Five Stars

Five Star albums in Allmusic

Kraftwerk – Autobahn

More Art Rock

More Records We Only Sell on Import Vinyl

  • Seriously good sound on this fun, TAS-approved album with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from start to finish
  • The title track takes up all of this Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side one and is practically as good as we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • The right early import pressings (a happy discovery from a few years back) have richness, transparency, space and presence not found anywhere else, I tell you!
  • Forget the dubby domestic pressings – they’re disappointing in the extreme
  • These imports are tough to find with the right stampers, the right sound and audiophile quality playing surfaces, which explains why our last big shootout was way back in 2022
  • 5 stars: “The 22-minute title track became an international hit single and remains the peak of the band’s achievements – it encapsulates the band and why they are important within one track – but the rest of the album provides soundscapes equally as intriguing.”

This vintage British Vertigo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

George Harrison – All Things Must Pass

More George Harrison

More of The Beatles

  • With superb sound on all six sides, this early British box set of All Things Must Pass will be very hard to beat
  • If you’ve struggled with domestic pressings and later imports or Heavy Vinyl reissues, your troubles are over – here is the sound you were looking for
  • This is a tough record to play, but if you devoted plenty of time and money into your system, and you have big dynamic speakers and the power to drive them to fairly loud levels, you are really in for a treat with this set
  • 5 stars: “Without a doubt, Harrison’s first solo recording is his best. Drawing on his backlog of unused compositions from the late Beatles era, Harrison crafted material that managed the rare feat of conveying spiritual mysticism without sacrificing his gifts for melody and grand, sweeping arrangements.”
  • This is clearly George Harrison’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist can be found here.
  • This is a Must Own title from 1970, an exceptionally good year for rock and pop music
  • Ken Scott used a great deal of tube compression in the mixing and mastering of the album, which of course makes the sound exceptionally Tubey Magical. No modern reissue we’ve ever played has been able to capture that sound
  • The flip side is that it is also one of the most difficult to reproduce, requiring the highest quality, most transparent, least distorted, most highly-tweaked equipment in order to cut through the layers and layers of sound

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Art Pepper / Meets The Rhythm Section

More Art Pepper

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

  • A vintage Contemporary recording pressed on OJC vinyl, here with very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last
  • True, this reissue earned a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, but we still guarantee that it will beat the pants off any Heavy Vinyl reissue, because every one of those that we played was opaque, muddy and thick enough to have us crying “uncle” after five minutes
  • Many consider this to be the best record Art Pepper ever made, along with Art Pepper + Eleven, and I agree completely
  • If you are looking for a shootout winning copy, let us know – with music and sound like this, we hope to be able to do this shootout again soon
  • 5 stars: “… this recording convinced [Pepper] that emotion was the paramount impulse of jazz performance… a diamond of recorded jazz history.”
  • This is a Must Own jazz album from 1957 that belongs in every jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

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Frank Sinatra – Come Dance With Me!

More Frank Sinatra

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Come Dance With Me! returns to the site for only the second time in three years, here with superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this early Capitol stereo LP
  • This pressing was doing pretty much everything we wanted it to — and on both sides — with an abundance of energy and the kind of immediacy that can put Frank Sinatra front and center right in your very own listening room
  • One of the more fun Sinatra albums we’ve had the pleasure of playing recently, and this is a copy that delivers big time
  • It also plays about as quiet as we can find them, and finding one without marks that play is practically a miracle
  • 5 stars: “Working with Billy May again, Frank Sinatra recorded his hardest swing album ever with Come Dance with Me! . . . an intoxicating rush of invigorating dance songs.”

Get ready to swing with the Chairman of the Board on this superb pressing of his classic album from 1959! Billy May and his orchestra back Frank with wonderful arrangements here, and a copy like this lets you appreciate everyone’s hard work. On the better pressings, the brass blasts on side two are to die for!

It’s tough to find good-sounding copies of almost any Sinatra album, finding amazing copies of his most classic albums like this one is a ridiculously tough task. Even for us, the guys who do nothing but search for and audition records all day every day! So we were thrilled to play a copy like this one that did just what we wanted from music like this.

If you never thought you’d hear a Sinatra record sound as powerful as the man himself came across — this is the pressing that you’ve been looking for. Most copies were either smeary or edgy, but this one was wonderfully smooth with impressive clarity.

Sinatra fans, don’t miss out — we don’t find records like this too often.

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Leonard Bernstein – West Side Story (Original Soundtrack)

More of the music of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

More Soundtrack Albums

  • You’ll find INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this original Columbia 6-Eye Stereo pressing
  • Spacious, rich and smooth – only vintage analog seems capable of reproducing all three of these qualities without sacrificing resolution, staging, imaging or presence
  • Tonality is the hardest thing to get right on this album, and here it is right on the money, because if it were not, it would not have won the shootout
  • For those of you who like to do your own shootouts, good luck, you will need a lot of originals to find one that sounds as good as this one does
  • The biggest selling album of the ’60s – 54 weeks at Number One (!)
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 5 stars: “The soundtrack of the West Side Story film is deservedly one of the most popular soundtrack recordings of all time, and one of the relatively few to have attained long-term popularity beyond a specialized soundtrack/theatrical musical audience.”

This album is at least five times more common in mono than it is in stereo, and finding enough clean early stereo pressings takes us years nowadays.

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Miles Davis – Miles Smiles

More Miles Davis

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

  • A Miles Smiles like you’ve never heard, with superb Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this original 360 Stereo pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Both of these sides are full-bodied, high-rez and spacious, with Miles’ horn uncannily present, a sound you just cannot find on Heavy Vinyl no matter who makes it
  • Miles here is backed by his classic ’60s All Star crew – Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter & Tony Williams
  • 5 stars: “This is music that demands attention, never taking predictable paths or easy choices. Its greatest triumph is that it masks this adventurousness within music that is warm and accessible – it just never acts that way… Arguably, this quintet was never better than they are here, when all their strengths are in full bloom.”

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The Band – Music From Big Pink

More of The Band

More Roots Rock LPs

  • Both sides of this vintage copy of The Band’s 1968 masterpiece boast superb Double Plus (A++) sound
  • Forget all those vague, veiled, lifeless, ambience-free Heavy Vinyl pressings – this is the Big Pink that The Band recorded!
  • Remember when you used to play the same record over and over, never taking it off the turntable for days at a time?
  • Well here it is – this pressing captures the music in a way that will make repeated plays the joy they are meant to be
  • 5 stars: “…as soon as ‘The Weight’ became a singles chart entry, the album and the group made their own impact, influencing a movement toward roots styles and country elements in rock. Over time, [the album] came to be regarded as a watershed work in the history of rock, one that introduced new tones and approaches to the constantly evolving genre.”
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Music from Big Pink is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but would be well advised to get to know better.

We guarantee you have never heard Music from Big Pink sound as good as it does on this very copy. There’s plenty of the all-important Tubey Magic and real weight to the bottom. You’ll have a VERY hard time finding one that sounds this good, if our experience is any guide.

This copy has the kind of sound we look for in a top quality Band record: immediacy in the vocals (so many copies are veiled and distant); natural tonal balance (most copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; ones with the right balance are the exception, not the rule); good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful); spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space); and last but not least, transparency, the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this sophisticated recording. (more…)

Stevie Wonder – Innervisions

More Stevie Wonder

More Soul, Blues and R&B

  • With outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades throughout, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Innervisions you’ve heard – it also plays about as quietly as this title ever does in our experience
  • A Stevie Wonder classic as well as a proud member of our Top 100, but you will need a copy like this one to prove that it belongs there
  • Richness, warmth, Tubey Magic, and clarity are important to the sound, and here you will find plenty of all four
  • 5 stars: “Stevie Wonder applied his tremendous songwriting talents to the unsettled social morass that was the early ’70s and produced one of his greatest, most important works, a rich panoply of songs addressing drugs, spirituality, political ethics, and what looked to be the failure of the ’60s dream – all set within a collection of charts as funky and catchy as any he’d written before.”
  • This is our pick for Free’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best recording by an artist or group can be found here on the blog.
  • If any record can be called a Must Own, Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece from 1973 is one, slotting in nicely right at the top of any list of the greatest soul albums of all time, if not THE greatest

Millions of these were made, but most of them weren’t made right.

Years ago we made some progress with regard to the various stampers and pressing plants we liked best, but trying to find clean copies with the right matrix numbers has proved challenging. Even when you do get the copies with good stampers, they often don’t sound all that amazing. I had practically given up on making this shootout happen until about ten years ago, when a friend dropped off a copy that had seriously good sound.

It didn’t turn out to be the ultimate copy — that’s why shootouts are crucially important to the discovery of the best pressings — but it was so enjoyable that we decided to give Innervisions another try, and since that time we’ve gotten better and better at finding, cleaning and playing Stevie Wonder’s Masterpiece, a record that should be played regularly and one that belongs in any right-thinking audiophile’s collection.

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Steely Dan – Aja

More Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Aja

  • Killer sound for Steely Dan’s magnificent Jazzy Pop breakthrough album, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Punchy, full and smooth, with the kind of rhythmic energy that brings out the jazzy funk in the music
  • A Better Records rock and pop Top 100 album and a true Demo Disc on a pressing that sounds as good as this one does
  • If I were to make a list of my favorite rock and pop albums of 1977, this album would definitely be right at the top
  • Considering how dismal the releases by Cisco Music and Mobile Fidelity were, it seems that no one outside of Bernie Grundman has managed to get Aja sounding right on vinyl, and that was 47 years ago
  • The sound is as heavily processed, artificial and overly glossy as practically anything produced in the 70s, which means that its Mid-Fi appeal is all but assured
  • For those of you on the Higher Fidelity end of the spectrum, our best Hot Stampers get everything sounding as right, balanced and natural as Aja can possibly sound
  • Unfortunately for those of you who don’t like paying our prices or doing your own shootouts, Bernie’s new UHQR leaves a lot to be desired. With mediocre-to-bad sound on all four of its sides and a price tag of $150, what else can you call it but another Analogue Productions rip-off?

Folks, there’s not much I can tell you about this copy of Aja that’s going to make you want this record, other than to say this: If you’re in the market for a superb pressing of what’s gotta be the most beloved Steely Dan record they made, look no further. It’s right here. (more…)

Horace Silver – Song For My Father

More Horace Silver

More Blue Note Albums

  • This Van Gelder-mastered Blue Note reissue pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in years) boasts solid Double Plus (A++) grades from start to finish
  • Tubey Magic is the key to the sound of the better pressings, and we guarantee this one has the kind of Tubey Magic that no modern pressing of the last 40 years can offer the audiophile community
  • Energetic, clear and spacious, as well as relaxed and full-bodied (thanks, RVG!) – this pressing was a step up over most other copies we played
  • An incredibly tough album to find with the right sound and decent surfaces, but the music makes it worth all the time and trouble we spent finding this outstanding copy
  • 5 stars: “Horace Silver’s signature LP and the peak of a discography already studded with classics. Silver was always a master at balancing jumping rhythms with complex harmonies for a unique blend of earthiness and sophistication, and Song for My Father has perhaps the most sophisticated air of all his albums…”

The leading edge transients on the horns here are excellent, with the pinched quality you hear on some tracks kept to a minimum. The whole of the ensemble is transparently clear. (more…)