Music Genres – Commentaries

I Ask You: What Album from 1985 Has Better Sound than Little Creatures?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

We’re huge fans of Little Creatures here at Better Records. When you hear one of our Hot Stamper copies you’ll know exactly what we love about it.

Not many records from this era sound as amazingly rich as this one, not in our experience anyway. (As I write this there are four Hot Stamper pressings from 1985 on the site, and one of them is Brothers in Arms, hardly anyone’s idea of audiophile quality sound I venture to say.)

[I was being much too harsh to Brothers in Arms above. The best pressings have superb — albeit modern — sound.]

The recording is simply outstanding — punchy, smooth & so ANALOG, with an especially beefy bottom end, the kind a good Big Beat Pop Album record needs. (For a reference think Get The Knack or Parallel Lines.)

The best copies boast the kind of tight, punchy, surprisingly deep note-like bass that absolutely makes or breaks the sound on Little Creatures. Without the proper bass foundation this funky beat-crazy Talking Heads album can’t BEGIN to do what it’s trying to do: get your feet tappin’ and your body rockin’ to the music.

(more…)

We Was Wrong about Mr. Fantasy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

UPDATE 2026

For our newest take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy, please click here. Years ago we wrote:

We used to think that The Best of Traffic had better sound, but in a head to head comparison with this very copy, we were proved wrong.

Big, full-bodied and lively, with huge amounts of space and off the charts Tubey Magic, the sound here is Hard to Fault.

This is one of the best sounding Traffic records ever made. Musically it’s hit or miss, but so is every other Traffic record, including my favorite, John Barleycorn. The best songs here are Heaven Is In Your Mind, Dear Mr. Fantasy, and Coloured Rain. The first of these is worth the price of the album alone, in my opinion. It’s a wonderful example of late ’60s British psychedelic rock. (more…)

As a Rule, the Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 CDs Suck

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written shortly after having done our first shootout for the album in 2007.

As for the band’s CDs, for a great introduction to their music, please consider the compilation Four Sider. Four Sider also came out on record but like most compilations it is made from copy tapes and mediocre sounding at best.

Those of you who have purchased some of this group’s CDs may have noticed that they typically do not sound very good. It seems as though precious little effort was expended in their mastering, which is no doubt the case.

Almost any good original brown label A&M pressing will be better, although few of those do not suffer from sonic problems of their own.

A Note About The Mix

Fool on the Hill may not be up there with Sergio’s best sonically (not many albums are!), but it can still sound very good when you get the right stamper. The balance of this record takes some getting used to. We weren’t sure what to make of it at first.

(more…)

Avoid these Stampers on Buffalo Springfield’s Retrospective Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

In 2025 we finally got around to doing another shootout for Buffalo Springfield’s wonderful Retrospective album, a “greatest hits” compilation for a band that really only had one hit but put out two of my all time favorite albums, Buffalo Springfield Again and Last Time Around. Our Shootout Winning early pressing was described this way:

Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the best pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment. “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments

And the three Psych tracks – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – are guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard them.

But if you somehow ended up with a copy that has the wrong stampers, stampers similar to the ones you see below — on the original label mind you — none of those songs will have the audiophile qualities we describe.

And if you thought you were buying an original pressing of the album on the Yellow Atco label, well, that’s exactly what you were buying.

It’s not really your fault. The good pressings and the bad pressings all look the same. How were you to know your random purchase would only hint at the sound quality of the best pressings?

(more…)

What to Listen For on Songs from the Big Chair

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tears For Fears Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Below you will find an excerpt from the commentary we wrote for an early Shootout Winning pressing we played many years ago.

There is one quality that the best copies always have and that the worst copies always lack: Frequency Extension, especially on the top end.

When you get a copy like this one, with superb extension up top, the grit and edge on the highs almost disappears. You can test for that quality on side one very easily with the percussive opening to Shout.

If plenty of harmonics and air are present at the opening, you are very likely hearing a high quality copy.

Side one here has smooth, sweet, analog richness and spaciousness I didn’t think was possible for this recording. The bass is full and punchy. When it really starts cooking, like in the louder, more dynamic sections of Shout or Mothers Talk, it doesn’t get harsh and abrasive like practically every other copy I’ve heard.

(more…)

It Only Took Us Six Years to Find Another Killer Copy of Down In L.A.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Our comments about our Hot Stamper winner from 2019 appear below.

Note that we could not even find White Hot sound on either side, and side two, at 1+, does not even qualify as a Hot Stamper these days, which means it would never be offered for sale on the site.

This was a tough shootout!

We had a lot more research and development to do, and six years later we had the killer copy to prove that it could be done. In 2025, we found a pressing that made it all worthwhile.

This is one of the BEST copies we’ve played in many years, close to five I would guess. 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 Hippie 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. (more…)

Love’s Debut and Forever Changes on Heavy Vinyl – Indefensible Dreck from Sundazed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Love Available Now

Two audiophile hall of shame titles, and another two Sundazed records reviewed and found seriously wanting.

We got hold of a minty original pressing of the first Love album back around 2007, so in preparation for the commentary I pulled one of the Sundazed pressings off the shelf, (Forever Changes, the only one we ever bothered to sell), cracked it open and threw it on the turntable. 

Gag, what a piece of crap. When I had auditioned them all those years ago (2002), it was — I’m not kidding — the best of the bunch.

The sound to me back then was nothing special, but not bad. Knowing how rare the originals were, we gave it a lukewarm review and put it in the catalog, the single Sundazed Love album that (just barely) made the cut.

Now I wish I hadn’t, because no one should have to suffer through sound that bad. Here’s what I wrote for the shootout:

You’d never know it from those dull Sundazed reissues, but the right pressings of Love albums are full of Tubey Magic! With Bruce Botnick at the controls you can expect a meaty bottom end and BIG rock sound, and this recording really delivers on both counts.

With Sundazed mastering engineers running the show, you can expect none of the above.

No Tubey Magic, no meaty bottom end, no big rock sound.

After the shootout, I took the two copies we had in stock right down to my local record store and traded them in.

I didn’t want them in my house, let alone on my site.

(more…)

In Search Of Amazing Mona Bones

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

UPDATED 2026

Below you will see the notes we made during our first shootout for Mona Bone Jakon back in 2007.

Until fairly recently the handful of UK imports we had played sounded subpar to us.

The UK pressings may have been the versions on the TAS Super Disc List, but none of the ones we’d played sounded all that super to us.

Out of the blue, in 2023 we found some imports that set a new standard for the recording quality of the album.

We thought we knew “How high is up?”, but the mports we played that year proved to us we didn’t.

Egg on our faces? Not really. It’s just us going about doing the work.Since no one else in the world of records seems to want to figure any of this stuff out, you don’t have a lot of other sources for reliable information. Seriously, wWho else are you going to turn to, other than Robert Brook?

Most of the reviewers we stumble upon act like it’s still 1982.

True, the imports don’t win by much — the best domestic pressings can still earn Nearly Triple Plus grades — but that extra half a plus the Shootout Winning imports merit is quite noticeable when you play the best pressings against the close-to-the-best copies.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “I felt like I entered another world.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Hi Tom,

I just wanted to thank you at BR for The Pentangle Super Hot Stamper.

Upon listening to it, I felt like I entered another world.

The sound is through the roof and the music blows my mind,

I’m not sure I actually have the words to describe just how beautiful this sound experience really is, so I will leave it at that.

So Many Thanks,
Michel

Michel, I couldn’t agree more. The sound of the Pentangle’s first album is so pure you feel like the barrier between you and the music has disolved and no longer exists.

When a record is so good it lets you lose yourself completely in the music, that is the sign of a very special pressing indeed, in this case of a very special recording.

(more…)

Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection.

As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how badly MoFi had ruined the sound, I was mortified.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. Thrilled to it even. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

(more…)