Test Records

Rockin’ Out to Simple Dreams

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

Clearly this is one of Linda’s best albums, and I would have to say, based on my fairly extensive experience with her recorded output, that it is in fact THE BEST SOUNDING record she ever made.

I love Heart Like a Wheel, but it sure doesn’t sound like this, not even on the Triple Plus copies that win our shootouts. (Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.)

I confess to having never taken the album seriously, dismissing it as a commercial collection of pop hits with about as much depth as the L.A. River — but I was wrong wrong WRONG.

This is a great sounding album on the right pressing, not the compressed piece of grainy cardboard we’ve all been playing for years, unaware of the tremendous sound quality lurking in the grooves of other copies, the ones that were blessed with the right stampers, the right vinyl and a healthy amount of fairy dust wafting over the press that day.

That’s what Hot Stamper shootouts are all about — finding those copies, the ones no one knows exist.

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This Tsar Saltan Is Diffuse, Washed Out, Veiled, and Vague

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

Sonic Grade: C (at most)

Year ago we cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare in a head to head comparison with a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out at the time. Here are the differences we heard.

The soundstage, rarely much of a concern to us at here at Better Records but nevertheless instructive in this case, shrinks roughly 25% with the new pressing. Depth and ambience are reduced by about the same amount.

But what really bothered me was this:

The sound was just so vague.

There was a cloud of musical instruments, some here, some there, but they were very hard to SEE. On the Londons we played they were clear. You could point to each and every one. On this pressing that kind of pinpoint imaging was simply nowhere to be found. (Here are some other records that are good for testing vague imaging.)

Case in point: the snare drum, which on this recording is located toward the back of the stage, roughly halfway between dead center and the far left of the hall. As soon as I heard it on the reissue I recognized how blurry and smeary it was relative to the clarity and immediacy it had on the earlier London pressings we’d played. I’m not sure how else to describe it — diffuse, washed out, veiled — just vague.

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

This particular Heavy Vinyl reissue is more or less tonally correct, which is not something you can say about many reissues these days. In that respect it’s tolerable and even enjoyable. I guess for thirty bucks it’s not a bad deal.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocre sound?

Yes, the cutting systems being used nowadays to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.

Are the tapes too old and worn?

Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?

Could the real master tape not be found, and a safety copy used to master the album instead?

To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.

We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them. If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue, we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot. (Someone did, which proves it can be done!)

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and most other audiophile LPs of all kinds. (These we like.)

So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this kind of sound bores us to tears.

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Listen for the Room Around this Drum Kit

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Barney Kessel Available Now

We highly recommend you make every effort to find yourself a copy of this album and use it to test your system. The right pressing can be both a great Demo Disc and a great Test Disc.

The best Hot Stamper early pressings have the Tubey Magic we’ve come to expect from Contemporary circa 1958, with that warm, rich, full-bodied sound that RVG often struggles to get on tape. (But when he’s good he too is hard to beat.)

However, some pressings in our shootout managed to give us an extra level of transparency and ambience that most of the original pressings we played could not.

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The Biggest “If” in All of Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right.

That’s a big if.  In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.

But that is not our story for today. Our story today concerns the relationship between more accurate timbre and higher fidelity.

What do we love about vintage pressings like the Ted Heath disc you see pictured above?

The timbre of the instruments is reproduced with wonderful fidelity.

The unique sound of every instrument in this very large ensemble has been recorded accurately. Every instrument sounds the way it would sound if you were hearing it live. Every instrument sounds real.

That’s what we mean by Hi-Fi, not the kind of “Audiophile Sound” (sneer quotes are very much called for whenever the word “audiophile” is used to describe sound quality, mostly because there is so little in the way of quality to be described ) that passes for Hi-Fidelity on some records.

Some of the worst offenders along those lines can be found here.

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Neil Young and His Crazy Pals LIVE in the Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Hot Stampers are all about finding those rare and very special pressings that manage to represent the master tape at its best.

Notice I did not say ACCURATELY represent the master tape, because the master tape may have faults that need to be corrected, and the only way to do that is in the mastering phase.

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that absolute fidelity to the master tape should never be — and more importantly, rarely is — the goal of the engineer mastering a record.

Which, as a practical matter, means two things:

  1. Flat transfers are most often a mistake.
  2. Talking about the fidelity you think a record has to its master tape, a tape you have never heard, is completely pointless.

Whether we like or dislike the presentation of any given recording is of course a matter of taste. When listening we constantly make judgments about the way we think the recording at any moment ought to sound, based on what we like or don’t like about the sound of recordings in general and how our stereos deal with them.

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This Early Stereo Black Label Pressing of My Fair Lady Sounded Great

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

The piano sounds lifelike right from the start, a beautiful instrument in a natural space, tonally correct from top to bottom.

This copy makes it clear that this is an exceptional Demo Disc quality recording for Contemporary, and that’s saying a lot.

It’s all tube, live-to-two-track direct from the Contemporary studio. It’s pretty much everything you want in a recording from this era.

How can you beat a Roy DuNann piano trio recording? We have a good supply of Hot Stamper pressings of great jazz piano recordings, but the ones we offer on Contemporary set a standard that few other labels have ever been able to meet.

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An Open Soundstage Is Key on Get Close

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Pretenders Available Now

Take it from us, it is the rare pressing that manages to get rid of the harshness and congestion that plague so many copies.

Look for a copy that opens up the soundstage — the wider, deeper and taller the presentation, the better the sound, as long as the tonal balance stays right.

When you hear a copy sound relatively rich and sweet, the minor shortcomings of the recording no longer seem to interfere with your enjoyment of the music. Like a properly-tweaked stereo, a good record lets you forget all that audio stuff and just listen to the music as music. Here at Better Records, we — like our customers — think that’s what it’s all about.

And we know that only the top copies will let you do that, something that not everyone in the audiophile community fully appreciates these days, what with one Heavy Vinyl record sounding worse than the next.

We’re doing what we can to change that way of approaching the pursuit of high quality audio playback in the home, but progress has always been, as you can imagine, slow.

This is no Demo Disc by any means — we grade on a curve, and considering the limitations of a heavily-processed pop record designed to be heard over the radio, the best copies are very good sounding for what they are.

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The Byrds in Mono – How Do The Original Pressings Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could put up with that kind of sound on a modern audiophile system?

Can the apologists for mono really be taking this ridiculously crappy sound seriously?

I hope not, but I suspect that is exactly what they are doing. The question is: why?

They seem to like the congested, distorted, top-end-lacking Beatles records in mono, so why not The Byrds?

To these ears, the monos for both bands have a lot in common.

And what they have in common is sound we want nothing to do with.

Now, to be fair, we’ve stopped buying these monos, so there may actually be a good copy or two out there in the used record bins that does have good sound.

In our defense, who really has the time to play records with so little potential for good sound?

What about the Sundazed mono pressings?

The best Columbia stereo copies on the original label are rich, sweet and Tubey Magical — three areas in which the Sundazed reissues are seriously lacking.

Does anyone still care? We simply cannot be bothered with these bad Heavy Vinyl pressings. If you’re looking for mediocre sound just play the CD. I’m sure it’s every bit as bad.

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Do Pressings Remastered at 45 RPM Have Better Sound?

More Reviews and Commentaries for 45 RPM Pressings

No doubt some do, but based on our admittedly limited experience, we rather doubt any of the titles shown here, or from this series, are likely to be very good sounding.

I was going to write about the awful Holst The Planets with Previn from this series that I had played a few years back, but never got around to it.

Lots of punchy, powerful and deep bass — yes, 45 RPM mastering is known for that — but the dry, overly clean, clear, modern sound and the screechy strings made me take it off the turntable halfway through the first side. (We write more about EMI and Angel pressings here.)

If you want a good sounding pressing of The Planets, our favorite by far is Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

As usual, our advice is to accept no substitutes. There are a lot of bad sounding, poorly performed Planets out there.

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Universal Heavy Vinyl Quadrophenia Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

UIPDATE 2026

These are old notes from many years ago. Take them with a very large grain of salt, and don’t buy this version of the album unless it’s reasonably priced and returnable. A pressing with Hot Stampers is going to be dramatically better, and might sound as good as this pressing.

Wow! This Universal Heavy Vinyl pressing from circa 2000 (the turn of the century!) is superb, not all that far from a good Track original, and quieter for sure. 

Side One rocks incredibly hard from start to finish. What a great album. It has to rank right up there with the best rock of the ’70s, right behind Who’s Next and probably on a par with Tommy, good company indeed, since we LOVE all three of those albums here at Better Records. (Both Tommy and Who’s Next are Top 100 titles, but Quadrophenia is not far behind either of them for sound or music.

Here’s what we wrote about this pressing when it was still in print ten twenty or more years ago.

Thank you Universal! We have almost forgiven you for the Cat Stevens records you ruined. With more great releases like this one, that debacle will fade one day from memory.

Although you can still buy those crappy pressings from my competitors. Have they no shame?

As with any Who album, this is obviously not your average Audiophile Demo Disc. We don’t imagine you’ll be enjoying this one with wine, cigars, and polite conversation. This one is for turning up loud and rockin’ out — in other words, it’s our kind of record.

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