Top Artists – Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd Sounds Terrible on this Japanese “Audiophile” Pressing

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

More Reviews, Letters and Commentaries for The Wall

This Japanese Import is one of the dullest, muddiest, worst sounding copies of The Wall we have ever played. It is clearly made from a second generation tape (or worse!).

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

And somehow this pressing, or one very much like it, ended up as on the TAS Super Disc List. I would hope that the copy Harry played sounded a whole lot better than this one.

And the CBS Half-Speed is every bit as bad!

How is it that the worst sounding pressings are so often marketed to audiophiles as superior to their mass-produced counterparts? In our experience, more often than not they are just plain awful, inferior in every way but one: surface quality.

Dear Audiophiles, stop collecting crappy audiophile pressings with quiet vinyl and just switch to CD already.

Further Reading

Pink Floyd – A Saucerful of Secrets

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Pink Floyd

  • This vintage UK stereo pressing was doing pretty much everything right, with both sides earning seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
  • Forget whatever sleep-inducing Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of these wonderful sessions from 1967 (some with Syd, some with David), this is the only way to go
  • In 2014, Nick Mason named A Saucerful of Secrets as his favorite of Pink Floyd’s studio albums. “I think there are ideas contained there that we have continued to use all the way through our career,” he says. “I think [it] was a quite good way of marking Syd [Barrett]’s departure and Dave [Gilmour]’s arrival. It’s rather nice to have it on one record, where you get both things. It’s a cross-fade rather than a cut.”

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Letter of the Week – “…makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

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

Hey Tom, 

I absolutely love my Hot Stamper of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and of Dark Side of the Moon, and so many others that you have sold to me.

I find myself just playing the same side over and over, never tiring of the music. Which is something I never do with a CD….. no matter with a Reimyo CD player, or CEC TL-1X with Audiologic DAC, or even Acoustic Arts DAC, which actually sounds pretty good, but still fatiguing, and missing the immediacy and soul of a good LP — and in addition to sounding better, there is just something about having an original copy made back when the music was fresh and newly released, putting me back in my college years, and somehow linking up the past to the present.

The music is living there in those grooves, even better now because I can actually hear the music with a decent system. I don’t think many record players back in 1972- 1978 could begin to do these records justice.

Thanks so much for all the great music – makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.

Kurt B.

Kurt, you are welcome!

We love both these albums and we’re in agreement with you that the music is more alive in these grooves than it could ever be in the digits of a CD.

Thanks for your letter.

TP

Reviews and Commentaries for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Reviews and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

What We Think We Know about Pink Floyd’s Amazing Wish You Were Here Album from 1975

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Letters and Commentaries for Wish You Were Here

We have added some moderately helpful title specific advice at the bottom of the listing for those of you want to find your own Hot Stamper pressing.

This is the perfect example of everything we look for in a recording here at Better Records: it’s dynamic, present, transparent, rich, full-bodied, super low-distortion, sweet — good copies of this record have exactly what we need to make us audiophiles forget what our stereos are doing and focus instead on what the musicians are doing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the album, Pink Floyd managed to record one of the most amazing sounding records in the history of rock music. The song Wish You Were Here starts out with radio noise and other sound effects, then suddenly an acoustic guitar appears, floating in the middle of your living room between the speakers, clear as a bell and as real as you have ever heard. It’s obviously an “effect,” but for us audiophiles it’s pure ear candy.   

The Seventies – What a Decade!

Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the ’60s and ’70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Yes and far too many others to list. It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.

Big Production Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn’t get much better than Wish You Were Here.

A Big Speaker Record

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

It demands to be played LOUD. It simply cannot come to life the way the producers, engineers and artists involved intended if you play it at moderate levels.

This is also the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers. You need a lot of piston area to bring the dynamics of 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.) To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Size and Space

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

We often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three dimensional? We sure didn’t, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation.

Think about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded that open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one of two clean British original copies with which to do a shootout? These records are expensive and hard to come by in good shape. Believe us, we know whereof we speak when it comes to getting hold of original pressings of Classic Rock albums.

One further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it’s an entirely different – and dare I say unforgettable — listening experience. (more…)

David Gilmour – About Face

More David Gilmour

More Pink Floyd

  • An outstanding pressing of About Face with Double Plus (A++) sound from the first note to the last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Here you will find sound quality that is both cleaner and clearer, with much less grit and grain – richness is also key to these better copies
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back – it’s a simple as that
  • 4 1/2 stars: “About Face is well-honed rock album that is riveting from beginning to end.”

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Letter of the Week – “I need to catch my breath here.”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin II

One of our good customers had this to say about the Hot Stamper Zep II he purchased recently, and we exchanged quite a few emails about his findings. 

As promised, we had given him a free copy of the Jimmy Page remaster so that he could compare the two, something we have always encouraged our customers to do, especially in this case.

Tom,

I need to catch my breath here. I rushed home to compare the two Zep 2s you sent. I played Whole Lot of Love on the Jimmie Page cut, then on the WH stamper. I was…stunned. Then I  asked my wife to come in to listen. She’s not a Led Zeppelin fan, so I said “Just listen to a minute of each track”. I played a minute of the Jimmie Page, she nodded, shrugged, and said “It sounds good”. Then I played the WH stamper. About 15 seconds in she exclaimed “What the F*CK?!?!”, and smiled. And wanted to hear the rest of the song.

You guys are geniuses to send the Jimmie Page LP with the WH. My friend insists on comparing it to his Classic Records copy, which we’ll do this weekend. I don’t think it will be a fair contest.
Is it worth $2,499? I know many people would say no. The vast majority. So I’m in the minority on this one.

Bill

Bill,

Such great news! It seems that even people who don’t care for Zep can’t resist the power of a hot copy of Zep II!

I will have more to say, and I wanted to let you know that we still want to hear from those who have compared the two pressings. If you feel like it, tell us what you think the differences are.

And the same with your friend and his Classic repress. That record was so bright it practically peeled the paint in my room. I doubt if it has changed much.

But you can tell me!

As we have said time and time again, the number of people that have ever had the privilege of playing a killer copy of Zep II like the one we sent you is small. It’s like owning your own rocket to Mars.

It would be worth $2500 to me too! Double that.

Thanks for your letter,

Best,

TP

Tom,
Before making my first purchase from Better Records, I scoured the internet to learn about you and your company, devoured your blog (which I continue to do), and read the Washington Post article [1] and watched the accompanying video. In the end, it came down to “Well, he sure is enthusiastic, he makes a lot of sense, and it is a money back guarantee, so what do I have to lose?” Turns out I had nothing to lose and much to gain!

To be honest, after comparing the two pressings on Whole Lotta Love and Heartbreaker on side 2, I stopped comparing them. I just wanted to listen to the entirety of the hot stamper pressing. And I did, twice. It’s just an incredible immersive experience. However, when we have our Led Zeppelin “boys night” in a week or so, we’re going to compare all of the tracks, as well as the Classic Records version.

I didn’t describe my wife’s entire reaction. By the end of Whole Lotta Love, she was jumping up and down and singing the lyrics and just having a great time! Quite a reaction from someone whose musical tastes lean more towards Lionel Richie and Johnny Hartman.

Oh, she also preferred the Rumours hot stamper to the 45 rpm. [2] She couldn’t pinpoint why, except to say that with the hot stamper it seemed like they were in the room.

I have enjoyed being the beneficiary of your skill and efforts. And I’ll let you know how the Led Zeppelin shoot-out night goes!
Bill

Bill,

Pay special attention in your shootout to The Lemon Song. I am going to discuss some things I learned about it recently.

See how all your versions do on the song and what you think each version is doing right and wrong.

Enjoy and have fun.

TP

[1] The shootout video can be found here.

[2] A discussion of the 45 RPM remaster oF Rumours can be found here.

New to the Blog? Start Here

Customer Letters for Lez Zeppelin II

Customer Letters for Rumours

Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

The Kinds of Things You Too Can Learn from Experimenting with Records

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Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

More Pink Floyd

More Prog Rock

  • A vintage import pressing of this Pink Floyd classic with excellent Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Demo Disc Quality Floyd Magic – our Hot Stamper pressings are bigger, richer, more dynamic, have better bass, more immediacy, and more of just about everything that makes a Classic Pink Floyd album a listening experience like no other
  • 5 stars on Allmusic, a Top 100 title and one that is tough to find with sound this good and surfaces this (relatively) quiet
  • “Showcasing the group’s interplay and David Gilmour’s solos in particular… the long, winding soundscapes are constantly enthralling.”
  • If you’re a fan of the band, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this classic from 1975 belongs in your collection.
  • On big speakers at loud levels, this is a Demo Disc of the Highest Order

The sound of this very special import pressing is HUGE, open, and spacious like nothing you have ever heard.  It’s also exceptionally transparent, with substantial amounts of depth and three-dimensionality.

There is a huge room around the drums that we guarantee you have never heard sound as big and real as it does on this very record.

Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Here is the size, energy, and presence to bring the music out of the speakers and right into your listening room! (more…)

Pink Floyd – “Breathe” Is a Good Check for Midrange Tonality

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Letters and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

Breathe is my favorite test track for side one for any version of Dark Side Of The Moon, Half-Speed or otherwise. When the voices come in about halfway through the song, you can tell that most copies are too bright simply by listening to the vocals on this track. The cymbals might sound wonderful; lots of other instruments might sound wonderful; and there might be plenty of ambience, detail and transparency.

But all of that counts for nothing if the voices don’t sound right.

And on most copies the voices sound bright, aggressive, grainy and transitory. (This is the case with the 180 gram 30th Anniversary Edition, unfortunately. That pressing will wake up a sleepy stereo, but my stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play that recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.)

The discussion below may shed light on some of the issues involved in the remastering of Dark Side.

Of course, most audiophiles are still under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity, with their strict ‘quality control’, which they spend hundreds of words explaining on their inner sleeves, eliminates pressing variations of these kinds.

Isn’t that the reason for Limited Edition Audiophile Records in the first place? The whole idea is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Copy money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 99% of what we do around here would be a waste of time.

Everybody knows what the audiophile pressings are, and there would be nothing for us to do but find them and throw them up on the website for you to buy. Why even bother to play them if they all sound so good?

Mobile Fidelity

If you’ve spent any time on the site at all you know we are not fans of Mobile Fidelity’s mastering. There are a few potentially excellent MoFis, and certainly Dark Side Of The Moon would be included in that group.

But it’s vitally important to keep in mind that the average copy of DSOTM on MoFi is not at all good. We had a 2-Pack a while back that illustrated that point perfectly — two copies, each with one amazing side and one mediocre side, allowing the buyer to hear for himself the good and the bad side of Dark Side. We wrote:

The person who buys this two LP Package will have the opportunity to hear for himself just how bad most MoFi pressings of Dark Side are. With these two LPs, you are getting an Amazing Side One and an Amazing Side Two – just not on the same piece of vinyl. (The joke here at Better Records is that I should label which side sounds good and which side doesn’t in case the buyer has trouble telling them apart. Since so many audiophiles like so many bad sounding records – don’t get me started – this is not as ridiculous as it sounds. But the difference between the two sides is so OBVIOUS that virtually anyone will hear it. (Even those people who still think that MoFi was a great label.)

$250 is a lot to pay for the MoFi of Dark Side Of The Moon. But consider this: the UHQR sells for two to four times that amount, and doesn’t sound as good as the Hot Stampers found here. Of course, the people that buy UHQRs would never notice that, because they would have simply assumed that they had already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and wouldn’t need to try another. [More on that kind of mistake here.]

The complete text for our Mobile Fidelity shootout can be found here.

I was guilty of the same Mistaken Audiophile Record Collector Thinking myself about 40 years ago. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper in the early ’80s (right before the box set came out in ’83) and thinking how amazing it sounded and that I was so lucky to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now, I suspect that all I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice) and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard plenty of good pressings of Sgt. Peppers, like the wonderful UK reissues we regularly put on the site, I suspect that now the MoFi UHQR would sound so phony to me I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

Back to Dark Side. We’ve found that the album, along with the others linked below, is helpful for testing the following qualities:

  1. Midrange Tonality
  2. Midrange Presence

I would make one other quick point here. The bad MoFi pressings of Dark Side are veiled and recessed in the midrange on Breathe. I remember playing the record in the ’80s and thinking how muffled it sounded on that song. Looking back and thinking about those days, I realize I had a lot to learn, about a lot of things. I had no idea that MoFi’s standard operating procedure was to suck out the midrange. Here is another, equally famous MoFi with similar midrange issues.

  1. Upper Midrange Brightness

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Pink Floyd – Meddle

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

More Prog Rock

  • An outstanding British copy of this shockingly well recorded album featuring Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on both sides
  • Here is the Tubey Magic, presence, size and space we guarantee you have never heard on Meddle no matter what pressing you may own (particularly on side one)
  • A Top 100 audiophile Demonstration Quality Recording on a par with Dark Side of the Moon, which is really saying something
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Pink Floyd were nothing if not masters of texture, and Meddle is one of their greatest excursions into little details, pointing the way to the measured brilliance of Dark Side of the Moon and the entire Roger Waters era.”
  • This killer reissue puts to shame the originals we’ve auditioned, and the reissues we offer on the site are guaranteed to do the same
  • If you’re a Pink Floyd fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1971 is clearly one of their best

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Letter of the Week – “As an obsessive compulsive individual, I can say without a doubt that they are providing a hugely valuable service to audiophiles.”

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

I wanted to comment on the discussion as to the validity of the ‘Better Records’ business model and offerings to audiophiles. As a backgrounder, I am an electrical engineer that grew up in the 60s and 70s listening first hand to many of the classic LPs that Better Records now offers for sale. I was also a musician with perfect pitch (playing French Horn in the Symphony and keyboards in various bands), I had a killer stereo and spent a lot of time in recording studios that produced some of the top acts and albums of the era so I certainly had exposure to the best equipment and listening environments back in the day.

I went on to being a CEO of various telecom/mobile software companies and somewhat lost touch with my musical purist roots. But I had 3 boys and one of them turned out to have the same music bug I had and he has gone on to pursuing a career as a recording engineer, re-introducing me to analog vinyl LPs, pushing me to re-engage in my greatest love, which I eventually did in spades: I tossed out my electrostatics and full digital sound chain and I built a set of Altec 604 monitors driven by a 300B tube amp and a killer turntable, and I went about spending about $30,000 on 1st pressing vinyl from around the world, cleaning them with an ultrasonic platform, and I learned a great deal during that process.

For one, I fell back in love with high efficiency speaker systems, for another I realized that I was spending an average of $200-300 per LP to get what I wanted and in some cases, over $1000 in total (buying 7 different DSOTM pressings and travelling to the UK multiple times to find the best pressings), and I found out that Better Records was on to something: I got burned more than once myself when I was buying clean, never played 1st pressings of some of the top LPs and ending not feeling the love for the results. I appreciate the complexities of the old school vinyl pressing sound chain and its infinite variables, and more times than not I was back sourcing additional copies of the same LP looking for that ‘magical pressing’.

I eventually got a stunning DSOTM 2nd pressing (A3/B3) and bought another only to find that the 1st one was way ahead of the 2nd so it shows that even the same pressings can be highly variable – in sound quality/feel/depth/clarity/warmth, but also noise floor. So, yes, there are magical ‘Hot Stampers’ out there, but to find them takes patience and lots of $ and effort.

When you score the perfect ‘Hot Stamper’ the result can be to draw you close to the very soul of the artist – bringing you right into the recording room with them, sometimes 50+ years after the fact. And when you put on a digital download or CD of the same LP it is a shocking insult in many many cases.

So, back to Better Records: they are doing all of the foot work for you, and as an obsessive compulsive individual, I can say without a doubt that they are providing a hugely valuable service to audiophiles. They are purists and they listen on ‘big’ speaker systems that will highlight the limitations of MOFI 1/2 speed mastered LPs (typically flawed low frequency response and some mid-range colouration).

I am very happy with Better Records and must say that they reduce my stress and have me impatiently waiting for their next shipment. 5 stars.

Derek

Derek,

As an obsessive-compulsive individual myself, I know very well the suffering you must have gone through with the colorations of the MoFi pressings and what passes for audiophile “product” these days.

Glad we could help reduce the stress you felt pursuing good sounding vinyl. Finding that so little of what was supposed to sound good actually does is frustrating for anyone who is serious about this hobby.

Best, TP

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