Advice-WTLF, Rock and Pop

Advice on what to listen for in order to help you separate the best pressings of rock and pop records from those that are merely good.

Sibilance Is a Bitch on Nick Of Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

We here present some advice on what to listen for to help you separate the best pressings of some of our favorite rock and pop records from those that are merely good.

On side two listen for the sibilance on Bonnie’s voice on Too Soon to Tell.

Some copies have gritty, spitty sibilance on her voice, while others keep the spit well under control, allowing much more of the silky quality of her vocal to be heard.

Sibilance is a great test for pressings that you may be comparing for sound quality. Sibilant pressings tend to be crudely mastered and that crude quality is sure to show up in other areas of the recording.

(Half-Speed mastered pressings are almost always spitty and should be avoided, for sibilance problems as well as their many other shortcomings we have documented in detail on this blog.)

Also, pay special attention to how silky the cymbal crashes can be on the better copies.

We also recommend that you listen for how all the elements of the recording are clearly laid out and audible, never forced or hyped in any way. The sound can be surprisingly 3-D for a modern recording.

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Shoot Out The Lights – Bigger, Taller, Wider, Deeper

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

One of the qualities we don’t talk about nearly enough on the site is the SIZE of a record’s presentation. Some copies of the album don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. Other copies do, creating a huge soundfield from which the instruments and voices positively jump out of the speakers. 

When you hear a copy that can do that, needless to say (at least to anyone who’s actually bought some of our best Hot Stamper pressings) it’s an entirely different listening experience.

With constant improvements to the system, Shoot Out the Lights is now so powerful a recording that we had no choice but to add it to our Top 100 list in 2014, but we would go even further than that and say that it would belong on a list of the Top Ten Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time.

The guitars are HUGE — they positively leap out of the speakers on the title cut, freeing themselves from a studio that seems already to be the size of a house.

Not long ago we played an amazing copy of The Sky Is Crying, one of the biggest — and by that we mean tallest, widest and deepest — sounding records we have ever heard. This album is every bit as big. It’s nothing less than astounding.

We live for that sound here at Better Records. If you do too, you might want to check out the albums in this group we consider to be Demo Discs for size and space.

There is the kind of solid, powerful kick to the drums on every track that only the best of the best rock records ever display, the Back in Blacks and Zep IIs, with deep punchy bass augmenting the drums, just as it does on the Hot Stamper pressings of those two titles.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this record should put to shame 99% of all the rock records you have ever heard.

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An Open Soundstage Is Key on Get Close

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Pretenders Available Now

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 these days, what with one Heavy Vinyl record sounding worse than the next.

We’re doing what we can to change that way of approaching the pursuit of high quality audio playback in the home, but progress has always been, as you can imagine, slow.

This is no Demo Disc by any means — we grade on a curve, and considering the limitations of a heavily-processed pop record designed to be heard over the radio, the best copies are very good sounding for what they are.

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Cat Stevens on 2 Heavy Vinyl 45 RPM Discs, Part 1 – Is This the Truest Tillerman of Them All?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

About ten years ago we auditioned and reviewed the 2011 edition of Tea for the Tillerman pressed by Analogue Productions, the one that came on a single Heavy Vinyl 33 RPM LP.

I wrote a very long commentary about the sound of that record, taking it to task for its manifold shortcomings, at the end of which I came to the conclusion that the proper sonic grade for such a record is F as in Fail. My exhaustive review asked the not-very-subtle question, this is your idea of analog?

Our intro gave this short overview:

Yes, we know, the folks over at Acoustic Sounds, in consultation with the late George Marino at Sterling Sound, supposedly with the real master tape in hand, and supposedly with access to the best mastering equipment money can buy, labored mightily, doing their level best to master and press the Definitive Audiophile Tea for the Tillerman of All Time.

It just didn’t come out very well, no matter what anybody tells you.

Recently I was able to borrow a copy of the new 45 cutting from a customer who had rather liked it. I would never have shelled out my own money to hear a record put out on the Analogue Productions label, a label that has an unmitigated string of failures to its name. But for free? Count me in!

The offer of the new 45 could not have been more fortuitous. I had just spent a number of weeks playing a White Hot Stamper Pink Label original UK pressing in an attempt to get our new Playback Studio sounding right.

We had a lot of problems. We needed to work on electrical issues. We needed to work on our room treatments. We needed to work on speaker placement.

We initially thought the room was doing everything right, because our Go To setup disc, Bob and Ray, sounded super spacious and clear, bigger and more lively than we’d ever heard it. That’s what a 12 foot high ceiling can do for a large group of musicians playing live in a huge studio, in 1959, on an All Tube Chain Living Stereo recording. The sound just soared.

But Cat Stevens wasn’t sounding right, and if Cat Stevens isn’t sounding right, we knew we had a Very Big Problem. Some stereos play some kinds of records well and others not so well. Our stereo has to play every kind of record well because we sell every kind of record there is. You name the kind of music, we probably sell it. And if we offer it for sale, we had to have played it and liked the sound, because no record makes it to our site without being auditioned and found to have excellent sound.

But I Might Die Tonight

The one song we played over and over again, easily a hundred times or more, was But I Might Die Tonight, the leadoff track for side two. It’s short, less than two minutes long, but a lot happens in those two minutes. More importantly, getting everything that happens in those two minutes to sound not just right, but as good as you have ever heard it, turned out to be a tall order indeed.

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More Bass or More Detail, Which Is Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

With Doug Sax mastering from the real tape, you get a Rock Solid Bottom End like you will not believe. Talk about punchy, well-defined and deep, man, this record has BASS that you sure don’t hear too often on rock records. 

And it’s not just bass that separates the Men from the Boys, or the Real Thing from the Classic Reissue for that matter. It’s WEIGHT, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, that area that spans roughly 150 to 600 cycles.

It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern.

It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Johns intended.

The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.

But not the Classic. Oh no, so much of what gives Who By Numbers its Classic Rock sound has been equalized right out of the Heavy Vinyl reissue by Chris Bellman at BG’s mastering house.

Some have said the originals are warmer but not as detailed. I would have to agree, but that misses the point entirely: take out the warmth — the fullness that makes the original pressings sound so right — and you of course hear more detail, as the detail region is no longer masked by all the stuff going on below it.

Want to hear detail? Disconnect your woofers — you’ll hear plenty of detail all right!

Keep that in mind when they tell you at the store that the record you brought in to audition is at fault, not their expensive and therefore “correct” equipment. I’ve been in enough of these places to know better. To mangle another old saying, if you know your records, their excuses should fall on deaf ears. (more…)

Donald Gets Dynamic on Rikki

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Pretzel Logic is one knockout of a recording.

Having done shootouts for every Steely Dan title, I can say that sonically this one has no equal in their canon. (Click on that link to see two hundred others.)

Which is really saying something, since Becker and Fagen are known to be audiophiles themselves and real sticklers for sound. No effort in the recording of this album was spared, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.

They sweated the details on this one. The mix is perfection.

But you would never know it by playing the average pressing of this album, which is dull, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail.

(We’ve played plenty of records — actually, specific pressings of records — that were dull, compressed, and dead as a doornail. We’ve made links for them by the hundreds here so that audiophiles who do not want records with these problems can more easily avoid them.)

It’s positively criminal the way this amazingly well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP pressing. Hint: avoid all imports and anything not on ABC.) How can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right?

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One of Our Best Sounding Pressings of Revolver Lacked Space on One Side

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

On side one we played I’m Only Sleeping first, followed by Taxman.

On side two we started with And Your Bird Can Sing, followed by Good Day Sunshine.

You may notice that there seems to be a pattern in the way we pick which songs of each side to do first.

As you can see from the notes, side two of our most recent White Hot stamper Shootout Winner was doing everything right.

The second track was very tubey and present. Good Day Sunshine, the first track, was super rich and weighty, with lots of room around the vox. (I hope you can read our writing. If you can’t, just email me and I will try to find the time to transcribe the rest of the text.)

However, we had a side one that was slightly better than the side one you see here.

The Second Round

When we played the two best copies back to back, side two of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side one of another pressing showed us there was even more space in the recording than we noticed the first time around.

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When Did You First Hear that 10k Boost on Sittin’ In?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Loggins and Messina Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It took us a long time to recognize it, I can tell you that. 30 years? Maybe even more.

And how about the boost to the low end?

This commentary is from many years ago, perhaps as far back as 2010.

Of course it could not have been written until the stereo had reached the level where these anomalies and others like them could be easily recognized, the clearest kind of evidence of progress in audio.

If you’re not noticing these kinds of things on the vintage vinyl you play, then it’s probably time for a serious upgrade or two.

The anomalies are there, of that there can be no doubt. They’re everywhere. You just need a more accurate and revealing system and room to show them to you.

In that respect, you my find our shootout notes are helpful at pointing you in the right direction as to what you should be listening for. They are especially helpful in recognizing when one side or another falls short in some specific area.

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On the Beach – Here’s the Live in the Studio Sound We Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we described a Shootout Winning early pressing with the comments you see below. (Please excuse the excessive capitalization.)

We’ve been trying for a while to find a copy of this album with the kind of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sound we get from the best copies of Zuma and After The Gold Rush, but it hasn’t been easy.

However, on the best copies, the title track is out of this world.

It’s got that live-in-the-studio sound we recognize and love from Zuma, but in this case it sounds like it was recorded at three in the morning in a room full of pot smoke.

When you play a Hot Stamper copy, the soundfield is huge — big, wide, and deep — and there’s lots of space around all the instruments. You will not believe all the studio ambience, and you may even catch a contact high from it.

Two Knockout Sides

Side one held its own against every copy we threw against it, earning our top grade of A+++. The sound is relaxed, musical, and SUPER transparent — there’s virtually nothing between you and the music. Neil’s voice is PERFECTION with lots of texture, and it is surrounded by lovely ambience.

Play the second track, See The Sky About To Rain, to hear some mellow magic. Neil’s work on the wurlitzer sounds fantastic, and the soft, breathy vocals are bound to give you goosebumps.

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Wild Things Run Fast – A Personal Favorite

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

One of our favorite Joni Mitchell albums.

A Desert Island disc for me and one of the few good reasons to listen to new music in the 80s. 

My personal Must Own Joni Mitchell list includes:

  1. 1968 Song to a Seagull
  2. 1971 Blue
  3. 1974 Court and Spark
  4. 1982 Wild Things Run Fast

WTRF is a TAS list Super Disc with many good qualities, but you’d never know it from the typically lean, bass-shy pressing you might find on your turntable.

Also, since this record can be a little cold sounding — it’s a modern recording after all, and 1982 is sadly nothing like 1972  — filling it out and warming it up is just what the doctor ordered.

John Golden (JG) mastered the originals. The best of them prove that he did a great job at least some of the time. (To find “the best of them,” aka Hot Stampers, read on.)

You can count on the fact that our Hot Stamper pressings will be unusually rich and full-bodied, with lovely warmth and presence.

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