Records that Are Good for Testing

Boz Scaggs and His Background Singers – How Well Can You “See” Them?

More of the Music of Boz Scaggs

What to Listen For – Transparency Vs Opacity

This original (SD-8239) pressing has two excellent sides, which is two more than the typical cardboardy, flat, thin, lifeless copy has. If you like your music dry and clean, try the remixed version (SD-19166), the CD, or perhaps there is a heavy vinyl version out there (at one tenth the price). That’s not our sound here at Better Records.

The best recordings from the era do not have that sound, so when we find that kind of analog richness, sweetness and naturalness on a pressing such as this, we know the record is RIGHT.

What to Listen For — Background Singers You Can “See”

If you have multiple copies of the album and want to shoot them out, here’s an easy test. Listen for how clear and correct the female background singers sound. This is an excellent test because it will hold true for both sides on the album.

On opaque copies they are hard to “see,” on transparent copies they are easy to “see.”

On tonally thin copies they will sound edgier and harder than they should.

And on Tubey Magical copies they will sound full-bodied, solid and real.

Keep in Mind

It’s nice when the copy in hand has all the transparency, space, layered depth and three-dimensionality that makes listening to records such a fundamentally different experience than listening to digitally-sourced material, but it’s not nearly as important as having that rich, relaxed tonal balance.

A little smear and a subtle lack of resolution is not the end of the world on most of the records we sell, including this one.

Brightness and leanness, along with grain and grit on the vocals, can be.

The Bottom Line

Transparency (and all the other stuff we talk about) can and do make a big difference in your enjoyment of music like this.

If the average record sounded even close to right nobody would need us to find good sounding copies for them, they’d be in every record bin in town and we would have to find some other kinds of records to sell.

The records may be in every bin in town — that’s where we found the copies that went into this shootout — but the sound sure isn’t.

Further Reading

The Pretenders – An Open Soundstage Is Key

More of the Music of The Pretenders

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Pretenders

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 to this day. We’re doing what we can to change that way of thinking, but progress is, as you may well imagine, slow.

What To Listen For

The best copies have superb extension up top, which allows the grit and edge on the vocals to almost entirely disappear.

Some of it is there on the tape for a reason. That’s partly the sound they were going for, this is after all a Bob Clearmountain mix and a Jimmy Iovine production.

But bad mastering and pressing adds plenty of grit to the average copy, enough to ruin it in fact.

You can test for that edgy quality on side one very easily using the jangly guitar harmonics and breathy vocals of “My Baby.” If the harmonic information is clear and extending naturally, in a big space, you are very likely hearing a high quality copy.

Further Reading

Lincoln Mayorga – Listen for Strained and Blary Brass

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

More Reviews and Commentaries for Direct to Disc Recordings

Most copies of this album are slightly thin and slightly bright.

They give the impression of being clear and clean, but some of the louder brass passages start to get strained and blary, or glary if you like.

The good copies are rich and full.

The sound is balanced from top to bottom.

The sound is smooth, which allows you to play the album all the way through at good loud levels without fatigue.

On the best pressings, the trumpets, trombones, tubas, tambourines, and drums, all have the true tonality and the vibrancy of the real thing. The reason this record was such a big hit in its day is because the recording engineers were able to capture that sound better than anybody else around [not really, but that’s what it seemed like at the time].

That’s also the reason this is a Must Own record today — the sound and the music hold up.

Just listen to that amazing brass choir on Oh Lord, I’m On My Way. It just doesn’t get any better than that. If ever there was a Demo Disc for Brass, this is one!

I used to think the Tower label copies were not as good — that the later pressings were pressed better. Now I know that it doesn’t matter what era the pressing is from: the tonal balance is the key to the best sound.

Notes from an Older Shootout

Side One has all of the texture and transients you could ever want to hear from this title. The bass is big and full-bodied and the drums have all of the energy and presence we love. Again, the CLARITY and clean sound of all the instruments is OFF THE CHARTS!

The beginning of That Certain Feeling is so warm and smooth it makes the typical hard copy sound like crap.

When we dropped the needle on You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, we knew we had a Side Two that was something special.

Immediately we heard more LIFE and ENERGY than we had heard before.

It was so spacious and transparent we felt as if we were in the studio, which is, after all, the point of listening to recording like this, isn’t it?

The bass is PUNCHY and full.

The saxophone solo on ‘Sunshine’ is so breathy and textured and you can hear the keys clacking as he does his trills.

If you have another copy listen for different sax solo performances to see if you have a different take. I believe there are two and they are easily distinguished from one another.

A Round Of Applause For Sheffield

As I’m sure you’ve read on the site, time has not been good to the sound of the typical Mobile Fidelity record. We may have been impressed back in the day, but now it’s clear their mastering approach was disastrous for most of the titles they did.

Sheffield, in this period anyway, turns out to have made some truly amazing sounding records: this one, in particular, as well as the other two Mayorga titles. The Grusin has a few problems [not really when you correct for the polarity issues], and after that their catalog is hit and miss. But the early days at Sheffield produced some wonderful, wonderful albums.

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

Tchaikovsky / 1812 Overture on Telarc UHQR

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for the 1812 Overture

Sonic Grade: D

You can find this one in our Audiophile Hall of Shame, along with more than 250 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some Hall of Shame records, the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

This is what we had to say about the UHQR back in 2005 or so:

Having played this record all the way through, I have to comment on some of its sonic qualities. It’s about the most dynamic recording I’ve ever heard. This was the promise of digital, which was never really delivered. On this record, that promise has been fulfilled. The performance is also one of the best on record. It’s certainly the most energetic I can remember. 

DATELINE 2015

Now that we’ve heard the best pressings of the Alwyn recording on Decca, I would have to say that Alwyn’s is certainly every bit as energetic if not more so and dramatically better sounding as well.

In other words, in 2005 we had a lot to learn.

They only made 1000 of these, which makes it 5 times more rare than any MOFI UHQR. I had a sealed copy of this record on the site fifteen or twenty years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a sealed copy, as open ones are hard enough to come by.

Stone Age Audio Sound

Telarc makes clean, modern sounding records.

To these ears they sound pretty much like CDs.

If that’s your sound, you can save yourself a lot of money simply by avoiding vintage Golden Age recordings, especially the ones we sell. They’re much more expensive and rarely as quiet, but — again, to these ears — the colors and textures of real instruments seems to come to life in their grooves, and in practically no others. We discussed the subject, as well as a few others, in the commentary you see below:

We include in this modern group analog labels such as Classic Records, Analogue Productions, Speakers Corner, Reference, Sheffield, Chesky, Athena and the like. Having heard hundreds of amazing vintage pressings, at this stage of the game I find it hard to take any of these labels seriously.

Twenty years ago, maybe. But twenty years is a long time, especially in the world of audio.

We started a list of records that suffer from a lack of Tubey Magic like this one, and it can be found here.

Further Reading

Rod Stewart – 2016, The Year We Finally Broke Through

More of the Music of Rod Stewart

More Reviews and Commentaries for Every Picture Tells a Story

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Every Picture Tells A Story shootouts.

We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing back in 2016, a copy that took the recording to a level we had no idea was even possible.

Side one was so jaw-droppingly amazing that we awarded it the rare Four Plus (A++++) grade. 

Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.

We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.

In our breakthrough shootout from 2016 the magic stampers were discovered, and they have won every shootout since then.  We would be very surprised to find any stampers that could compete with them, but you never know.

More on the subject of stampers and breakthrough pressings:

This is a superb recording, and on the best pressings it is true Demo Disc material. Not too many of our Hot Stamper titles are going to ROCK you the way this one does. We put it in a class with Led Zep II, Nevermind, and Back In Black — elite company to say the least.

A Quick Check for Tonal Balance

One quick note on how to tell if you have a tonally balanced copy, at least on side two: Maggie May has multi-overdubbed, close-miked mandolins that should have plenty of midrange presence and an extended top end.

As soon as that song ends, a very sweet, smooth guitar opens the next track, Mandolin Wind.

The two songs lean towards opposite ends of the tonal balance spectrum, but on a good copy, both of them sound right.

One’s a little darker, one’s a little brighter, but they’re both right.

And of course the next track, … Losing You, is a great test for energy, whomp and excitement.

Every Picture Tells A Story checks off some prestigious boxes for us here at Better Records:

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On Trust, the Bass Is (Almost) All

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Elvis Costello

Notes from a Hot Stamper from a while back.

There’s a TON of low-end on this record. Regrettably, most copies suffer from either a lack of bass or a lack of bass definition. I can’t tell you how much you’re missing when the bass isn’t right on this album. (Or if you have the typical bass-shy audiophile speaker, yuck.) 

It’s without a doubt THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT of the sound on this album. When the bass is right, everything falls into place, and the music comes powerfully to life. When the bass is lacking or ill-defined, the music seems labored; the moment-to-moment rhythmic changes in the songs blur together, and the band just doesn’t swing the way it’s supposed to.

On the best pressings, you get the full-on bottom end WHOMP you paid for, with no loss in control. You can clearly follow Bruce Thomas’s bass lines throughout the songs, a real treat for any music lover. (He and Elvis don’t get along, hence the end of the Attractions as his backing band. I guess we should be thankful for the nine albums on which they were together; many of them are Desert Island Discs for me.)

Not only that, but the drums have real body and resonance, a far cry from the wimpy cardboard drum sound you’ll hear on the typical copy.

Hey, these are The Attractions: the pro’s pros. You can’t ask for better, and as expected they deliver big time on this album. But the mastering and pressing problems of most British copies typically make them sound half-hearted and uninspired, which is certainly nothing like what they sound like on the master tape. On the master tape, they play GREAT. You need a very special copy of the LP to hear them play that way, and that’s all there is to it. The better the pressing, the better the band.

A Must Own Title

This, along with My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, is as good as it gets for Elvis on LP. All three are absolute Must Owns that belong in any serious rock collection. This is that rare breed of music that never sounds dated (especially considering the era in which it was produced). Music with real depth such as this only gets better with the passage of time. The more you play it, the more you appreciate it, and love it.

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Chicago II – 360 Original or Red Label Reissue?

More of the Music of Chicago

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Chicago

Both can be good. I did the shootout and often tried to guess the label for the copy I was hearing, for fun more than anything else. I have to admit that my batting average was not much better than chance. 

The 360s tend to be a little fuller and smearier, but plenty of red label copies sound that way and some 360s don’t, so trying to match the sound to the label was even more pointless than usual.

When comparing pressings in a shootout it’s too late for the label to have any predictive value.

We’ve already bought the records, cleaned them up and now just want to know what they actually sound like — not which ones might be the best, but which ones are the best.

The time for guessing games has passed. Of course, if we do actually figure out what the right stampers are, this helps us next time around.

What Stampers Mean

Stampers mean something, but sometimes, as is the case here, they don’t mean much. (If you don’t know that by now you probably haven’t done that many big shootouts on your own. Can’t blame you — without lots of helpers in the cleaning and needle-dropping departments, they’d be an even bigger pain than they already are. Even with three people involved it can still take almost all day, and that’s if you just happen to have ten or fifteen copies handy. It took us about two years to find that many, hitting multiple stores every week.)

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Jackson Browne’s Debut – Smooth or Detailed, Which Is Right?

More of the Music of Jackson Browne

Hot Stamper Albums with Choruses that Are Big and Clear

The real trick with this album is in striking the right balance between richness and presence. A White Hot Stamper from years back made me change my mind about this recording. I used to think it was dull, but I was wrong. I used to think that even the best copies of this recording sounded rolled off on the top end. I no longer believe that to be true. On the best pressings the top end is correct for this music.

It took the right pressing to show me the error of my ways.

Side one of that copy was rich and full and sweet as can be. Playing side two I noticed more transparency and clarity, especially in the guitars and voices. It seemed to have correct highs, highs that were a little soft on the first side.

But the more I listened, the less I liked it. It started to sound more like a record and less like music. Going back and forth between sides one and two, it was obvious that side one had less clarity because it had the kind of richness and fullness that made all the musicians and their instruments sound real in a way that wasn’t happening on side two.

Side two had clarity, it had transparency, but it kept reminding me that it was a recording.

Side one allowed me to forget that I was playing a record.

When the music started, my attention was completely focused on the songwriting and the performing. Aspects of the recording were lost in my enjoyment of the music. I kept thinking what a great album this is, not what a great recording it is. That tells me that both the recording engineer and the mastering engineer did their jobs right. They created a sound that best served this music.

I think if an audiophile label had produced a version of this album that sounded like side two, most audiophiles would love it. They would hear detail that they’d never heard before. (It’s my belief that the original Asylum master tape has been lost, so the details of which we speak can be heard on these good originals and nowhere else.)

But, fooled into listening for details in the music rather than the music as a whole, they would never know how RIGHT the album can really sound.

The best of our Hot Stampers are the ones that have the right sound for this music.

Elvis Costello / Armed Forces – A True Demo Disc from 1979

More Elvis Costello

More Top 100 Rock and Pop Albums

  • With KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout, this early UK pressing will show you just how good sounding Elvis’s Best Recording can be – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Some of the biggest, boldest rock sound ever recorded
  • A Top 100 Demo Disc, and just amazing here – every track is Elvis at this best
  • 5 stars: “In contrast to the stripped-down pop and rock of his first two albums, Armed Forces boasted a detailed and textured pop production… However, the more spacious arrangements – complete with ringing pianos, echoing reverb, layered guitars, and harmonies – accent Costello’s melodies… It’s a dense but accessible pop record and ranks as his third masterpiece in a row.”

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

Armed Forces is one of the best-sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this is proof enough to back up that claim. The best copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

I would say the sound of the rhythm section of this album ranks up there with the very best ever recorded. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the very best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

The song Oliver’s Army on the first side is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Rock music doesn’t get much livelier than that. Skip on down to Green Shirt for another track that’s as punchy as they come.

Virtually every other pressing of this record I’ve ever played sounds pale and washed out compared to the good British early pressings. It almost makes you wonder what happened to the tape; it seems as if this tape wasn’t used to make any records after this batch was pressed, it’s that big of a difference! (We have found surprisingly good British second pressings before but they are never competitive with the likes of these early ones.) (more…)

The Biggest “If” in All of Audio

More of the Music of Ted Heath

More Records that Are Good for Testing Tonality and Timbre

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” that passes for hi-fidelity on some records. (Some of the worst offenders along those lines can be found here.)

Old Sound, New Sound

Older audiophile records, typically those made by Mobile Fidelity in the ’70s and ’80s, suffered from a common group of problems which could be heard on practically every record they released:

A boosted top, a bloated bottom, and a sucked-out midrange.

Nowadays that kind of low fidelity sound is no longer in vogue.

Not to worry!

A new, equally low fidelity sound has taken its place.

What seems to be the “in sound” these days, judging by the Heavy Vinyl Reissue pressings we’ve played in recent years, is a very different sound from the one described above, with a different but no less irritating suite of shortcomings.

These new records, with few exceptions, tend to be compressed, thick, dull, opaque, veiled, recessed and badly lacking in ambience.

These are the current hallmarks of the Heavy Vinyl LP. Whether made by Speakers Corner, DCC, Analogue Productions or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, these labels apparently preferred  sound that was just too damn smooth. We were hearing overly smooth sound on practically every infuriatingly unbalanced modern Heavy Vinyl record we played.

The phony boosted highs of the bad old days are gone, replaced by the phony rolled off highs of today.

(The exception was Bernie Grundman. Bernie cut hundreds of records for Classic Records starting in the ’90s, and it’s clear he chose a different path, but his path turned out to be every bid as problematical. And Mobile Fidelity no longer makes bright records with ill-defined, bloated bass. Now they make overly smooth records with ill-defined, bloated bass.)

Are the audiophiles who are buying these new, smooth records any better off?

The ones with bright, phony systems probably are. Everybody else is getting taken to the cleaners. Ripped off. Sold a bill of goods. Etc. Etc. (There are scores of terms for this activity because there have always been companies and individuals who were happy to take your money in exchange for something of low quality dressed up in fancy packaging.)

First Things First

As we have been saying for years, to get anywhere in this hobby, the first thing you need is reasonably good sound.

Then you can buy records that actually have the potential to be good records. Records with higher fidelity. Records that are tonally correct.

If you’re buying these modern heavy vinyl pressings, what are you going to do with them when you finally get around to making your stereo reproduce music properly and can now hear how second- and third-rate they are?

You can tell yourself you’ll sell them for high prices on ebay down the road, but can you be sure they will hold their value?

And do you really want to go through the hassle? As someone who has been selling on ebay since 1998, I can tell you from experience it is a pain. Why create a problem for yourself now that your future self will have to clean up?

Further Reading