Records that Are Good for Testing Midrange Presence

These Stampers Consistently Come in Last in Our Shootouts

More of the Music of The Eagles

Reviews and commentaries for The Long Run

All the original domestic pressings are cut by Ted Jensen at Sterling.

You can find TJ and STERLING on every last one of them (with the notable exception of the SRC pressings, best avoided). What you can’t find is good sound on every last one of them.

The most common stampers can be found from pressing plants using the following label designations: MON, PRC, PRCW, AR and SP.

In our experience, two of the five labels listed above have the potential to win shootouts. Two of the others tend to end up somewhere in the middle of the grading curve. One consistently ends up at the bottom.

It’s important to keep in mind that in our shootouts, the person hearing the copy being played, the one noting its strengths and weaknesses, has no idea what pressing plant actually produced the record, or what its specific stampers numbers might be.

That kind of  information is compiled after the grading has been done. That’s when these patterns emerge.

The domestic pressings with the stampers shown above have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of The Long Run than you have ever heard. It won’t be cheap, but we guarantee that it will be very, very good.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and less than stellar sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

Stampers

That the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers, the simpler the better. Easier to memorize that way.

But in the world of records, answers, simple or otherwise, are fairly hard to come by.

There is only the hard work that it takes to come up with the best answer you can under your present circumstances, and by that we mean: your present equipment, your present tweaks, your present room, your present electrical quality, your present listening skills, your present table setup, etcetera, etcetera.

Not to mention the present condition of your ears.

With every change to your system, the record you used to like the best could turn out to be second-rate compared to the record you used to think was second-rate but has now become first-rate. What changed? Who knows?

This, of course, drives most audiophiles crazy, so they ignore or downplay their own inconvenient findings. Instead they refuse to believe their own two ears!

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Donny Hathaway Lives On Through His Masterful Live Album from 1972

More of the Music of Donny Hathaway

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues and R&B Albums Available Now

This live recording has YOU ARE THERE sound. The soundstage is wide and deep. It’s so natural, rich and transparent, what is there to fault? 

Within moments of the needle hitting the groove your speakers disappear and the music just flows into the room.

On the best original domestic pressings you can immediately understand and appreciate the honest, emotive quality of his singing that made Donny Hathaway the tremendous performer he was known to be.

I’ve been playing this record regularly since I first heard it back in the mid-’90s and even after twenty years it has never failed to thrill. If I could take only one soul album to my desert island, it would be this one, no doubt about it.

Listening Test — Don’t Be Fooled

Pay close attention to the audience chatter and clapping. Most copies, being compressed and veiled, have no hope of reproducing the handclaps and audience shout-outs correctly. Only those copies with transparency and presence let you “see” the crowd clearly.

But don’t be fooled by thinner, leaner sounding copies. There is tons of low end and lower midrange in this recording — it’s one of its prime strengths, and it’s what it would have sounded like if you were there — so make sure you have plenty going on in the lower frequencies before you start evaluating the audience participation.

Many audiophile recordings and remasterings are leaner and cleaner, producing a phony kind of transparency and detail at the expense of the fullness and richness of the original recording.

This is almost never a good thing.

Listening Test — Conga Energy

The copies where the congas are up-front, punchy and full-bodied were the ones where the rhythmic energy really carried the day. You know it when you hear it, that’s for sure. Most copies failed in this regard to some degree. If you have more than one copy, see if you don’t hear quite a bit more energy on the copies with more prominent, solid-sounding congas.

Congas, like drums and pianos, are good for testing specific pressings as well as stereo equipment.

If these instruments get lost in the mix, or sound smeary or thin, it’s usually fairly easy to hear those problems if you are listening for them. Most of what you will read on this blog is dedicated to helping you do that kind of listening.

The richness of analog is where much of its appeal lies. Lean drums, congas and pianos are what you more often than not get with CDs.

These three instruments are also exceptionally good for helping you to choose what kind of speakers to buy. (We recommend big ones with dynamic drivers.)

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Harry James & His Big Band – What to Listen For

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

More of Our Favorite Jazz Test Discs

Unlike most Direct to Disc recordings, this album actually contains real music worth listening to — but only when the pressing lets the energy of the musicians through, with actual fidelity to the sounds of the real instruments. Brass without bite is boring. Drummers who are too delicate in their drumming will put you to sleep.

Many copies of this album will do exactly that, which is a real shame. During our shootout, the more we played the good copies, the more we appreciated the music these guys were making. They were swinging, a big group of top quality players totally in the groove. When it’s played well, and the sound is as good as it is here, there’s nothing boring about these Big Band Jazz Classics. The music works. It swings. If you like the kind of big band recordings Basie made — and who doesn’t — you will find much to like here.

What to Listen For

No matter what copy you have, when you play it notice how the brass in the center of the soundfiield sounds so different from the brass on either side, where, obviously, closer mics allow their solos to be picked up and mixed more easily. There are lovely trumpet solos in the left channel and a baritone sax solo in the right that have amazingly realistic fidelity. Close your eyes and those instruments are RIGHT THERE.

One thing Sheffield got right is tonally-correct, hi-fidelity brass in a real acoustic space. (The latter is where For Duke fails so miserably, although no one ever seems to notice or bother to write about it. To me that dead acoustic is like fingernails on a blackboard, completely inappropriate to the sound.)

What to Watch Out For

As a rule two areas are especially lacking: there is a noticeable lack of presence on most copies, causing the brass to get stuck in the speakers and lose its bite; and, every bit as bad, the sound is often just plain compressed, lacking energy and life.

The musicians on most copies are just not giving it their all.

But wait a minute. This is a direct disc. How can it be compressed, or lack transients? Aren’t those tape recorder problems that are supposed to be eliminated by the direct to disc process? Maybe so, but there is some very strong evidence to the contrary, and this record is that evidence.

Even though the mastering is fixed at the live event, there are many other variables which no doubt affect the sound. The album is pressed in three different countries: the United States, Japan and Germany. Many mothers were pulled from the acetates and many, many stampers made from those mothers.

Bottom line? You got to play ’em, just like any other pressing. If no two records sound the same, it follows that no two audiophile records sound the same, a fact that became abundantly clear very early on in the listening.

Of course, not many audiophiles are in a position to shootout multiple copies of The King James Version, and I’m not sure most would even want to.

Here at Better Records we have a whole system set up to do exactly that, so we waited until we had a pile of them, got them all cleaned up, and off to the races we went.

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Bad Company – Straight Shooter’s Punchy Drums

More of the Music of Bad Company

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Classics Available Now

This commentary was written in 2009.

In late 2009 we had just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ album, our first since January of ’08, and what we were hearing this time around BLEW OUR MINDS. This record got a whole lot better over the course of the last twenty months or so. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the drum sound on this record is the right up there with the most present, punchy and realistic I have ever heard on record. 

I saw a friend’s band play recently in a small club and remember thinking how amazingly punchy the snare sounded (the sound coming from the live instrument itself and the club’s speakers) and this record has that kind of drum sound!.

There’s nothing like live music — everybody knows that — but good copies of this album get you a whole lot closer than I ever expected to get.

It’s a classic case of We Was Wrong. Last time around we wrote “I don’t think you’ll ever find a copy of this album that qualifies as a True Demo Disc, but make no mistake: on the right pressing there’s magic in the grooves.”

We was wrong: It is a true Demo Disc.

On our system anyway. Our stereo is all about playing records like this, and playing them at good loud levels as nature — and the artists — intended.

We revamped our Top 100 List in 2011 and this sucker is now on it, right next to its older brother, the first Bad Company album.

[We have since revamped our list, removing Straight Shooter but leaving the first album. There are so many contenders for our Top 100 that one Bad Company album — out of the two we like — is probably the right number.]

What You Want

It’s got exactly what you want from this brand of straight ahead rock and roll: presence in the vocals; solid, note-like bass; big punchy drums, and the kind of live-in-the-studio energetic, clean and clear sound that Bad Company (and Free before them) practically invented. (AC/DC is another band with that kind of live studio sound. With big speakers and the power to drive them YOU ARE THERE.)

One of the best cuts on side two is the ballad Anna, and boy does it sound good. This track will show you exactly what we mean by “live in the studio” sound. You can just tell they are all playing this one live: it’s so relaxed and natural and REAL sounding.

Turn It Up and Rock Steady!

If you’re playing this copy good and loud, you’ll feel like you’re in the room with the boys as they kick out the jams. Feel Like Makin’ Love rocks like you will not believe — shocking clarity, tons of ambience, silky sweet highs, and a grungy guitar sound that will blow you away. Who gets better tone than Mick Ralphs? Half the sound of Bad Co. is his guitar and the other half is Paul Rodgers voice. Between the two of them they rocked FM radio in the ’70s as good as any band of their time and far better than most. Check out the lineup on side one. Three out of four of those songs are serious Heavy Hitters that you probably know by heart. (If you listen to a Classic Rock station you definitely know these songs by heart.)

Cleaning

We used to think that “the biggest problem with the average copy of this record was GRIT and GRAIN, no doubt caused mostly by the bad vinyl of the day. You have to suffer through a lot of dry, flat, grainy copies in order to find one that sounds like this.”

That was not our experience this time around. Our Odyssey record cleaning machine, Walker fluids and tons of interim tweaks have taken most of that grain and grunge our of the sound of the records we played. (Uncleaned or improperly cleaned records are a major cause of Old School sound. There really is no hi-fidelity without the use of these revolutionary cleaning methods.)

Engineering

This album was one of Ron Nevison’s first big engineering jobs. He also did Bad Company’s debut, a Top 100 album for us. In 1977 he worked on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffitti.

He went on to do lots of the biggest selling monster rock albums of the ’80s, but The ’80s Sound has never held much appeal for us, which is of course why you find so few recordings from that era on our site, silk purses, sow’s ears and all that.

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The Eagles / The Long Run – The True Test for Side One

More of the Music of The Eagles

More Records with Specific Advice on What to Listen For

Want to know if you have a good side one on your copy? Here’s an easy test.

Timothy B Schmit’s vocal on I Can’t Tell You Why rarely sounds right.

Most of the time he’s muffled, pretty far back in the soundstage, and the booth he’s in has practically no ambience.

On the good copies, he’s not exactly jumping out of the speakers, but he’s clear, focused, and his voice is breathy and full of emotional subtleties that make the song the heartbreaking powerhouse it is.

This is why you need a Hot Stamper. Most copies don’t let you FEEL the song.

And the rest of the band is cookin’ here as well. From the big, full-bodied bass to the fat, punchy snare, the best sides are doing practically everything we want them to.

Further Reading

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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

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 unless we 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 the album. The hot copies are just too rare.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to having to shell out the big bucks we charge for their 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, and in excellent sound.

In addition, So Far has 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 about it.

This record is good for testing the following sonic qualities:

Testing the Cost of Freedom

The better copies of So Far have Demo Disc Quality Sound on this track. You could say everything that needs to be said about the beauty of analog with this one track alone. It’s not even two minutes long, but it’s two really wonderful minutes of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the height of their powers.

The voices should sound as sweet and as silky as any CSN three part harmony you have ever heard. This song rivals Helplessly Hoping for vocal blend. Good pressings of this song have midrange magic to die for.

As this is the last track on side one, closest to the inner groove, most copies are going to have some trace of tracking distortion (or even cutting distortion). The better your arm and cartridge, the less this should present a problem for you. (My Dynavector 17dx/ Triplanar combo tracks the best copies perfectly.) For most weekend warrior audiophiles, it’s never going to vanish completely.

Anti-Skate Testing Too!

This track is a wonderful test for proper anti-skate adjustment. With the anti-skate set right, there should be less harmonic distortion in the voices. A correct setting will also bring out dynamics and energy as well.

Of course, the problem is that if you start playing this song again and again and making small adjustments to the anti-skate, you’re probably going to end up damaging the track.

One solution would be to find a cheap used copy to play with, not one of our wonderful (and pricey) Hot Stampers.

Further Reading

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Seals & Crofts’ Folky Rock – What to Listen For

More of the Music of Seals and Crofts

Hot Stamper Pressings of Folk Rock Albums Available Now

In our recent shootout, all our best copies had very similar numbers and letters in the dead wax, which doesn’t happen all that often but does from time to time.

This album does not have a single set of stampers that always win, but it does have a set of very similar stampers that always win. All of the best stampers can only be found on the Green Label original pressings, if that’s any help.

What We’re Listening For On Summer Breeze

Here are some of the things we specifically listen for in a vintage Folk Rock record. Our hottest Hot Stamper copies are simply doing more of these things better than the other copies we played in our shootout. The best copies have:

  • Greater immediacy in the vocals (most copies are veiled and distant to some degree).
  • Natural tonal balance (many copies are at least slightly brighter or darker than ideal; those with the right balance are the exception, not the rule).
  • Good solid weight (so the bass sounds full and powerful).
  • Spaciousness (the best copies have wonderful studio ambience and space).
  • Tubey Magic (without which you might as well be playing a CD).
  • And last but not least, transparency, the quality of being able to see into the studio, where there is plenty of musical information to be revealed in this sometimes simple, sometimes complex and sophisticated recording.

Further Reading

If you would like to run your own tests on the Folk Rock records you own, we make that easy. Here are some other titles that are good for testing these qualities, many with specific advice on what to listen for.

Listening in Depth to Sounds of Silence

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Paul Simon (and Art Garfunkel)

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Sounds of Silence. Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

Sounds of Silence is made from a second generation tape, as we explain below. Since we listen to all the records we sell, we like to point out such things so our customers know what they are getting.

This album is the proverbial tough nut to crack, a mix of folkie tracks and ambitious big production numbers, all recorded on a four track machine and bounced down maybe just a few too many times along the way. Some got handed a troublesome case of Top 40 EQ — hey, this is 1965, it’s the way they thought pop records should sound.

But many of the best tracks survived just fine. They can sound wonderful, it’s just that they rarely do. This is precisely where we come into the picture.

The key to good sounding pressings of this record is to look for the ones with a top end. Now of course you can’t see the top end when you buy the record. But most of the copies of this album you pick up are going to sound like cassettes. There won’t be much over 8K, and that means hard, harsh, transistor radio sound. You need extended highs to balance out the upper midrange.

Although the rock tracks certainly come to life and really do sound good on the hottest of the hot copies, the folkie tracks are the real reason to buy these early pressings. They have the Tubey Magic that’s missing from virtually any reissue or digital format version.

Best and Worst Tracks

For the best sounding tracks try Leaves That Are Green on side one, and April Come She Will on side two. 

Keep in mind that the big hit ”Sounds of Silence” will never sound much better than it does in the car. It’s basically the track from their previous album with rock instrumentation added, meaning an electric guitar, a second generation of tape and some extra distortion for good measure.

But on a superb copy, that track can still be surprisingly enjoyable. Not Demo Disc quality, just enjoyable.

Below you will find our moderately helpful advice for finding the best sounding pressings of Sounds of Silence.

In our experience the album sounds best this way:

Which simply means that the 360 label domestic stereo pressings win our shootouts, in this case without exception.

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Listening in Depth to Rickie Lee Jones

More of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones

Reviews and Commentaries for Rickie Lee Jones’ First Album

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of RLJ.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

On the best of the Hot Stamper copies, it becomes abundantly clear just how well the string bass was recorded — assuming you like the close-miked, maximum-presence quality they were clearly after. You hear all the fingering, the wood of the body resonating; all the stuff you could never hear live unless you were ten feet from the guy.

Natural it’s not, but natural is not what most hit records are all about anyway.

Credit — or blame — belongs squarely with LEE HERSCHBERG.  There’s no question that he knew exactly what he was doing, he’s the pro’s pro, so let’s give him credit for making the sound of the record really POP.

Side One

Chuck E.’s in Love

Rickie’s biggest hit is a great test track for side one. The guitars should have some twang but not too much. The typical pressing errs in one of two ways here — either they are overly smooth and lacking texture, or they are a bit bright, giving the guitars a glary, hi-fi-ish sound.

Also listen for a big room around the finger snaps. If you don’t hear a lot of ambience around them you won’t hear it on the rest of the side either.

On Saturday Afternoons in 1963

This track should sound warm, sweet, and breathy, but will almost always be plagued by a bit of surface noise behind the quiet intro.

Night Train
Young Blood
Easy Money

This song is a great test for bass definition. No MoFi ever made will have the tight bass found on the best pressings of this record.

There’s a wonderful version of this song on Lowell George’s solo album that we love every bit as much. Check it out if you have a copy.

The Last Chance Texaco

Side Two

Danny’s All-Star Joint
Coolsville

Bar none the toughest test track for side two. Only a superb copy will get all the orchestral instruments right. Listen for texture on the strings, extension on the chimes, and lots of room around the timpani. This is another track with a quiet intro that will almost always be a bit noisy.

Weasel and the White Boys Cool

Much like Chuck E.’s In Love, you’ll want to hear just the right amount of twang on those guitars. If your copy doesn’t sound punchy and lively on this track, we suggest you contact us for a Hot Stamper pressing ASAP.

Company
After Hours (Twelve Bars Past Goodnight)

Further Reading

Billie Holiday – Balancing the Vocal, Strings and Rhythm

More of the Music of Billie Holiday

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

The better copies reproduce clearly what to our minds are the three most important elements in the recording — strings, rhythm, and vocal — and, more importantly, they are properly balanced with one another. 

The monos, as you might expect, balance the three elements well enough, but the problem with mono is that the vocals and instruments are jammed together in the center of the soundfield, layered atop one another.

Real clarity, the kind that live music has in abundance, is difficult if not impossible under those circumstances.

Only the stereo pressings provide the space that each of the players needs in order to be heard.

Naturally the vocals have to be the main focus on a Billie Holiday record. They should be rich and tubey, yet clear, breathy and transparent.

To qualify as a Hot Stamper, the pressings we offer must be highly resolving. You will hear everything, all of it surrounded by the natural space of the legendary Columbia 30th Street Studio in which the recording was made. 
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