Testing for Edgy Vocals

These records are good for testing how edgy the vocals are.

Judy Collins / Wildflowers – Three of Her Best on Side One

More of the Music of Judy Collins

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Judy Collins

The first three songs on side one alone are worth the price of the album, three of the best Judy ever recorded.

Joni Mitchell’s Michael from Mountains is one of the best songs on her debut album; Judy sings it with comparable taste and skill.

Since You Asked is Judy’s own composition, her first to be recorded in fact. In this writer’s opinion it’s the best song she ever wrote, “as good as it gets” as we like to say.

And of course Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy is one of his many masterpieces and brilliant in all respects as performed here.

What to Listen for

Most copies were small and veiled, with edgy, dry vocals that often get hard or shrill when loud — definitely not our sound.

We were surprised that so few copies sounded the way we expected them to, that so few had the Tubey Magical qualities that we’ve come to expect from Elektra in 1967.

The label was home to The Doors and Love at the time, so what happened here?

John Haeny, the engineer, worked on Waiting for the Sun, which is an amazing sounding Doors album on the right pressing. Why so few great sounding Wildflowers?

If that’s a legitimate question to pose, then first answer me this: why so few great sounding copies of Waiting for the Sun?

It’s simple — the 1967 Elektra magic of the tape did not make it to the 1967 Elektra vinyl with any consistency. That’s why it’s hard to find good sounding Judy Collins records or good sounding Doors records. This is our first big Judy Collins shootout for precisely that reason.

We can find great sounding Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell records all day long; the site is full of them. Judy Collins, not so much. Almost none outside of this one.

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Energy Is Key to Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues

More of the Music of Janis Joplin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blues Rock Albums

ENERGY is the key element missing from the average copy of I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, but not on this bad boy (or girl if you prefer). 

Drop the needle on the song Try and just listen to how crisp, punchy, and BIG the drums sound.

On many copies — too many copies — the vocals are pinched and edgy. Here they’re breathy and full — a much better way for Janis to sound. There’s a slight amount of grit to the vocals at times and the brass as well, but the life force on these sides is so strong that we much preferred it to the smoother, duller, deader copies we heard that didn’t have that issue.

On copy after copy we heard pinched squawky horns and harsh vocals, not a good sound for this album.

Janis’ voice needs lots of space up top to get good and loud, and the best sides give her all the space she needs.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities:

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Led Zeppelin / In Through The Out Door – Another Classic Records Bomb

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Led Zeppelin

Sonic Grade: F

After finishing our first shootout for this album in August of 2007, our faces were sure red. We used to think the Classic version was pretty decent, but the best originals SLAUGHTER it! We had never done a shootout for this album before that. We didn’t feel up to the challenge, because most pressings tend to be miserable — gritty, grainy, hard sounding, with congested mids, dull, and so on.

The best pressings of this album sound AMAZING, but they are few and far between. The test is an easy one — a copy that makes you want to turn up the volume is likely a winner. The Classic does not pass that test.

We threw one on and just couldn’t deal with the edgy vocals and upper midrange boost. As far as we’re concerned, there’s no substitute for The Real Thing.

As hard as it may be to find great sounding copies of this album, it’s positively impossible to sit through Classic’s version.

I used to think the Classic Records pressing was a decent enough record.

Then my stereo got a lot better, which I write about under the heading Progress in Audio.

Eventually it became obvious to me what was wrong with practically all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that were put out by that label.

The good ones can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.

The bad ones can be found in this group.

And those in the middle end up in this group.

Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right,, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.

Every listing in this section is about knowing now what I didn’t know then, and there is enough of that material to fill its own blog if I would simply take the time to write it all down.

Every album shootout we do is a chance to learn something new about records. When you do them all day, every day, you learn things that no one else could possibly know who hasn’t done the work of comparing thousands of pressings with thousands of other pressings.

The Law of large numbers[ tells us that in the world of records, more is better. We’ve taken that law and turned it into a business.

It’s the only way to find Better Records.

Not the records that you think are better.

No, truly better records are the records that proved themselves to be better empirically. We employ rigorous scientific methodologies that we have laid out in detail for anyone to read and follow.

Being willing to make lots of mistakes is part of our secret, and we admit to making a lot of them

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Doris Day – Hooray For Hollywood

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

TAS List Super Discs with Hot Stampers

This fairly rare, fairly clean Six Eye Columbia original Stereo pressing has TWO SUPERB sounding sides, each earning our Super Hot stamper sonic grade. Frank DeVol did the orchestral arrangements, and it sounds like he let Miss Day have some of the same ones he’d done for Sinatra. Don’t mess with success, right?

The vintage Columbia sound is overflowing with Tubey Magic — it’s about as Big and Rich as it gets! If you don’t mind some heavy-handed reverb, the kind found on practically every vintage Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole record ever made, you will find much to like here.

There’s a bit of an edge to the vocals that we think has something to do with the reverb interacting with the compressors of the day, but this is all part of the sound of the tape (we’re guessing) and not something that can be altered in the mastering.

This is an Older 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 fine art.

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 out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.

The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.

The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.

Led Zeppelin – The One Test that Every Top Copy Must Pass

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Yet Another Record that Sounds Better on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

In our review for this album, we debunked the Classic Records pressing using a very simple test which you may want to try at home.

The test we stumbled upon is actually quite an easy one to use — a copy that makes you want to turn up the volume is likely to be a winner. The Classic does not pass that test.

We threw one on and just couldn’t deal with the edgy vocals and upper-midrange boost. We wanted to turn down the volume as quickly as we could get our hands on the knob. As far as we’re concerned there’s no substitute for The Real Thing. As hard as it is to find great sounding copies of this album, it’s even harder for us to sit through a sub-par version like the Classic.

And boy were our faces red. We used to think the Classic version was pretty decent, but the best originals SLAUGHTER it! We had never done a shootout for this album before 2007. We didn’t feel up to the challenge, because the typical pressing tends to be miserable — gritty, grainy, and hard sounding, with congested mids, dull up top, and on and on.

But 2007 turned out to be a Milestone Year for us here at Better Records.

Looking back on that year, the discovery of the Walker Cleaning System, along with some system upgrades, allowed us to jump to the next level.

With better cleaning and more revealing and accurate playback, the Zeppelin shootout we conducted in 20o7 made it clear to us that the Classic was all sorts of wrong up against the best domestic pressings.

Try the Turn Up the Volume Test and see if your copy makes the grade, or makes you want to turn it right back down. I’m guessing the latter, unless you were lucky enough to get one of our Hot Stampers from the last shootout. There sure weren’t enough to go around.

More records that sound best the way this one does:

Lee Michaels – 5th

  • A superb 2-pack, with Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side one and an excellent Double Plus (A++) side two
  • “Do You Know What I Mean” rocks, with prodigious amounts of surprisingly deep bass – it’s a real Bass Demo Track
  • “There are only a few originals on the album, and one, “Do You Know What I Mean” (which really sounded like a cover), was a monstrous hit and cemented Lee Michaels as one of the best white blues performers of the period, along with Joe Cocker and Steve Winwood.”

As is usually the case with our 2-packs, the killer sides are each backed with something much more typical, so you don’t have to take our word for how bad the average pressing is — you can just flip the record over and hear it for yourself. Of course, if you don’t have time to listen to mediocre sounding records you can stick with the killer sides and leave the tedium of hearing bad sound to us. (more…)

Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills – Tonally Correct Vocals Are Key

More of the Music of Al Kooper

More of the Music of Michael Bloomfield

Most copies have bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, this album pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud. At higher volumes the distortion and grit are just too much.

On the better copies, the one with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange, you are doing better than expected.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan / What We’re Listening For

More of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan

More Electric Blues

Listening Level By Level

Number one by far: Too many instruments jammed into too little space in the upper midrange. When the tonality is shifted-up, even slightly, or there is too much compression, or too much smear, there will be too many elements — voices, guitars, drums — vying for space in the upper area of the midrange, causing congestion and a noticeable loss of clarity.

With the more solid sounding copies, the lower mids are full and rich; above them, the next “level up” so to speak, there’s plenty of space in which to fit all the instruments comfortably, without having them sound like they are all piled up on top of one another as is so often the case.

With more space and less compression and smear the upper midrange does not sound overstuffed and overwhelmed with musical information.

Listening for Edgy Vocals

Number Two: edgy vocals, which is related to Number One above.

Almost all of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s recordings seem to have some edge to his vocals — the man really belts it out on his albums, it’s what he does — but the best copies keep the edge under control, without sounding compressed, dark, dull or smeary.

The Allman Brothers – Listen for Thin, Edgy Vocals

More of the Music of The Allman Brothers

Easily the group’s best sounding studio recording and especially impressive on a copy like this

Drop the needle on Midnight Rider or In Memory Of Elizabeth Read to hear what this copy can do. You get lots of extension here both up top and down low that makes the overall sound far more engaging and musical than what you’d hear on a typical copy.

One of the biggest problems we ran into with this shootout was thin, recessed or edgy vocals. This is a band known for their rockin’ guitar jams, so it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the vocals are not where they focused their energy when recording.

I wish the vocals here were a bit fuller but at least they have enough presence to put them front and center. (more…)

Frank Sinatra and Count Basie – What to Listen For

There is some edge on Sinatra’s voice on every side of every copy; it’s so common it’s got to be on the tape. Those copies with less edge and grit on the vocals which are not overly smooth or dull tend to do very well in our shootouts.

Also, richness is very important. We look for a combination of rich, Tubey Magical sound that still maintains a fair amount of space, clarity, transparency and freedom from smear.

The original label pressings (always in stereo; the monos are really a joke) are richer and thicker as a rule.

The pressings with the orange two-tone labels tend to be thinner and clearer. A high percentage of them are much too modern sounding, bright and gritty, and when they are we throw them right in the trade-in pile.

Finding the copy with “best of both worlds” sound is the trick. Pressings on both labels have won shootouts in the past. With this album we do what we always do. We play the record without looking at the label and simply grade the quality of the sound coming out of the speakers. Any other approach is liable to fall prey to unconscious biases. As we like to say, record shootouts may not be rocket science, but they’re a science of a kind, one with strict protocols developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can possibly make them.

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