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Buffalo Springfield / Retrospective – Our 2021 Shootout Winner

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides, this original Atco pressing is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • 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 just two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments
  • And the Pysch stuff – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – is guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard it
  • 5 stars on Allmusic – this is Must Own Music from one of the most groundbreaking and accomplished groups of the late-60s (even though they never cracked the Top 40 Album chart)

Midrange Magic Is Key

Extracting all the Midrange Magic from a legendary album and Desert Island Disc like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile. Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc list? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it. And if the only way to find good-sounding clean copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records like this is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we will have to do.

It takes us years to find enough good clean copies to shoot out. You folks who don’t live in big cities with lots of used record stores are really out of luck when it comes to albums like these. We must look at twenty for every one we buy.

As I’m sure you know, it’s exceedingly difficult to find good sound for this band anywhere. Great copies of the second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, are out there and sound amazing, but we don’t have much luck finding them in clean condition.

Our last shootout was about four years ago, which to my mind is just a sin. We need to find more copies so we can regularly shootout the album, it’s such a classic. Most of the copies we see are beat to death and no amount of cleaning can bring them back to life.

We’ve never heard a copy of this album that truly qualifies as a Demo Disc, but some of the songs can sound superb — “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” come immediately to mind. The recording, like so many from the 60s, may not be perfect, but it’s so full of Midrange Magic, ambience and sweetness that the musical values inherent in these heartfelt songs are nevertheless communicated completely — if you have a copy that sounds as good as this one does.

Those are pretty darn hard to find, and quiet ones are even harder to find. There was a lot of bad mastering and bad vinyl going around when this record and thousands just like it were made. If you don’t believe us just pick up a few (for cheap, otherwise forget it) and see for yourself.

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Poco Produced Their Masterpiece of Country Prog Rock in 1970

More Country and Country Rock

Poco’s second album is an unusual blend of country-rock, with some long, jazzy instrumental breaks that center around Rusty Young’s pedal steel, which doesn’t sound like any pedal steel guitar you’ve ever heard. It’s played with a wah-wah pedal and, if that wasn’t enough, the resulting sound is sent through a Leslie organ speaker.

We know it sounds crazy, but it really works. There is nothing else like it on record, nothing that we’ve ever heard anyway.

Country Prog Rock

Most of side two is taken up by a single track, Nobody’s Fool / El Tonto de Nadie, Regresa. It’s a suite in which the band stretches out instrumentally in a somewhat proggy way, although one could make the case that Bluegrass music is all about “stretching out instrumentally.” (more…)

Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – Our First Shootout Winner

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

This copy is ALIVE! The drums and percussion are powerful and punchy with lots of room around them, and the bass is PERFECTION. There’s plenty of whomp and lots of extension on the top end.

This side two really conveys a sense of the amazing performances of these great musicians. It’s rich, full, smooth, sweet, open, spacious — everything you’d expect from an A+++ / A+++ record.

Funky Brazilian Music For Audiophiles

This is one of my favorite albums, one which certainly belongs in any Audiophile’s collection. Better sound is hard to find — when you have the right pressing. Unfortunately those are pretty hard to come by. Most LPs are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled and full of compressor distortion in the louder parts: this is not a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.

But we LOVE this album here at Better Records, and have since Day One. One of the first records I ever played for my good audio buddy Robert Pincus (Cisco Records) to demonstrate the sound of my system was Sergio’s syncopated version of Day Tripper off this album. That was close to twenty years ago [now more than 30], and I can honestly say I have never tired of this music in the intervening decades.

We’re glad to see that our customers share our enthusiasm for the band; note that there is not a single good sounding used Mendes record on the site at present (September ’08). They all seem to have sold, and most of the Hot Ones flew out of here.

[We do regular shootouts for the band’s albums, but their debut is tough to find in clean shape and it’s been years since we’ve had enough to play for a shootout.]

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Another Passenger – A Personal Favorite

More of the Music of Carly Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Carly Simon

This is my personal favorite of all of Carly’s albums. In terms of singing and songwriting it’s her most consistent, highest quality work. Nothing too heavy, just well crafted and enjoyable Singer Songwriter pop. If you like the kind of albums Paul Simon used to make before Graceland, or middle period James Taylor, you should find much to like here.

Another Passenger checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

Some of her albums can be badly overproduced, with monstrously reverberating drum thwacks courtesy of Richard Perry and his minions. Thankfully this is not one of them, so it tends to wear well over time. I can personally attest to that fact because I used to have a tape of the album in my car that I’d be willing to bet I’ve heard more than two hundred times (!)

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You Too Can Get an Old Buffalo Springfield Record to Sound This Good

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

This commentary is from 2005 or thereabouts.

Not long ago we found a White Hot Stamper pressing of Last Time Around that really blew our minds. We were surprised to hear some of the breathiest, silkiest vocals we’ve ever heard on ANY Buffalo Springfield album, with startling presence and immediacy to boot! Side two had BY FAR the most energy and life of any side of any copy we’ve ever played. Man, does it ROCK.

Even as recently as 2010 we would not have expected to find that kind of sound on a vintage ’60s pop/rock album. We know better now.

When you get hold of the right copy and know how to clean it and play it right, these vintage pressings (well, the White Hot ones anyway) are a damn sight better than the vast majority of audiophiles think they are. How is such apparently never-before-possible sound being heard now, 45 years after the record came out? Our answer can be found below. 

The kind of MIDRANGE MAGIC found on this pressing let us hear into the music in a way we (and you too I’m guessing) never imagined was possible.

Most copies have no bass, no real top, and are compressed so badly they sound more like cardboard than vinyl. But not this copy — it breaks the mold, revealing to the world (well, our world anyway, the world at Better Records) that those badly recorded Buffalo Springfield records from the ’60s weren’t so badly recorded after all. (more…)

Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled – We Broke Through in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This listing is for our 2012 Shootout Winner wherein we discussed the breakthrough we had made five years before.

Around 2007 I stumbled upon the Hot Stampers for this record, purely by accident of course, there’s almost no other way to do it, and was shocked — shocked — to actually hear INTO the soundfield of the recording for the first time in my life, this after having played copy after frustratingly-opaque copy decades.

Yes, the stereo got better and that helped a lot. Everything else we talk about helped too. But ultimately it came down to this: I had to find the right copy of the record. 

Without the right record it doesn’t matter how good your stereo is, you still won’t have good sound. Either the playback source has it or it doesn’t. It’s not what’s on the master tape that matters; it’s what’s on the record.

More than any other, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.

Our Shootout Winner

This SUPERB WHITE HOT STAMPER copy is our overall winner from the recent huge Hot Stamper shootout we did for Ambrosia’s second — and second best — album. Friends, it’s been a long time coming but, judging by this copy and the others which fared well, it was worth it. We LOVE this music.

Ambrosia is one of the few groups that has mastered the technique of being both far-out galactic in scope of vision and mainstream AM commercial in execution… There is an unusual dreamlike quality that pervades its work. The songs seem to be reaching the listener direct from some strange and beautiful realm of the unconscious. It is an experience rare in popular music today, or at any time.

Billboard, 1977

We here present one of the best sounding copies for Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled we have ever played. Side one rated A+++, As Good As It Gets, with a side two that was not far behind at A++. From beginning to end this pressing is KILLER. (more…)

Bellybutton – Maybe Not a Perfect Recording, a Good One for Testing Though

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Jellyfish

I spent quite a few hours tuning up the stereo with side two of the album, specifically the song Now She Knows She’s Wrong, with its glockenspiel, loudly clanging tubular bells and yelling chorus at the end. 

It’s exceedingly hard to get everything right at the same time: the energy, the deepest bass, the extension at the very top of the top end, the greatest transparency, just to mention a few of the main ones. There are always trade-offs, and being able to balance the trade-offs against the gains in these areas and others is a real test of your critical listening skills.

It’s not a perfect recording, and those are usually the ones that can teach you the most about your system’s strengths and weaknesses.

DMM

The problem with the typical copy of this record is gritty, grainy, grungy sound — not the kind that’s on the master tape, the kind that’s added during the mastering and pressing of the record. When that crap goes away, as it so clearly does on side one of the copy we played recently, it lets you see just how good sounding this record can be. And that means REALLY good sounding.

While during the shootout I had completely forgotten that all the domestic pressings of Bellybutton are direct metal mastered. (The import pressings are clearly made from copy tapes and are to be avoided.) It was only afterwards, when looking for stamper variations, that I noticed the DMM in the dead wax .

On most copies the CD-like opacity and grunge would naturally be attributed to the Direct Metal Mastering process; that’s the conventional wisdom, so those with a small data sample (in most cases the size of that data sample will be no more than one) could be forgiven for reaching such a conclusion. Based on our findings, it turns out to be completely erroneous.

The bad pressings do indeed sound more like CDs. The better pressings do not. All are DMM, so the conventional wisdom, a term of disparagement here at Better Records to start with, again shows how little probative value it actually brings to the discussion.

We would love to hear a version of the album that was not Direct Metal Mastered, just for comparisons sake. That unfortunately is an experiment that cannot be run. What we can do is play the CDs — I have several, the earliest ones being the best — and note that they are clearly grungier and grittier sounding than the better LP pressings. Some of that sound is on the Master Tape, how much we will probably never know.

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Listening in Depth to Candy-O

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now

This is one of our favorite recordings — a former member of our Top 100 — for one very simple reason: it’s got Big Rock Sound in spades! Drop the needle on Let’s Go and check out the sound of the big floor tom. When the drummer bangs on that thing, you will FEEL it! It’s similar to the effect of being in the room with live musicians — the difference between just hearing music and also feeling it. That’s what you get from a Hot Stamper copy.

What other New Wave band ever recorded an album with this kind of DEMONSTRATION QUALITY sound? It positively JUMPS out of the speakers. No album by Blondie, Television, The Pretenders or ANY of their contemporaries can begin to compete with this kind of sound, with the exception of the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. The Cars very own first album is excellent, but it doesn’t have this kind of LIFE and ENERGY. No way, no how.  (more…)