Album Test Records

It Doesn’t Get Much More Real on Vinyl Than This

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Pentangle’s first album is an honest-to-goodness Demo Disc.

When for a (thankfully) brief time back in the 70s I was selling audio equipment, the song “Pentangling” was a favorite demo cut to play in the store. The sound of the string bass and snare drum are amazingly natural; I don’t know of any other pop album from the era that presents the vibrant timbre of those two instruments better.

The Transatlantic British originals can be quite good as well, but are very tough to come by in good condition these days, and pricey when you find them.

This record easily qualifies for our Top 100 List, it’s that good (but unfortunately too rare to make the cut).

The Best Sides

The true foundation of the music is provided by two legendary guitar heavyweights, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. With Jacqui McShee’s almost unbearably sweet vocals soaring above them, this album presents the classic lineup at its best, with superior sonics to boot.

It’s Acoustic!

The unprocessed folky sound found throughout the album has its audiophile credentials fully in order, especially in the area of guitar harmonics, as well as drums that sound like real drums actually sound. (How many of the ’70s rock albums in our Top 100 have that natural drum sound? Not many when you stop to think about it.)

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Why Did Suite No. 2 Sound Better than Suite No. 5?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of J.S. Bach Available Now

We described our most recent Shootout Winning pressing of SR-90370, Bach’s Suites Nos. 2 and 5 for Solo Cello this way:

An early Mercury label pressing of Starker’s legendary 1963 recording of Bach’s sublime music for solo cello with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them.

The bass-boosted, muddy, veiled and ambience-challenged sound of the typical modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is nowhere to be found here.

I would bet money that whatever version is currently available has plenty of shortcomings along those lines, which may be acceptable to the mid-fi crowd but is positively ruinous on the high-fidelity systems that our customers have (or why on earth would they keep paying these prices?)

Some Mercury pressings from the 50s have absolutely amazing sound – we should know, we’ve played them by the score

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

  • Present
  • Rich and sweet
  • Great texture and space all around
  • So lively too

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

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Dexter Gordon Knocked Us Out Back in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2007 we had a fairly low opinion of both the Blue Note label and the work of Rudy Van Gelder, but that changed over the decades as we auditioned more and more of his amazing recordings, many of which were reissues of one kind or another.

In the commentary below, some text has been altered, mostly the overuse of capitalization.

Our latest review for One Flight Up can be found here.

Our 2007 Commentary

This Blue Note LP is without a doubt one of the best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard. We were auditioning a bunch of jazz records today (4/25/07), and when the needle hit the grooves on this one we were absolutely blown away.

I can’t think of one jazz record we’ve ever played here at Better Records with this kind of whomp. Everything here is so rich and full — nothing like a typical Blue Note album.

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Check Out the Big Beat of Drummer Bruce Gary

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Records that Sound Better on Big Speakers at Loud Levels 

If you’re a fan of big drums and jump out of the speakers sound, this is the album for you.

We rarely have Get The Knack in stock, but we do have a good selection of other debut albums.

This Monster Power Pop Debut by the Knack is an AMAZINGLY well-recorded album, with the kind of wall to wall big beat live rock sound that rivals Back in Black and Nevermind — if you’re lucky enough to have a copy that sounds like our Shootout Winning pressings do. (If you’re not, then it doesn’t.)

This is a Rock Demo Disc that is very likely to lay waste to whatever rock Demo Disc you currently treasure — certainly in some areas of sound reproduction.

My Sharona is simply stunning here. You just can’t record drums and bass any better. That’s why it’s a lifelong member of the prestigious none rocks rarder club. We love the sound of punchy drums and these are as punchy as they get.

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Listening in Depth to Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Taking Tiger Mountain.

Taking Tiger Mountain is all about sound, pure sound itself if you will: the sound of the instruments, their textures, and the textures of the soundscapes Eno has created for them.

With the subtle harmonics of Eno’s treated sounds captured on to vinyl intact, the magic of the experience far exceeds just another batch of catchy songs with clever arrangements. It truly becomes an immersive experience; sounds you’ve never heard in quite that way draw you into their world, each sound more interesting than the next.

Only these British originals sound like they are made from fresh master tapes on rich, sweet Tubey Magical, super-high-resolution cutting equipment.

Side One

(Which, by the way, is BRILLIANT from the opening guitars of Burning Airlines to the never-ending chirping crickets of The Great Pretender. I mean that literally: on these early British pressings the run-out groove has the sound of the crickets embedded in it so that the crickets chirp until you pick up the arm, much in the same way that Sgt. Pepper has sound in the run-out groove at the end of A Day In The Life.)

Burning Airlines Give You So Much More

Pure Pop for Now People. Listen to all those multi-layered harmonies! They’re sweet as honey, and only the best British copies get them to sound that way. You can make out practically every voice. This is what we mean by Midrange Magic.

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The Reiner Sound Is A Demo Disc for Energy, Dynamics and Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

This review was written in 2010.

I don’t think we have found a Reiner Sound as nice as this one since then. 

UPDATE 2024

It may have taken us more than a decade and cost us a lot of money to get a shootout going for a rare and expensive title such as LSC 2183, but all it took was one killer copy to make it worth all the time and trouble it took track it down.

And when a record sounds as good as our best copy did, with a grade of at least 3+ on side one, who cares how much trouble we went through to find it?

We live for records like these.

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Two Qualities Are Hard to Come By on Dad Loves His Work

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

As usually happens in one of our shootouts, we learned that there’s so much more to this album than just great songs.

What really made this music work on the best copies was the result of two qualities we found were in fairly short supply:

Correct Tonality

Most copies have a phony MoFi-like top end boost in the 10k region that we found irritating as hell. The longer we listened the less we liked the copies that had that boost, which adds a kind of “sparkle” to cymbals and guitars that has no business being there.

Now if you’re a MoFi fan, and you like the boosted highs that that label is famous for, don’t waste your money buying a Hot Stamper copy from us. Our copies are the ones with the correct and more natural-sounding top end. The guitars will sound like real guitars and the voices will sound like real voices.

Lower Midrange and Bottom End Weight

When the vocals sound thin, bright and phony, as they do on so many copies of this album (partly no doubt the result of the grainy crap vinyl Columbia is infamous for) that hi-fi-ish sound takes all the fun out of the music.

Many tracks have background vocals and big choruses, and the best copies make all the singers sound like they are standing in a big room, shoulder to shoulder, with the full lower midrange weight that that image implies.

The good copies capture that energy and bring it into the mix with the full-bodied sound it no doubt had live in the studio. When the EQ or the vinyl goes awry, causing Taylor and crew’s voices to take on a lean or gritty quality, the party’s over.

This is one of our favorite Taylor albums here at Better Records.

It’s the last album by the man that bears any resemblance to the genius of his early work. It’s steeply, steeply downhill after DLHW. (Case in point: His specials for PBS of the last few years [make that twenty or more] are a positive cure for insomnia, with every song slowed down and all the energy drained from the material.)

But he still had fire in his belly when he made this one — one listen to Stand and Fight is all the evidence you need; the song rocks as hard as anything the guy ever did. (And it’s got plenty of cowbell, always a good sign.)

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Listening in Depth to Sweet Baby James

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Before you play one of our Hot Stamper pressings, be sure to have your system fully warmed up and tweaked to perfection. Then turn up the volume good and loud. You’re about to hear some amazing music with superb sound. For me, and I hope you, when it comes to music this good, nothing less will do.

Side One

Sweet Baby James
Lo and Behold
Sunny Skies

James’ voice and the acoustic guitars should be warm, sweet, and surrounded by ambience. On a good copy, one that gets this song right, it’s pure milk and honey.

Steamroller

A big production number with rockin’ guitars and big brass. Some copies will be too bright and aggressive when the horns come in, and the majority of those that aren’t will be too dull on the other tracks. Only a copy with superb tonal balance will sound correct for both the rockers and the ballads.

Country Road
Oh Susanna

For some reason this song is too loud relative to the others on side one, so if you want it to sound right we recommend you bring the volume down a notch or two. (Those of you with a remote on your preamp finally have a good use for it.)

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The Best Reissue Pressings of Way Out West Are Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

When it comes to Contemporary recordings, sometimes the originals are the best sounding pressings. Other times, regardless of how good the originals may be, the best reissues, which is to day the right reissues, somehow manage to beat them.

This is undeniable — at least it is to those of us who audition records without regard to preconceived notions of which pressings are sure to have the best sound, based on attributes such as who mastered them, what label they have, what country they’re from, as well as a host of other things that collectors tend to look for.

We hold a different view. Foundational to understanding the nature of the vinyl LP is the idea that rules were made to be broken — the rules I just mentioned and others just like them.

The winners cannot be predicted. They can only be discovered.

Which is precisely why we do shootouts: to find out which pressings have the best sound, not which ones should have the best sound, or used to have the best sound, or might have the best sound, or were told will have the best sound.

Not only do we not care what anybody else thinks is the best pressing. It’s worse than that. We don’t even care what we used to think was the best pressing.

The current best evidence is the best evidence and that’s all there is to it. When new evidence overturns our previous understanding, then we naturally change our views. It’s the main reason we have no qualms about admitting our mistakes. If you let the evidence guide you in your search for the best sounding pressings, one thing you can be sure of is that you will get a lot of things wrong, and we have.

Not long ago we came across a Shootout Winning pressing of Way Out West with absolutely amazing sound. You can see the notes we took below. We described it this way:

This copy has superb 1957 Contemporary stereo sound – big, open and natural throughout. It’s one of our favorite Rollins records – one listen to this copy and you will know exactly why we love the recordings engineered by Roy DuNann.

Side One

Track One

  • Weighty and rich
  • Very 3-D and warm sax
  • Deep note-like bass

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What to Listen for on Back To Oakland

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

The biggest problems we found in our shootout were:

Some edge to the horn sound, the kind of “detail” that some audiophiles might prefer but that to our ears would eventually be a source of listener fatigue.

Stuck in the speakers low-resolution sound, by far the most typical, in which the ambience and spaciousness of the studio are noticeably compromised.

And lack of bass, which either takes the rhythmic quality out of the music, the drive so to speak, or makes the horns sound thin, which is a not a sound we tend to like, on this album or any other, although most of the audiophiles that I’ve met seem not to mind it all that much.

The Wrong Kind of Clarity

Much of what passes for clarity in some systems is just a lack of lower mids and thin bass response — woofers too small, not enough of them, the same old story. There are many commentaries on the site concerning this very issue and I recommend you check a few out when you have the time.

Music like this needs full-bodied sound to do what it’s trying to do; you need to be able to move lots of air in your listening room to bring this music to life. You can be sure this band full of horn players was moving huge amounts of air in the studio. Would have loved to be there!

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