

A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock and Pop Hall of Fame.
Compiling the strongest material from the first four albums — all produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David — somehow, against all odds if you stop to think about it, this Columbia record club exclusive pressing ended up being mastered exceptionally well, obviously from superb tapes.
This Double Allbum 2-pack is the first of its kind here at Better Records. One copy we played had three amazingly good sides out of four, with a very weak fourth side, and another copy had three no-better-than-decent sides with a shootout winning White Hot side 4. Together the four LPs have the four best sides we have ever listed, with 2 White Hot sides and 2 Super Hot sides. You would need a VERY big stack of copies to find four sides with anything close to the sound of this set.
We’ve played more than our share of bad sounding Dionne Warwick compilations over the course of the last thirty years, so imagine our surprise when so many tracks here were competitive with the best originals we’ve heard.
Which means that the future owner of these records will get to hear classics such as Anyone Who Had a Heart; Don’t Make Me Over ; Wishin’ and Hopin’; and Make It Easy on Yourself, not to mention the nineteen other songs on the album, all of them with SUPERB SOUND.
Of course the pressings we played were all over the map; they always are. You know right away if you’ve got a bad one on the table: The voices get screechier as they get louder (somewhat of a problem on even the best copies), the overall image is small, flat and opaque; the midrange dark, veiled and smeary.
We are of course including all the bad sides so that you can hear how bad the average side really is. Side four of the first set and side three of the second set were two of the worst sides we heard in the entire shootout. They’re positively painful.
There’s plenty of Tubey Magic on these recordings. The good pressings show you a rich, breathy, unbelievably emotional Dionne Warwick. The bad ones dry up her vocals, smear away her breath and take the heartache right out of her voice. (more…)