Bruce Botnick, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Dave Mason – Alone Together (Marble Vinyl)

More of the Music of Dave Mason

  • Mason’s Masterpiece, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides of this vintage Blue Thumb pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Listen to how big and rich the dynamic chorus gets on the first track, “Only You Know and I Know” – what a thrill to hear it like that
  • A killer Bruce Botnick recording – Tubey Magical analog, smooth and natural, with the whole production sitting on a rock solid bottom-end foundation
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Alone Together represents Dave Mason at his peak… everything comes together perfectly.”

Before I get too far into the story of the sound, I want to say that this album appears to be criminally underrated as music nowadays, having fallen from favor with the passage of time.

It is a surely a Masterpiece that belongs in any rock collection worthy of the name. (Others that belong in that category can be found here.) Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s no filler here.

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How to Make All Your Records Sound Like MoFi’s – For Free!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

The Doors debut album is yet another obvious example of MoFi’s predilection for a sucked-out midrange.

Scooping out the middle of the midrange has the effect of creating an artificial sense of depth where none had ever been.

Play any original Bruce Botnick engineered album by Love or The Doors and you will notice immediately that the vocals are front and center.

When the DCC Doors first album was released on vinyl, we noted that the vocals were finally back where they belonged. After having lived with the MoFi for so many years, we’d almost forgotten.

And now of course we can’t tolerate the smear and opacity of the DCC. We like to think we’re simply setting higher standards these days.

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room.

Pull your speakers farther out into the room, and also farther apart, and you can get that MoFi sound on every record you play. I’ve been hearing it in the systems that audiophiles — who made the mistake of inviting me into their homes — we’re proud of for decades.

Once you know what that effect sounds like, and have done the work to fix it in your own system, it takes mere moments to recognize it in any other system.

Fixing a problem is practically the only way to hear what actually is a problem.

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Listening in Depth to Let It Bleed

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Glyn Johns is without a doubt one of the Best Rock Engineers who ever lived. Let It Bleed is one of the many classic albums he engineered in the 60s and 70s that have stood the test of time musically and would be hard to beat by any album recorded after that era.

Ken Scott, Stephen Barncard, Alan Parsons, Geoff Emerick and others are right up there with him of course. We audiophiles are very lucky to have had guys like these around when the Stones (and The Who and The Eagles) were at their creative peak. 

What follows is some advice on what to listen for, provided by your friends at Better Records to help you separate the best pressings from those that may be merely good. (The awful ones we expect you can recognize easily enough without any help.)

Side One

Gimme Shelter
Love in Vain

One of the best sounding Rolling Stones songs of all time. In previous listings I’ve mentioned how good this song sounds — thanks to Glyn Johns, of course — but on the best Hot Stamper copies it is OUT OF THIS WORLD.

This is our favorite test track for side one. The first minute or so clues you into to everything that’s happening in the sound.

Listen for the amazing immediacy, transparency and sweetly extended harmonics of the guitar in the left channel.

Next, when Watts starts slapping that big fat snare in the right channel, it should sound so real you could reach out and touch it.

If you’re like me, that tubey magical acoustic guitar sound and the rich whomp of the snare should be all the evidence you need that Glyn Johns is one of the all time greats.

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Letter of the Week – “Let’s just say the physiological experience was absolutely terrific.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available No

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper copy of Let It Bleed he purchased recently.

Hi Tom,

Just a quick note to say that I’ve never been more engaged with the music of Let It Bleed than yesterday when I heard a 3+ side one.

Let’s just say the physiological experience was absolutely terrific.

I don’t need to go on about the sound, as it was simply the best I’ve ever heard. So transparent!

I am feeling very fortunate to be really enjoying this music the way it was meant to sound.

Michel

Michel,

We like to think that the White Hot Stamper pressings we offer are the ones that take the music to another level, typically beyond where the listener (and that even includes us) thought it could go.

It seems that you had the same kind of revelation that many of our customers have had when they finally hear a famous recording sound the way they had always wished it could.

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Love’s Debut and Forever Changes on Heavy Vinyl – Indefensible Dreck from Sundazed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Love Available Now

Two audiophile hall of shame titles, and another two Sundazed records reviewed and found seriously wanting.

We got hold of a minty original pressing of the first Love album back around 2007, so in preparation for the commentary I pulled one of the Sundazed pressings off the shelf, (Forever Changes, the only one we ever bothered to sell), cracked it open and threw it on the turntable. 

Gag, what a piece of crap. When I had auditioned them all those years ago (2002), it was — I’m not kidding — the best of the bunch.

The sound to me back then was nothing special, but not bad. Knowing how rare the originals were, we gave it a lukewarm review and put it in the catalog, the single Sundazed Love album that (just barely) made the cut.

Now I wish I hadn’t, because no one should have to suffer through sound that bad. Here’s what I wrote for the shootout:

You’d never know it from those dull Sundazed reissues, but the right pressings of Love albums are full of Tubey Magic! With Bruce Botnick at the controls you can expect a meaty bottom end and BIG rock sound, and this recording really delivers on both counts.

With Sundazed mastering engineers running the show, you can expect none of the above.

No Tubey Magic, no meaty bottom end, no big rock sound.

After the shootout, I took the two copies we had in stock right down to my local record store and traded them in.

I didn’t want them in my house, let alone on my site.

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Love in Vain Is a Great Test Track on Let It Bleed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Love In Vain is our favorite test track for side one on Let It Bleed.

The first minute or so clues you into to everything that’s happening in the sound.

Listen for the amazing immediacy, transparency and sweetly extended harmonics of the guitar in the left channel.

Next, when Watts starts slapping that big fat snare in the right channel, it should sound so real you could reach out and touch it.

If you’re like me, that Tubey magical acoustic guitar sound and the rich whomp of the snare should be all the evidence you need that Glyn Johns is one of the Five Best Rock Engineers who ever lived. Ken Scott, Stephen Barncard, Alan Parsons and a few others are right up there with him of course. We audiophiles are very lucky to have had guys like those around when the Stones were at their writing and performing peak.

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Pet Sounds on DCC Is Yet Another Mediocre Remaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.

It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?

You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

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Turning Master Tapes into Mud Pies – The Magic of the Electric Recording Company

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary originally came out in 2023 I believe. The comments section at the end is a bit of a hoot. Man, there sure are some real wackos in the world of audio.

We did a shootout for Love’s Forever Changes earlier this year, and it was our good luck to get hold of a copy of the Electric Recording Company’s pressing of the album in order to see how it would fare against our Gold Label Stereo original LPs.

As you can see from the notes, to say that we could hardly believe what we were hearing clearly understates the depth of our befuddlement.

We simply have no context for a record that sounds as bad as this record sounds. We’ve never heard anything like it, and we’ve played a lot of records in the 37 years we’ve been in business. After critically auditioning thousands upon thousands of pressings in our shootouts, all day every day for the last twenty years, we’ve worn out scores of cartridges and even our Triplanar tonearm.

But this is new ground for us. A quick recap:

  • Incredibly dull,
  • Has no top or space at all,
  • One of the worst reissues I’ve ever heard.

You get the picture. What more needs be said? Last year I wrote the following:

Pete Hutchison of The Electric Recording Company makes some of the worst sounding records I have ever played in my life.

If you play me one of his awful records, and don’t tell me who made it, I can judge the record on its merits, the way we judge all records. We test records blindly for precisely this reason. We let the record tell us how well it was made, what it does right and wrong relative to other pressings of the same album, comparing apples to apples.

His records tell me he loves the sound of the murkiest, muddiest vintage tube equipment ever made, and wants every record he produces to have that sound.

In my book that is an egregious case of My-Fi, not Hi-Fi. We wrote about it here.

It’s astonishing to me that anyone takes this guy seriously.

In the Washington Post video, we did a little comparison on camera for two pressings of Quiet Kenny, a record I will have more to say about in Part Two of this commentary. Here is Geoff Edgers’ description in the article of how it all went down.

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Botnick and Levine Knocked Equinox Out of the Park

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

The music is of course wonderful, but what separates Sergio from practically all of his ’60s contemporaries is the AMAZING SOUND of his recordings. Like their debut, this one was engineered by the team of Bruce Botnick and Larry Levine.

Botnick is of course the man behind the superb recordings of The Doors, Love and others too numerous to mention. 

Levine is no slouch either, having engineered one of the best sounding albums on the planet, Sergio Mendes’ Stillness.

Just play the group’s amazing versions of Watch What Happens, Night and Day, or Jobim’s Wave to hear the kind of Mendes Magic that makes us swoon. For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. (Well, almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but Equinox is right up there with it.)

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to let the listener hear all the elements laid out clearly, with each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. When you hear one of those copies, you have to give Botnick and Levine their due. These guys knew what they were doing like few that have come along since.

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Room Treatments Bring Out The Big Speaker Whomp Factor

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The first Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 album is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback.

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to grant the listener the privilege of hearing all the elements laid out clearly, each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. 

With recent changes to some of our room treatments, we now have even more transparency in the mids and highs, while improving the whomp factor (the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp) at the listening position.

There’s always tons of bass being produced when you have three 12′ woofers firing away, but getting the bass out of the corners and into the center of the room is one of the toughest tricks in audio.

For a while we were quite enamored with some later pressings of this album — they were cut super clean, with extended highs and amazing transparency, with virtually none of the congestion in the loud parts you hear on practically every copy.

But that clarity comes at a price, and it’s a steep one. The best early pressings have whomp down below only hinted at by the “cleaner” reissues. It’s the same way super transparent half-speeds fool most audiophiles. For some reason audiophiles rarely seem to notice the lack of weight and solidity down below that they’ve sacrificed for this improved clarity. (Probably because it’s the rare audiophile speaker that can really move enough air to produce the whomp we are talking about here.)

But hey, look who’s talking! I was fooled too. You have to get huge amounts of garbage out of your system (and your room) before the trade-offs become obvious.

When you find that special early pressing, one with all the magic in the midrange and top without any loss of power down below, then my friend you have one of those “I Can’t Believe It’s A Record” records. We call them Hot Stampers here at Better Records, and they’re guaranteed to blow your mind. (more…)