Glyn Johns, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Harry Moss Cut These UK Stampers for Hey Jude – How Did He Go So Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Now with a couple of shootouts for both Hey Jude and the 1967-1970 compilation album under our belts, our main listening guy thinks the versions of the overlapping songs on Hey Jude are a little more fun.

He said that, all things being equal, the best pressings of Hey Jude might be a little more exciting while the best pressings of The Blue Album are a little more polite.

Here is how we described a recent shootout winning copy:

An amazing 10-song compilation from 1970 of some of the band’s biggest and best hits – “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Paperback Writer,” “Lady Madonna,” and the iconic title track among them.

Longtime customers know that we had never been able to offer this title up until 2022 – it took us twenty years to figure out what the right pressings are, and believe me, we had to go through a lot of crap to find them.

If you know the album at all, you know how bad it sounds on the average copy, and my guess is you just gave up on the idea of finding good sound for these songs, which is more or less the way we felt too, but we finally found what we were looking for, and here it is.

However, some stampers are disappointing as you can see from this section of the stamper sheet we compiled for the shootout.

Harry T. Moss, the man with the initials HTM you see above, is the Parlophone/Apple engineer who cut many of the greatest sounding Beatles albums ever made (and plenty of not-so-great sounding ones, which is why you either need to do your own shootouts or have us do them for you).

Seems at though at least some of the work he did for the Hey Jude album is not his best. We awarded both sides a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+, which means the sound is passable at best, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning it would probably not even earn that one plus.)

We do not sell records with 1+ grades; you can find those on your own. The world is full of them.

Our notes for this pressing read:

  • Too midrangey and compressed
  • Heavy tape or tube saturation, side two especially

Your only other option for hearing some of this music with top quality sound is on the 1967-1970 compilation album, the Hot Stamper pressings of which have only recently been discovered.

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Are All the Original Asylum Pressings of Desperado Demo Discs?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

No, and this should come as not much of a surprise to anyone that’s bought records from us or spent much time reading this blog.

As you can see from the notes below for this particular pressing of Desperado, both sides are passable, earning a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+.

It’s a decent sounding copy I suppose, but a long, long, long way from the best.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Desperado can be on the best vintage pressings.

To see more records that earned the 1.5+ grade, please click here.

Incidentally, some of them are even on Heavy Vinyl. The better modern pressings have sometimes, if rarely, been known to earn Hot Stamper grades, and one shocked the hell out of us by actually winning a shootout. Wouldn’t you like to know which one!

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

Desperado Is a True Super Disc 

Of course, the best sound on an Eagles record is found on the first album. For whatever reason, that record was left off the TAS super disc list, even though we feel that both musically and sonically it beats this one by a bit.

On the TAS Super Disc list. Harry Pearson recommends the British SYL pressings for this album. SYL pressings can sound very good; in fact, one of the top copies from a recent (2024) shootout was SYL. A bit of a surprise since our champion for both sides during the previous shootout was domestic.

Does that mean the best domestics will always beat the best SYL pressings? Not at all. Only critical listening can separate the superb pressings from the typical ones. After playing more than a dozen copies of this album this week, we can definitively tell you that there are far more mediocre copies of this record — both domestic and import — than truly exceptional ones. The typical pressing of this album, whether the domestic or SYL, falls far short of belonging on a Super disc list.

There are killer domestic copies and killer SYL imports out there, and the only way to know which ones sound good is to collect ’em, clean ’em, and play ’em.

Remember: TAS list doesn’t guarantee great sound, but Better Records does — if you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve stated, we’ll always happily take that record back and refund your money. Good luck getting ol’ Harry to send you a check when the TAS-approved pressings you pick up don’t deliver.

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Robert Brook Revisits a White Hot Stamper Pressing of The Eagles

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is a posting Robert wrote many years ago and has recently updated.

EAGLES: WHITE HOT and SOARING HIGHER!

A quote I rather liked:

You can throw a Hot Stamper onto your rig and hear that it sounds better than your crappy “audiophile” 180g reissue, but when you compare it to your high res digital file, you’re not quite sure which one you like better.

The digital vs. analog debate, perhaps the most enduring in all of audio, persists because only a handful of audiophiles have truly realized the full potential of analog in their systems.

You may be reading this thinking “hey whad’ya mean! My analog system sounds great!.” And it very well may sound great, but I thought and still think that my copy of Eagles sounds great, and let me tell you, the White Hot Stamper is a WHOLE new platter of wax!

The tubey jangle of the guitars, the room filling weight of the drums and bass, the airy, spacious, luscious vocal harmonies, and every last sumptuous element of the mix, unmoored, liberated from obscuration so completely that the music, freed from every conceivable resolution constraint, SOARS to life in the listening room.

That’s what this White Hot Stamper of Eagles sounds like, and that’s what analog is ALL ABOUT!

This record, The Dude be damned, is one of my all time favorites. It’s a delicious recording on even a decent copy. My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Here is our description of a recent copy that is up on the site at this time.

Super Hot and $699 — affordable maybe for some, certainly not cheap, but as Robert makes clear in his review, one of the most amazing sounding recordings in the history of popular music on the right pressing, and the right pressings are the only ones we offer.

The notes for our Shootout Winning copy from 2024 can be seen at the very end of this post. Side two was a “strong 3+, ” which we would have called 4+, Beyond White Hot, way back when, but we stopped doing that many years ago.

Side two was HTF — Hard To Fault. This may have been the side two that Robert is raving about in his review.

My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Can’t argue with any of that! That’s what we heard too.

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The True Test for Side Two (and How Wrong We Were about Domestic Pressings) of Backless

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

During our shootout we discovered that the true test for side two was the second track, the old blues song Early In The Morning.

It’s by far the best sounding track on the album, with huge space, rich bass, a fat snare and Tubey Magic to die for. This is the kind of sound that the likes of Glyn Johns gets down on tape, live in the studio no doubt, and it made it easy to do the shootout for side two.

The bigger, the richer, the tubier, the more transparent the better. It’s THE track to demo with. 

Both sides have rich, smooth, clear sound. Listen for the guitars on the first track on side one; the grungier the better. Punchy bass too.

Turn It Up and Let It Rock

The typical pressing of Backless, much like the typical pressing of Slowhand, is just too thick, dull, compressed and veiled to be much fun.

At the very least you need to turn this album up good and loud to get it to do anything.

The copies that are solid and weighty love getting loud; the copies that are thin and bright only get worse as the level goes up, a sign that they leave a lot to be desired. This is a rock album after all.

We Was Wrong

We used to note the following regarding the country that produced the best sounding pressings:

We had top quality copies on both domestic and British vinyl. Both were cut here in L.A.. It makes sense that either can be good.

This should have been corrected a long time ago, as far back as 2017, perhaps earlier. The domestic copies, thought cut at The Mastering Lab, are not competitive with the British LPs also cut there and then sent to England for pressing.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

We may have liked the domestic pressings a long time ago, but with changes to the system and many shootouts under our belts, the sonic superiority of the Brits cannot be denied.

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How Does the Abbey Road Half-Speed of Sticky Fingers Sound?

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

A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced this way:

If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazingly well-recorded an album it is.

It is truly a landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns / Chris Kimsey recording, as well as our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and one that earned 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).

5 stars: “With its offhand mixture of decadence, roots music, and outright malevolence, Sticky Fingers set the tone for the rest of the decade for the Stones.”

However, we found the new Half-Speed Heavy Vinyl pressing mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road to be seriously lacking in “outright malevolence.” It’s so tame that even at high volume it would be unlikely to disturb the most innocuous afternoon tea in the back garden of a country estate.

Brown Sugar is:

  • It’s smaller
  • Not as weighty or lively
  • Tonally pretty close

Sway is:

  • Tonally pretty close
  • Just missing some weight and dynamics

Oh, is that all? Well then, not as bad as it could have been, right?

1.5+, which means it would qualify for our lowest Hot Stamper grade. But no record that does not earn at least that grade on both sides can make it to our site, and when we flipped the album over, side two let us down even more than side one.

Bitch is:

  • A little sandy up top

I Got the Blues is:

  • Missing the dynamics

Grade for side two: 1+. Substandard. Not good enough to sell.

Usually our notes are filled with disgust about how awful sounding the current crop of remastered pressings tends to be.

Those interested in reading such notes have plenty to choose from. Here are some from 2024 through 2025. (At some point this year the number of awful sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve reviewed will hit 200!)

But this version isn’t awful. It’s just not very good. The sound quality is middling.

The sound of other audiophile pressings of Sticky Fingers, including one mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig, was much, much worse.

As far as audiophiles are concerned, this new release should be regarded as nothing more than a waste of money.

The Question Before the House

We’ve asked this question before, but it’s worth asking again:

Can this really be the sound audiophiles are clamoring for?

It shouldn’t be, but apparently it is.

However, it’s not as though we haven’t run into this issue hundreds and hundreds of times before. Audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them regularly rave about one Heavy Vinyl pressing after another being The Greatest of All Time, yet we have never found a single instance in which this was true for any of the modern reissues they have seen fit to crown.

Except for this one.

Three Little Words

Our explanation for the mistaken judgments audiophiles and reviewers make so consistently has never been all that complicated. As you may have read elsewhere on this blog:

More evidence, if any were needed, that the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?

No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.

You must keep testing all the reissues you can find, and you must keep testing all the originals you can find.

Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of very special records. That’s why you must do them.

Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us), you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances where you just got lucky. In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.

If you would like to hear what you’ve been missing, there’s a small chance we have a Hot Stamper pressing of the album in stock.

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Letter of the Week – “I haven’t felt better listening to an album in decades.”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

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

Hey Tom,  

Just a quick note to thank you for the extraordinary copy of “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.” I won’t enumerate all the remarkable qualities of the pressing since you know them well. I’ll just say that I haven’t felt better listening to an album in decades. What a remarkable experience.

By the way, since I bought this as a birthday present for my brother please let me know if another copy of equal or better quality becomes available. You know how this copy made my Londons and Japanese pressing sound. (more…)

Talk About Getting the Sound Wrong – What Was Decca Thinking?

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

Even though we know that the UK Decca pressings have not done well in our shootouts for more years than I care to remember, if we see one for cheap locally you know we’re going to buy it and get it another chance at the brass ring no matter how many times it’s failed in the past.

As you can see from our shootout notes, the Decca import has once again let us down.

It’s bright, with no warmth or weight. It’s not musical like the London pressings with the right stampers are.

If a certain kind of audiophile were to play this record, the kind of audiophile who might be given to simplistic conclusions based on insufficiently small sets of data — which, in our experience, pretty much covers the entire audiophile record collector community, including, if not especially, the so-called expert reviewers — the conclusion such a person might reach is that Beggars Banquet is just not very well recorded.

If Decca pressings don’t sound good, what on earth would?

Or, to put it another way, if Decca, the label that the Stones recorded this album for, can’t figure out how to make Beggars sound its best, why would we assume that any other company could?

We would, naturally, assume that Decca did the best they could with the tape and the mediocre quality of the sound you hear — 1+/1.5+ is pretty much our definition of mediocre — is all there is.

The Option that Is Almost Always Wrong

Worse — if a new Heavy Vinyl pressing of the album came out with even halfway-decent sound, then it would prove beyond a doubt that some modern mastering engineer had finally figured out how to get Beggars to sound right.

But of course it would prove no such thing.

If all you have to guide you is conventional collector wisdom, then the one thing you can be sure of is that the Decca pressing from the UK should have better sound than any other, especially any record made in the states.

But it doesn’t. It’s possible I suppose – we haven’t played every pressing ever made – but it sure is unlikely based on the evidence presented to our ears over the course of the last twenty to thirty years or so.

If you would like to hear Beggars Banquet sound right, and have the hundreds of dollars we charge for a copy that is guaranteed to sound right or your money back, click on the link. It’s rare that we have one in stock, but you never know.

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How Does the Brass Sound on Your Copy of Sticky Fingers?

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

The best copies have texture and real dynamics in the brass.

The bad copies are smeared, grainy and unpleasant when the brass comes in.

Toss those bad ones and start shooting out the good ones.

Believe me, if you find a good one it will be worth all the work.

One customer observed that the recording was “deliberately a bit muddy and smeared…” and he was mostly right about that. We replied as follows;

You are spot on with your observation about the sound being deliberately muddy.

Glyn Johns loves his tube compressors. They can make some tracks murkier than many of us would like, but they work positive wonders most of the time.

A lot of the smearing you reference is from uncleaned or improperly cleaned vinyl. Once we got our cleaning regimen dialed in, a lot of the smear we used to hear so often stopped being a problem.

3-Dimensionality also greatly improves with clean, fully restored vinyl. A lot of old records just sound like old records until you learn how to clean them right.

Play It Loud

Even through the noise of the bad vinyl you can hear the audio magic. The sound is exactly what you want from a Stones album: deep punchy bass and dynamic grungy guitars.

This record is to be played loud like it says on the inner sleeve and the surface noise is to be ignored.

The louder you play it, the less bothersome the noise will be.

This album ROCKS and it was not made to be listened to in a comfy chair with a glass of wine.

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Listening in Depth to The Eagles’ Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

We consider this album a Masterpiece.

It’s a recording that belongs in any serious rock music collection.

Let’s talk about the specifics of some of the tracks.

Side One

Take It Easy

On most copies the vocals in the chorus will be a little bit strained. When you hear the vocals sound completely free from harmonic distortion or “edge” of any kind, you have yourself an exceptionally well-mastered, well-pressed copy.

Witchy Woman 

Witchy Woman is one of the key test tracks we use for side one. Take It Easy, the opening song, often sounds amazingly good — it’s got that driving beat and those acoustic guitars and it just seems to be one of those songs that usually sounds right on the original pressings.

Witchy Woman starts out with huge, powerful drums: they should just knock you out. Next comes an acoustic guitar with a lot of echo: the more echo the better, because that means the pressing has lots of resolution. The echo is on the tape, and the more of the tape that ends up on the record the better. Then comes the vocal. It should not be too bright, spitty or grainy. The vocals also have tons of ambience surrounding them on the best copies.

This is a HUGE Demo Quality track. If this song doesn’t knock your socks off something is not working right.

Chug All Night 
Most of Us Are Sad 
Nightingale

Side Two

Train Leaves Here This Morning 

This is my favorite track on the album. In fact I like it so much I think it’s the best Eagles song ever recorded. (Dillard and Clark recorded it on their album as well.) The acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies on this track are simply as good as it gets. If somebody can play me a CD that sounds like this I will eat it.

Take the Devil 
Early Bird 

This is another tough track to master properly. The mix is very complicated, and there’s a banjo that figures prominently in it. Getting that banjo to sound musical is the trick. The bass is very rich on the best copies. On those copies that are a bit on the lean side, the banjo can take on an edgy and aggressive quality.

The best copies get the banjo JUST RIGHT and place it perfectly in the mix. On The Border, their third album and my personal favorite, makes wonderful use of the banjo. When the band changed their sound to take them in the direction of more straight ahead rock (One of These Nights) they lost me. The public felt differently, sending the album to Number One in the charts, which set the stage for the monster success of Hotel California.

Peaceful Easy Feeling 
Tryin’

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Letter of the Week – “Un******believable that any record could sound that good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

I want to tell you I bought America’s 1st LP from you some couple of years back. White Hot designation at that time. I don’t know if you have found one better since then.

Paid big dollars and I still cannot believe the sound. Worth every penny. 

When I play that LP, I cannot avoid getting goose bumps or getting totally enveloped with the music. The guitars and vocals are flat out surreal.

It is just as amazing as the Eagles 1st LP Hot Stamper. Un******believable that any record could sound that good.

Bill 

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I know exactly what you mean. In 1971 or 1972 I got my first copy of America and it quickly became a record I could not get enough of.

I didn’t discover how hot the first Eagles album could sound until about 2000. That’s how long it took me to stumble upon the original white label Asylum pressing.

Before then all I had heard were the blue label reissues, and most of those are unimpressive to say the least.

Since then we have written in some depth about the album, which you can read all about here if so inclined.

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