Lower Sound Quality Pressings

Aerial Boundaries Has Some of the Most Bizarrely Unnatural Digital Sound We Have Ever Heard

A Record Better Suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/fail record, I don’t know what would be.

It sounds as if someone went into the biggest room in the studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls.

Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using?)

And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!

If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.

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Boy, Was We Ever Wrong About Solti’s Rite of Spring

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is an old and somewhat embarrassing commentary providing the evidence for just how wrong we were about the sound of Solti’s 1974 recording for Decca.

Here is what we had to say about the album in 2008:

This is an amazing recording, DEMO QUALITY SOUND, far better than the Decca heavy vinyl reissue that came out in the 2000s. [That part is no doubt true.]

This record is extremely dynamic; full of ambience; tonally correct; with tons of deep bass. Because it’s a more modern recording, it doesn’t have the Tubey Magic of some Golden Age originals, but it compensates for that shortcoming by being less distorted and “clean.” Some people may consider that more accurate. To be honest with you, I don’t know if that is in fact the case.

However, this record should not disappoint sonically and the performance is every bit as exciting and powerful as any you will find. The Chicago Symphony has the orchestral chops to make a work of this complexity sound effortless.

Skip forward to the present, roughly ten years later. We had three or four copies on hand to audition when we surveyed the work a couple of years ago in preparation for a big shootout.

The Solti did not make the cut. It was not even in the ballpark.

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And Here I Thought The Mastering Lab Made Nothing But Good Sounding Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:

Analog at its Tubey Magical finest. You’ll never play a CD (or other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long you live.  This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.

But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.

One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.

The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.

Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*

Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)

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Coltrane’s Sound – A Very Good Reissue by Bernie Grundman

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review For Coltrane’s Sound on Rhino Records was written in 2021.

Sonic Grade: B+ (at least)

This is one of the better sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings we have played recently.

What makes it different from so many others that fail to live up to the remastering hype that surrounds them? (And regularly irritates the hell out of those of us who actually know what a good record actually sounds like.)

  • It’s tonally correct from top to bottom. At most five or ten per cent of the audiophile repressings we’ve played in the last ten years can make that claim.
  • The bass is not boosted or poorly defined. This eliminates at a minimum 98+% of all the Mobile Fidelity pressings we have ever played. Nobody seems to notice how bad the bass is on their records. A real puzzler, that fact.
  • It’s not exceptionally veiled or recessed. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Heavy Vinyl pressings that are not far too veiled and recessed to compete with their vintage vinyl brethren.

It is slightly veiled, and lacks some of the life, the space and obviously some of the presence of the real thing, the real thing in this case being an early stereo pressing on the Blue and Green Atlantic label.

Still, for your money you are getting a helluva good record.

One of the top two or three Rhino records to date.

(Bernie did a great job on this Coltrane album, but whatever you do, don’t waste your money on his recut of Lush Life. It is just plain awful, an audiophile hall of shame pressing that’s so bad it defies understanding. Something sure went wrong somewhere, I can tell you that. Stay tuned for my review.)

• Lacquers cut by Bernie Grundman
• LPs cut from the original analog masters
• Packages replicated to the finest detail manufactured with more care than ever

Our Previous Hot Stamper Commentary for Coltrane’s Sound

This is yet another superb Tom Dowd recording of Coltrane in his prime, with support from the brilliant McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.

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Brahms and Dvorak / Serenades / Kertesz

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

This London Whiteback LP (CS 6594) has Super Hot Stamper sound on side two, which is where the Dvorak Serenade for 10 wind instruments, cello and bass can be found. It has lovely space and depth, with dead on tonality and lots of Tubey Magic.

If you love the sound of wind instruments (and who doesn’t? British Band Classics springs immediately to mind as one of the most enjoyable classical recordings I own), then this just may be the classical chamber recording for you.

We reviewed this recording using a single pressing back in 2011. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then. Everybody else did them that way too, and we see no evidence that they have adopted any of our methods

Until about twenty years ago we had no idea how incomplete and inadequate our understanding of any title could be with only a single copy on hand.  When we began doing shootouts in 2004, immediately it became obvious that only a stack of cleaned pressings allowed us to recognize what a recording’s strengths and weaknesses might be.

More to the point, it offered us the opportunity to clearly identify the best record in the group — the pressing whose superior sound quality stands out above all the others. (We call such records White Hot Stampers and put them in this section if at least one side earns a 3+ grade.)

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons. The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and detailing the specific differences we heard forced us to become better listeners.

Through this work, carried out over the course of many years, we learned that there is only one way to find better sounding records. Everything else is a guess, just like our review of this London was.

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The Not So Swingin’ Nutcracker in Living Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We wrote the commentary you see below about 15 years ago.

We liked the record back then just fine. However, we recently got another couple of copies in and they sounded OK, not great, but what really had aged badly was the music, which was corny and, worst of all, contra the album’s title, definitely did not swing. Don’t waste your money on this one the way we did.

There are many jazz pressings we’ve discovered with audiophile quality sound and enjoyable music, but we reluctantly had to admit that this title should no longer be considered one of them. Live and learn, right?

We hope we can be forgiven for our mistaken bias in favor of a Golden Age title with a cool vintage cover. (And it wouldn’t be the first time.)

Another source of mistaken thinking: The Swingin’ Nutcracker came out in 1960, a year known for a great many other exceptionally good sounding titles produced during the Golden Age of vacuum tube recording. After playing so many wonderful recordings on that label, from that era, we were primed to like it regardless of whatever shortcomings it might have had.

This is why we recommend audiophiles pull titles off their massive shelves and give them a spin from time to time. Some records have simply not stood the test of time as well as others. Some will be better than we remember, some worse.

A wall full of records, most of which have not been played in years, even decades, is not a record collection worthy of the name. It’s better understood as a pile of vinyl that has been doing nobody any good for a very long time and, according to Newton’s Laws of Motion, will continue doing nothing for nobody forever.

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Strawberry Studios Dropped the Ball When They Mastered This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis Costello’s Albums Available Now

We described a Shootout Winning Hot Stamper pressing of Armed Forces we listed not long ago this way:

This vintage UK pressing will show you just how good sounding Elvis’s best recording can be, with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one.

It’s some of the biggest, boldest rock sound ever recorded. A Top 100 Demo Disc – every track is Elvis at his best.

Armed Forces is one of the best-sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this is proof enough to back up that claim. The better copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

I would say the sound of the rhythm section of this album ranks up there with the very best ever recorded. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the very best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

All true, if you happen to be playing the right UK pressing. The ones with Strawberry in the dead wax on side one, however, are not remotely competitive with the best pressings we played in our last shootout, as you can easily see from the stamper sheet below.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Armed Forces can be on the best vintage pressings.

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Grieg / Peer Gynt Suite / Barbirolli

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review and one that may not be especially accurate as it was written before the advent of the modern record shootout. Pick this one up for cheap if you like though.

Our current favorite pressing of the Peer Gynt Suite is the one Fjeldstad recorded for Decca.

1959 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2025 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and seventy titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to discover.

We think there are close to 50 that belong in any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.

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Roger The Engineer Is Awful on the Early UK Pressing

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

A hall of shame pressing if there ever was one.

The UK pressing of Roger the Engineer we played was pure crap.

Cool for collectors I suppose, but very bad news for audiophiles.

Your response to this news may depend on which camp you find yourself in. If you love collecting original pressings, we would put you in the record collector camp, not the audiophile one. Audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality, so if the more original pressing is the one you want, then you are a record collector first and an audiophile second, if at all. Harsh? Let’s call a spade a spade.

Regardless, we ask that you please not buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are always going to be the best sounding pressings. The hundreds of reissues listed here prove otherwise.

The original British pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a poor imitation of what was most likely on the master tape, as revealed by the Edsel reissues.

Maybe you have a good sounding one. We can’t say you don’t.  But we would be very unlikely to spend much money on an original import pressing after hearing this one.

And the domestic records we’ve played were clearly made from dub tapes, so they’re a bust too.

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A Deep, Deep Dive into LSC 2323 – A Shootout Like No Other

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records remastered pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

It seemed better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on the hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned up to then, was unexpected to say the least.

Unheard of is more like it. (That is no longer true — stay tuned for the story of the one Classic Records classical record that actually won a shootout not that long ago.)

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the right early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout. (Most are terrible.)[1][2]

Some Inside Baseball

Most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

The time to do a serious investigation of LSC 2323 necessary to get to the bottom of what was truly a head scratcher was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years. (Other such oddities have their own section here by the way.)

This title would have to wait until 2025 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records.

Why? Because every record with any hope of sounding good must be given the chance to show us what it can do. It deserves to be evaluated fairly, without the listener having any knowledge as to which pressing my be playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings, which is very bad indeed.

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