Top Artists – Paul Simon (with or without) Garfunkel

Paul Simon – Graceland

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Hot Stamper Pressings of Graceland Available Now


  • With two outstanding Double Plus (A++) sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Richer and smoother, two important qualities all the best pressings must have, yet still clear and resolving – this is the sound you want for Graceland
  • Guaranteed to trounce the well-reviewed but nevertheless awful Heavy Vinyl LP in every way, or your money back and the shipping is on us
  • There’s a delicate, extended top end on this pressing that simply does not exist on the new reissue
  • 5 stars: “An enormously successful record, Graceland became the standard against which subsequent musical experiments by major artists were measured.”

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Simon & Garfunkel – Stick to the 360s for the Best Sound

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

More superb sound from the legendary CBS 30th street studios in New York!

This album checks off some big boxes for us here at Better Records.

Turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and you’ll have one of the best — if not THE best — folk duos of all time performing right there in your listening room for you. The sound is open, spacious, and transparent with breathy vocals and unusually low levels of spit. The strings are more dynamic than we’re used to hearing and the bottom end has really nice weight to it.

These old Simon & Garfunkel records weren’t often owned by audiophiles who kept their records in pristine condition. 

No, these were the popular records of their day, purchased by the record-buying public, and they were played and played hard, typically on cheap equipment. There are many quiet passages on this album that are going to reveal whatever surface issues might exist, so a copy that plays Mint Minus Minus is about as good as you can hope for.

Since only the right vintage 360 pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell.

Audio in the 70s

In my formative years in the hobby, most of the audiophiles I ran into were primarily classical guys. Some played jazz and vocal records, but nobody really put much time and money into their stereo so they could hear radio-friendly pop songs reproduced in higher fidelity.

That was my experience when I first got into audio in the early 70s. It was taken for granted that good equipment existed to play orchestral music, jazz, vocals and not much else.

We Can Help

Below you will find some moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.

Stick to stereo. The mono pressings we’ve played over the last ten years ranged from passable to awful. We stopped buying them a long time ago. We know of no Simon and Garfunkel albums that sound better in mono than they do in stereo.

As of 2023, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme sounds best to us this way:

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Letter of the Week – “whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

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

Hey Tom, 

That latest S&G album — BOTW — is absofuckinglutely blowing my mind tonight. Wow. Those deep horns (?) blasting at times (end of Keep the Customer Satisfied, chorus of Why Don’t You Write Me, end of The Boxer… whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound. Hard to sit down!!

Dear C.

The power of those horns is exactly what I was telling you about –  they cannot be reproduced properly until you have speakers with dynamic drivers large enough to play the full weight of the brass.

TP

We discuss the idea of Big Speakers in this boilerplate commentary all over the site:

Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Further Reading

Listening in Depth to Bookends

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bookends

Musically side two is one of the strongest in the entire Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre (if you’ll pardon my French). Each of the five songs could hold its own as a potential hit on the radio, and there is no filler to be found anywhere. How many albums from 1968 can make that claim?

The estimable Roy Halee handled the engineering duties. Not the most ‘natural” sounding record he ever made — the processing is heavy handed on a number of tracks — but that’s clearly not what neither he nor the duo were going for.

If you want natural, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme has what you are looking for. That said, as of 2022 both are Top 100 Titles.

The three of them would obviously take their sound much farther in that direction with the Grammy winning Bridge Over Troubled Water from 1970.

The bigger production songs on this album have a tendency to get congested on even the best pressings, which is not uncommon for four track recordings from the 60s. Those of you with properly set up high-dollar front ends should have less of a problem than some. $3000 cartridges can usually deal with this kind of complex information better than $300 ones.

But not always. Expensive does not always mean better, since painstaking and exacting setup is so essential to proper playback.

The Wrecking Crew provided top quality backup, with Hal Blaine on drums and percussion, Joe Osborn on bass and Larry Knechtel on piano and keyboards.

Side One

Bookends Theme
Save the Life of My Child

I used to think this track would never sound good enough to use as an evaluation track. It’s a huge production that I’d found practically impossible to get to sound right on even the best original copies of the album. Even as recently as ten years ago I had basically given up trying.

Thankfully things have changed. Nowadays, with great copies at our disposal and a system that is really cooking, virtually all of the harmonic distortion in the big chorus near the opening disappears. It takes a very special pressing and a very special stereo to play this song.

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Simon & Garfunkel / Bookends

More Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bookends

  • Our hottest copies have lovely midrange magic on the guitars and voices as well as plenty of studio ambience on most tracks, especially the simpler, more folky ones
  • An album that has become much tougher to come by, especially copies that play as well as this one does
  • Top 100, 5 stars – side two alone has four all time classics: Fakin’ It, Mrs. Robinson, A Hazy Shade of Winter and At the Zoo
  • If you’re a fan of this phenomenal folk duo, this early domestic pressing of their 1968 classic belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1968 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The best copies of Bookends and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme are a sonic step up in class from anything else these two guys ever released. If you’re looking for the Ultimate Audiophile Simon & Garfunkel record, you just can’t do better than a killer Hot Stamper pressing of either title.

This album has exceptional bass as well as lovely midrange magic on the guitars and voices. There’s plenty of studio ambience on most tracks, especially the simpler, more folky ones.

Do you know how hard it is to find a clean copy of this record? I’ll bet we look at 50 every year and probably buy no more than a few, which, after cleaning and going into a shootout may or may not sound good or have audiophile quality surfaces. (more…)

Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

More Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

  • This pressing of Simon & Garfunkel’s classic boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a seriously good Double Plus (A++) side two
  • There’s a reason you see this title on our site so infrequently – we have a devil of a time finding lightly-played 360s without significant marks or surface noise, especially on the title track
  • The sound is big, lively, and clear, with the kind of Tubey Magical richness that only the best 360 pressings can offer
  • Surely this is by far the toughest album of theirs to find with top quality sound and decent surfaces
  • This Magnum Opus ended the duo’s collaboration with a ginormous over-the-top production, which taxed the recording technology of the day and is sure to tax any system that attempts to reproduce it
  • 5 stars: “Perhaps the most delicately textured album to close out the 1960s from any major rock act… the songs matched the standard of craftsmanship that had been established on the duo’s two prior albums”
  • We’ve auditioned many pressings of BOTW, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS Half-Speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999. There have been many more remastered since these came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days of other titles, so we haven’t auditioned any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time. If any of the labels currently making records start to make good ones, please let us know.

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Listening in Depth to Sounds of Silence

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Paul Simon (and Art Garfunkel)

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Sounds of Silence. Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

Sounds of Silence is made from a second generation tape, as we explain below. Since we listen to all the records we sell, we like to point out such things so our customers know what they are getting.

This album is the proverbial tough nut to crack, a mix of folkie tracks and ambitious big production numbers, all recorded on a four track machine and bounced down maybe just a few too many times along the way. Some got handed a troublesome case of Top 40 EQ — hey, this is 1965, it’s the way they thought pop records should sound.

But many of the best tracks survived just fine. They can sound wonderful, it’s just that they rarely do. This is precisely where we come into the picture.

The key to good sounding pressings of this record is to look for the ones with a top end. Now of course you can’t see the top end when you buy the record. But most of the copies of this album you pick up are going to sound like cassettes. There won’t be much over 8K, and that means hard, harsh, transistor radio sound. You need extended highs to balance out the upper midrange.

Although the rock tracks certainly come to life and really do sound good on the hottest of the hot copies, the folkie tracks are the real reason to buy these early pressings. They have the Tubey Magic that’s missing from virtually any reissue or digital format version.

Best and Worst Tracks

For the best sounding tracks try Leaves That Are Green on side one, and April Come She Will on side two. 

Keep in mind that the big hit ”Sounds of Silence” will never sound much better than it does in the car. It’s basically the track from their previous album with rock instrumentation added, meaning an electric guitar, a second generation of tape and some extra distortion for good measure.

But on a superb copy, that track can still be surprisingly enjoyable. Not Demo Disc quality, just enjoyable.

Below you will find our moderately helpful advice for finding the best sounding pressings of Sounds of Silence.

In our experience the album sounds best this way:

Which simply means that the 360 label domestic stereo pressings win our shootouts, in this case without exception.

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Simon and Garfunkel – Sounds of Silence

More Simon and Garfunkel

More Folk Rock

  • Boasting two excellent Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this vintage 360 Stereo pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on S&G’s sophomore release
  • Forget that critical listening stuff and just notice that these hot copies are simply more relaxed, musical and involving
  • Although the rock tracks come to life and really do sound good, the Tubey Magical folkie tracks are the real reason to play the album
  • “A work of finely expressed folk. It’s arguably the duo’s big breakout, a crossover success with some handsome hits.” — COS

The sound is big, open, rich and full, with the performers front and center. This 360 Stereo pressing also has the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s no doubt missing from whatever 180g reissue has been made from the 50+ year old tapes. As good as that pressing may be, we guarantee that this one is dramatically more REAL SOUNDING. It gives you the sense that Simon and Garfunkel are right in the room with you. (more…)

Paul Simon – What to Think When the New Version Is Completely Unrecognizable?

More of the Music of Paul Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for Graceland

Sonic Grade: F

Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd come from?

Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version (maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened).

Can that possibly be a good thing?

Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.

On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.

We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.

Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.

The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.

Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!

Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.

But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.

VTA

You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.

The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.

You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?

The Bright Side

Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.

The CD already exists. It has a sound.

The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.

Or, dissatisfied with the sound of the original records and CDs above, and not in the market to spend hundreds of dollars on a good copy from us, you could look at the new Heavy Vinyl pressing as another option, a different take, a new approach, something along those lines.

Just don’t think that by doing so you’re going to hear Graceland the way Paul Simon, Roy Halee, or the folks at Sterling wanted you to hear it.

They produced millions of copies that mostly sound one way, and now some fellows — at least one of whom was involved with the new project, to be fair, but it was 40 years ago(!), and it’s fair to point that out too, right? — some new fellows have produced a few thousand copies that sound another way.

It’s clear to us who got it right, but based on what I’ve been reading in preparation for writing this commentary, the audiophile reviewers and at least some of the audiophile public at large see it quite differently.

Our Offer [no longer valid, sorry]

We are more than happy to let you decide the issue for yourself. Rather than throwing up our hands and saying “we give up,” we actually would like to help you make an informed decision.

To that end we will happily send you our copy of the Heavy Vinyl version along with your purchase of any Hot Stamper of Graceland on the site. Play them head to head and let the chips fall where they may.

The only thing we ask is that you return it to us so the next person who wants to compare the two can do so. (Assuming you like the Hot Stamper better of course. If you don’t, send them both back for a full refund, including the domestic shipping. No, really, we insist.)

Our latest preoccupation here on the blog is to point out as often as we can that the Modern Heavy Vinyl remastered pressing is often just too damn smooth.

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

Other consistent problems found on the Modern Heavy Vinyl Reissue, in addition to being too smooth, are shortcomings that rob the music of its life and energy. Thick, opaque, and lacking in ambience, this is what we hear on record after record pressed on Heavy Vinyl.

It may be someone’s idea of “analog,” but it’s definitely not ours.

The remastered box sets of The Beatles (see: Pepper, Sgt.., etc.) are the poster boys for making records sound more “analog” by boosting the bass and smoothing the treble, like your old ’70s system used to do. (Those of you who were in the hobby back then know exactly the sound I am talking about. For those who would like to know more, we wrote this overview.)

The Beatles records that we sell as Hot Stampers have nothing in common with that absurdly artificial approach. Mid-Fi systems may benefit from more bass and less top end, but Hi-Fi systems worthy of the name will not, hence our distaste for this kind of EQ overreach.

More example of overly smooth modern records can be found here. More will be added as time permits.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “I have heard this music a zillion times but it never ever once sounded like this.”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I just listened to Bridge over Troubled Water that arrived while I was on my trip to India. It was really spectacular. I have heard this music a zillion times over the last 40 years but it never ever once sounded like this. Amazing. I have to get Bookends and PSRT also. 

John R.

John,

We love it when customers tell us that our Hot Stamper pressings are a revelation. At these prices they’d better be!

This album has been remastered many times, but as far as we know you just cannot beat the right 360 label pressings, which is why those are the only ones we sell.

We’ve auditioned many pressings of BOTW, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS half-speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999.

There have been many more remastered since those three came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days, so we haven’t bothered to audition any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time.

If any of the labels currently making records start to make some that sound as good as the ones we sell, please let us know.

[UPDATE: Can you believe, after all these years, we actually found one ourselves! You could have knocked me over with a feather. One of these days we may tell you the name of the record, but for now we are keeping it a secret.]

Thanks for your letter.

TP

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