*Pressing Advice, by Title

Dream With Dean – Watch Out for Hard and Honky Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

Dream with Dean is great for finding any traces of “honk” in your midrange. Getting Deano’s baritone to sound tubey and rich, to get the sound that Bing Crosby could get just by opening his mouth, is not all that easy on some systems, mine included.

Correctly set VTA is critical in this regard, but pretty much everything must be working at its best for Dean to sound as intimate and natural as we know he can on the best pressings.

Balancing the lower mids with the upper mids is the goal, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. This album is great for testing, and guaranteed to bring practically any high-dollar system at a stereo showroom, a convention, or your very own home to its knees.

This is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet behind him (featuring Contemporary favorites Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell!) doing standards. On the best copies, the immediacy is absolutely mind-blowing. It’s a shame that there aren’t more Frank Sinatra records that sound like this.

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The Original Pressings of The Beatles Albums Are the Best Sounding, Right?

beatles help labelHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

No, they are most definitely not. At least the ones on the label you see pictured are not (with the exceptions noted below).

We think it’s just another example of mistaken audiophile thinking.

Back in 2005 we compared the MFSL pressing of Help to a British Parlophone copy of the Help album and were — mistakenly, as you may have already surmised — impressed by the MoFi. We wrote:

Mobile Fidelity did a GREAT JOB with Help!. Help! is a famously dull sounding record. I don’t know of a single original pressing that has the top end mastered properly. Mobile Fidelity restored the highs that are missing from most copies.

The source of the error in our commentary above is in this sentence, see if you can spot it:

I don’t know of a single original pressing that has the top end mastered properly.

Did you figure it out? If you’ve spent any time on this blog you did.

Original pressing?

Is that the standard?

Why? Who said so? Where is it written?

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On Tarkus, Only the Brits Have the Tubey Magical Sound We Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

This killer copy features some of the more intense prog rock sound to hit our table in quite some time. This is a true Demo Disc LP, one of the most dynamic and powerful rock recordings ever made.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame, we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings will rattle the foundation of your house if you’re not careful. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense. It’s big Bombastic Prog that wants desperately to rock your world. At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly. At loud levels it actually does rock your world.

Unlike most British pressings of the first album, the Brits here really ROCK, with greater dynamic contrasts and seriously prodigious bass, some of the best ever committed to vinyl. This music needs real whomp down below and lots of jump factor to work its magic. These Brits are super-low distortion, with an open, sweet sound, especially up top, but they still manage to convey the awesome power of the music, no mean feat.

All but the best Brit pressings have a tendency to be a bit turgid and many of them lack the bottom end weight that music like this absolutely needs in order to work its magic. There are some good domestic copies — not in a league with the best Brits at all — but most of them have sub-generation sound that robs the instruments of their immediacy and texture (much the same way that Heavy Vinyl does, truth be told).

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Big Speakers, Loud Levels and Plenty of Bass Work Their Magic on Stand Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

It’s common for pressings of Stand Up to lack bass or highs, and more often than not the copies that we play in our shootouts — shootouts which are strictly limited to import pressings on Island or Chrysalis — lack both.

The bass-shy ones tend to be more transparent and open sounding — of course, that’s the sound you get when you take out the bass.

90-plus percent of all the audiophile stereos I’ve ever heard were bass shy, no doubt for precisely that very reason: less bass equals more detail, more openness and more transparency. Go to any stereo store or audiophile show and notice how bright the sound is. (Yet another good reason not to go to those shows. We stopped decades ago.)

Just what good is a British Classic Rock Record that lacks bass?

It won’t rock, and if it don’t rock, who needs it? You might as well be playing the CD. (The average CD of Stand Up — I have a couple of them — is terrible, but the MoFi Gold CD is superb in all respects.)

The copies that lack extreme highs are often dull and thick, and usually have a smeary, blurry quality to their sound. When you can’t hear into the music, the music itself quickly becomes boring. Most Island pressings suffer from these shortcomings.

If I had to choose, I would take a copy that’s a little dull on top as long as it had a meaty, powerful, full-bodied sound over something that’s thinner and more leaned out. There are many audiophiles who can put up with that sound — I might go so far as to say the vast majority can — but I am not one of them.

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Peter Gabriel’s So – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

We wrote this about a killer copy that came our way years ago:

Here is a copy of So with the big and bold Peter Gabriel sound we love.

If you want your art rock to actually rock as well as be arty, this is the copy for you.

It’s not a perfect recording by any means, but when it sounds this good you can just forget its shortcomings and marvel at how consistently good the material and the production are.

No Mean Feat

It’s exceptionally hard to find good sounding copies of this album. With a digital recording such as this, the margin for mastering error is very slim. Most copies just aren’t worth the vinyl they’re pressed on. More often than not they will sound harsh, gritty, grainy, edgy, and thin.

We did a shootout many years ago that taught us a few things. The most surprising finding? The Brit copy I had in my own collection sucked — how about that! As a rule, I like the Brit pressings best for PG, but that rule got broken after playing all these domestic copies, some of which really sound good, clearly better than the Brits we had on hand.

Are rules made to be broken?

Yes they are.

This is a digital recording, and most of the time it is BRIGHT, SPITTY and GRAINY the way digital recordings tend to be, which plays right into the prejudices of most audiophiles for the “100% analog” approach they favor.

After hearing a bad copy, what audiophile wouldn’t conclude that all copies will have these bad qualities?

After all, it’s digital. It can’t be fixed simply by putting it on vinyl.

Ah, but that’s where logic breaks down. Proper mastering can ameliorate many if not most of a recording’s shortcomings. When we say Hot Stampers, we are talking about high-quality mastering doing exactly that.

Mass Produced Plastic Problems

But of course the mastering is only one part of the puzzle. I have multiple copies with the same stampers. Some of them are terrible, some of them are wonderful — you just can’t rely on the numbers to guide you with a piece of mass-produced plastic like this. You have no choice but to play the record to know what it sounds like. (And that’s a good thing. Keeps you honest. There’s no “cheating” when you have nothing to go by but the sound.)

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Minstrel In The Gallery Needs Space for the Drums

More of the Music of Jethro Tull

More Records with Specific Advice on What to Listen For

Space is critical to the success of the dense mixes employed in the proggy parts of the recording. The best copies have room for all the instruments to separate themselves out. Just to take one example: the drums are everywhere: higher, lower, in the front, in the back; in short, all over the place, and there’s no doubt in our minds that they were meant to be heard that way, not congested, blurred and smeared together on a single plane as they were on many of the copies we played.

And not thinned out either, which is not so much about space but sure is important on a rock record.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

In our experience, this record sounds best this way:

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Bob Dylan Listening Test – Here’s One to Wet Your Whistle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Presenting today’s Home Audio Exercise. Play your copy of Nashville Skyline — on speakers, no fair cheating on headphones! — and see if you can answer this question. At the beginning of one of the songs on this album two sounds are heard, neither of which is produced by an instrument, but could be said to have been produced by a singer. What are these two mysterious sounds?  

If you have a good copy of the record, a good stereo and the ability to listen critically, you should have no problem figuring out what these sounds are. When you do, drop us an email. Until we come up with a better prize, for now we can offer you an extra 10% off your next order.

Have fun. Once you hear it you will be pretty amazed that you never noticed it before. We sure were.

What’s most striking about this album is the sound of Johnny Cash’s voice in the duet he sings with Bob (we’re on a first name basis, don’t you know). I can’t remember when’s the last time I heard Johnny Cash sound better.

The stuff he did for American Recordings had much to recommend it; the first album sounded especially good. It was practically Mono.

But you just can’t beat a well produced, well engineered Columbia from this era. There’s a richness and a naturalness to the sound that has almost completely disappeared from the modern world of music.

You really do have to go back to these old originals to find it. And then you have to find just the right old originals for it to be there.

Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – Our First Shootout Winner

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

This copy is ALIVE! The drums and percussion are powerful and punchy with lots of room around them, and the bass is PERFECTION. There’s plenty of whomp and lots of extension on the top end.

This side two really conveys a sense of the amazing performances of these great musicians. It’s rich, full, smooth, sweet, open, spacious — everything you’d expect from an A+++ / A+++ record.

Funky Brazilian Music For Audiophiles

This is one of my favorite albums, one which certainly belongs in any Audiophile’s collection. Better sound is hard to find — when you have the right pressing. Unfortunately those are pretty hard to come by. Most LPs are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled and full of compressor distortion in the louder parts: this is not a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.

But we LOVE this album here at Better Records, and have since Day One. One of the first records I ever played for my good audio buddy Robert Pincus (Cisco Records) to demonstrate the sound of my system was Sergio’s syncopated version of Day Tripper off this album. That was close to twenty years ago [now more than 30], and I can honestly say I have never tired of this music in the intervening decades.

We’re glad to see that our customers share our enthusiasm for the band; note that there is not a single good sounding used Mendes record on the site at present (September ’08). They all seem to have sold, and most of the Hot Ones flew out of here.

[We do regular shootouts for the band’s albums, but their debut is tough to find in clean shape and it’s been years since we’ve had enough to play for a shootout.]

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The Supertramp You Don’t Know – Even In The Quietest Moments

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

After discovering killer Hot Stampers for this Forgotten Classic we feel the album can hold its own with any of Supertramp’s classic ’70s releases, from Crime of the Century all the way through to Breakfast in America.

Our White Hot stamper pressings showed us some of the best Supertramp sound we have ever heard on any of their albums, which is saying a lot. Supertramp is one of the most well-recorded bands in the history of pop music. GEOFF EMERICK took over most of the recording duties after the band decided to work with a different engineer for this, their 1977 album.

KEN SCOTT recorded the two albums that came before this one, Crime and Crisis, and as has been well documented on this very site, he knocked the two of them out of the park.

As I’m sure you know, both famously engineered The Beatles.

What we didn’t know, not until 2015 anyway, was how amazingly well recorded this album was.

In 2005 we noted that we had basically given up on ever finding a good sounding copy of Even in the Quietest Moments. It’s now ten years later. Having gone gone through more copies than we care to remember we think we’ve got EITQM’s ticket. We think we know which stampers have the potential to sound good as well as the ones to avoid. Finding the right stampers has been a positive boon.

Once we discovered the right stampers we were in a much better position to hear just how well recorded the album is. Now we know beyond all doubt that this recording — the first without Ken Scott producing and engineering for this iteration of the band — is of the highest quality, in league with the best.

Until recently we would never have made such a bold statement. Now it’s nothing less than obvious.

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Which Epic Labels for 12 Dreams Have the Best Sound?

More of the Music of Spirit

Here is some moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.

Don’t bother with the black label Epic reissues. In our experience they are consistently awful.

Yellow is the original label and orange the first reissue; both can be good.

The reviews reproduced below tell the story of the album far better than I can. If you like Pink Floyd, The Beatles (circa Revolver and Pepper), and the myriad other bands who took off in the direction of Psych Rock and Art Rock, you should find much to like here.

And if you don’t we give you your money back.

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