Records that Are Good for Testing Midrange Congestion

Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but listening for the details in a recording can be a trap we too easily fall into if we do not guard against it.

Tonal balance is the key. Without it no judgments about detail have any real value. 

One example: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic Records pressing gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar doesn’t have the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word detail, since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful “detail.” Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind.

The MoFi guys and the CD guys often fall into this trap.

Get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is usually have systems that make my head hurt.

But most people will never know what they’re missing on Helplessly Hoping, because they will never have an amazing sounding copy of this album. The hot copies are just too rare.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to having to shell out the big bucks we charge for the extremely hard to find debut album, one of the rarest titles we offer, and that would be our moderately pricey copies of So Far, which have the song Helplessly Hoping in excellent sound.

In addition, they have one of the hardest tracks to reproduce in the entire Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young canon: Find the Cost of Freedom. Scroll down to read more at the end of this listing.

This record is good for testing the following sonic qualities:

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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

For a More Scientific Approach to Finding Better Records, Sweat the Details

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

When it comes to doing shootouts, half the battle is just being able to play the record right.

Our approach is simply a matter of precisely adjusting the arm and cartridge for every title, then comparing the various pressings, properly cleaned of course, under carefully controlled conditions, with as much scientific rigor as we can bring to the proceedings.

In some ways it is analogous to rocket science, which we would define as the seemingly simple process of discovering all the details that need to be sweated and then sweating the hell out of them.

It’s the opposite of theoretical physics. One doesn’t need to be a novel thinker or have big ideas to do audio well.

Obsessively working through the basics of table setup, tweaks, room treatments and electrical quality will take your system to levels beyond those you could have ever imagined.

And, you sure don’t need a bloody microscope to check your stylus rake angle, unlike some audiophile reviewers who insist that such devices are somehow essential.

Your ears, if they are any good at all, will do the job just fine, and probably much better.

Further Reading

Simon & Garfunkel / Bridge Over Troubled Water – A Price Must Be Paid

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

One of the most interesting findings in this shootout was that no Red Label copy scored as high as the best 360 Label copies. The later labels can be very clean and clear, but ultimately they lack the midrange magic, warmth and sweetness of the best early pressings.

Since this recording has a problem in all those areas to start with, most red label copies suffer from a pronounced deficit of  Simon & Garfunkel magic, the kind of magic that is so wonderfully evident on their two previous outings: Parsley, Sage… and Bookends.

The Last of the Four Track Recordings

Why do the two previous albums have more magic?

They’re simpler productions, the kind that can be handled by the four track machine they were recorded on.

Bridge, on the other hand, is the boys’ Grand Musical Statement for All Time, with production and scope far exceeding their previous work. Like the Beatles with Abbey Road, they gave it their all and went out on a high note. (The Beatles planned it that way, while S and G fell victim to their ambition, which you can read about in the AMG review below.)

What a Masterpiece they achieved. Ten weeks at Number One on the charts. Depth and breadth of material only hinted at on their earlier efforts.

Who can argue with this as one of the most important achievements in popular music of the last fifty years? [Make that sixty.]

It’s on this short list for a reason.

Back Away From The Console

The sonic problems and promise of the multi-track approach can both be heard in one track: The Only Living Boy In New York. The song starts out simply, focusing on the duo’s lovely voices, with only minimal instrumentation. It sounds PHENOMENAL on the best pressings, and very good on even the typical copies. Halfway through the song, heavy-handed production kicks in, and the sound suffers significantly. You can’t fault the band for going big, but nor can you blame audiophiles for wishing they had kept it simple.

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Even shootouts won’t teach you what you can learn from variations in your table setup

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark

There are loud vocal choruses on many tracks, and more often than not at their loudest they sound like they are either breaking up or threatening to do so. I always assumed it was compressor or board overload, which is easily heard on Down to You.

On the best copies there is no breakup — the voices get loud and stay clean throughout.

This assumes that your equipment is up to the job. The loudest choruses are a tough test for any system.

Setup Advice

If you have one of our hottest Hot Stampers, try adjusting your setup — VTA, Tracking Weight, Azimuth, Anti-Skate — Especially! Audiophiles often overlook this one, at their peril — and note how cleanly the loudest passages play using various combinations of settings.

Keep a yellow pad handy and write everything down step by step as you make your changes, along with what differences you hear in the sound.

You will learn more about sound from this exercise than you can from practically any other. Even shootouts won’t teach you what you can learn from variations in your table setup.

And once you have your setup dialed in better, you will find that your shootouts go a lot smoother than they used to.

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Grieg / Peer Gynt – Speakers Corner Reviewed, with Handy VTA Advice

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Reviews and Commentaries for Peer Gynt

Sonic Grade: C+

The Fjeldstad has long been one of our favorite performances of Peer Gynt here at Better Records. 

This record is handy for VTA set-up as well, a subject discussed below in our listing from 2010.

The sound is excellent for a modern reissue*, but in the loudest sections the orchestra can get to be a bit much, taking on a somewhat harsh quality. (The quieter passages are superb: sweet and spacious.)

So I adjusted the VTA a bit to see what would happen, and was surprised to find that even the slightest change in VTA caused the strings to lose practically all their rosiny texture and become unbearably smeared.

This is precisely why it’s a good heavy vinyl pressing for setting up your turntable.

If you can get the strings to play with reasonably good texture on this record you probably have your VTA set correctly.

VTA

Correct VTA adjustment for classical records (as well as all other kinds of records) is critical to their proper reproduction. If you do not have an arm that allows you to easily adjust its VTA, then you will just have to do it the hard way (which normally means loosening a set screw and moving the arm up and down until you get lucky with the right height).

Yes, it may be time consuming, it may in fact be a major pain in the ass, but there is no question in my mind that you will hear a dramatic improvement in the sound or your records once you have taken the time to correctly set the VTA, by ear, for each and every record you play.

We heard the improvement on this very record, and do on all the classical LPs (and all other kinds of records) we play.

The Big Caveat

As for the asterisk (*) in the first line above, it concerns the caveat “…for a modern reissue…” What exactly do we mean by that? Allow us to reprint what we wrote about another Heavy Vinyl classical pressing, one that we used to like.

We cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare against a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out a while ago. Here’s what we heard in our head to head comparison.

The soundstage, never 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 about the same amount. Similar and even more problematical losses can be heard in the area of top end extension.

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 it was impossible.

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. I’m not sure how else to describe it – diffuse, washed out, veiled. It’s just vague.

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 that’s about the most you can hope for.

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.

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 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?

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.

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and other Audiophile LPs of all kinds. So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this is the kind of sound that just bores us to tears.

This record is disappointing in a number of ways that we believe are important to the proper presentation of orchestral music.

If you own a copy, listen for the things we’ve identified in the sound that came up short.

Here are some of the other records that we’ve found are good for testing the specific qualities that the Speakers Corner pressing lacks.

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

More of the Music of The Byrds

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Byrds

Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could possibly tolerate 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 they do.

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 used record land that we haven’t heard and 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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War – Bass, Choruses and Energy Are Key to the Best Pressings

More of the Music of War

More Jazz / Rock Fusion Records with Hot Stampers

[This review was originally published about 2012 or so. Note that we rarely have any War records in stock. If you see one, grab it, the recordings on the best pressings are positively amazing on big speakers at loud levels.]

We just finished our first big shootout for this fun album — the All Music Guide calls it “a magical ride with plenty of surprises to keep the listener on his or her toes” and we couldn’t agree more.

This copy gives you punchy bass, airy flutes, hard-hitting percussion and loads of Tubey Magic. Many copies we played had too much hardness, edge, and midrange honk, but this one is smooth, sweet and rich.

Engineered by the brilliant Chris Huston, this recording displays all his trademark gifts.

His mixes feature:

lots of bass;

huge, room-filling choruses that get loud without straining or congestion; and

rhythmic energy that few pop recordings could lay claim to in 1972.

The links above will take you to other albums that are good for testing all of these qualities.

As for the choruses, allow me to paraphrase our listing from Commoner’s Crown.

This is one of the rare pop/rock albums that actually has actual, measurable, serious dynamic contrasts in its levels as it moves from the verses to the choruses of many songs. The first track on side two, Four Cornered Room, is a perfect example. Not only are the choruses noticeably louder than the verses, but later on in the song the choruses get REALLY LOUD, louder than the choruses of 99 out of 100 rock/pop records we audition. It sometimes takes a record like this to open your ears to how compressed practically everything else you own is.

The Top Is Important Too

Richness and weight are key to the sound, but oddly enough an extended top end was almost as crucial to the success of the best copies. When the top end extends, the sound is open and relaxed. When the various songs build to their climaxes, the copies with lots of clean top end had a sense of “ease” that simply was not to be found on the smoother (read: duller) brethren.

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The Pretenders – Why Are We Guessing (Again)?

More of the Music of The Pretenders

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Pretenders

German Pressings? Why Not British?

We discovered that only the best German pressings convey the energy and enthusiasm of the band while avoiding the grunge, flatness and hardness that make the typical pressing of this album all but unlistenable at loud volumes.

Isn’t this a British band that just happens to be led by an American? And wasn’t the album produced by the clearly British Chris Thomas and recorded at George Martin’s AIR studios in London? How is it possible that the best German pressings consistently sound better than the best British pressings?

Your guess is as good as mine. And, if you stop to think about it, who in his right mind would think that any answer they might give to such a question is anything other than a guess?

But that’s not the half of it. It’s not simply the fact that the Germans seem to be the only ones able to work their magic on this title. Most German pressings are not nearly as good sounding as this one. It is only this specific German pressing that does everything right. It has won every shootout for the last five years if that tells you anything.

What to Listen For

In the chorus of Time the Avenger, the better copies do not get as harmonically distorted, edgy and hard as most. The best really “bloom,” but they are few and far between.

A Top Pretenders Title

This is where Chrissie Hynde matured into a top class songwriter; every track is good and many are brilliant. With Robbie McIntosh having joined the band, this is first and foremost a guitar rock record; his jangly, grungy riffs drive every song. Great songs and great guitar work — what more do you need in a rock record?

Think of Middle of the Road — everything that’s good about this band on this album is there in that song: it’s uptempo, with a driving beat, a rock solid rhythm section and a beautifully distorted guitar out front and high up in the mix.

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Jimmy Smith – A Difficult to Reproduce Jazz Masterpiece

More of the Music of Jimmy Smith

Rudy Van Gelder Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

In the past we’ve complained about “Rudy Van Gelder’s somewhat over the top echo-drenched brass,” but on a copy such as this there is nothing to complain about!

All that reverb on the brass sounds RIGHT. If you have a top quality front end (and the system that goes with it), this recording will be amazingly spacious, three-dimensional, transparent, dynamic, and open.

Copies of this album are sometimes so sour or dull (or both) that they go right in the trade pile. Add to that the difficulty of finding copies that are scratch-free and not too noisy and you have one tough shootout. Inner Groove Distortion caused by the non-anti-skate-equipped turntables of the day is a chronic problem with vintage jazz records, and this title is typically no exception — except in this case! 

A Must Own Jazz Record

This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Jazz Collection.

It also ranks fairly high on our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems .

Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process.

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