Top Artists

Jim Croce – You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

More Jim Croce

  • This early pressing boasts outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – the ’70s ABC vinyl is also about as reasonably quiet as we can find it
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back – it’s as simple as that
  • “Croce’s debut ABC album was also his commercial breakthrough, topping the charts for five weeks, largely due to the comic, up-tempo title tune, a story song about competing pool hustlers, although Croce also reached the Top 20 with the change-of-pace ballad ‘Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)’.”

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Dopey Record Theories – Putting Bad Ideas to the Test

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark

Below we discuss some record theories that seem to be making the rounds these days.

The discussion started with a stunning White Hot Stamper 2-pack that had just gone up on the site..

I implored the eventual purchaser to note that side two of record one has Joni sounding thin, hard and veiled. If you look at the stampers you can see it’s obviously cut by the same guy (no names please!), and we’re pretty sure both sides were stamped out at the same time of the day since it’s impossible to do it any other way.

What accounts for the amazing sound of one side and the mediocre sound of its reverse?

If your theory cannot account for these huge differences in sound, your theory is fundamentally flawed. 

Can anything be more ridiculous than the ad hoc, evidence-free theories of some audiophile record collectors desperately searching for a reason to explain why records — even the two sides of the same record — sound so different from one another?

The old adage “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” couldn’t be more apt. If you want to know if a pudding tastes good, a list of its ingredients, the temperature it was cooked at, and the name of the person stirring it on the stove is surely of limited value. To know the taste one need only take a bite.

If you want to know the sound of a record, playing it is the best way to find out, preferably against other pressings, under carefully controlled conditions, on good equipment, while listening critically and taking notes.

The alternative is to… Scratch that. There is no alternative. Nothing else will ever work. In the world of records there are no explanatory theories of any value, just as there are no record gurus with all the answers. There are only methods that will help you find the best pressings, and other methods that will not.

The good news is that these methods are explained in detail on this very site, free of charge.

We’ve made it clear to everyone how to go about finding better sounding LPs. Once you see the positive results our methods produce, we suspect you will no longer be wasting time theorizing about records.

You will have learned something about them, at least about some of them, and that hard-won knowledge is the only kind with any real value.

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What to Listen For – Side to Side Differences

More Entries in Our Critical Thinking Series

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

Charlie Byrd – Brazilian Byrd

More Charlie Byrd

More Bossa Nova

  • This vintage Red Label pressing was doing pretty much everything right, with both sides earning superb Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them
  • Big, balanced, lively and musical, this copy had some of the better sound we heard in our most recent shootout (particularly on side one)
  • The right 360 Label pressings are going to win the shootouts, but the best of the Red Label pressings can still beat the pants off anything pressed after 1970, which is roughly when this copy was mastered
  • Other titles in which the early pressings have the potential to be the best sounding can be found here
  • 4 stars: “Acoustic guitarist Charlie Byrd always had a strong affinity for Brazilian jazz, and he sticks exclusively to Antonio Carlos Jobim songs (including ‘Só Danço Samba,’ ‘Corcovado,’ ‘Dindi,’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’) during this tasteful and melodic effort. Truly beautiful music.”

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Grand Funk – We’re An American Band

More Grand Funk

More Rock Classics

  • A stunning pressing with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to the last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • One of the best copies to hit the site in years, with sides that are full-bodied, lively and present, with a solid bottom end
  • More important, here is all the rock and roll energy that would simply be missing in action on any reissue made these days
  • It’s tough to find good Grand Funk sound on audiophile quality playing surfaces, but these sides did the trick
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Sonically, the record was sharp and detailed and the band’s playing was far tighter and more accomplished… The album’s title song, an autobiographical account of life on the road written and sung by Brewer, was released in advance of the album and became a gold-selling number one hit, Grand Funk’s first really successful single.”
  • If you’re a fan of the band, this title from 1973 is clearly one of their best, and unquestionably one of their best sounding

If you don’t already know, take our word for it: not many copies of this record will have much in the way of good sound. Grand Funk was not a band marketed to audiophiles. Their recordings tend to be crude and compressed, more radio-friendly than home-stereo-friendly.

This copy is a BIG step up from every other that we played. You’ll have a very hard time finding another one with two sides as good as this.

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Botnick and Levine Knocked Equinox Out of the Park

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Records Available Now

The music is of course wonderful, but what separates Sergio from practically all of his ’60s contemporaries is the AMAZING SOUND of his recordings. Like their debut, this one was engineered by the team of Bruce Botnick and Larry Levine.

Botnick is of course the man behind the superb recordings of The Doors, Love and others too numerous to mention. 

Levine is no slouch either, having engineered one of the best sounding albums on the planet, Sergio Mendes’ Stillness.

Just play the group’s amazing versions of Watch What Happens, Night and Day, or Jobim’s Wave to hear the kind of Mendes Magic that makes us swoon. For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. (Well, almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but Equinox is right up there with it.)

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to let the listener hear all the elements laid out clearly, with each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. When you hear one of those copies, you have to give Botnick and Levine their due. These guys knew what they were doing like few that have come along since.

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Rockin’ the Mandolin with Loggins and Messina

More of the Music of Loggins and Messina

More Country and Country Rock

A recent White Hot Stamper pressing of L&M’s fourth release demonstrates pretty convincingly just what an amazing DEMO DISC this album can be. When Jim Messina rips into his mandolin solo halfway through Be Free your jaw is likely to hit the ground. On the best copies it positively LEAPS out of the left speaker.

I can’t recall another pop or rock recording that captures either the plucked energy or the harmonic nuances of the instrument better. To hear such a well-recorded mandolin on a copy of this quality is nothing less than a THRILL.

This copy showed us:

  • a full-bodied piano
  • rich, lively vocals, full of presence and brimming with enthusiasm
  • harmonically-rich guitars, mandolins, dobros and the like
  • as well as a three-dimensional soundstage that reveals the space around them all

What to Listen For

What typically separates the killer copies from the merely good ones are three qualities that we often look for in the records we play: transparency, speed, and lack of smear.

Transparency allows you to hear into the recording, reproducing the ambience and subtle musical cues and details that high-resolution analog is known for.

Note that most Heavy Vinyl pressings being produced these days seem to be quite Transparency Challenged. Lots of important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found.

Lack of smear is also important, especially on a recording with so many plucked instruments. The speed and clarity of the transients, the sense that fingers are pulling on strings, strings that are ringing with tonally correct harmonics, is what makes these L&M records so much fun to play.

The best copies really get that sound right, in the same way that the best copies of Cat Stevens’ records get the sound of stringed instruments right.

No two pieces of electronics will get this record to sound the same, and some will fail miserably. If vintage tube gear is your idea of good sound, this record may help you to better understand where its shortcomings lie.

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Letter of the Week – “I am still amazed by the negativity I read sometimes about your records and prices…”

More of the Music of Stevie Wonder

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

I also offer my humble apologies for ordering one LP at a time, it started with that (insanely good by the way) 4-star pressing of my wife’s favorite Stevie Wonder record, then, I have been waiting for a solid B-52 pressing for years now, so I had to grab it and just today, I noticed the Bee Gees… just glad nobody snatched it before me, seriously, this is the HARDEST Bee Gees record to get in any condition at all !!

I am still amazed by the negativity I read sometimes about your records and prices… we talked about it before but, for god’s sake, nobody is forced to buy anything. Plus, you have very fair prices for hot stampers that are great pressings of the best records, if the luxury items are not your cup of tea.

Still keeping my eyes open for a 4-star (or maybe 5 stars 😉 Hunky Dory one day. Would not mind a similar grade for a copy of Southern Accent too !!

Cheers,
David

My reply to David, in part:

The ignorance of the audiophile community is really something, but who am I to complain? I held many of the same silly ideas about Heavy Vinyl up until about 2000, so let’s be fair and give the audiophile community another twenty years and hope they catch on the way we at Better Records did.

But of course they won’t. I had to work very hard for the last twenty years to get to where I am now and most audiophiles don’t seem very interested in doing the hard work it takes to create, tweak and tune a system to be revealing and accurate enough to show them how lacking the modern remastered LPs they love to collect really are.

Why should they?

That would mean they would have to stop collecting all the new, fancily-packaged records being released these days.

Instead, they would have to start digging through the used record bins where actual good sounding records can be found and spend their nights and weekends cleaning them.

Seems like a rough row to hoe. We know exactly how rough it is, we hoed it.

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What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

Bryan Ferry – Let’s Stick Together

More Bryan Ferry

More Roxy Music

  • For material and sound I consider this to be the best of Bryan Ferry’s solo albums – it’s a blast from start to finish
  • The energy, presence, bass, and dynamic power (love that horn section!) place it well above his other side projects
  • 4 Stars: “The title track itself scored Ferry a deserved British hit single, with great sax work from Chris Mercer and Mel Collins and a driving, full band performance. Ferry’s delivery is one of his best, right down to the yelps, and the whole thing chugs with post-glam power.”
  • If you’re a Roxy fan, this title from 1976 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1976 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Bryan Ferry’s third solo album is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should get to know better.

As for material, he covers some early Roxy songs (brilliantly I might add); Beatles and Everly Bros. tunes; and even old R&B tracks like ‘Shame, Shame, Shame.’ Every song on this album is good, and I don’t think that can be said for any of his other solo projects. Five stars in my book.

Let’s Stick Together checks off some important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Electric Light Orchestra – Out Of The Blue

More Electric Light Orchestra

More of our favorite Art Rock Records

  • This outstanding copy of ELO’s seventh studio album boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last- exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Lots of hits on this one, Turn to Stone and Mr. Blue Sky among them
  • “The last ELO album to make a major impact on popular music, Out of the Blue was of a piece with its lavishly produced predecessor, A New World Record… Out of the Blue was massively popular and did become the centerpiece of a huge worldwide tour that earned the group status as a major live attraction for a time.”  
  • If you’re an ELO fan, this classic double album from 1977 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1977 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here
  • If you are new to the music of ELO and want to learn more about our pick for their best album, click here

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The Curtis Counce Group – Skip the OJC of Carl’s Blues

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

Roy DuNann Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

The sound of the OJC pressings of Carl’s Blues that we’ve played recently left a great deal to be desired.

They are thinner and brighter than even the worst of the ’70s and ’80s LPs we’ve auditioned. That is decidedly not our sound. It’s not the sound Roy DuNann was famous for, and we don’t like it either, although we have to admit that we did find the sound of many of these OJC pressings more tolerable in the past.

Our old system from the ’80s and ’90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one. Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from those same afflictions. Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great.

And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve much better sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutions in audio had not yet come to pass. It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.

Overview

Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.

Those who fail to approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lacks of seriousness can be found on every audiophile forum there is. The youtubers are the worst, but are the self-identified aristocrats of audio any better? I see no evidence to support the proposition.

The methods that all of these folks have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about coming to grips with that inconvenient truth.

Reviews R Us

We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings, and here are reviews for some of the ones we’ve auditioned to date:

Here Are the Potentially Good Sounding OJC Pressings

Here Are the Not Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings

To be fair, we may have only had one copy of some of the OJC pressings we reviewed. Perhaps another copy would have sounded better, but we are so familiar with the sonic shortcomings of this series that one bad sounding copy was all we cared to bother with.

It would be hard to justify the time and expense of chasing after records that are unlikely to be much better than the copy we already know to have bad sound. That’s just the reality of the record business. There are so many good records that need auditioning, why bother with the second- and third-rate ones? (We’ve actually played less than 1% of all the newer Heavy Vinyl reissues for the same reason.)

Here are some other records with the same problems as this OJC that you may consider prudent to avoid, including many on premium-priced Heavy Vinyl. At least Fantasy had an excuse for making records that don’t sound good: they were cheap.

If you wasted $65 on a crappy sounding pressing of Stand Up, what else would you feel other than ripped off? Sadly, Analogue Productions does not offer refunds.

More Records with Thin Sound

More Records with Dry Sound

More Records with Bright Sound

More Records with Tizzy Cymbals

More Records Seriously Lacking in Tubey Magic