Top Artists – Eric Clapton, Cream, Blind Faith, etc.

Cream / Fresh Cream – Yes, It Can Actually Sound Quite Good on Atco

More Cream

More British Blues Rock

  • Fresh Cream returns to the site with excellent Double Plus (A++) sound or very close to it on both sides of this Plum and Tan Atco stereo original
  • The band’s debut album has much better sound than most of those that followed – it’s surprisingly Tubey Magical, with tons of studio space and lovely vocal presence
  • If all you know is the DCC pressing, or any other Heavy Vinyl pressing, you are in for quite a treat with this domestic Hot Stamper (here is our review)
  • The Atco pressings never win our shootouts, but they can still have sound that is quite a bit better than 90% of the pressings audiophiles seem to like
  • 4 1/2 Stars: “Fresh Cream represents so many different firsts, it’s difficult to keep count. Cream, of course, was the first supergroup, but their first album not only gave birth to the power trio, it also was instrumental in the birth of heavy metal and the birth of jam rock…”
  • If you’re a fan of the band, this title from 1966 is clearly one of their best, and one of their best sounding
  • The complete list of titles from 1966 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

We recently finished a shootout for this band’s hard-rockin’ debut album and were once again delighted to hear how good this music can sound when you get a pressing that sounds as good as this one does. Nothing the band did in the studio was as well-recorded as their first album.

(more…)

Cream – Live Cream

More Cream

More Live Recordings of Interest

  • An outstanding copy of Live Cream, with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Super lively and clear with the kind of bass that most pressings simply don’t have in our experience
  • 4 stars: “Foreground and background seem to dissolve as all three musicians take charge, using the full range of their instruments. And where Bruce goes with his bass, especially on ‘Sweet Wine,’ is every bit as rewarding as the places that Clapton’s guitar takes us; and Ginger Baker’s playing is a trip all its own. Performances like this single-handedly raised the stakes of musicianship in rock.”
  • If you’re a Cream fan, this live classic from 1970 belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1970 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

Cream were certainly no slouches in the musicianship department, and this live performance captures them at the peak of their powers.

When you get a good copy of this album you’re sure to hear what we heard — that this is truly one of the great live rock albums (with a bit of studio material on side two as well). This has the Big Rock Sound that we go crazy for at Better Records. The best pressings, the ones that are full-bodied and smooth, let you crank the levels and reproduce the album good and loud the way it was meant to be heard.

When it’s all working, you’re front and center for a fiery Cream concert with these guys delivering one heckuva performance. And where else are you gonna get that these days?

Over the last 18 years that we’ve been doing our Hot Stamper thing we’ve heard scores of Cream albums; we know their music well, and they are hard to beat when playing live. (more…)

John Mayall – Back to the Roots

More John Mayall

  • A stunning copy with all four sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or very close to it
  • The sound throughout is clean, clear, present and spacious with lots of bottom end weight
  • “John Mayall gathered together prominent musicians who had played in his bands during the past several years, including Sugarcane Harris, Eric Clapton, Johnny Almond, Harvey Mandel, Keef Hartley, and Mick Taylor… the sidemen frequently shine, especially Clapton.” – All Music

(more…)

Heavy Cream – Not Recommended

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cream Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

A Polydor Double LP mastered by Robert Ludwig.

The tonal balance is right on the money, but of course, because this is a compilation, it is made from copies of master tapes, not real master tapes themselves, so it will always have that blurry, smeary, recessed, flat, opaque, airless, sub-generation-tape sound. In short, it’s dubby.

Hey, that’s what we hear on most of the Heavy Vinyl we audition, too. Imagine that.

What to listen for:

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.

We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

Further Reading

John Mayall with Eric Clapton – Blues Breakers

More John Mayall

More Eric Clapton

  • You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides of this superb pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Far more richer, smoother and livelier than most, with Tubey Magic and space you won’t believe
  • The Decca UK vinyl on this superb pressing is as QUIET as we ever expect to find for this album
  • 5 stars: “Bluesbreakers was Eric Clapton’s first fully realized album as a blues guitarist — more than that, it was a seminal blues album of the 1960s, perhaps the best British blues album ever cut, and the best LP ever recorded by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.”
  • Want to find your own shootout winner? Scroll to the bottom to see our advice on doing just that.

This copy is guaranteed to be superior to virtually all imports, all domestic pressings, whatever crappy Heavy Vinyl they’re making these days — in short, any version of this music on any format that you’ve ever played. This is it folks. They cut this one right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to know it. Blues Breakers finally sounds the way you always wanted it to sound.

We’ve been searching for copies of Bluesbreakers for years — everyone wants a great copy of this Five Star Classic, the only album John Mayall ever made that we would consider a Must Own. After many, many years of experimentation and dozens of copies purchased we’ve finally discovered the British pressings that deliver the best sound we’ve ever heard for this music.

But they don’t come easy and they sure don’t come cheap, so don’t expect the floodgates to open with White Hot Stamper after White Hot Stamper hitting the site. One was it and it will be a year or two at the very least before we have a big enough stack of copies with which to do a shootout fo find another.

Until then this is a great copy that belongs in your collection, and it’s QUIET. (more…)

Eric Clapton / At His Best – But Is It Really?

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

More Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Eric Clapton

Sonic Grade: D

This pressing, along with the rest of the series, was mastered by Robert Ludwig. The sound may be as rich and full as we described it years ago, but the tapes RL had to work with were dubs, so the sound is not up to audiophile standards, not ours anyway.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good record, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much more inexcusable.

Eric Clapton – Money and Cigarettes

More Eric Clapton

  • Money and Cigarettes makes its Hot Stamper debut here with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • A superb pressing, with lovely richness and warmth, good space, separation between the instruments, and real immediacy throughout
  • “Eric Clapton’s first album for Warner Bros. is an unexpected show of renewed strength after a debilitating illness and too many sleepy records… the simple, unaffected blues power at work here is surprising and refreshing.”

The one real flaw in the recording is the amount of compression the engineer used — it’s a bit heavy-handed. This is after all a radio-friendly pop album, so no surprise there.  (more…)

Wheels of Fire and its Glaring Lack of Bass

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

It’s EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to find even decent sounding copies of this album. We’ve played SCORES of original domestic copies, original imports, and all kinds of reissues — trust me, most of them would make you cringe.

When you get a good copy, this music is AWESOME! For ’60s power trio hard rock, you just can’t do much better than the studio material.

White Room, Sitting On Top Of The World, Politician, Born Under A Bad Sign — this is the very essence of Classic Blues Rock. Unfortunately, the typical copy barely hints at the potential of this recording, and the audiophile pressings are even worse.

The DCC Gold CDs are especially bad in our opinion; they sound nothing like the good pressings we’ve played over the years.

Where’s The Bass?

Most early pressings you find these days are thrashed beyond belief. We used to pick up every clean Plum & Gold label copy we’d find back in he day, but no more. We gave up. The Cream magic was just plain missing from the early domestic pressings. The problem is simple: a glaring lack of bass.

Let’s think about that. Cream is a power trio. The music absolutely demands a solid, weighty bottom end. Sacrifice the bass and the sound is just too lean to rock.

We can sum up the sound of the whomp-less copies in a word: fatiguing. As is always the case, some copies sound better than others, but none could give us the kind of bass that we were hoping for. (more…)

Fresh Cream – A DCC Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be all any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash needs to know.

Compressed, thick, dull, opaque, and almost completely lacking in ambience, this record has all the hallmarks of the Modern Heavy Vinyl Reissue.

Whether made by DCC or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, many remastered audiophile pressings started to have a tonal shortcoming that we found insufferable from day one: they are just too damn smooth.

Almost any domestic or British original pressing of Fresh Cream will be better in almost every way. Read our Hot Stamper review below for the full story. 

UPDATE

[This is an old review. We buy very few domestic pressings of Fresh Cream. They are often noisy, and they don’t sound remotely as good as the right British imports, including some late reissues. But anything beats the DCC LP.

It is, in our experience, the worst version ever.

Our Hot Stamper Commentary from 2008

AN EXCEPTIONAL SIDE ONE BACKED WITH GREAT SIDE ONE, both on surprisingly quiet vinyl! We just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ debut album and were delighted to hear how good this music can sound on the right pressing. This copy has the kind of bottom end that this music absolutely demands but is sadly missing in action from most of the pressings we played. If your Cream record can’t rock, remind me, what exactly is the point again? (more…)

Eric Clapton – Behind The Sun

  • Clapton’s 1985 release returns to the site with Nearly Triple Plus (A+++) sound – exceptionally quiet vinyl too 
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • “The level of musicianship is impressive. Additional percussion by Phil Collins and Ray Cooper help to make this one of Clapton’s most rhythmically adventurous projects to date… I recommend it to both casual and serious fans. You cannot go wrong with an album featuring such strong tracks as “She’s Waiting, “See What Love Can Do”, “Same Old Blues”, “Forever Man”, and “Just Like A Prisoner”.”

(more…)