TAS List – Wrong Pressing

These titles are on the The Absolute Sound Super Disc list, but they picked an inferior sounding pressing to the one we prefer.

Joni Mitchell – Court and Spark

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell 

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, this early Asylum pressing is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Court and Spark you’ve heard
  • The sound is rich, warm and natural, with wonderful transparency, ambience and loads of Tubey Magic
  • Musically this is one of our favorite Joni albums here at Better Records, and probably her Best Recording as well
  • A proud member (along with Blue) of our Top 100 Rock and Pop albums – yes, it’s that good sounding when it’s mastered and pressed as well as this copy is
  • It takes us about two years to get a shootout for this album going, mostly because the Asylum vinyl of the day is a problem, and also because this album is so good it tended to get played a lot
  • 5 stars: “[A] remarkably deft fusion of folk, pop, and jazz … the music is smart, smooth, and assured from the first note to the last.”
  • If I were to compile a list of my favorite rock and pop albums from 1974, this album would definitely be on it

Court and Spark deserves to be heard with all the clarity, beauty and power that our Hot Stampers reproduce so well. If there is a better sounding album with Joni Mitchell’s name on the cover, you’ll have to prove it to us.

What you hear is the sound of the real tape; every instrument has its own character because the mastering is correct and the vinyl — against all odds — managed to capture all (or almost all; who can know?) of the resolution that the tape had to offer. (more…)

Eric Dolphy – Out There in 2026

More Saxophone Jazz

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this vintage Prestige stereo recording pressed on OJC vinyl
  • This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical yet still super open and spacious
  • 5 stars: “A somber and unusual album by the standards of any style of music, Out There explores Dolphy’s vision in approaching the concept of tonality in a way few others – before, concurrent, or after – have ever envisioned.”

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If It’s Made from the Real Master Tape, Shouldn’t Blue Sound Better than This?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I wrote the commentary you see below way back in 2006. I wanted to give our customers an incentive to critically listen to the new Rhino pressing of Blue, a Heavy Vinyl reissue we actually gave out for free with every Hot Stamper of the album we sold.

We wanted our customers to try and answer the question I had posed in my review as to what aspect of the sound was improved in the new pressing, relative to the vintage copy they would have just purchased from us.

For those of you who have been reading our commentaries about modern remasterings, you know that rarely do we find any area of their sound that could be considered in any way “improved.”

As you will see from our commentary below, no less a personage than Michael Fremer had said at the time that the Rhino pressing “has far greater presence and physicality and is more immediate, dynamic, detailed and especially transparent.”

As hard as it may be to believe, I actually agreed with him about one of those qualities.

I’ve broken down his list below. If you have one of our Hot Stampers and the Rhino reissue, play them back to back and try to hear what is better about the reissue. Which of the following does it have more of compared to even the best vintage pressings?

  • More presence,
  • More physicality (whatever that is),
  • More immediacy,
  • More dynamics.
  • More detail,
  • More transparency

I had posed this question on the blog over the course of many years and never got anything approaching a serious answer.

I was going to reveal what quality I thought it was at some point, but I have since decided that it is better left for the reader to figure out for himself rather than have me tell him. What do you learn from being given an answer? Nothing, or next to nothing, so why do it?

Similarly, the Heavy Vinyl Led Zeppelin II and Brothers in Arms reissues are very good sounding records, with obvious shortcomings which I had hoped my readers would be able to spot and write to me about. None have to date, or at least none have told me what they are, which works out to be more or less the same thing.

I will have a great deal more to say on this subject down the road, one that is critically important for audiophiles regardless of their experience. For now let me leave you with what Steve Hoffman had to say about the work he did on Blue. (You can find the quote on Joni Mitchell’s website.)

This is a really wonderful album; Joni just laid it all out there for the world to hear. Brave, especially back in the day & I feel that this new version is the true giant killer.

Unlike the original 1970’s pressings, this new version was mastered without ANY added compression whatsoever, making it a true problem child in cutting (of our own making) but I wouldn’t have it any other way. After many spoiled lacquer masters and one too many Altoids, it was finished to everybody’s satisfaction.

The effort was worth it. The ebb and flow of the music is totally intact. Parts were cut, plated and pressed at Record Tech (RTI) and the actual 1971 Reprise master tape (as recorded and mixed at A&M Recording Studios) was used in disk cutting, bypassing the usual/”EQ’d and Compressed Cutting Master” completely.

Unlike the DCC, most of the songs on this vinyl version were cut without ANY equalization at all so this will be the closest you will ever be able to get to the sound of the true master tape of Blue. It was exciting to work on and I’m sure it will please y’all.

Steve Hoffman, mastering engineer

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Joni Mitchell – Blue

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

  • Boasting two solid Double Plus (A++) sides, this copy of Joni’s 1971 masterpiece is doing just about everything right – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Full-bodied and balanced with the kind of smooth musicality that’s not always easy to find for Blue
  • We lucked into this quiet copy during our most recent shootout, but in our experience that is something we would not expect to happen very often, but we’re glad it did in the case of this wonderful pressing
  • A Better Records Top 100 title that belongs in any audiophile music collection worthy of the name
  • 5 stars: “Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell’s songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity…”
  • Everything changed for us in 2007 with the release of the Hoffman/Gray-mastered Rhino pressing of Blue, a record that made us ask ourselves, “Why are we selling records that we would not want to own or listen to ourselves?”
  • It was truly a kicked-by-a-mule moment for all of us here at Better Records, and I am glad to say one kick was all it took to get the rocks out of my head

The best copies bring out the breathy quality to Joni’s voice, and she never sounds strained. They are sweet and open, with good bass foundation and transparency throughout the frequency range.

The best pressings (and our better playback equipment) have revealed nuances to this recording — and of course the performances of all the players along with it — that made us fall in love with the music all over again. Of all the tough nuts to crack, this was the toughest, yet somehow copies emerged from our shootouts that made it easy to appreciate the sonic merits of Blue and ignore its shortcomings.

Hot Stampers have a way of doing that. You forget it’s a record; it’s now just Music. The right record and the right playback will bring this music to life in a way that you cannot imagine until you hear it. That is our guarantee on Blue — better than you ever thought possible or your money back.

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Why Is It So Hard for Mobile Fidelity to Get the Midrange Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity One-Step pressing of Blue and made the notes regarding the sound you see below.

We focussed on the quality of their pressing’s vocal reproduction, for the simple reason that a Joni Mitchell album that gets the vocals wrong is a Joni Mitchell album that no music lover and certainly no audiophile  would ever want to play.

The fact that some audiophiles do want to play this record speaks poorly of their ability to reproduce it properly. Accurate playback will reveal the problems with Joni’s voice described in detail below. The post-it for side one is on the left, for side two on the right.

We try to be very specific about the shortcomings of these records, which is why we reproduce our notes whenever they are available.

Side One

  • Tonally not far off, a bit too stringy and flat. Not awful. Congested vocals at peaks, harsh. 1+

Side Two

  • Vocal peaks like “traveling, traveling, traveling…” or “California” get squashed and harsh, lacking the real dynamics, presence and space of the vocals. No grade. (Awful in other words.)

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Blue – Play The Game, Not the Album

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Another in our series of Home Audio Exercises, one we created all the way back in 2007. If you want to learn more about doing your own shootouts, this listing has lots of good advice on how to go about it.

In 2007, a milestone year for us here at Better Records, we mentioned to our customers that we would not be carrying the new 180 gram Rhino pressing of Blue. We noted:

Since Kevin and Steve are friends of mine I won’t belabor its shortcomings. Let’s just say I think you can do better.

Down the road when we’ve had a chance to do a shootout amongst all our best copies, we will be offering something more to our liking. I recommend instead — and this is coming from a die-hard LP guy, someone who disconnected his home CD player over two years ago and only plays the damn things in the car — that you pick yourself up a nice used copy of the gold CD Hoffman mastered for DCC. It’s wonderful.

Some people are already upset with us over this decision, actually going so far as to question our motives, if not our sanity. Without a doubt we feel this will end up being the single most controversial stance we’ve ever taken. I predict that a great number of audiophiles are going to get really upset over our criticism of this new pressing. We are going to get emails like crazy asking us to explain what on earth could possibly be wrong with such a wonderful sounding LP. The writers of these emails will no doubt extoll its virtues relative to the other pressings they may have heard, and, finding no other reasonable explanation, these writers will feel impelled to question both the quality of our playback equipment and — yes, it’s true — even our ability to recognize a good record when it’s spinning right on our very own turntable.

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Blue on Heavy Vinyl – We Broke Through in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Thoughts on the so-called definitive vinyl version

Yet another milestone event in the history of Better Records.

In 2007 a customer took issue with our decision to reject the sale of the newly remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing of Blue, the one put out by Rhino and mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray.

We actually used to give the record away for free with every purchase of a Hot Stamper Blue, making it easy for our customers to hear for themselves just how superior sounding our Hot Stamper pressings were.

UPDATE 2024

With every purchase of a Hot Stamper Led Zeppelin II, we give our customers the Page-remastered version for free so that they can hear for themselves why our pressing costs well over $1000 and Jimmy’s a small fraction of that figure, sometimes as small as one hundredth!

We did this partly out of necessity. I had foolishly taken the advice of a Mr. Robert Pincus (the discoverer of Hot Stampers let us never forget) that the new version was indeed all it was cracked up to be and proceeded to put in an advance order for twenty copies to sell to our audiophile customers.

We were still selling Heavy Vinyl in 2007, but it would not be long before we decided to end the practice. Within a few years we were only selling records that we had cleaned and played and could guarantee both their superior sound quality and audiophile-quality playing surfaces.

So we had about twenty copies of Blue we did not think qualified as “better records” and decided to just give them away.

After spending quite a number of hours evaluating the new version, I got fairly worked up over the disappointing sound, worked up enough to write a very long commentary about the album, which I entitled Blue, The Game.

Rather than detailing the shortcomings of the new pressing, in this particular commentary, the first of its kind, I decided to take a different tack.

I implored the reader to do his own shootout for the album and tell me what he heard on the various pressings he might have at hand to work with. (Nothing much came of it of course, and not too surprisingly. Shootouts are hard and the vast majority of audiophiles are averse to them in our experience, hence the sorry state of audiophile records and the systems that fail to reveal their shortcomings — but that’s a horse that gets flogged regularly enough on this site. Enough is enough.)

Tom, 

I find it curious you are not carrying the new Joni Mitchell Blue vinyl issue. Even to the point of saying you can do better… for 25 bucks? After clicking on the LP cover and reading the comments from over the years it makes me wonder what your agenda really is. I paid $250 for a wonderful WLP and this Rhino issue smokes it, even as good as it is. I even have a CD cut from this mastering session off the analog FLAT, not Dolby tapes and this vinyl even beats it…. of course just my opinion.

I have listened on $100,000 systems, all the way down to portable units, solid state and tube and there is no denying this is the definitive vinyl version….. and again for 25.00. What a bargain.

Maybe all you did was look at that Rhino sticker and think back to the Grateful Dead records they did a few years ago (horrible) and just assumed this wasn’t up to Better Records standards.

Thanks for reading. I enjoy your e mails and store….

Tom

Tom,

We don’t review records based on their labels or stickers. And of course we never assume anything about the sound of a record. We talk about this stuff all the time. Here’s a relevant quote:

My approach to reviewing records is pure skepticism: a record sounds good if it sounds good, regardless of how it was made, who made it, or why. I’ve heard lots of expensive so-called audiophile equipment do a pretty poor job of making music over the years, the owners of which had an armful of reasons for why the sound should be truly awe-inspiring. But it just wasn’t. Most fancy gold faceplates are nothing but lipstick on a pig in my opinion.

I once heard Blue poorly reproduced at a friend’s house, and this is probably the best explanation for this letter writer’s inability to understand our position on Blue.

And paying $250 for a White Label Demo that apparently doesn’t sound good is the height of audiophile collector foolishness.

That money should have gone for better equipment or room treatments or tweaks, something, anything, to make this guy’s stereo and room work better than they apparently do.

Actually this brings up a good point. If I had to choose one record that separates the men from the boys, the stereos that really work from the artificial, restricted audiophile systems you might read about in the magazines or hear in a showroom or at an audio show, Blue would be a darn good choice.

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Blue – Rhino Records Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Available Now

Sonic Grade: B-

In March of 2007 we remarked that we would not be carrying the new 180 gram Rhino pressing of Blue. We noted at the time: 

Since Kevin and Steve are [were] friends of mine I won’t belabor its shortcomings. Let’s just say I think you can do better.

The following is an excerpt from our first successful Hot Stamper shootout back in 2007. Blue has only gotten better — dramatically better, if I may be so bold — since then.

The copy of Blue we are offering today is one of the few that sounded good before. Now it sounds really good. It got much quieter after applying some of our new cleaning techniques, and the sound became even warmer, richer, sweeter and more transparent.

Both sides sound wonderful — rich, sweet, and delicate. The warmth, breath, and presence of Joni’s vocals take this copy to a place light years beyond the typical copy, not to mention any reissue. The guitars sound amazing, particularly on side two, and the piano has weight without hardness. There’s tons of energy and lots of ambience, plus real depth to the soundfield — you really hear INTO this copy. Try that with your Rhino LP.

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