*Thinking About Records

Our Four Plus Shootout Winner for Dire Straits from 2011

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review for Dire Straits’ first album was written in 2011. We had just discovered that a pressing of the album was clearly superior to every other pressing we had ever played. We were pretty excited about it and wanted to share the news about our breakthrough.

A substantial amount of the time, breakthroughs come about due to the conventional wisdom being wrong — and us not knowing it until an experiment proved it wrong. The needle is the only thing that can give us an answer we can trust, certainly not the pundits or the self-described experts.

What makes them experts? We have no idea and they never say. They just seem to “know” things, but they never tell us how they know them.

We do. We can’t shut up about all the stuff we know!

No concept is more fundamental to collecting the best sounding pressings than to be able to test records to find out if the received wisdom you are using as a guide is right, wrong or something in-between.

At the bottom of the listing for the album you can see a number of links to other records that share the same qualities as the first Dire Straits release does.

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Can a Pile of Different Pressings All Sound the Same?

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Making Progress 

There are certain things we can stipulate as all but impossible. Nobody who says they can levitate should be taken seriously.

But are there aspects of audio reproduction that you’re not familiar with?

Are there stereos that reproduce music at a much higher level than any with which you are familiar?

Are there ways to make your stereo sound better than the ones you know of?

Are there record pressings that sound better than the ones you’ve heard?

The reason I ask is this: There is never been a case in which a person contacted me and told me that they had played a pile of copies of a particular album and that they all sounded the same.

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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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With This UK Copy You’d Better Be Ready to Rock

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The shootout for Zep IV discussed below was carried out in 2012.

It seems an early British PORKY/PECKO pressing did very well, winning side one and coming close to the best on side two.

For at least five years now we have been unable to find a British pressing that eaned grades better than 2+, or Super Hot. Since the British pressings tend to be very expensive and hard to find in good shape, we have simply stopped buying them as they do not seem to be capable of winning shootouts anymore.

Other comments may be problematic in this review as well, so best to consult our latest listing for what we think we currently know about the album. Here is a short test to get you started.

Our Review from 2012

We did a massive shootout in 2012 for Zep’s beloved fourth album and this British pressing earned a nearly perfect score with some of the BIGGEST, BOLDEST, HARDEST Rockin’ sound we have ever heard on the album. Without a doubt this is the best sounding IV side two we’ve ever played, with the biggest bottom of them all.

When the Levee Breaks, a problematical track on even the best copies, finally sounds the way you’ve always heard it in your head — relentless and so powerful it’s downright scary.

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Compromised Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different in those days. A few dozen had been done starting in 2004, and probably not nearly as well as they should have been, truth be told.

This was unexplored territory, a new world. At the time we had no way of knowing how much there was to learn and how much time and effort would go into learning it.

Thousands of shootouts later we have a pretty firm grip on how to go about finding the best sounding pressings of the greatest music ever pressed on vinyl. Those recordings, with sound that is dramatically superior to those that have come along since, are why this blog exists. (The blog also allows me to promote 100+ personal favorites that I think should be more popular with my fellow audiophiles.)

Our Story, Circa 2006

Years ago one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few truly amazing sounding direct discs that offered music actually worth listening to. This was an actively touring big band, not a group of studio cats trying to make a record out of some charts somebody managed to cook up.

And you can read all about the killer copy we discovered a few years back here, complete with our shootout notes. (The notes can also be seen at the bottom of this post.)

Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. (For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how one goes about acquiring them.)

Hot Stamper pressings of jazz or popular music are almost always going to be multi-track, tape recordings with plenty of overdubbing and processing, about as far from purist live-in-the-studio performances recorded directly to disc as you can get.

They will invariably suffer a great many compromises, especially when compared to the approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate all sources of distortion in the pursuit of higher fidelity. In the case of direct to disc recordings, this means the losses that result from the use of analog tape.

But when they do that, they almost always fail.

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Professional Skateboarder Danny Way on Flow

Confessions of a Thrillseeking Audiophile

This quote comes courtesy of Shane Parrish’s Brain Food newsletter.

“Skateboarding is a game of failure. That’s what makes this sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure.

“But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there’s a zone I get into. Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It’s the most peaceful state of mind I’ve ever known. I’ll take all the failures. As long as I know that feeling is coming, that’s enough to keep going.”

I expect that Danny would understand exactly why someone would want to go into a room to listen to a record by himself. Good sound tends to make everybody in the room stop talking.

Exceptional records take it to the next level. They cause those in the room to to go silent in order to listen more intently — because the music and the sound demand it.

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Three Ideas to Better Understand the Mysteries of Records

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

We think that sitting down to play a Hot Stamper pressing — one you find yourself through the shootout process, or one we find for you — is the only way to appreciate its superior sound quality.

A great sounding LP, played on a top quality system, is an immersive experience hard to recreate with anything other than a properly-pressed, properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP.

For those who want to dig deeper into the mysteries of vinyl, consider the three commentaries we’ve linked below:

The uses and abuses of rules of thumb

Some audiophiles use the following rules of thumb when targeting higher quality rock and pop records:

If it’s an English band, get the UK import pressing. If it’s an American band, the master tapes should be here in this country, so the original domestic pressing will be the best.

As rules of thumb the ones above are not actually all that bad. Most of the time they will turn out to be correct. They’re just wrong so often (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Peter Gabriel, The Eagles, Black Sabbath, etc.) that you must be very careful how stringently you rely on them.

Many audiophiles will never bother to test them, since such tests require money and time, often in very large amounts. He will more than likely be content to leave his prejudices intact rather than seek out disconfirming evidence. (Just ask John.)

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Advice on Which Sgt. Peppers Pressings to Avoid

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This letter came in many years ago, but the lessons to be learned from Chris’s failed approch to finding a good sounding copy of Sgt. Pepper are no doubt timeless.

Many audiophiles who start collecting records make exactly the same mistakes Chris made, and some percentage of those audiophiles, however small, actually learn from them. Sad to say, it seems that many do not.

In our own humble attempt to rectify the situation, we devote a great deal of time to discussing record collecting on this blog, seeing as how so many audiophiles suffer by going about it in all the wrong ways.

Chris, an erstwhile customer from long ago, sent us a letter describing his search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading his letter is that many record collecting rules were broken in going about the search the way he did.

But then I thought:

What rules?

Whose rules?

Where exactly does one find these rules?

If one wants to avoid breaking them they need to be written down someplace, don’t they? Wikipedia maybe?

Sadly, no, not at Wikipedia, or any place else for that matter — until now. As crazy as it sounds, we are going to try to lay down a few record collecting rules for record loving audiophiles, specifically to aid these individuals in their search for better sounding vinyl pressings. And by “these individuals” we mean you.

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Another Dirty Little Secret of the Record Biz

More of the Music of Traffic

For our current take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy and The Best of Traffic, please click here.

Let’s talk about hits that are made from dubbed tapes.

The sound of some songs on some greatest hits albums can be better than the sound of those very same songs on the original pressings.

How can that be you ask, dumbfounded by the sheer ridiculousness of such a statement?

Well, dear reader, I’ll tell you. It’s a dirty little secret in the record biz that sometimes the master for the presumptive Hit Single (or singles) is pulled from the album’s final two track master mix tape and used to make the 45 single, the idea being that the single is what people are going to hear on the radio and want to buy. Or, having heard it sound so good on the radio, go out and buy the album.

One way or another, it’s the single that will do the selling of the band’s music. This is clearly the case with Mr. Fantasy on the original Island Pink Label pressing. (Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)

A dub is then made of the tape that was used to cut the 45 and spliced back into the album master, so that the single (or singles) is one generation down from the master for the other songs on the side.

This explains why the hit single from so many albums is often the worst sounding song on the album — it’s the one most likely to suffer from bad radio EQ and distorted, smeary, sub-generation sound.

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Listen to Winwood’s Left Hand on “Glad”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steve Winwood Available Now

Many years ago, perhaps in 2015, while playing an especially transparent copy of John Barleycorn, we learned something new about the album. Although it was a title I had been playing since it came out all the way back in 1970, apparently things had changed.

This pressing made it clear — really, for the first time — exactly what Winwood was doing with his left hand on the piano during the song Glad.

There are two musical figures that one can focus on: one involving the lower notes, which tend to be blurry, obscured and murky on most pressings, and two, the right-handed higher notes, which are typically much more clear and audible in the mix.

Only the very best copies let us “see” the bass notes of the piano so clearly and correctly. Next time you’re in the mood to compare different pressings of Barleycorn, pay special attention to the lower notes of the piano on Glad. It is our contention, backed by mountains of evidence, that no two copies of the album will get that piano to sound the same. (It will also help if you have large dynamic speakers with which to do the test.)

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.

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