Joni Mitchell
1968 Song to a Seagull
1969 Clouds
1970 Ladies of the Canyon
1971 Blue – Top 100, TAS List
1972 For the Roses – Some of her best sound
1974 Court and Spark – Top 100, TAS List, her best sounding recording
Top Artists – Joni Mitchell
Turntable Testing Using Court and Spark and a Yellow Pad
Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark
Hot Stamper Pressings of Court and Spark Available Now
There are loud vocal choruses on many tracks, and more often than not at their loudest they sound like they are either breaking up or threatening to do so. I always assumed it was compressor or board overload, which is easily heard on Down to You. On the best copies there is no breakup — the voices get loud and stay clean throughout.
This assumes that your equipment is up to the job. The loudest choruses are a tough test for any system.
Setup Advice
If you have one of our hottest Hot Stampers, try adjusting your setup – VTA, Tracking Weight, Azimuth, Anti-Skate (especially! Audiophiles often overlook this one, at their peril) — and note how cleanly the loudest passages play using various combinations of settings.
Keep a yellow pad handy and write everything down step by step as you make your changes, along with what differences you hear in the sound.
You will learn more about sound from this exercise than you can from practically any other. Even shootouts won’t teach you what you can learn from variations in your table setup.
And once you have your setup dialed in better, you will find that your shootouts go a lot smoother than they used to. (more…)
Joni Mitchell – Court and Spark
Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark
Hot Stamper Pressings of Court and Spark Available Now
- An outstanding copy of Court and Spark with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout
- The sound is rich, warm and natural, with wonderful transparency, ambience and loads of Tubey Magic
- Musically this is one of our favorite Joni albums here at Better Records, and probably her Best Recording as well
- Court and Spark recently joined Blue on our Top 100 Rock and Pop List for 2019 – yes, it’s that good sounding when it’s mastered and pressed as well as this copy is
- 5 stars: “[A] remarkably deft fusion of folk, pop, and jazz … the music is smart, smooth, and assured from the first note to the last.”
Court and Spark deserves to be heard with all the naturalness, clarity, beauty and power that our Hot Stamper pressings reproduce so well.
What you hear is the sound of the real tape; every instrument has its own character because the mastering is correct and the vinyl — against all odds — managed to capture all (or almost all; who can know?) of the resolution that the tape had to offer. (more…)
Joni Mitchell – Ladies Of The Canyon
More Joni Mitchell
More Singer-Songwriter Albums
- This outstanding pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
- Ladies of The Canyon is a very strong album for Joni, with some of her most well known, seemingly timeless songs: Morning Morgantown, For Free, Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock, The Circle Game and more
- We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, 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
- 4 1/2 stars: “Yet another essential listen in Mitchell’s recorded canon.”
Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns
More Joni Mitchell
More Jazz Rock Fusion
- Joni’s superb 1975 release finally returns with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from top to bottom
- Lots of Tubey Magic, textured synths, big bass and breathy vocals – this copy brings Joni’s jazzy folky fusion to life
- Check out the big bottom end on The Jungle Line, which features the Drummers Of Burundi
- Who made a more original, forward looking and interesting album in 1975 than this? I can’t think of anyone, can you?
- 4 1/2 stars: “Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records [as difficult as it is brilliant] … a strange and beautiful fusion of jazz and shimmering avant pop.”
Both sides here are airy, open, and spacious, with plenty of ambience. The bottom end is tight and punchy throughout with good solid weight, and the top end is silky sweet. Many copies of this album have a phony hi-fi “glare” that made us wince, but the sound here is warm and natural.
After hearing a few copies that bored us to tears years ago we had pretty much given up on finding good sound for this album, but once we found some truly hot Hot Stampers we found ourselves really enjoying this sophisticated Jazzy Folk Pop music. (more…)
Joni Mitchell – Blue
Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Available Now
More Joni Mitchell
Reviews and Commentaries for Blue
- Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it throughout for arguably Joni’s greatest album
- Full-bodied and balanced with the kind of smooth musicality that’s not always easy to find for Blue
- A Better Records Top 100 title that belongs in any audiophile music collection worthy of the name
- 5 stars: “Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell’s songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity…”
This vintage Reprise pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern pressings cannot BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back. (For proof just check out the mediocre Blue Steve Hoffman mastered for Rhino on Heavy Vinyl. (more…)
Joni Mitchell – Clouds
More Joni Mitchell
More Singer-Songwriter Albums
- Triple Triple! A stunning copy with Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish- this is As Good As It Gets, folks!
- Check out the clear transients on Joni’s guitar — you can really hear her moving her hands around the fretboard and pulling on the strings
- It’s tough to find this album in clean shape with this kind of warm, natural sound (something the new reissue is no doubt profoundly lacking)
- 4 1/2 stars: “Clouds is a stark stunner, a great leap forward for Joni Mitchell. Vocals here are more forthright and assured than on her debut and exhibit a remarkable level of subtle expressiveness. Guitar alone is used in accompaniment, and the variety of playing approaches and sounds gotten here is most impressive.”
Everything you could ask for from this album is here on this copy: stunning clarity and transparency, breathy vocals, richness, sweetness, warmth, and tons of ambience.
Check out the clear transients on the acoustic guitar — you can really hear her moving her hands around the fretboard and pulling on the strings. The immediacy is mindblowing — Joni and her guitar are right there in the room with you, without being forced into your lap.
The best sounding copies of Clouds are the ones that put Joni and her guitar right there in your living room. The copies with veiled vocals really don’t allow the music to come to life, and the copies where her voice is too forward come across as unnatural and hi-fi-ish. It takes an exceptional copy to strike the right balance and put both the voice and guitar right between your speakers, not under a blanket or in your lap.
The intimacy of the recording is simply breathtaking, but most pressings can’t begin to do it justice. This is especially true of the reissues, which tend to be thin, edgy and sorely lacking in Tubey Magic. You have not begun to hear these songs with this kind of realism and power unless, like us, you’ve cleaned and played plenty of copies and lucked into a truly killer Hot Stamper. (more…)
The Definitive Vinyl Version? – Perhaps There Is a Third Way
More Joni Mitchell
Reviews and Commentaries for Blue
The letter you see reproduced down below got me to thinking.
If I had to choose one record that separates the men from the boys, the stereos that really work from the phony, lifeless audiophile systems you might read about in the magazines or hear at an audio show, Blue would make a darn good choice.
The problem there is that you have to be one serious record collector to have a great copy of Blue. But good pressings are out there, if you can clean and play them properly. This is why we created the Blue Game. It can be done, and we can help you get there, but most of the work has to be done by you.
Naturally we are happy to do the shootouts for you and charge you the pretty penny the winners command, but for those of you who want to find out what’s wrong with the new Blue and don’t want to buy a Hot Stamper from us, there is a third way: Blue, The Game.
Jackson Browne – For Everyman
More Jackson Browne
More Singer-Songwriter Albums
- A KILLER copy of JB’s sophomore effort with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it on both sides
- David Lindley joins the band, and talented helpers include Bonnie Raitt, Glen Frey, David Crosby, Elton John and Joni Mitchell
- “His work is a unique fusion of West Coast casualness and East Coast paranoia, easygoing slang and painstaking precision, child’s-eye romanticizing and adult’s-eye acceptance… Brilliantly conceived, incomparably immediate, For Everyman truly earns its title.” – Rolling Stone
The average copy of this record is MUD, but this pressing will show you that the master tape of For Everyman is a whole lot better than most music lovers and audiophiles might suspect. (The first album is the same way.)
Want a quick test for transparency? Listen to the piano on I Thought I Was a Child. On most copies you can’t really hear the attack of the hammers hitting the strings, but here you can. If the tonal balance is correct — and it is on this copy — then you know you are getting a pressing of very high quality.
Note that the first track on side one almost never sounds as good as those that follow. (more…)
Joni Mitchell – Wild Things Run Fast – Our Shootout Winner from 2013
More Joni Mitchell
A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock and Pop Hall of Fame.
One of our favorite Joni Mitchell albums. A Desert Island disc for me & one of the few good reasons to listen to new music in the ’80s.
My personal Must Own Joni Mitchell list includes: The First Album (side one only), Blue, Court & Spark and Wild Things Run Fast.
WTRF is a TAS list Super Disc with many good qualities, but you’d never know it from the typical lean, bass-shy pressing. Since this record can be a little cold sounding — it’s a modern recording after all — filling it out and warming it up a little is just what the doctor ordered. Our Hot Stamper pressings are usually rich and full-bodied with lovely warmth and presence. (more…)