Top Artists – Kansas

Kansas – Point of Know Return

More of the Music of Kansas

  • An original Kirshner pressing that is doing practically everything right, with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides
  • Big and solid guitars and keyboards, with great bass, full vocals, and plenty of Tubey Magic – this the way to hear the band
  • Most copies are just too thin and bright to be any good for seriously listening at serious levels, but the best of the best manage to stay smooth enough and tonally correct enough to allow an extra click or two of volume, which of course results in a much more powerful audio experience
  • 4 stars: “This is the definitive Kansas recording. . . their interplay and superior musicianship make this both an essential classic rock and progressive rock recording.”

Drop the needle on Dust in the Wind — here the guitars and vocals are full-bodied and natural, qualities unfortunately in short supply on the typical pressing. (more…)

Kansas – Leftoverture

More of the Music of Kansas

  • An early Kirshner pressing that was doing everything right, with both sides earning INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The best copy from our recent shootout – the sound is big, full and lively with real Prog Rock energy and a huge punchy bottom end
  • Kansas’s most consistent and engaging album, their true Masterpiece by our lights – a copy as good as this will show you the awesome energy the band brought to their music
  • “Undoubtedly their finest album, Leftoverture warrants Kansas a spot right alongside Boston and Styx as one of the fresh new American bands who combine hard-driving group instrumentation with short, tight melody lines…” – Rolling Stone
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for this album.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

On the hottest of our Hot Stampers the recording is a glorious example of the Big Rock Sound we love here at Better Records. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling barely begins to do it justice. Like so many of the great rock recordings we offer, when you play one of our Hot Stampers, the sound commands your attention.

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Leftoverture – “…a certain ‘squawky, pinched’ sound to the guitars…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Arty Rock Albums Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity.

This copy of Kansas’ most consistent album, their masterpiece I might venture to say, has an OFF THE CHARTS A+++ side two! This copy shows you the ROCK album they actually recorded. The average copy of Leftoverture only hints at the power of the band.

Side two just KILLED from start to finish, with the deepest, punchiest bass, moving up the frequency ladder to the clearest sweetest mids, and following it all the way to the top with the most extended grain-free, silky highs.

Most copies, like so many rock records from the era, are veiled and smeary. Often they lack extension at one or both ends of the frequency spectrum, more often than not up top, which results in harshness and shrillness, not the sound you want on a Kansas record.

But copies such as this one show you the kind of sound that is possible with Leftoverture. It is, in a word, SMEAR-FREE, with superb transients, textures and clarity that are the natural result of getting every last bit of musical information into the grooves.

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Point of Know Return – CBS Half-Speed Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Proggy Rock Albums Available Now

Both this album and Leftoverture are way too bright and thin.

What were the engineers thinking — that brighter equals better?

In the case of these two titles it most definitely does not. It’s the sound that most audiophiles are fooled by to this day.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many half-speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lessons by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons usually turn out to be. 

Waking Up a Dull Stereo

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way older systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in no time.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an old school system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We discussed the issue in this commentary:

My advice is to get better equipment and that will allow you to do a better job of recognizing bad records when you play them.

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Kansas – Masque

More Kansas

More Prog Rock

  • The band’s 3rd studio album finally makes its Hot Stamper debut here with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too  
  • 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
  • Features some of the band’s best rock epics, including “Icarus-Borne on Wings of Steel” and “Mysteries and Mayhem”
  • “Musically, Masque foreshadows the tight melodies and instrumental interplay on the next two albums, Leftoverture and Point of Know Return, which together serve as the peak of Kansas’ vision.”

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Leftoverture – CBS Half-Speed Debunked

More of the Music of Kansas

Sonic Grade: F

Way too bright and thin. What were they thinking?

It’s the sound that most audiophiles are fooled by to this day! Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many half-speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did. Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson, expensive and painful as it may have been. 

If your speakers are dull, dull, deadly dull, the way Old School speakers tend to be, this record has the juice to bring them to life in a hurry.

Unmusicality

The best real-time mastered copies get rid of a problem that quickly becomes irritating as you play track after track: a certain “squawky, pinched” sound to the guitars. Bad copies of the album have that sound through and through, along with excessive amounts of grain and grunge. The guitars are very prominent in the mix on practically every song here, so when the guitars sound sour, the track as a whole does too.

These mastering and pressing problems make the overall sound simply UNMUSICAL. The way we found that out was simple. We cleaned and played lots of copies, and every once in a while we heard one that allowed the music to breathe, open up, sound balanced, make sense even.

Those copies showed us a Leftoverture we didn’t know existed and gave us a goal to shoot for with all the other copies we played. After hearing such a truly killer copy we often go back and downgrade the ratings for the copies we thought were the best. Such is the way with these shootouts. (more…)

Reverse Your Polarity, My Wayward Son

kansalefto

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with Reversed Polarity.

About eight years ago (time flies!) we discovered that the first track on side one is in the wrong polarity, or out of absolute phase, whichever terminology you prefer (we ourselves use both). The full story can be found below.

Here’s what we wrote:

But last night (07/13/06) we made an AMAZING discovery. I was listening to another Sterling original, and the slightly aggressive, hi-fi-ish quality of the opening vocals made me think that maybe I had been putting up with a problem that I should have investigated further. What really sold me on the idea was listening to the vocals and noticing that the ambience was “disconnected” from the voices. It’s hard to explain exactly what that sound is, but it’s almost as if the ambience is added in on top of the voice instead of surrounding and resulting from the voice. I suspected reversed absolute phase.
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