Top Artists – Bonnie Raitt

Luck of the Draw – 2012 Was a Long Time Ago

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We’re close to having enough copies to do another shootout, our first in four years.

In 2012 we did our first one for Luck of the Draw, at the end of which we found a pressing that was clearly superior to the DCC, our default favorite at the time.

That was 14 years ago, and 14 years is a long time in audio. Having done the shootout many, many times since then, I can tell you two things we have learned:

1) Yes, of course, the domestic copies are better sounding than the DCC.

I often mention that DCC’s releases had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system (more here). That gives an advantage to practically any pressing not mastered by him.

His list of failures is surely one of the longest in the business. Of course, we can only guess about most of them, as we are not in the business of playing junk Heavy Vinyl. We much prefer the business we are in: selling the best sounding vintage pressings of the greatest albums of all time.

2) The domestic pressings are very unlikely to ever win a shootout.

They tend to earn grades of A++ or A+ to A++, and none of them lately has managed to earn a grade of A++ on both sides.

The imports are just too good. They are clearly better sounding, and it does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it. Why that is we have no idea, and we are congenitally opposed to speculating about the subject. (More on that subject below.)

Our 2012 Shootout

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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 their sibilance problems as well as their many other often serious shortcomings, which we have documented in detail all over 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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Nick of Time – Size Matters

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2010 after playing a killer Shootout Winning pressing that was so huge and powerful we just had to write about it.

We custom built a system that was especially good at, among other things, showing us just how big some pressings could get. Twenty years ago we wrote about it in a lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound.

If you have big speakers in a big room and like to compare pressings, you should have no trouble hearing the differences in size between pressings. Here are a number of other records that are good for testing ambience, size and space.

The sound here is POWERFULLY BIG AND BOLD, with meaty, deep bass (such a big part of the rockers here, Thing Called Love being a prime example) and some of the sweetest, richest, most ANALOG sound we’ve heard from any record Don Was was involved with.

When you hear it like this — something probably pretty close to what he heard during the control room playback for the final mix — it actually makes sense. It works. It’s not exactly “natural,” but natural is not what they were going for, now is it?

We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her music a profound disservice.

Size Matters

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is SIZE of the record’s presentation. So many copies of this album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. Some copies do; they create a huge soundfield with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. When you hear a copy that can do that, it’s an entirely different listening experience.

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Bonnie Raitt – Nick Of Time

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

  • Incredible sound for Bonnie’s 1989 Masterpiece, with both sides of this original copy earning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • There was a time when these Capitol pressings were sitting in the bins all over town, but those days are gone, my friend
  • Some of the sweetest, richest, most analog sound we’ve heard from any record Don Was produced – “Have A Heart” is a Demo Disc quality track
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Producer Don Was used Raitt’s classic early-70s records as a blueprint, choosing to update the sound with a smooth, professional production and a batch of excellent contemporary songs. In this context, Raitt flourishes; she never rocks too hard, but there is grit to her singing and playing, even when the surfaces are clean and inviting. A great comeback album that made for a great story.”
  • Yes, the sound is heavily processed, with the kind of gloss that we’ve come to expect from Don Was, but these qualities take nothing away from the consistently high quality of the songwriting and production
  • If you like the vintage smooth sound of this album, there are plenty of Hot Stamper pressings currently available that offer it

The sound here is powerfully big and bold, with meaty, deep bass (such a big part of the rockers here, “Thing Called Love” being a prime example).

When you hear it like this — something probably pretty close to what he heard during the control room playback for the final mix — it actually makes sense. It works. It’s not exactly “natural,” but natural is not what they were going for, now is it?

We play albums like this very loud. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times, and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her music a profound disservice.

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DCC + RTI = Audio Enervation

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was the first one I wrote criticizing the sound of DCC vinyl, probably around 2008 or so. There would be many to follow.

A well-known Joni Mitchell album we played the year before didn’t exactly set us on a different path, but it did have the effect of kicking us up into a higher gear, and Bonnie’s album was one of the early fruits of that change.

During our shootout for Bonnie’s first Capitol album, we found that the DCC pressing was lacking in so many ways that I felt compelled to spell out for our customers what its shortcomings were.

I had enthusiastically recommended the album in 1996 when it came out, but our first big shootout had shown me how wrong that judgment would turn out to be. Our complete commentary from 2008 is reproduced below.

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Nick Of Time is how completely they MURDER the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest.

Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound very good, but it can’t compete with the best original pressings. It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better original pressings. 

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music? You can try turning up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her a disservice.

The DCC Approach

The DCC, like a lot of modern remastered titles we”ve played, is too damn smooth.

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John Lee Hooker – The Healer

More Electric Blues

  • Here is a vintage copy with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout
  • On the best pressings like this one, you get something approaching the warmth and unforced clarity of analog we audiophiles crave
  • With Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos, Canned Heat and others
  • Four Stars in Rolling Stone: “Brilliant, 100-proof blues… the spirit that animates this album is the ageless voice of John Lee Hooker and his boogie-man blues. He has conjured up a renewed world blues with the canniness of the hoodoo healers and root doctors who first gave birth to the Delta blues.”

These guys (and one gal!) are definitely LIVE in the studio. The amount of studio reverb may be a bit much for some, but we think it works for this music. (more…)

Bonnie Raitt / Self-Titled – Our Shootout Winner (with Liner Notes)

More Bonnie Raitt

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Bonnie Raitt

The average Green Label Warner Bros. copy we played was lackluster to say the least.

The words on some of my notes read flat, veiled, dry, dark, edgy.

[Many years later we would characterize the above shortcomings as the Warner Bros. House Sound.]

None too promising, but we persevered and found a good one.

The reissues we heard tended to be modern and thin. Definitely not our sound. 

Bonnie Raitt fans take note: This album did not sell well. It appears that it never even charted, which means that original copies are hard to come by.

On top of that, clean ones tend to be expensive and prices are climbing.

With those things considered, it is unlikely we would ever do this shootout again.

Side One

A++. By track two the sound is rich and solid, yet clear. Lovely Tubey Magic and an unprocessed live quality make this one sound about as right as it’s going to get. The drums are especially real sounding, with little in the way of EQ and compression (not that those are bad things).

The rich piano and vocals on track three seal the deal — It’s Super Hot.

Note that the first track, a cover of Bluebird, was a bad idea from the start. The sour sound did it no favors either.

Side Two

A++. Yes, it’s a dead room, but on the best pressings there is still ambience and space to be heard. 

The vocals, often edgy on other copies, were not edgy here. The sound is rich and clear, the ideal combination.

Based on what were the winners of this shootout, this album should sound better this way:

For those of you who might be interested in finding their own Hot Stamper pressings of other titles, we here provide more moderately helpful title specific advice.

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Bonnie Raitt – Home Plate

More Music from Women Who Rock

  • An outstanding copy of Home Plate with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • Sound this good means you’re probably hearing the album better than they did when they played back the master tape in the control room — studio monitors being what they are
  • Since this is one of my three favorite Bonnie Raitt albums — the others being Sweet Forgiveness and Nine Lives — and quite possibly the best sounding album she ever made, it goes without saying that this is THE Must Own Bonnie Raitt Hot Stamper Pressing of All Time
  • “. . . a wonderful hybrid of American music, built on a thoroughly impressive set of songs, all delivered with Raitt’s warm, expertly shaded, and undeniably sexy singing.”

This is a classic case of a record that really starts to work when the levels are up. It’s so free from distortion and phony processing it wants to be played loud, and that’s the level this music works at. It’s the level it was no doubt mixed at, and that mix sounds pretty flat at moderate levels. If you want to hear the real rockin’ Bonnie Raitt you gots to turn it up!

Like a lot of the best recordings from the mid-’70s, the production and recording quality are clean and clear, and we mean that in a good way. There is very little processing to the sound of anything here; drums sound like drums, guitars like guitars, and Bonnie sings without the aid of autotuning — because she can sing on-key, and beautifully. Her vocals kill on every song. (Her dad had a pretty good set of pipes too.)

Click here to see more of our favorite Rock and Pop records with relatively unprocessed sound.

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The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Home Plate

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

This is a classic case of a record that really starts to work when the levels are up. It’s so free from distortion and phony processing it wants to be played loud, and that’s the level this music works at. It’s the level it was no doubt mixed at, and that mix sounds pretty flat at moderate levels. If you want to hear the real rockin’ Bonnie Raitt you gots to turn it up!

Like a lot of the best recordings from the mid-’70s, the production and recording quality are clean and clear, and we mean that in a good way. There is very little processing to the sound of anything here; drums sound like drums, guitars like guitars, and Bonnie sings without the aid of autotuning –– because she can sing on-key, and beautifully. Her vocals kill on every song. (Her dad had a pretty good set of pipes too.)

Her Best Material

What sets this album apart from others made around this period is the strength of the material. Every song on side one would fit nicely on a greatest hits album, they’re that good. The reason side one has always been a personal favorite is that it ends with the best track on the album, maybe the best song Bonnie ever sang, the excruciatingly heartfelt ballad, My First Night Alone Without You. If that one doesn’t hit you hard, something somewhere is very wrong. 

More Hot Stamper Commentary from 2008

This original WB Palm Tree label LP has THE BEST SIDE ONE we have ever heard here at Better Records. “A Triple Plus” sound means you’re probably hearing the album better than they did when they played back the master tape in the control room. (Studio monitors being what they are.) Since this is one of my three favorite Bonnie Raitt albums — the others being Sweet Forgiveness and Nine Lives — and quite possibly the best sounding album she ever made, it goes without saying that this is THE Must Own Bonnie Raitt Hot Stamper Pressing of All Time.

Nine Lives? Luck of the Draw?

What about the Capitol albums she recorded with Don Was?

Man, they sure don’t sound like this! That stuff is way too digital, overly-processed and modern sounding for my taste, not to mention my delicate hearing.

The first two she did for Capitol are fine albums in their own right, but she was already out of gas by the time she got accepted by the record buying public and the Grammy Award committee.

That was 1989; this album is from 1975 when she still had her groove on. You may gain a lot of wisdom as you age from thirty-six to fifty, but you don’t gain a lot of rock and roll energy (or any other kind, for that matter).

The Big Sound

This a big production, with horns and strings and lots of wonderful sounding instruments thrown into the mix such as tubas, mandolins and autoharps to name just a few. Getting all these sounds onto the vinyl of the day is a tough challenge, but some copies had the goods, and this is one of them.

Bonnie Raitt – Luck of the Draw

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

  • This import pressing will blow the doors off any other Luck Of The Draw you’ve heard with superb sound from start to finish
  • Amazingly open and transparent, with tons of energy and real immediacy to Bonnie’s wonderfully breathy vocals
  • This copy had more ANALOG qualities than most others in our recent shootout, which tended to have that digital / sterile sound that ruins so many albums from the era
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…Luck of the Draw is an unqualified success, filled with strong songs — including the hits ‘Something to Talk About’ and ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me,’ plus the Delbert McClinton duet ‘Good Man, Good Woman’ — appealing productions, and just enough dirt to make old-school fans feel at home.”

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