Top Artists – Fleetwood Mac

Letter of the Week – “I was actually bouncing up and down in my listening chair like a complete idiot.”

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Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Fleetwood Mac

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

Hey Tom, 

I just wanted to say THANK YOU (!!!!!) a billion times over, for bringing me the most musical pleasure I’ve had in recent memory. I just spun the copy of “Barboletta” you guys sold me, and it’s so jaw-droppingly SPECTACULAR I was actually (literally) weeping (or at least, eyes welling up). SO many micro-details I had NEVER heard before – little tonal shifts in the guitar, ride patterns in the background I’d never been able to previously discern, etc. On “Mirage” I was actually bouncing up and down in my listening chair like a complete idiot – I simply could not resist the incredible groove!!!

I mean, we’re talking MASTER TAPE here. I don’t know how you guys do it – but thank the gods you do!!!!

I can only afford to buy a few LPs from you every couple of years, but I hope ya’ll know that your hard work and labor is SO appreciated by your loyal customers – because you’re opening new musical vistas up to us, through hearing beloved albums the way they were MEANT to be heard.

Steve M.

 

Beware The Green Manalishi with the Two Prong Crown

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many years ago, more than 20 in fact!, a copy of this record was returned by one of my customers for poor sound quality, so I threw it back on the turntable to see if I had been mistaken in my judgement of its sound.

I confess that hearing the first track again, The Green Manalishi, was painful — it’s the worst sounding song on the album.

But then Oh Well starts up, and it’s full of midrange magic, ambience and exceptional transparency.

The sound varies from track to track after that, but if your stereo can’t find the magic on records like this, you seriously need to look into some better equipment.

This record sounds amazing on our system and it ought to at your house too.

The real test for a stereo is to get difficult to reproduce recordings to sound good, not easy to reproduce recordings.

If you want to test your system after doing some tweaking and tuning, these are the kinds of difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.

When these records start sounding better, there’s a good chance that whatever you did to your system to improve it actually worked.

And if you’re up for a challenge and want to buy some records that can sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.

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Listening in Depth to Rumours

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

This is a rock album — it needs to be played LOUD and it needs to be played on a DYNAMIC system.

Case in point: consider how quietly The Chain starts out, and how loud it is by the end. Those kinds of macro-dynamics are very rare on a pop recording. Rumours has the kind of dynamics you just don’t hear anymore, which is why the killer copies are a such a THRILL to play on a big dynamic system fitted with a top-notch turntable.

The best copies exhibited the kind of presence, bass, dynamics and energy found only on the kind of Super Demo Discs we rave about here endlessly: the BS&Ts, Stardusts, Zumas and the like. When you get a good copy of this record, it is a Demo Disc.

Who knew? Who even suspected? Who raves about Rumours but us? Let’s fact it, the audiophile world has no clue how good this record can sound.

Quick Listening Test — Dreams

What do the best copies have that the also-rans don’t? Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you may want to pay special attention to: the sound of the snare. When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to the sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the stuff we ADORE about the sound of the best copies of Rumours.

Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare on Dreams. That’s probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to the entire Rumours album, as well as anything by The Beatles, and Neil Young’s Zuma, and lots of our other favorite records, and we expect favorites of yours too.

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Letter of the Week – “Your discovery is easily the most amazing thing of all the amazing things this audiophile has come across in 30 years of amazing things.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

Friend over recently, played Fleetwood Mac Rumours, 45RPM. He says that’s gonna be awful hard to beat. “With one arm tied behind my back! Watch this!”

Wow, that was more open….!

Your discovery is easily the most amazing thing of all the amazing things this audiophile has come across in 30 years of amazing things.

Keep at it, no one else can, we are counting on you.

Hi,

Thanks for the kind words.

Finding a pressing with amazing sound is our top goal in every shootout we do. It is not hard to beat the 45 RPM 2 disc set that Steve Hoffman mastered. This story has many similarities to the one you recount in your letter.

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Heavy Vinyl Quality Control? We Put That Proposition to the Test

bellcurve500

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

Part one of this commentary concerns the random results of all record making processes. It can be found here.

A Heavy Vinyl Shootout

A number of years ago (2011?) we had the opportunity to crack open two brand new sealed copies of a recently remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing came our way. I already had one which I was waiting to audition, so that meant there were actually three copies to play.

At the time, we were told that with this pressing every effort was made to produce the highest quality product and to maintain the utmost in quality control throughout the production process. They fellow representing the company distributing the title was adamant that every copy produced, from first to last, would be indistiguishable from any other — not just in terms of surfaces, but sound quality too.

To accomplish this feat, the producer used the real master tapes (we were told, no reason to doubt him), had a well known mastering engineer do the mastering at a highly-regarded studio, then had a well-known audiophile pressing plant in Germany make the record, using the finest vinyl compounds available, in presses that meet the highest standards in the industry, operated by skilled individuals of the utmost professionalism.

Any stamper would be replaced long before it could possibly be showing any wear.

All the metal mothers and stampers would be made in a way designed to eliminate all variation.

One and only one complete run would be made. If another was needed at some later date the whole process would have to be started over from scratch using the same strict quality controls.

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Fleetwood Mac – Bare Trees

More Fleetwood Mac

Reviews and Commentaries for Fleetwood Mac

  • With two Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a Bare Trees that sounds remotely as good as this vintage UK import
  • It’s the impossibly rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on the title track and you’ll see what we mean
  • Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two superb sides such as these
  • “Arguably the first consistently strong album Fleetwood Mac ever recorded [not true, Kiln House is] … 1972’s Bare Trees is also the album where the band finally defines its post-blues musical personality.”

This period of Fleetwood Mac, from Kiln House (1970) through Mystery to Me (1973) — both are albums I would put at the top of my list to take to my Desert Island — has always been my favorite of the band. I grew up on this stuff, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is a positive THRILL to hear the albums from this era sound so good.

Until not that many years ago we simply were not able to successfully shootout Bare Trees, Fleetwood Mac’s wonderful album from 1972. The pressings we were playing just didn’t sound very much like Hot Stampers to us. British, German, Japanese, domestic originals, domestic reissues; all of them left much too much to be desired.

Thankfully we can tell you that the best copies sound a whole lot better now than they did then. (more…)

Listening in Depth to Bare Trees

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Bare Trees.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

Side One

Child of Mine

A real rocker from Danny Kirwan. If the electric piano is rich on your copy and you have some top end and space you are probably off to a very good start.

The Ghost
Homeward Bound
Sunny Side of Heaven

A wonderfully poignant, even melancholy instrumental track by Bob Welch. Not sure if that’s him on guitar but the playing is beautiful. The high point of side one.

Side Two

This is where most of the best music on Bare Trees can be found. We like every song on this side.

Bare Trees

If this song doesn’t get your blood pumping, you need to turn up the volume another click or two. There is tremendous energy and joy in this song, and it needs to be played loud to get those feelings across.

Sentimental Lady
Danny’s Chant
Spare Me a Little of Your Love

This is a tough track to get right. The Brit is smoother and sweeter, which works on this song. Bad copies can sound hard on Christine’s vocals as well as the chorus.

Dust

One of my all time favorite Fleetwood Mac songs. On a good copy this track sounds so sweet. The texture to the voices is right on the money — neither grainy nor dull.

Thoughts on a Grey Day (more…)

The Fleetwood Mac You Don’t Know – Future Games

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Danny Kirwan is the guy who really takes control on Future Games, the band’s 1971 release. Some of the best songs this band ever did are here, many of them written by Kirwan.

The opening track on side one, Woman Of A Thousand Years, and the opening track on side two, Sands Of Time, are both his and set the tone for the whole side, which is folky, ethereal and extended. The best of these pop songs don’t seem to follow any of the standard pop conventions of verse verse chorus. They seem to wander on a journey of discovery. In that way they remind me a little bit of 20th century French classical music, or some of the longer tracks from Neil Young’s Zuma.

Any Fleetwood Mac greatest hits collection would be a joke without those tracks. They are of course missing from most of the compilations I am familiar with. Sadly, few people miss them because few people have ever even heard them.

This period Fleetwood Mac, from Kiln House through Mystery to Me (both are records I would take to my Desert Island) has always been my favorite of the band. I grew up on this stuff, and I can tell you from personal experience, having played a dozen (or more, I lose track there are so many) copies of Future Games practically all day at some pretty serious levels that it is a positive THRILL to hear it sound as good as it does on the best pressings.

The Fleetwood Mac You Don’t Know – The Self-Titled First Album & English Rose

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac 

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Fleetwood Mac

You just can’t write better songs than Love That Burns or Black Magic Woman, both of which can be found here. And Albatross, the mellow instrumental that closes out side four, was a Number One hit in the UK in 1969, can you believe it? It was backed on some releases by Need Your Love So Bad, another one of our all time favorite Fleetwood Mac covers. The band was on fire back when Peter Green was at the helm. These two LPs are proof enough.

The material found on this American-only compilation is tough to come by on vinyl; their early albums barely charted in the states and are anything but plentiful. The Peter-Green-led blues band that performed this music was huge in England however, and for me, personally, I would take Fleetwood Mac as a blues band over any other blues band from the period.

Keep in mind that some of these recordings are engineered to sound like old blues songs from the thirties and forties. Don’t expect audiophile sound on those tracks because it’s just not on the master tapes that way.

But it’s easy enough to tell when the material sounds right, and that’s all we are after here — the right sound.

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Buckingham Nicks / Self-Titled

More Lindsey Buckingham

More Stevie Nicks

  • A superb pressing of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ one and only album, with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Rich and Tubey Magical with a massive bottom end – this is a true Bass Demo Disc (much like the first Mac album they sang on)
  • Recording Engineer great Keith Olsen went for a very rich, very smooth sound, in the tradition of Classic British Folk Rock
  • “An engaging listen and served as a proving ground of sorts for both artists’ songwriting chops and for Buckingham’s skills as an emerging studio craftsman. Crisp, ringing acoustic guitars and a bottom-heavy rhythm section framed the pair’s songs…”

We really enjoy playing this album here at Better Records. It’s an obvious preview of things to come for these two (and the engineer too!). Check out the wonderful early version of “Crystal.” On the better copies, it is warm, rich, and sweet — just like it is on the better copies of the Fleetwood Mac self-titled LP. In fact, many parts of this album bring to mind the best of ’70s Fleetwood Mac. Fans of the self-titled LP and Rumours are going to find A LOT to like here.

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