Bernie Grundman, Engineer (Vintage) – Reviews and Commentaries

Hejira Overview and Joni Mitchell Discography

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Most copies we played were too compressed or veiled to involve us in the music, but the best ones have the big, rich, clear sound of analog that Joni’s spacey “beatnik jazz” needs to work its magic

We played a ton of copies and heard a lot to dislike. Many copies have a tendency to sound phony, a case of heavy-handed EQ in the mastering perhaps.

Our old friend Bernie Grundman handled the mastering for the album.

When a copy sounds glossy, it loses its natural warmth and starts to sound like any old audiophile LP. We’re ideally looking for something akin to Blue here, and not the sound you find on Patricia Barber LPs. (Gratuitous maybe, but it feels like it’s been too long since we took a swipe at that third-rate audiophile-oriented music. But I digress…)

Plenty of copies had natural sound but no real life or presence to speak of. It’s a sound you could live with until you heard a good one, but there’s no going back once you’ve heard what the album’s really capable of. A copy like this one gives you lots of richness and warmth without sacrificing the texture to the instruments or the breath to Joni’s voice. The percussion really comes through, the bass has more weight and the immediacy of the vocals put Joni front and center, just where she should be.

If you aren’t familiar with this album, it’s a few more steps down the path she started taking on Court and Spark. The musicians include Larry Carlton and Jaco Pastorius, so that should give you an idea about the jazz-fusion direction of the arrangements. It was a fun album to get to know and on a copy like this one, it really rewards multiple listens.

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A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Record Reviewing

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Allow me to respond to a comment left by a fellow named Ian Malone.

It was left in the comments section for the interview Steve Westman did with me.

He wrote:

Quite happy for you to promote your business Tom, but surely you are a better person than doing it in this way. I know that other people in the industry have said unkind things about you but you can rise above these insults.

My response:

I never say that the people making these modern records, as well as those reviewing them, are malicious or evil. I say they make or review bad sounding records and are simply misguided and, more than anything else, incompetent.

Am I being unkind? If Michael Bay makes one bad movie after another, are we unkind to point that out? I don’t know whether or not he is a bad person, but I do know that he is a bad filmmaker, and gets called out regularly for putting out a bad product.

Everyone understands that this is a matter of taste. If you always wished The Beatles albums had more bass, more compression and a smoother tonal balance overall, you can buy the new Heavy Vinyl pressings and get the sound you prefer on every title The Beatles ever released.

However, I hope you know that the sound I have just described does not exist on the master tapes.

I have no way of actually knowing that for a fact, but since no mastering engineer before 2014 had ever put that sound on an actual record, I think we can safely say that the evidence supports the idea that a completely “new sound” was specifically created for The Beatles when their catalog was remastered early in this century. [1]

A New Sound

Call it The New Beatles Sound. I am on record as not liking engineers who create a new sound for records that had perfectly good sound already. Those of us who do not like our Beatles album to have those qualities should not be buying these newly remastered versions.

We offer the consumer an alternative sound, and, since our Beatles Hot Stampers are far and away our best sellers, it seems our customers agree with us that they actually do sound better. Some come back, sure, but not many, and I don’t think anyone has ever said they liked the new pressings better, although I cannot rule out that possibility in the future, audiophiles being who they are.

In some ways we operate like Consumer Reports. Blender X is terrible at making margaritas and blender Y is good at making those delicious drinks. The company that makes bad blenders should be called to account. If there is a name attached to that company, then I guess we can say that the person who runs that company should learn how to make better blenders or find something else to do with his time.

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The Tapestry Shootout Video Is Here!

Geoff Edgers’ Washington Post article “The Search for the Perfect Sound,” in which he talks to lots of audiophiles and music lovers about his personal journey into the world of audiophile equipment and records, is now active on their website.

NEWSFLASH! This is currently the most popular story/video on the WAPO website! Number One with a bullet, baby. [Alas, no longer.]

Don’t miss the video below of yours truly doing a shootout for Tapestry.

It’s actually not a real shootout. For Tapestry we would typically play 8-10 early pressings and grade them for sound. This was more of a test, to see if I could spot the Hot Stamper among the pretenders, more What’s My Line than a shootout.

Part of the attraction of course is that I’m the guy they love to hate. Just check out the comments.

And please add some of your own. You are the only people on the planet qualified to talk about Hot Stampers because you are the only ones who have heard them on your own stereos with your own two ears.

Why should anyone care what somebody else has to say about something that that person has never experienced? The reason we stopped posting on the Hoffman website back in 2002 was simply the fact that I was tired of arguing with people that have strong opinions about the results of experiments they have never run.

Hot Stamper Shootouts are simply our way of doing blinded experiments on various pressings of records. We eschew theories and conjecture. We prefer observations and data. We write about these issues a lot here on the blog for those who would like to learn more about records. If you already know it all, this is probably not a blog you will find of much value.

I will be posting some comments soon, mostly about all the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor. We spent most of the time with some orange label Vertigo pressings of Dire Straits’ first album, finding a White Hot Stamper LP out of the batch we played, then comparing our records to the execrable Mobile Fidelity 45 RPM 2 disc pressings, pressings so bad they defy understanding. But that is another story for another day! (The MoFi was mastered by Krieg Wunderlich, so if you see his name in the credits of a record you may be interested in, don’t waste your money. He is hopelessly incompetent and can be counted on to produce some of the worst sounding audiophile records ever made.)

I had eye surgery on my right earlier on the day of the interview, so hopefully that accounts for some of my squinty appearance.

I have also been invited to participate in a Reddit Q&A sometime next week, discussing the issues raised in the article or video anyone would like to ask about, so stay tuned for that, and I hope you will participate as well.

Our customers have plenty of their own Hot Stamper stories to tell, and I hope to hear from some of you on that Reddit panel.

You are the only audiophiles with real, first-hand knowledge of what a Hot Stamper sounds like. Perhaps you will wish to share with other audiophiles what they don’t know they are missing.

And if you have any questions of any other kind, I hope you will give me a chance to answer them.

Just email tom@better-records.com

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Better Records’ Record Collecting Axiom Number One

Handy Tips and Tricks for Collecting Better Sounding Records

In an old commentary we wrote for Carole King’s Tapestry album, we took shots at both the CBS Half-Speed mastered audiophile pressing and the Classic Heavy Vinyl audiophile pressing, noting that both fell far short of the standard set by the Hot Stamper copies we had come across years ago

This finding (and scores of others just like it) prompted us to promulgate the first two axioms of audiophile record collecting.

Better Records Record Collecting Axiom Number One

The better your stereo gets, the fewer Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered pressings you will choose to play, or own for that matter.

This assumes a fact not in evidence: that audiophiles get rid of their bad sounding records.

It has been my experience that the reverse is actually more often the case. Most audiophiles seem to like to hang on to their audiophile pressings, even the bad sounding ones. Why they do this I cannot for the life of me understand.

To me a bad sounding audiophile record is a record not worth playing. It should either be given away or sold, with any proceeds from the sale applied to the purchase of good records — you know, like the ones found on this site.

Click here to read Better Records’ record collecting axiom number two.

We Get Letters

Quite a number of our customers have written us about our Hot Stamper pressings of Tapestry, and their letters can be found here.

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Joni Mitchell – The Most Underrated Album of Her Early Period?

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Joni Mitchell

Some current thoughts on Joni’s oeuvre have been added in brackets to this older commentary.

This is probably the most underrated Joni Mitchell album, both in terms of sonics and music. It seems that everyone wants a great copy of Blue or Court And Spark, but this album ranks right up there with them and seems to have been undeservedly overlooked.

Let’s face it, we love Blue (1971), but most pressings suffer from a raft of sonic problems, as does Ladies of the Canyon (1970).

Court and Spark (1974) is up at the top up the list as well, but Roses (1972) seems to have more recording purity. Perhaps the engineers saw this as an opportunity to address the problems with Blue, the album that preceded it.

By the time Joni had fully indulged her jazzier inclinations with Court and Spark, some of the recording quality had been lost in the quest for slicker production values for which that album is known. The complexity of the instrumentation required more multi-tracking and overdubbing, and as good as that record can sound on the best copies, in a head to head matchup with For the Roses the latter would probably win, and probably by no more than a nose.

Side One

Clear, present, breathy vocals, about as good as Joni can sound on vinyl, which is saying a lot.

The second track is a great test. Here the guitars are full-bodied, harmonically rich, with more reverb and space than practically any side one we have ever played. The Tubey Magical liquidity of the sound is what vintage analog is all about. No reissue and no CD will ever get that sound the way this copy does.

And you don’t need tubes in your system to hear it. The magic is on the tape and it was transferred beautifully to this piece of vinyl.

Side Two

Listen to how huge the piano is — no other copy could reproduce the size, weight and clarity of that piano. No two copies will show you the same piano, which makes it a great test for sound. Put this side up against the best you’ve got, it should be no contest.

Breathy, immediate vocals are key to any Joni Mitchell record and this side reproduces them as well as any we heard in our shootout.

Letter of the Week – “Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile.”

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased back in 2017 [the bolding of the text has been added by us.]

Hey Tom, 

Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile. I discovered the Better Records website way back in 2007, but being a hardcore skeptic I didn’t purchase anything until almost two years later. Although I agreed with the premise that different pressings have varying degrees of sound quality, I simply could not believe that any record could sound so much better to justify the prices. Frankly, I thought that the buyers of these records were folks with more money than sense.

What finally drove me to purchase my first Hot Stamper was my attempt to find a decent copy of Carole King’s Tapestry album. I had decided to try the Better Records approach and gathered half a dozen copies, as well as the Classic heavy vinyl reissue that I had read good things about. Talk about an exercise in futility. Despite a thorough cleaning with Disc Doctor, no copy sounded significantly better than any of the others. However, Better Records just happened to have a 1+ copy of Tapestry on sale for $75 at the time, so I decided to take the plunge and buy it, even though I still thought the price was outrageous.

What followed next absolutely stunned and amazed me. Although I was prepared to shoot out the Hot Stamper against my own copies, I knew within the first minute of play that it would be totally unnecessary. The Hot Stamper sounded like a completely different recording. I cannot stress this enough. Everything sounded much, much more lifelike and REAL, as if I was listening to the performance inside the recording studio, instead of sitting outside hearing it through the walls. Of particular note was the fact that I could hear the personality in Ms. King’s voice, with all the attendant subtle inflections and timbre; she sounded like a real person, not just a recording of one. The $75 price was suddenly transformed into a real bargain, and the skeptic in me died completely. (more…)

Heart Like A Wheel Is an Album Everyone Needs to Hear

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

Reviews and Commentaries for Heart Like a Wheel

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

The list is purposely wide-ranging. It includes some famous titles (Tumbleweed Connection, The Yes Album), but for the most part I have gone out of way to choose titles from talented artists that are less well known (Atlantic Crossing, Kiln House, Dad Loves His Work), which simply means that you won’t find Every Picture Tells a Story or Rumours or Sweet Baby James on this list because masterpieces of that caliber should already be in your collection and don’t need me to recommend them.

Which is not to say there aren’t some well known masterpieces on the list, because not every well known record is necessarily well known to audiophiles, and some records are just too good not to put on a list of records we think every audiophile ought to get to know better.

Out of the thousands of records we have auditioned and reviewed, there are a couple of hundred that have stood the test of time for us and we feel are deserving of a listen. Many of these will not be to your taste, but they were to mine.

Heart Like A Wheel

I’ve been playing HLAW since the year it came out, roughly 48 years by my calculation, and I can tell you it is no easy task to find this kind of smooth, sweet, analog sound on the album. Folks, we heard it for ourselves: the Heart Like A Wheel magic is here on practically every song.

A Must Own Pop Record

Linda’s Masterpiece, and a recording that should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Better Records’ Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

Thinking Critically About Records Is Key to Understanding Them

In an old commentary for a shootout we did for Carole King’s Tapestry album, we took to task both the CBS Half-Speed mastered audiophile pressing and the Classic Heavy Vinyl audiophile pressing, noting that both fell far short of the standard set by the Hot Stamper copies we’d discovered over the years.

This finding (and scores of others just like it) prompted us to promulgate the following axioms of audiophile record collecting. (Axiom Number One can be found here.)

Which leads us to Better Records Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

No two records sound the same.

If that weren’t true we’d be out of business. It is in fact the very foundation of our business. We wrote a commentary with that idea firmly in mind under the heading identical stampers + new vinyl = different sound?, which goes into that subject in more detail.

And it’s equally true for Half-Speeds — they’re records, right? — so we have a few entries in our we was wrong. section about those rare copies that actually have sounded good to us over the years.

For example, the chances of there being exceptionally good sounding CBS Half-Speed mastered pressings of Tapestry may be vanishingly small, but we can’t say the chances are zero.

There could be some, but considering how bad the idea of Half-Speed mastering is, would they have much chance of beating our Hot Stampers?

As a practical matter I would have to say the chances are zero.

They can’t beat the right early pressings, properly cleaned. They can beat lots of pressings with the wrong stampers.

There might be some copies that sound better than the mediocre Classic Records pressing, which is tonally fine but suffers from the basic issues most of Bernie Grundman’s remastered records suffer from.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “… I felt the earth move under my feet with this record …”

More of the Music of Carole King

Reviews and Commentaries for Tapestry

This letter came in many years ago. Please to enjoy.

Our good customer Roger (and, if he keeps this up, a future editor-at-large) recently purchased the cheapest Hot Stamper Tapestry ($150) from our mailing. As is his wont, he proceeded to do his own shootout with the CBS Half-Speed. We told him in our listing it wasn’t any good, but we’re glad to see he didn’t take our word for it.

There is no substitute for hearing a record on your own stereo, good or bad. (The record, not the stereo.)

Hi Tom,

I heard your Carole King Tapestry Hot Stamper over the weekend and compared it to the CBS half-speed version. I always thought CBS did a pretty good job on this record, at least as compared to a standard US pressing I had, and I avoided buying hot stampers because of this.

So I didn’t expect much when I put this on my turntable, but it was obvious within the first, oh, 2-3 seconds that the hot stamper completely eclipsed the half-speed. I don’t think even a 1/4 speed or 1/100 speed would have sounded like this record. Instruments were startlingly immediate and stood out from the mix, whether it was pianos arrayed in space with weight and body, or the drum rim shots in It’s Too Late, or guitars, or even Carole’s voice. I was amazed, I mean amazed, at the fireworks display type bass on Home Again and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.

I definitely felt the earth move under my feet with this record–it is rare to hear this kind of bass on any recording, no less a pop record. I used to pride myself on not being a bass whore, but I admit I am hopelessly in love with the kind of bass heard on this record. If you like transparent soundstaging you will love this record and there is tons of detail, but not the type of hyper-detail that will drive you screaming from your room.

I have heard the songs on this record literally thousands of times but never like this. And this was the cheap $149 version. Fabulous!

Roger

Roger, thanks as always for the insightful review. We haven’t liked the Half-Speed since the Classic came out more than a decade ago. Although it’s tonally much more correct, the Classic Records pressing just doesn’t cut it, in more ways than I care to recount. This commentary gets at some of it.

Further Reading

Heart Like A Wheel – Does Bernie Ever Get Bored?

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

Years ago we wrote:

One thing we noted with interest while doing this shootout was how compressed the first track is. When the chorus comes in, and Linda seems to be singing louder — should be singing louder, with a substantial coterie of vocalists backing her up — the volume is actually lower. In the verse immediately following you can hear that not only is she singing louder, but the amount of dynamic contrast in her voice is greater. Go figure.

The compression also means that that song will never sound the way we would wish it to. But that doesn’t mean it won’t sound good. It means it will sound good in more of a radio-friendly way. On a good copy, one with relatively little grain and plenty of bass, the music can still be very enjoyable, and that includes a Number One Pop Hit like “You’re No Good.”

Do we still see things this way? Well, yes and no. It’s not exactly that we were wrong, but that better cleaning and better playback (all that revolutions in audio stuff) have now allowed us to hear that some copies are actually much more dynamic on this track than others. Quite dynamic in fact.

Think about it. Bernie Grundman is going to cut this record many, many times, maybe more times than he wants to. Is he always going to apply exactly the same amount of compression to each cutting, or is he going to experiment a bit and see what works better over time? Or maybe he just learned a thing or two as he went along.

Which is pretty much what we do when playing copy after copy. The best pressings show us precisely what it is they are doing when they actually work. We can’t know that in advance; we’re learning on the job so to speak.

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