Five Star Albums – Reviews and Commentaries

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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Born Under a Bad Sign – Where Are All the Clean Copies?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Electric Blues Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2020

This is a very old review, probably from close to twenty years ago. Like I say, we have trouble finding clean copies to shootout. We expect to be doing the record soon, however.

In 2025 we finally made it happen, and this is the copy that blew our minds.

Our Review from 20 Years Ago

This original Stax LP has AMAZING sound. You could not make this record sound any better. We really liked the Sundazed copy of this record until we heard this bad boy.

It MURDERS the Sundazed! It has more life, energy and natural presence.

We always suspected that a good original pressing would be better than the Sundazed but we had no way of knowing since all the copies we ever saw were beat to death. This is the first clean copy of this record I’ve seen in 20 years.

The sound is RICH and FULL with lots of texture to the guitars. It’s very natural sounding and full-bodied.

One of the all time great electric blues albums — a Must Own for fans of the genre (more…)

The Kinks – Something Else in 2009

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Kinks Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We did our first shootout for the album in 2009, and it would take us until 2026 to do another one. The original domestic pressings are by far the best, and you can imagine how difficult it is to find them in audiophile playing condition.

Make sure to read the insightful 5 Star AMG review — they really nail this one!

This Original Reprise Tri-Color Steamboat Label pressing is one of the best sounding Kinks records we’ve ever had the pleasure of playing here at Better Records. It sounds nothing like the typically dull and smeary domestic Kinks LPs we are used to hearing. The overall sound is lively, musical, and natural. Drop the needle on No Return for wonderful sound and music — it’s got a bit of a Jobim vibe. 

After dropping the needle on a wonderful sounding copy a few months back, we started pursuing these in the hopes of getting a proper shootout together. It didn’t happen easily or inexpensively — clean looking copies of this one go for as much as $50 in the local bins, and that’s obviously with no guarantee of good sound or quiet vinyl. We found a few good ones and a few stinkers, but this copy went beyond our expectations. It’s got punchy bass, great energy, and real texture to everything. Most copies tend to be too smooth and veiled, but this one passed our tests with flying colors.

Play David Watts or No Return on side one for the best sound, and Afternoon Tea or Waterloo Sunset on side two for the same. (more…)

Just How Good Is a Second Tier Neil Young Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

AMG raves about this album, giving it 5 big stars. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s half a star MORE than they gave Harvest.) We like the album just fine, but I doubt we would want to go quite that far. Sure, these are great songs, but give us After The Gold Rush, Zuma or Harvest (all Top 100 titles, Hot Stampers of which are sometimes in stock) over this one any day.

Still, a second tier Neil Young album (by our standards) usually will beat a first tier album from just about anybody else making records in 1979.

And if you’re a fan this record absolutely belongs in your collection, along with about ten others by the man. Now what other solo artist can you name that has ten or more records to his name worth owning? I’m hard pressed to think of one. The Beatles and The Stones don’t count, obviously. Elvis Costello comes pretty close, but ten? I can’t get there, with him or anybody else. Neil’s body of work stands alone.

This is a live recording with minimal overdubs. Crazy Horse is of course widely recognized to be one of the all time killer concert acts of its day, so it’s a bit of a shame that most of the copies we played this week made us want to go to sleep. The not-so-Hot copies failed in a number of ways: thin guitars or vocals, overly dry or edgy sound, and insufficient presence, just to name a few. It was the rare copy that made us forget we were listening to a record and allowed us to really get into the music.

Needless to say we had this record playing very very loud. Twenty db less than at the live event, sure, at least, but very very loud for a 18×20 living room in the suburbs.

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Our Previous Shootout for Midnight Blue Took Place Back in 2019

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Guitar Recordings Available Now

Midnight Blue is back on the site for the first time in years, six of them to be exact, and here you will find Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades on both sides of this vintage 60s pressing.

One of our All Time Favorite Blue Note albums for music and sound – is there a better bluesy jazz guitar album?

5 stars on AMG – if there were a Top 100 Jazz List on our site, Midnight Blue would be right up at the top of it.

It’s taken us at least five years to get this shootout going, and none of the top copies we managed to get hold of did not have condition issues of some kind — good luck finding one of these on your own, you are going to need it.

Jazz Improv Magazine puts the album among its Top Five recommended recordings for Burrell, indicating that “[i]f you need to know ‘the Blue Note sound,’ here it is.”

Midnight Blue is our favorite Kenny Burrell album of all time, at least in part because it’s one of the All Time Best Sounding Blue Notes. 

If you already own a copy of Midnight Blue and you don’t consider it one of the best sounding jazz guitar records in your collection, then you surely don’t have a copy that sounds the way this one does! In other words, you don’t know what you’re missing. (And if you own the Classic Records release, or any other Heavy Vinyl pressing from the modern era, then you really don’t know what you are missing.) (more…)

T.Rex / Electric Warrior – Our Previous Shootout Was in 2019

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1971 Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Yes, it takes us five or six years to find enough clean copies of this album with the right stampers to get a shootout going these days.

This early UK pressing is amazing, with the kind of grungy, Tubey Magical guitars that are guaranteed to blow your mind.

It’s beyond difficult to find quiet copies of this title (same goes for The Slider), let alone those with this kind of sound, so any fan of Mr Bolan should snap this one up and be quick about it.

This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it. (more…)

Our Last Shootout for Cheap Thrills Was in 2019

We’ve rarely been able to get this shootout off the ground, but we finally managed to stumble upon enough clean copies to get this round going. It’s been well over two years since we’ve had any copy of this album on the site!

This album has got that trippy ’60s San Francisco sound, no doubt about it. Those of you who are familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow or the early Grateful Dead albums know what I’m talking about. The tubey magic of the guitars is worth the price of admission alone; you just don’t hear this kind of sound on modern records.

Like you might expect from this mixture of blues and psychedelic rock, the sound can be a bit raw. Of course, that’s probably the way the band wanted it to be — I don’t see what a mastering engineer might have done to make this music work any better. Much of this material is recorded at The Fillmore (check out the one and only Bill Graham introducing the band at the beginning) and the sound is surprisingly good for live ’60s sound. (more…)