Donn Landee, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

It Took Us Three Attempts to Get The Captain and Me Going

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

By 2009 I had been randomly buying clean copies of The Captain and Me for two decades, with the expectation that one day I would play them and find the mysterious deadwax and other clues that would lead me to the potentially best sounding copies.

Even though I had learned a fair bit about stamper numbers by that time, there was no getting around the fact that the best stamper numbers cannot be predicted for any given title. I didn’t know any especially good ones, which means that I needed to learn them for this title the way I learned them for all the others — one album at a time.

As I was not a fan of the pre-McDonald Doobies, I confess I really had no idea what to look for. I probably had picked up a few of the exceedingly rare Green Label pressings, but were they the best? I couldn’t say. I just hadn’t spent enough time with the album. And I had disproved that old canard that the originals are always the best sounding so many times by then that believing that nonsense was out of the question.

We had tried twice before to get something going, but could not find the sound we were looking for and had simply given up and moved on to greener pastures. This is long before Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System had come our way in 2007. It, along with our Odyssey record cleaning machine and some other tricks we learned about record cleaning, allowed us to get a shootout going a couple of years later.

The failed attempts to understand the album mentioned above happened long before we had turned the business over to carrying out shootouts all day, every day, which is all we were doing by 2009. We had stopped promoting Heavy Vinyl in 2007, and by 2009 we were on our way to selling nothing but records we had cleaned and played and evaluated for their sound quality with our own ears.

Eventually we sat down with the copies of The Captain and Me that we had — more than thirty according to the listing you see below, the one we wrote at the time — and gave it our best shot.

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Letter of the Week – “Oh man, what a difference. Huge sound – really alive – the way you remember this sound should be like.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Halen Available Now

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

Hey Tom,  

I just got a super hot stamper Van Halen and immediately got out my DCC version – which is a record I’ve had no complaints about – compared to most of the heavy vinyl remaster crap – but, oh man, what a difference.

Huge sound – really alive – the way you remember this sound should be like – I saw these boys when they first hit – one of my first rock concerts.

Thanks again – this was money well spent – and on this one, I can even ebay away the DCC and more than break even (I almost feel guilty about that!).

Richard

Richard,

Isn’t it funny how a record that doesn’t sound “bad” in any way — the DCC – falls so far short of what it really should have sounded like? How will the audiophile record collectors of the world ever get better sound when they already think they have it?

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Letter of the Week – “For me it is like the difference between 2-D and 3-D”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

As a newcomer to your business, and to the entire concept of “Hot Stamper” records, I was naturally skeptical. Many of us have invested in a wide variety of vinyl that simple failed to live up to expectations. Initially I was going to order one and only one record from you, and test your bold promises. Instead, I ended up ordering a nice variety to truly put it to the test… investing a couple thousand dollars on faith. In short, I am now your customer for life.

As a point of reference, my system includes a pair of Wilson Audio Alexia powered by 2 monoblock McIntosh tube Amps and a Mc-tube preamp. Most importantly, a Brinkmann mag drive turntable with a Sumiko low output moving coil cartridge. So, not the world’s best system, but enough to discern what is to follow.

I ordered the following:
* Carole King Tapestry, ((White Hot Pressing)
* The Doobie Brothers, What Were Once Vices (White Hot Pressing)
* James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (White Hot Pressing)
* Paul McCartney, McCartney (Super Hot Pressing)
* Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Donald Fagen, The Nightfly (White Hot Pressing)

I warmed up my amps with the tuner for an hour or so and then sat and listened to some of my other records and reacquainted myself with the music from my system. First up was “What Were Once Vices…”. It was immediately apparent that I was getting a range as wide, if not wider than anything I had ever heard from my stereo. Then when I got to the last song on side one, “Road Angel” the guitar and drum interplay in the instrumental jam completely blew me away. Midway through I took the volume from loud to louder, and it exposed nothing but pure, sweet rock and roll. Literally gave me goose bumps.

I then listened to “Countdown to Ecstasy” and in this instance I owe a clean original copy, so I put it to the test. Back to back. I did not have to go past “Bodhisattva” to know it was no contest. If I had to apply a percentage, something like 20% more music comes from the Hot Stamper, and this (like all of my orders) is one of my all time favorite albums.

I won’t go on and on, suffice to say that the experience repeated itself on all of the above.

Even the Fagen copy was WAY better than the 1982 MoFi copy I paid an arm and a leg for. I have always thought that record had a true analog quality, was surprised the first time I learned it was laid down on a digital track. The Hot Stamper even adds to this great sounding record.

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Takin’ It to the Streets – The Rich, Smooth Sound of Seventies Analog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

Recently we did one of our regular shootouts for Takin’ It To The Streets, using pressings we know from experience to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them as carefully as we always do, then we unplugged everything in the house we could get away with, carefully warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next couple of hours playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process could not be more simple. The first step is to go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

The Rich, Smooth Sound of Seventies Analog

Credit Donn Landee (and Ted Templeman too) with the rich, smooth, oh-so-analog sound of the best copies. He’s recorded many of our favorite albums here at Better Records.

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Gorilla – A Soft Rock Favorite from 1975

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This is soft rock at its best, primarily made up of love songs, and helped immensely by the harmonically-gifted backing vocals of Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Rolling Stone notes that “With Gorilla, Taylor is well on his way to staking out new ground. What he’s hit upon is the unlikely mating of his familiar low-keyed, acoustic guitar-dominated style with L.A. harmony rock and the sweet, sexy school of rhythm and blues.”

If you are not a fan of the mellow James Taylor, this is not the album for you.

I happen to be just such a fan. Taylor’s sixth album contains consistently engaging, well-produced, well-written, memorable, singable (or hummable) songs that hold up to this day.

After enjoying it for more than 45 years I can honestly say now it actually sounds good. The recording finally makes sense, now that I have the stereo that can play it and the cleaning system that could get the record truly clean. And it only took 35 years — nice!

At Better Records that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about progress. Make no mistake, it is very REAL. When we take a recording that, on copy after copy, never sounded much better than passable, and actually get it to sound musical and involving, that’s not an illusion. It’s the result of the countless revolutions in audio that we’ve participated in. Without the hundreds of changes we’ve made to our stereo, room and cleaning systems, old records would just sound like old records.

The average copy is so flat, lifeless and hard sounding that you might just wonder if there isn’t something wrong with your stereo when the needle hits the Gorilla groove. Most copies are awful, and the same goes for the albums that came before it and after it, Walking Man and In the Pocket, respectively.

This record does not sound like just any old record, not the best copies anyway.

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Minute By Minute – Donn Landee at His Best

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

If you could only have one Doobies album, assuming you prefer the Michael McDonald era as we do, wouldn’t it have to be this one?

An audiophile quality pop music production as close to perfect as one could possibly wish for, thanks to Ted Templeman and Donn Landee .

This is Donn Landee at his best — tonally correct, spacious, clear and sweet, with vocal choruses that can really take off when called upon.

The sound may be too heavily processed and glossy for some, but we find that, at least on the best copies, that sound really works for the music on this album.

It’s one our favorite titles from 1979.

Grammys

1979 Record Of The Year for “What A Fool Believes” 
1979 Song Of The Year for “What A Fool Believes” 
1979 Best Pop Vocal Performance By A Duo, Group Or Chorus for “Minute By Minute” 
1979 Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocals for “What A Fool Believes” 

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What to Listen For on What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

This mass-produced stuff is pretty lame most of the time. Actually, that’s not really fair; the specialty audiophile limited edition pressings of most records are even worse, so the production numbers really don’t have much to do with the final product, now do they? They made millions of copies of this album, and heavy vinyl pressings are made in the thousands, but which would you rather play? I’ll take good old thin vinyl from the 70s over that heavy stuff any day of the week.

But I digress. Most copies — like most modern heavy vinyl pressings — simply lack energy. They’re flat and compressed and no matter how loud you turn them up the band never seems to be all that enthusiastic about the songs they’re playing.

Ah, but the good pressings show you a band that’s on fire, playing and singing their hearts out. Such are the vagaries of record production. Who can explain it or even understand it? All we know is what the finished product sounds like. The rest is guesswork, entertaining for idle minds and forum posters but of little value to those of us who take records seriously and want to hear the music we love with the best sound we can find. (More on guessing and speculating here.)

Watch Out For

Tipped up top end, plain and simple.

A little extra top and the guitars sparkle and Johnston’s voice gets a little hi-fi-ish. On the most ridiculously tipped-up copies, you could easily mistake such a pressing for a MoFi Half-Speed mastered LP.

That sparkle used to thrill me forty years ago. Now it makes me roll our eyes — what the hell were they thinking, boosting the hell out of the top end like that?

And why can’t so many audiophiles today, still in thrall to that sound, recognize how unnatural it is and was?

The short answer: vintage audio equipment needs that extra kick.

Most audiophiles have not taken sufficient advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last twenty or so years and so must find records that give them the boost their deficient audio systems need.

Those of us — and that includes many of you or you wouldn’t be spending all your money on Hot Stampers — have systems that find dramatically more information in the grooves of our records than we ever dreamed was there.

We then get that information to go through our electronics and come out of our speakers with far more energy and far less distortion than we could in the past.

Lee Herschberg, Engineer Extraordinaire

One of the top guys at Warners, Lee Herschberg recorded What Once Were Vices… (along with Donn Landee, who recorded their previous album and would take over the engineering duties on subsequent releases) as well as the first Doobie Brothers album.

You’ll also find his name in the credits for many of the best releases by Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Gordon Lightfoot, and Frank Sinatra, albums we know to have outstanding sound (potentially anyway; if you’re on this site you know very well that you have to have an outstanding pressing to hear outstanding sound).

And of course we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the album most audiophiles know all too well, Rickie Lee Jones’ debut. Herschberg’s pop and rock engineering credits run for pages. Won the Grammy for Strangers in the Night in fact.

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Time Loves a Hero May Be Transparent in the Midrange, But So What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

After playing a killer Hot Stamper pressing of the album many years ago, we wrote the following: 

If you own the Nautilus Half-Speed, a record we actually liked years ago even after we had forsworn those kinds of pressings, you are really in for a treat. THIS is what the band sounds like in the REAL world, not the phony audiophile world that so many of our fellow hobbyists appear to be perfectly happy living in.

Just listen to how punchy the drums are on the real pressings, a perfect example of what proper mastering does well and Half-Speed mastering does poorly.

When you listen to a top quality pressing, you feel that you are hearing this music EXACTLY the way Little Feat wanted it to be heard. I just don’t get that vibe from the Half-Speed.

I was fooled back in the day myself. The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.

It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. That’s how they get those audiophile records to sound the way they do.

For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with sloppy bass.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with those qualities and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with sound like that.

Further Reading on the subject of Half-Speed mastering

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Letter of the Week – “The sound was simply amazing! I was listening to the master tapes!”

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

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

Hey Tom, 

The Doobie Brothers album “Livin’ on the Fault Line” has been my favorite album from one of my favorite bands of all time. It is full of great songs, phenomenal musicianship, and Michael McDonald at his best.

As a retiree who has very modest means today I have “shot out” more than a dozen copies of this lp and have a very good copy and backup. So last week Tom put up a double sided Triple Plus White Hot Stamper of “Livin’ on the Fault Line”. Could it be THAT much better than my best copy considering that my copy was the best of over a dozen and when played really sounds great? AND the Better Records copy would be almost 100 times the cost of my used record store “finds”.

But I couldn’t resist so I pushed the button and the Better Records White Hot copy arrived yesterday. I couldn’t wait to play it. It was in minty condition. I heated up the rig and sat down and laid my Jan Allearts “needle” (economy model $3000 cartridge with its Fritz Geiger stylus, ruby cantilever and hand wound gold coils that extract just about everything a record groove contains) on the band of the song “Little Darlin”.

Suddenly Michael McDonald was in the room in front of me. The sound was simply amazing! TOTALLY transparent. Dynamics were fantastic…..harmonics were great without losing the high end or low end to the midrange. I was listening to the master tapes!

Now this record was not one of the Doobies biggies. It’s a sleeper… a lot were made but you can find them easily and the used prices in bins are dirt cheap. Your average copy sounds pretty good and a good one sounds great BUT this White Hot Stamper just put ALL of them to shame!

This makes it a RARE find and Tom has alluded to how he hasn’t found many that sound this good. And that brings me to the thing that is most disturbing about collecting vinyl (forget CDs)… WHY could the record companies do such a really poor job shipping a majority of poor to good records when they also shipped a minority of fantastic Hot Stamper LP’s. I could say it’s the 80/20 rule where 20% of anything is great and 80% of everything is much less to awful. Like you want your car mechanic or your brain surgeon to be in the 20%! Then with vinyl you have to find the small percentage of the 20% that survived stems, twigs, coke, and horrible record players that destroyed most of all the records ever produced including the 20%.

But hey… there’s Tom Port and Better Records to do the hard work of finding a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage.

Are they expensive? Sure.

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What to Listen For on Another Passenger

More of the Music of Carly Simon

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Carly Simon

There’s one quality in particular that added immensely to our enjoyment of the music — gobs and gobs of Tubey Magic.

The copies that were opaque, dry, flat and “modern” sounding — which pretty much describes practically every Heavy Vinyl record we’ve played in the last five years — bored us to tears, not surprisingly in the very same way that most Heavy Vinyl does.

This is 1976, they were still making good records then. You would hardly know it by playing the average pressing of the album, but when you hear one like this, there is no mistaking the richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality.

These are qualities for which good tube equipment is rightly revered. (We no longer use tube equipment ourselves, preferring to be guided by the approach of reproducing the Tubey Magic of the records we play — assuming there is some — unadorned.)

Most pressings get Carly’s voice all wrong — gritty, edgy, hard and strained, but not this one. Carly’s singing on this copy is smoother, sweeter, more immediate and clearly more emotionally compelling than we heard on the other copies in our shootout.

We call this Master Tape Sound; you hear it on those rare pressings so far beyond the norm that the music seems to come to life right in front of you, right there in your very own listening room.

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