Pressings with Passable Sound

Looking for a Good Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto? Don’t Waste Your Money on LSC 2466

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Brahms Available Now

Never liked the performance or the sound.

LSC-2466 w/ Richter. Shaded dog, just ok sound, boring.
LSC-2466 w/ Richter. White dog reissue, smeary, NFG.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

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Three Copies of Harold in Italy and Still No Luck

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

For a Living Stereo record from the Golden Age of All Tube recording, especially one from the late-50s, you might expect that the better Shaded Dog pressings would have exceptionally rich, natural sound.

After all, 1958 is clearly one of the great years for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.

Unfortunately, the pressings we played of the Berlioz album you see pictured were quite a letdown. We dropped the needle on three different early copies of LSC 2228 with three different sets of stampers and found that none of them were all that impressive, as can be seen from our notes:

  • First: tubey but pretty hot, just okay. (6s/3s)
  • Second: smeary and congested, not great. (4s/4s)
  • Third: tubey but smeary (3s/1s)

We guessed that their final grades after a shootout would probably fall into the range of 1+ or so, just below the cutoff for a minimal Hot Stamper grade (1.5+).

If we’d half a dozen or more to play, some copies would probably be a bit better, some would be a bit worse, but the bulk of them would end up having sound that was merely passable, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning some might not even earn that single plus.)

For now we’re throwing in the towel and moving on to Golden Age records with better prospects.

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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…)

How Good Are the Domestic Pressings of Days of Future Passed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and the good early imports, you know that the imports just murder the American LPs.

Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, so they tend to sound dubby and smeary, yet strangely they’re also thinner and more transistory than the UK imports, and overall have a fraction of the Tubey Magic that make the good imports such an engaging listening experience.

Moody Blues albums on import are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for these problems. But the properly mastered copies are none of these things.

The cutting engineers who cut the pressings for the U.S. market thought they knew exactly how to fix the problem. When the album came out in America in 1968, leaner and cleaner were in and rich and tubey were out.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super-clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for.

It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the recording with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes. In our experience only the best UK pressings can give you the sound.

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Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs – Tubey Magical on the Red Label?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Tubey Magical Rock Records in Stock Now 

UPDATE 2023

In 2023 we did another shootout for this devilishly difficult-to-find album, and none of the Red Label pressings we played scored better than 1.5+ on any side. Many of them were hopeless thin and dry.

We would not recommend Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs at anything but a nominal price.

Our older commentary follows.

Years ago we noted that the red label Columbia reissues of most of their catalog leave much to be desired. Here is an excerpt from a listing for The Byrds’ Greatest Hits.

One might assume that the later label copies would be the ones that would most likely have been cut with lower distortion equipment, the way the later Kind of Blues are cut so much cleaner than the earlier ones.

On The Byrds’ albums this is almost never the right approach. The Tubey Magic of the earlier pressings is absolutely crucial to the sound of these albums. It is the sine qua non of Classic 60’s Rock sound. Without it you might as well be playing a CD.

It turns out that some copies of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs on the later red label can actually sound amazingly Tubey Magical, especially on side two. In fact we heard a red label side two that was even more rich than the best 360s.

Since the person listening to the record has no idea what the actual label is of the record being evaluated — which is about as close an approximation of the Scientific Method as we can manage around here — it was very surprising to hear such glorious Tubey Magical Richness and Sweetness come from such an unexpected source.

A good reason not to avoid later pressings and reissues absent any evidence of their inferiority.

And a good reason to judge your records by playing them whenever possible. (more…)

Ravel / Concerto in G – Munch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ravel Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We just played a clean, early Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2271, featuring Ravel’s Concerto in G.

Although it is a good sounding record, we do not believe it is very likely to be a great one.

If you own the record, play it and see if it still holds up. Our latest purchase didn’t.

There may be great sounding pressings of it, but at the price clean copies command these days, $100 and up, we have decided that pursuing this title is no longer in anyone’s interest.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

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Verdi, et al. / Ballet Music From The Opera

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written many, many years ago, so many years ago that I don’t think I knew that the Victrola reissue had consistently better sound than any Shaded Dog we had ever played.

But one thing I did know was that the sound had obvious and rather serious shortcomings, shortcomings that the fans of vintage vinyl never seemed to notice. The conventional wisdom according to which so many record collectors and record reviewers operate, including the vast majority of those who identify as audiophiles, may have blinded them to the reality of its defects.

It’s also rare and sells on the collector market for a lot of money. Those facts often blind record lovers too.

Someone with the original in his collection might pull it off the shelf where it has been sitting for years and show such a rare and valuable and therefore impressive record to you. I suspect that such a collector would be much less likely to play it for you.

Having to sit down and actually play the records we sell means that biases and prejudices of these kinds can have no effect on our judgments. The records get played against other pressings and we simply call them as we hear them.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the original is not that good of a record.

And the best news is that the reissue is a true Demo Disc of the highest order.

Our Old Review

This copy of LSC 2400 has vintage RCA Golden Age sound, for better and for worse. Even though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s got a healthy dose of Living Stereo Tubey Magic.

There will never be a reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found here.  

And the hall is HUGE — so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA.

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What Exactly Does Van Gelder Stamped in the Deadwax Tell You?

Hot Stamper Pressings of CTI Titles Available Now

The section of the stamper sheet we wrote up after our most recent shootout belongs to George Benson’s White Rabbit album, the one released by CTI in 1972.

We think these stampers illustrate an important reality regarding the variability of record pressings, and it’s one that we run into on regularly during shootouts.

Keep in mind that the notes you see were made without the listener knowing what the stamper numbers were for the copy being evaluated. Some relevant facts:

  • Rudy Van Gelder cut all the original domestic pressings for the album that we played in our shootout since those are the only ones we know of to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. (Hint: forget the reissues, imports, etc.)
  • The stampers for the two copies you see below were the two worst performers out of the six we had to work with. (We started out with more than six copies to audition. Unfortunately, some of the copies we clean and play get tossed out during the shootout for having noise issues — scratches that play, bad vinyl, inner groove distortion, etc. Noisy copies of  fairly common jazz records are not saleable no matter how good they sound.)
  • The top pressing shown below earned good, not great Hot Stamper grades of 1.5+ on both sides. This is the minimal rating any Hot Stamper pressing must earn to be offered to our customers. As you can see, A12/B2 are the stampers for this pressing.
  • There was another A12 side one in our shootout that did slightly better, earning a 2+ grade. The pressing you see at the bottom also had an A12 side one, but it did not make the grade. (The N/A means we didn’t play side two of that copy because the 1+ side one makes the record not worth the bother.)

We know that White Rabbit is an outstanding George Benson album, recorded by the immensely talented Rudy Van Gelder himself. All the original pressings were mastered by him as well. We’ve been doing shootouts for the album for more than a decade and in that time have heard some amazing sounding copies. I don’t recall one ever being returned, for any reason.

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Mussorgsky / Pictures At An Exhibition – A Good Record (Potentially), Not a Great One

More of the music of Modest Mussorgsky

More of the music of Benjamin Britten

This Chicago Symphony recording by RCA in 1968 has that BIG HALL SOUND we love here at Better Records.

Multi-miking is kept to a minimum, which allows the listener to visualize the orchestra from a more natural perspective than some of the other recordings of the work you may have heard. 

The sound is open and spacious, with lovely texture to the strings. The larger horns are especially well-captured here, Their dark and powerful sound, coupled with the fact that the recording is so dynamic and full-bodied, can really be quite moving. It might just send some shivers up your spine. (more…)

Mercury Did Not Produce an Especially Good Brahms Symphony No. 2

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

The sound of this 1959 Mercury recording (SR 90171) was not impressive.

The sound was decent enough, although somewhat dry and opaque on even the best copies of the record we played. Which makes it a passable sounding record, not much more than that, and not worth doing a shootout for.

It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to recognize its many shortcomings.

Vintage Vinyl

We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the hundreds on this blog.

We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than any other kind of record, including the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years, especially the ridiculously bad pressings we’ve reviewed more recently.

It Was a Very Good Year

1959 just happens to be one of the truly great years for analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, each of which was recorded or released that year.

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