Live Albums – Reviews and Commentaries

With the Right VTF the Record Comes to Life

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

With the RIGHT VTF the Record COMES to LIFE

Robert writes:

The other day I checked the VTF, yet again, and my scale showed it was set at 1.807. I adjusted it to 1.800 and went back to playing records. Was it now actually at 1.800? Impossible to really know for sure.

But it did seem, if 1.800 is the indeed the magic number, that I’d finally hit it.

I was playing Miles Davis Friday Night At The Blackhawk, an extremely well recorded live album. My copy had generally sounded excellent. On this occasion, the record sounded . . . imagine this, exactly like a live performance.

Of course there was some occasional surface noise and, of course, I wasn’t actually listening to a live performance. It was a record after all.

But never before that moment had a record convinced me so completely I was hearing something I wasn’t. Somehow one tiny little change had managed to strip away just enough of the remaining artifice to lift the experience of hearing a record from very live sounding to uncannily real.

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Otis Redding – Good To Me / Live at the Whisky A Go Go Volume 2

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

This Stax British Import is a Better Records highly recommended recording. If I had to choose one Otis Redding record to keep, this would be the one! As good as his studio albums are, the guy was MAGICAL live.

If you’re an Otis Redding fan, this live album released in 1992 surely belongs in your collection.

The complete list of titles from 1992 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Great in Stereo, Bad in Mono. What Else Is New?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

On this record, we say stick with stereo.

This album is much more common in mono than stereo, but we found the sound of the mono pressing we played deeply unsatisfying.

Where is the wall to wall space of the live club?

It has been shrunken down into the area between the speakers.

Much of the ambience disappeared with it, destroying the illusion the album was trying to create, that you are actually there with Ramsey and his rhythm section.

In mono, you really aren’t.

For albums that actually can sound sound good in mono, so good they can win shootouts, click here.

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The Wrong Early Pressings of Mad Dogs and Englishmen Have Horrendous Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

If you get the wrong stampers on this record, you will discover, as we did, that it’s clearly been mastered from a badly made dub. The “cassette-like” sound quality will not be hard to recognize. If you have stumbled onto one of those pressings, give up on it and try your luck elsewhere, making sure to note the bad stampers.

Most copies have a tendency to get smeary and congested when loud.

Listen for good transients and not too much compression.

Most copies are opaque, as well as dull up top; try to find the ones with some degree of transparency and as much top end extension as you can (the percussion will be helped most of all by the extended top).

And of course you need to find a copy that rocks, as this is a definitely a Rock Concert, although what it most reminds me of is Ray Charles doing a choice set of modern classics, mixing it up by off-handedly mixing in a few of his own. See how they all fit together? That’s how the pros do it. (The main pro in this case is Leon Russell, the mastermind of the whole operation. He clearly knows what he is doing.)

All tracks were selected and mixed by none other than the legendary Glyn Johns.

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Miles Davis In Person and the Sound of Tubes in 1961

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We have two new lists for those who would like to know which Columbia label pressings win shootouts — one for 6-Eye winners and one for 360 Label winners.

The pressing we review below was one of the 6-Eye winners. Most of what we have to say about it revolves around the idea that in 1961 the tube mastering was key to the sound of the best copies.

Below you will find some of the notes I made while playing a killer copy we auditioned a while back.

Normally our notes for the sound of the records we are shooting out against each other fall into two categories: what the record is doing right and what the record is doing wrong.

You’ll see that in the case of this pressing there was nothing wrong with the sound to write about.

I could have found fault somewhere, but when a specific pressing is so clearly superior to its competition, what’s the point?

  • The right sound — big, rich, tubey and real.
  • Transparent.
  • Rich, smooth, balanced.
  • Horn gets huge and loud the right way.
  • Piano is full.
  • Solid bass.
  • No need to pick nits.

The bottom line: both sides are killing it.

Reissues

There are some very good sounding reissues from the 70s that will eventually make it to the site. Again and again my notes made it clear that on those reissue pressings, the sound could have used some tubes in the chain.

On this record, more than any other, the tubes potentially make all the difference.

Now keep in mind that we are only talking about 1961 tubes, not the stuff that engineers are using today to make “tube-mastered” records. Those modern records barely hint at the Tubey Magical sound of a record like this, if our experience with hundreds of them is any guide.

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Al Di Meola et al. on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Di Meola Available Now

Sonic Grade: D?

The Speakers Corner remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing of this famous jazz album had two big strikes against it right from the get go. The sound is both congested and hard.

With these guys hell-bent on one-upping each other right off of the stage, even our best Hot Stamper pressings struggle with clarity, transparency and harmonic sweetness

Do you really want to add all the problems of the modern remastered heavy vinyl pressing to a tape that already has plenty of problems to start with?

Congested and hard is the kind of sound Speakers Corner should be quite familiar with by now. You can hear it on plenty of their mostly mediocre-at-best pressings.

Sourced from a digital tape of the master? Maybe, but who cares what tape was used to make this dog?

It’s a loser and should be avoided at any price.

Our Hot Stamper pressings of this album will be dramatically more transparent, open, harmonically-correct, resolving of musical information, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are the most obvious areas in which Heavy Vinyl pressings tend to fall short, if our experience with hundreds of them over the last few decades counts for anything.

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Letter of the Week – “Are Hot Stampers the only way to get my system to sound this good?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steve Winwood Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Yesterday I was marveling at the bottom-end and overall clarity of my new Stevie Winwood album. I think it’s right up there with Miles of Aisles, which sounded so good it made my wife cry (seriously).

But as always, I came up with a dark thought: Are Hot Stampers the only way to get my system to sound this good?

I have VERY few personally-selected LPs that can compete with a Hot Stamper. Even though I usually buy the “Budget” stampers, it looks like a future of hundred-buck-plus albums for me.

Gordon R.

Gordon,

Yes, our records are expensive, there is no denying that fact. I think you would agree they are worth what we charge, which is typically much more than a hundred dollars each these days. The average record on our site runs about three times that much.

Fortunately, if you want more records that sound as good as our Hot Stampers do, we tell you how to find your own.

We recently added some sections to our site for our “less expensive” titles:

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Living Stereo from 1962

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

The sound of the copies we’ve played of LSC 2605, Highlights from Rubinstein at Carnegie Hall, released by RCA in 1962, have never impressed us sonically.

We didn’t listen to the music critically because our primary purpose here at Better Records is to evaluate recordings for their sound quality first (hence the name of our business), and if the sound isn’t good enough, we have to move on to titles with better sound that our customers might find more to their liking.

1962 was surely one of the truly glorious years for analog recordings, but the sound of the most recent copy of the album we played may have been rich, but unfortunately is was also opaque.

We would consider the sound no better than passable, and therefore it’s not a title we would consider offering to our customers.

Unless…

Unless you somehow managed to come across a copy noticeably better than the ones we’ve played over the last twenty or more years — a possibility that, although unlikely, cannot be ruled out — we would advise those interested in a top quality piano recital recording to look elsewhere.

Leave this RCA to the people who love collecting records. It’s perfect for record collectors — it’s from the right company, made in the right era, and it has the right original label — but it’s really not suitable for those of us who love playing good sounding records. It will of course sit happily on a shelf, to be pulled out and shown to other like-minded souls, but it is unlikely to spend much time spinning on a turntable platter with a needle tracing its grooves.

Some audiophiles are of the opinion that vintage Living Stereo recordings on the original Shaded Dog label can do no wrong, but we have never subscribed to that view. We’ve played too many that did plenty wrong. Maybe one out of three are good enough for the audiophile who wants to experience music reproduced at a highest levels of sound quality.

There are quite a number of records that we’ve run into over the years with more shortcomings than this one. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of the titles we’ve played, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

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Goodbye Cream Has Some of the Best Live Rock Sound Ever Recorded

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

When you get a good side one of Goodbye Cream you’ll hear exactly why we are calling it one of the best sounding live rock albums of all time.

Goodbye has the Big Rock Sound that we go crazy for here at Better Records. The top copies just plain ROCK HARDER than all the others. Yes, they’re bigger. Yes, they have more weight and whomp down low. Yes, they are smoother and more natural up top. But what really sets them apart is the tremendous Energy they contain in their grooves. The music EXPLODES out of the speakers and comes to life on the best copies like practically nothing you have ever heard.

This link will take you to some of the hardest rockin’ albums we currently have in stock.

All the titles that have earned a place on our none rocks harder list can be found here.

It’s clearly one of  Bill Halverson‘s engineering triumphs, along with Deja Vu and Steve Stills’ first album (now that’s a trio!). Live rock music on record just does not sound better than a White Hot Stamper side one of Goodbye.

When it’s all working, you’re front and center for a fiery Cream concert with these guys delivering one heckuva performance. And where else are you gonna get that these days?

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Duke Ellington / Newport Jazz Festival 1958

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Duke Ellington Available Now

If you are a fan, this record on the original 6-Eye label will be a thrill. If you’re unfamiliar with the Duke’s music, I can’t imagine a better introduction than this.

This LP also includes Gerry Mulligan’s only performance with the Ellington band.

Paul Gonsalves’s saxophone performance is superb and worth the price of the album alone.

The clarinet parts on Princess Blue are out of this world — Ellington at his best!

This is an older jazz review.

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a full-time practice for our staff of ten.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we freely admit.

There is no reason to hide the fact that we know a great deal more now than we used to. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

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