*Record Breakthroughs

Living and Learning Is How the Game Is Played

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

A classic case of live and learn.

Scroll down to read more about what we learned from a big shootout we did many years ago for the Self-Titled album.

To illustrate how the game is played, we’ve copied some of the previous commentary into this listing to clarify how our understanding had changed from 2004 to roughly 2010, which is when all the comments you see below were written.

Live and Learn, Part One

These domestic original pressings have the very same stamper numbers as the British pressings. It appears that the metalwork was produced in England and shipped to America for pressing on domestic vinyl. What’s strange is that the American pressings are consistently brighter than the British pressings. Why this should be is a mystery, but I have a theory to explain it. The British stampers are used to make British LPs on that lovely see-through purple vinyl, and I’m guessing that that compound is a little smoother sounding than the vinyl that Uni uses. Either that or there is some other way that Uni produces their records so that they end up being brighter, even using the exact same stampers as the British ones.”

Partly true.

We have five British copies in stock, and the reason they don’t sound as good probably has less to do with British vinyl and more to do with the fact that the British ones we have are not the stampers we like the best. The domestic pressings with our favorite stampers have more highs and better highs and just plain sound better to us now.

Notice how I completely contradict myself below, yet both listings were up on the site all this time and nobody, especially me, seems to have noticed.

Live and Learn, Part Two

These original British pressings, with the lovely see-through purple vinyl, are the only good sounding versions of this album that I have ever heard. As you can imagine they are extremely difficult to come by in clean condition.

What is there to say about such a bald-faced turnabout?

Simple. We make our judgments based on the records we have on hand to play. When better pressings come along, or our equipment has improved to the point where we can appreciate other pressings, we will happily and unhesitatingly report what we hear.

The Best Version?

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Before 2016 We Were Completely Wrong About Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

There are two areas in which we would like to amend some of the previous comments we’ve made about Deja Vu.

The first has to do with early pressings. Many years ago we wrote the following:

As we noted in previous commentary, the originals are uniformly awful. 

Although that’s mostly still true — Deja Vu is a very difficult album to find with good sound no matter what stampers you have. However, we now know that there are very good sounding copies — Shootout Winning copies in fact — with early stampers.

Deja Vu is in fact a title in which one stamper always wins, and that stamper can only be found on the early pressings.

Amazingly enough, there are more than 90 others (as of 2025) that we’ve discovered with one killer set of stampers that beat all comers as well. (There are surely many more hundreds that do, we just haven’t found them all yet. Please be patient; we are working on it.)

That’s area number one. Area number two is part of this old piece of advice:

If you bought the Classic Records pressing and you can’t tell what’s wrong with it, this may not be the right hobby for you. I highly recommend you buy the Joe Gastwirt mastered CD and either play it on your system or take it to a hi-fi store in your area. It’s tonally correct and undistorted. The Classic version is neither. Now when a stupid $15 CD is correct in a way that a $40 LP is not, something is very very wrong.

The part where we said this may not be the right hobby for you if you like Classic’s godawful remastering of Deja Vu is still true, depending on what exactly you’re trying to accomplish in the hobby.

If you’re not too picky about sound quality and just want to play new records, perhaps because old records are hard to find and often noisy, then fine, the Classic should get that job done for you.

We of course want nothing to do with it because we want exceptionally good sounding vinyl, and the Classic is definitely not very good sounding no matter how many nice things audiophile reviewers may have said about it.

No, the problem we see above is that we were recommending the currently available CD.

Yes, it’s mostly tonally correct and not distorted, but it has a bad a case of dead-as-a-doornail sound.

It’s as awful sounding as any remastered CD I have ever heard.

There is no top, there is no space, there is no life, there is no immediacy, there is no Tubey Magic — in short there is almost nothing left of what makes the best copies of Deja Vu so good.

We’ve known this for about five ten years, apologies for not getting around to correcting the record.

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Most Domestic Pressings of On The Border Suck, and We Know Why

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some songs.

The domestic copies of On The Border have many tracks in reversed absolute phase, including and especially Midnight Flyer, a lifelong favorite of mine. The front and center banjo will positively tear your head off; it’s bright, sour, shrill, aggressive and full of distortion. Don’t look at me — that’s what reverse polarity sounds like!

I’ve known for some time that domestic pressings of On The Border have their phase reversed — just hadn’t gotten around to discussing the issue because I wasn’t ready to list the record and describe the phenomenon.

A while back [January 2005, time flies] I happened to play a copy of One Of These Nights and was appalled by the dismal quality of the sound. Last night I put two and two together. I pulled out both Eagles records and listened to them with the phase reversed. Voila! (On The Border is a favorite record of mine, dismissed by everyone else, but loved by yours truly.)

[I don’t think One of These Nights has its polarity reversed anymore, although some copies may.]

I’m of the opinion that only a very small percentage of records have their absolute phase reversed. Once you’ve learned to recognize the kind of distortion reversed polarity causes, you will hear recordings that may make you suspicious, and the only way to know for sure is to switch the positive and negative, wherever you choose to do so. 

With the help of our EAR 324 Phono Stage, the phase is reversible with the mere touch of a button, a wonderful convenience that we have grown to love, along with the amazingly transparent sound of course. (Hard to imagine living without either at this point.)

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The Thrill of Discovering Great Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

Robert Fine was one of the greatest audio engineers who ever lived. He is the man responsible for recording this audiophile gem for Command, as well as much of the Mercury catalog.

Unfortunately, we rarely have any Command records in stock, but we do make an effort to have a good selection of the most amazing sounding Mercury titles available in the form of Hot Stamper pressings.

If you have the system for it, it’s very possible you have never heard most of these instruments sound this real on any other recording. It’s as if you were standing right in the studio with them. Yes, it’s that crazy good.

Let Me Ask You This

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking:

Who is finding incredible Demo Discs like this Command from 1961 nowadays?

Harry Pearson used to.

Sid Marks reviewed plenty back in the day (reviews which I mostly disagreed with, but still, at least he wrote them).

Jim Mitchell (now long-forgotten) wrote about them back in the 80s.

Moon and Gray published a book full of the best sounding Deccas and Londons.

Anybody else?

Are the audiophile reviewers of today picking up the baton that the giants of the past have dropped at their feet?

I see little evidence of it. [1]

Not to worry. Better Records has taken on the job that no one else seems to want to do. For example, here are 200+ records we’ve discovered with (potentially) excellent sound.

And that’s not all. Not only have we set a higher standard for audiophile-quality records with our vintage vinyl Hot Stamper pressings, but we’ve endeavored to provide a great many other benefits to the audiophile community as well.

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Yes, Sometimes There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Way back in 2015 we wrote:

There are certain stampers that seem to have a consistently brighter top end. They are tolerable most of the time, but the real magic can only be found on the copies that have a correct or even slightly duller top. Live classical music is never “bright” the way recordings of it so often are.

On the other hand, it’s rarely “rich” and “romantic” the way many vintage recordings are — even those we rave about — but that’s another story for another day.

We recently did the shootout again, and now with a much more resolving, clear, accurate upper midrange and an even more extended top end, the stampers that we used to find “brighter than ideal” are almost always just too damn bright, period.

We will never buy another copy with those stampers except by accident or misfortune.

We was wrong and we don’t mind admitting it. We must be learning something in our shootouts, right?. We ran an experiment, we discovered something new about this album, and that should be seen as a good thing.

If you have been making improvements to your system, room, electricity, etc., then you too own records which don’t sound as good as you remember them. You just don’t know which ones they are, assuming you haven’t played them in a while.

One Stamper to Rule Them All

Which leaves one and only one stamper that can win a shootout. There is another stamper we like well enough to offer to our discriminating customers, but after that it is all downhill, and steeply.

Here are some of the other albums we’ve discovered for which one set of stampers has been consistently winning shootouts for years now.

Wouldn’t you know it — the right stampers are the hardest ones to find.

Which of course pretty much explains why you will rarely see a copy of the album for sale on our site.

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Striving for Orchestral Clarity on Finlandia with Decca and Failing with RCA

More of the Music of Jean Sibelius

More of the Music of Edvard Grieg

The original RCA Living Stereo pressings we played in our 2014 shootout were not competitive with the best Deccas and London reissues of Finlandia.

Is the original the best way to go? In our experience with Finlandia, it is not. And it’s not even close.

The Decca reissue you see here is yet another wonderful example of what the much-lauded Decca recording engineers were able to capture on analog tape all those years ago. The 1961 master tapes have been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer. [Not true, see Two Things below.)

When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts

Side One

Correct from top to bottom, and there are not many records we can say that about. So natural in every way.

The brass is HUGE and POWERFUL on this side. Not many recordings capture the brass this well. Ansermet on London comes to mind of course but many of his performances leave much to be desired. Here Mackerras is on top of his game with performances that are definitive.

The brass is big and clear and weighty, just the way it should be, as that is precisely the sound you hear in the concert hall, especially that part about being clear: live music is more than anything else completely clear. We should all strive for that sound in our reproduction of orchestral music.

The opening track on side one, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, is one of my favorite pieces of orchestral music. Mackerras and the London Proms make it magical.

Side Two

The richness on this side is awesome. So 3-D, with depth and transparency to rival any recording you may own.

Two Things

When you hear a record of this quality, you can be pretty sure of two things: one, the original is unlikely to sound as good, having been cut on cruder equipment.

UPDATE

Let me stop myself right there. I no longer subscribe to this view. There are many original pressings mastered in the 50s that are as hi-rez and undistorted as anything made after them. Here’s one example. It would be easy to name a great many more. Live and learn I say.

And two, no modern recutting of the tapes (by the likes of Speakers Corner for example, but you can substitute any company you care to choose) could begin to capture this kind of naturalistic orchestral sound. [Mostly still true.]

I have never heard a Heavy Vinyl pressing begin to do what this record is doing. The Decca we have here may be a budget reissue pressing, but it was mastered by real Decca engineers (a few different ones in fact), pressed in England on high quality vinyl, and from fairly fresh tapes (nine years old, not fifty years old!), then mastered about as well as a record can be mastered.

The sound is, above all, real and believable.

The brass has weight, the top extends beautifully for those glorious cymbal crashes, the hall is huge and the staging very three-dimensional — there is little to fault in the sound on either side.

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This Mud Slide Slim Rocked Like No Other Pressing We’d Ever Heard

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This Shootout Winning copy from 2008 or thereabouts showed us a Mud Slide Slim we had no idea could exist.

We have a name for records like this. We call them breakthrough pressings. They are one of the reasons we play so many thousands of records every year. We’re looking for records that sound as good as this one does, even for titles that no one thinks are particularly well recorded.

Especially for those titles. Experience has taught us they can only be found by playing lots of pressings and looking for whatever needles might be hiding in the haystacks. (The haystack for One Man Dog can be seen at the bottom of this post.)

As you will see from our commentary, the first track on side one, Love Has Brought Me Around, is a great test for energy.

If your copy does not seem very energetic to you, then we recommend you keep buying every green label original you see until you find one that does.

Our commentary from the early days of shootouts can be seen below.

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Yes, For Some Records There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music on Island Records Available Now

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Catch Bull at Four shootouts.

We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing in 2016, a copy took the recording to a level we had no idea could even be possible. (We were going to give it Four Pluses, and probably should have, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Since then we have had many copies come in, but none that could compete with the Magic Stamper pressings.

And the best part of this story is that, no, the best stampers are not 1U, or 2U, or even 3U.

As a matter of fact, they are far from the stampers found on the earliest pressings. That’s one reason it took us so long to discover them, because they are much less commonly found than pressings with the earlier stampers. By the time these later pressings were mastered, pressed and released, the album’s biggest selling days were over.

For all we know this cutting may have been done just to keep the record in print, possibly undertaken many years after its initial release.

Who knows? Who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, it does serve to make a point near and dear to our hearts: that the idea (and operational premise of most record collectors) that the originals are always better is just a load of bunk. It might be and it might not be.

If you want better sounding records, you had better open your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressings.

These, for starters, and there are hundreds more you can read about here on the blog.

Of course this is nothing but bad news for the average audiophile collector, who simply does not have the time or money to go through the hassle of buying, cleaning and playing every pressing he can get his hands on.

But good news for us, because we do.

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Honky Chateau – Two Very Different Mastering Approaches

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

Our thoughts circa 2007, about the time we found our first real breakthrough pressing.

This has to be one of the best sounding rock records of all time. The highs are silky sweet, the vocals are full-bodied and breathy, and the tonal balance is perfection from top to bottom.

If you have any doubts that Elton John was a pop music genius, just play this record. It’s all the proof you will need. Drop the needle on any track — you just can’t go wrong.

There’s no need to go on and on about the sonic qualities of this copy. Everything you’d ever want from this record is here in abundance. Folks, this copy is the epitome of what we call Master Tape Sound — on both sides.

Two mastering approaches

The original British copies of this record, with the leatherette cover, have two distinctly different mastering approaches.

The earliest pressings tend to be very lively, but a bit hi-fi-ish and aggressive in places. I used to think these were the best.

The later British originals tend to sound dull and muddy.

There was a time when we liked a certain British stamper that we thought split the difference between the mastering approaches mentioned above.

The copies we played this time around with that stamper were practically unacceptable this time around.

Our best domestic pressings actually bettered many of the Brit copies with our old favorite stamper.

Recent improvements in our stereo and evaluation process have allowed us to discover the stampers with that we think have the right sound.

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing little of such information on the site, for a number of reasons we discussed in a commentary we wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution. (Ahem.)

However, in 2024 we decided to reverse our previous policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:

Please to enjoy.

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Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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