such as this and the rest of their sorry output, but apparently people are still buying these records. The label is still in business and cranking out more dreck with each passing year. 

And none of the Columbia monos we’ve played did much for us either. Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could possibly prefer that sound?

Audiophiles? Record collectors? What in god’s name are they listening with, or for?

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Workingman’s Dead – Watch for Strain in Jerry’s Voice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

High Time tells you the most about the sound of side one on any given copy.

If the pressing in question is lean, bright, grainy, transistory or aggressive in any way, Jerry Garcia’s voice will sound strained.

Far from a professionally trained singer, he’s already straining to some degree on even the best copies. 

The better pressings have him sounding ever so slightly dull at the beginning of the track. As the song progresses he starts pushing his pipes pretty hard. The sound will quickly become unpleasant if there is any added brightness when he tries to reach those high notes.

Side One

Uncle John’s Band
High Time

This track tells you the most about side one. If the pressing is lean, bright, grainy, transistory or aggressive in any way, Jerry Garcia’s voice will sound strained. Far from a professionally trained singer, he’s already straining on this track.

The best copies make him sound ever so slightly dull at the beginning of the track; as the song progresses he is going to start pushing his pipes pretty hard and it will become quite unpleasant if there is any trace of brightness when he goes up to hit those higher notes.

Dire Wolf
New Speedway Boogie

Side Two

Cumberland Blues

The toughest track on side two. If the tonal balance is lean, or if the bad domestic vinyl causes the sound to be grainy, this track will be close to unbearable. On a Hot Stamper copy the sound can be absolutely MAGICAL.

Black Peter

Probably the best sounding track on the album. Here Jerry Garcia manages to sing within his range, the guitars are wonderfully sweet, and there is loads of Tubey Magic to go around. I can’t think of a better sounding Grateful Dead song than this one.

On the best pressings you can hear startling immediacy and transparency in the midrange of this track.

Easy Wind
(Not one of their stronger efforts.)

Casey Jones

Letter of the Week – “I have been listening to this record for 50 years and I have never heard it sound like this!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

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

Hi Fred,

I received the new copy of America last night. I have been listening to this record for exactly 50 years and I have never heard it sound like this! That big sound and tubey magic is there in abundance, the guitars sound like real guitars, the “jawbone” on Donkey Jaw vibrates forever, and the surface is amazingly quiet as well.

I know that 2020 was hard for everyone, and those of us who spent the year trying to cure kids of cancer while keeping them from catching and dying from COVID had a particularly hard time. I do not know if I would have made it through 2020 without the records that you guys sent me.

It was a great stress relief to come home at night, put on one of my “Better Records,” and be transported back to a simpler time.

Thank you for all that you and the entire team at Better Records do for us.

Bob S

Bob, glad we could help you get through some tough times. Great albums like this one are just what the doctor ordered.

This is a longtime Better Records favorite for both music and sound. For those of you who love folky, acoustic guitar pop — sometimes referred to as hippie folk rock — you should find a lot to like about this album.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

You can thank Ken Scott for that. He made many of our all time favorite recordings.

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