Ken Scott, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Ziggy Stardust Broke the Price Barrier in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

UPDATE 2024

The following is our 2007 commentary for the best Ziggy Stardust we had ever heard up to that time. Note that for the most part we were playing early British pressings back in those days, a mistake we did not know we were making. (Heroes was the same way, and it took us another ten years to figure out that one.)

In 2007, all we had to go by was the conventional wisdom that the original UK pressings on the RCA orange label should be the best, so that’s mostly what we were playing. I’m not even sure what pressing won this long-ago shootout. 

Looking back in 2024, it’s obvious to us that we had a great deal more research and development to do.

As best as I can tell, it would take us about ten more years to discover the pressings, like this one, that, based on our database going all the way back to 2017, consistently win our shootouts.

This RCA Import has DRAMATICALLY better sound than any Ziggy LP we’ve ever played here at Better Records. Whatever you think you know about the sound of this record, THINK AGAIN. The sound of this copy is so far beyond any expectation I had that hearing it was nothing short of a REVELATION. It’s TWO FULL GRADES better than any copy we played in our shootout.

After hearing this copy we had to lower our grades for every other pressing we had played. This was a completely new standard. (more…)

We Was Wrong About the Imports of Birds of Fire

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz-Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

In our shootout from 2021, we asked the question:

British or domestic?

The answer we gave was incorrect. At the time we wrote:

Both can be good in our experience. For a while we were convinced that the British originals were the way to go, but since then we’ve found domestic pressings that were their equal. We do the same shootouts over and over, and it’s not unusual for the rules to get broken. The records tell us their stories. Our job is to keep our minds and our ears open enough to hear what they are trying to say.

Now, in 2024, having just done the shootout, it’s clear to us that the early Brits are clearly a step up sonically over even the best domestics we have on hand. The domestics can earn a Super Hot (A++) grade, but it is unlikely — although you never know! — that they will earn the third plus it takes to win a shootout.

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

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Listening in Depth to the White Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

It’s exceedingly difficult to find audiophile quality sound on The White Album. The Beatles were breaking apart, often recording independently of each other, with their own favorite engineers as enablers, and George Martin nowhere to be found most of the time. They were also experimenting more and more with sound itself, which resulted in wonderful songs and interesting effects. However, these new approaches and added complexity often result in a loss of sonic “purity.”

Let’s face it, most audiophiles like simplicity: A female vocal, a solo guitar — these things are easy to reproduce and often result in pleasing sound, the kind of sound that doesn’t take a lot of expensive equipment or much effort to reproduce.

Dense mixes with wacky EQ are hard to reproduce (our famous difficulty of reproduction scale comes into play here), and the White Album is full of that sound, taking a break for songs like Blackbird and Julia.

Some of the Tubey Magic that you hear on Pepper is gone for good. (Play With a Little Help from My Friends on a seriously good Hot Stamper pressing to see what has been lost forever. Lovely Rita would probably work just as well, too.)

Side One

Looks at the lineup for side one. Is there a rock album on the planet with a better batch of songs?

Having done shootouts for the White Album by the score, we can also say with some certainty that side one is the most difficult side to find White Hot stamper sound for. It’s somewhat rare to find a side one that earns our top Triple Plus (A+++) sonic grade, even when all the other sides do. (Actually what happens more often than not is that we take the best second discs and mate them with the best first discs to make the grades consistent for the whole album. But don’t tell anybody.) (more…)

Are Your Cellists Digging In on I Am the Walrus?

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles’ Music Available Now

This commentary was written many years ago.

Over the last decade I Am The Walrus has evolved into a good test for side one, a fact that came as a complete surprise to me. As I was listening to the various copies in a shootout years ago I noted that the opening cellos and basses in the right channel were often tonally identical from copy to copy, but sounded quite a bit more lively and energetic on some pressings relative to others. Was it EQ? Level? Compression?  

Why so much more passion from the players on some copies and not others?

As I tried to puzzle it out, playing first one copy and then another, it became clear to me what was happening. The cellists and the bassists were just plain digging HARDER into the strings on the best copies. When you see live classical music, the cellists at the front of the orchestra are usually sawing away with abandon when the music is really going. They dig their bows hard into the strings to make them vibrate as loud as possible. To make their instruments heard in the back row it becomes a matter of muscle, of pure physical exertion.

So armed with the copies where the string players are working the hardest, I checked the other tracks. Sure enough, the opening cut, MMT, jumped out of the speakers with the most energy I had heard on any copy. As I went through the tracks one by one, they had the most life of any of the copies I had been listening to. To use a word that was popular at the time, the music was HAPPENING.

This was the final piece to the puzzle. Tonality always comes first. Frequency extension; lack of distortion; rich, powerful bass — these are important qualities as well. But the life of the music is in the micro and macro dynamics, and that is what I had not been paying sufficient attention to during the shootout.

That was until I listened to Walrus and heard the players working up a good healthy sweat. Then I knew I had a Hot Stamper. And when I played the not-so-Hot Stampers, the string guys sounded like session musicians picking up a paycheck.

Where was their passion? Didn’t they realize they were making a classic?

If you get the right pressing they sure were!

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Listening for Harmonically Correct Acoustic Guitars on America’s Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

The guitars on this record are a true test of stereo fidelity. As it says below, most of the pressings of this record do not get the guitars to sound right. They often sound veiled and dull, and on a copy with a bit too much top end they will have an unnatural hi-fi-ish sparkle.

This kind of sparkle can be heard on many records Mobile Fidelity made in the ’70s and ’80s. Tea for the Tillerman, Sundown, Year of the Cat, Finger Paintings, Byrd at the Gate, Quarter Moon in a 10 Cent Town — the list of MoFis with sparkling acoustic guitars would be very long indeed, and these are just the records with prominent acoustic guitars!

Three Roses and Rainy Day

The key song on side one that we use to test is Three Roses. There are three sonically-separated individuals each playing six string acoustic guitars, and when this side is cut right the guitars sound just gorgeous: sweet, with all their harmonic structures intact. (It’s also my favorite song on side one.)

The real test on side two is the song Rainy Day. Lots of guitars, and when the close-miked descending guitar figure comes in after the first few couplets, if it’s too bright, you’re going to know it. This song is the hardest one to cut and almost never sounds right. Some copies are cut JUST RIGHT. The vocals are breathy, the guitars are full-bodied, and the overall sound is airy, open, and spacious.

On the best copies Rainy Day is Demo Disc material — they just don’t know how to make acoustic guitars sound like that anymore. You have to go back to 50-year-old records like this one to find that sound.

Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency, all the things that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Of course, many 50 year old records are beat to death, and many of them don’t sound any good anyway. It’s no mean feat to find quiet, superb pressings of albums like this, but you can be sure that Better Records is up to the task.

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The Beatles 10 Copy Shootout – “I was near a nervous breakdown.”

More of the Music of The Beatles

Reviews and Commentaries for The White Album

Our good customer Erik in Germany purchased one of our hottest Hot Stamper White Albums ($700) and decided to do his own shootout with the ten — count ’em, ten — copies he had on hand.  

He makes a point to mention that it’s worth the seven hundred bucks he paid (plus international shipping and customs, let’s not forget, so add another 20-25% on to that figure). Some skeptics may think he’s suffering from Cognitive Dissonance, but we say there’s nothing dissonant about the kind of sound Erik describes hearing in the testimonial he sent us, as follows.

[UPDATE: We should note that for about the last ten years we have preferred the right UK pressings of the album over our previous favorite, the right German pressing. A textbook case of live and learn.]

Hello my friends,

I want to say THANK YOU for the Beatles White Album Hot Stamper. I’m so amazed and lucky – I can’t describe it. You graded it correct (A+/A++/A++/A++ to A+++) and it is worth the price, the sound is exactly “sweet, breathy vocals; well-defined bass; stunning clarity; warmth and richness; immediacy; astonishing transparency and spaciousness; clear transients; loads of ambience and more.”

I’m at the source here in good old Germany concerning the German Apple pressings, collected 10 copies (also a UK first issue and one in a box). 4 were crap, half a dozen had the condition for a shootout. But not one single side reach a rating above A-, I was near a nervous breakdown. Now this problem is solved and I can simply enjoy the album in the future.

Kind regards

Erik

Erik, so glad to hear our copy of the White Album so easily vanquished all comers. We live for letters like yours!

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 99% of the time.

It is not the least bit unusual for our customers to take another listen and become more aware of the superior sound of the Hot Stamper pressings the second time around.

When we do lose a shootout, we promptly refund the buyer’s money and wish him or her a nice day.

What do we do with the record, assuming the customer had no problem with its playing condition?

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Watch Out for 5c on Side One of The White Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

Starting as early as 1984, some pressings of The White Album came with a decidely inferior side one, 5c.

Often it was mated to an equally problematic-sounding side two, -6. Although the -6 stamper can be good, when it has 5c on side one, it’s never as good as it should be.

Even though this copy had less-than-impressive sound on sides three and four — these sides qualify as minimally Hot Stamper pressings — there is nothing inherently wrong with the -2/-3 stamper numbers for those sides.

These later pressings just don’t sound as good as the earlier ones we like.

Not that we like the originals.

The few we’ve played were terrible. They tend to have -1 or -2 stampers for the first two sides, and their mastering tends to add a lot of problems to a recording that already has more than its share.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice regarding the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. The White Album sounds its best:

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Letter of the Week – “No amount of anything can replace the joy in my being upon listening to these sounds.”

More of the Music of The Beatles

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

Hi Tom,
I just had to shoot you this quickie email. I just put on side 2 of my recently purchased WHS of the White Album.

When “I’m So Tired” came on, I found myself standing there in disbelief, mouth wide open, going are you fucking kidding me?!!

Such a simple song sounded like I have never heard it before. Unbelievable… I had not idea it could sound that good.

Simply and absolutely amazing. I am so stoked to be listening to these amazing sounds.

Thanks Again,
Michel

P.S. No amount of anything can replace the joy in my being upon listening to these sounds. I feel so lucky to be experiencing this. Never will I take any of this for granted, as it is really special. You and your team deserve a medal or something!

Michel,

Glad you liked our White Album as much as you did! We feel lucky to be able to play amazing recordings like The White Album and get paid to do it.

We never knew any copy could sound as good as the one you bought either, not until we started doing shootouts for the album around 2005, and it took us until about 2015 before we stumbled upon the right combination of stampers for all four sides. As I wrote to another letter writer:

It’s amazing how good it sounds once you know which pressings are the good ones and which to avoid.

Hint: it’s the originals that are to be avoided, but don’t tell that to the average record collecting audiophile. They will think you have lost your mind.

Thanks for your letter. By the way, no medals needed. We’re just doing our job. Once you catch on to how records work, then finding the best sounding pressings ever made is just a matter of applying the needed resources. It took a staff of half a dozen about ten years to unlock the secrets of The White Album, so if you are trying to do this on your own, you will need something like 10 times 6 man-years, or a total of 60 years if my record collector math is right.

The relatively high price you paid, $1100, covers the costs of running a business with more than ten people dedicated to buying, cleaning, and critically auditioning the greatest recordings of all time, as well as the ten years of research we had to do before we could dare to price “common rock records” for more than a thousand dollars.

The result is the record you now own and can enjoy for the rest of your life.

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Dreamer Tells You What You Need to Know About this MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

This commentary was written about 2000, when the Speakers Corner pressing had just come out. We liked it back then, but I doubt we would care much for it now.

Listen to the vocals at the end of Dreamer.

If they are too bright, the bells at the end of the song sound super-extended and harmonically clear and clean.

But at what price? Now the vocals are too bright. Which is more important, good vocals or good bells?

There has to be balance. This is something audiophiles — and audiophile labels, who should obviously know better — seem to have difficulty appreciating.

We used to get these MoFis in on a regular basis, and they usually sound as phony and wrong as can be. They’re the perfect example of a hyped-up audiophile record that appeals to people with lifeless stereos, the kind that need amped-up records to get them to come to life.

I’ve been telling people for years that the MoFi was junk, and that they should get rid of their copy and replace it with a tonally correct version, easily done since there is a very good sounding Speakers Corner 180g reissue currently in print which does not suffer from the ridiculously boosted top end and bloated bass that characterizes the typical MoFi COTC pressing.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many Half-Speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons so often turn out to be.

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way many of our older systems tended to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in a hurry.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

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Letter of the Week – “…the $900 White Album is blowing my mind…”

More of the Music of The Beatles

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

Hey Tom, 

Loving the recent records… the $900 White Album is blowing my mind… keep thinking I’m going to have to wipe Paul McCartney’s spit off my toes…

And the K. D. Lang… words fail for the sound here (not to mention the music) – it’s MASSIVE and lush.

Also, I’ll include the new AP Kind of Blue UHQR with this return for you to hear. I have been burning in a new phonostage, and my previous impressions were a bit rough and ready given that I was having to use a temporary phonostage at that time… so now I’d say that while yes there is more air in this issue/pressing than the claustrophobic and downright weird MoFi, this doesn’t sound natural; instruments (esp. horns) have no edge to them; piano and horn fade together in a single midi-like tone… see what you think and let me know.

Dear C.,

Looking forward to hearing it. Nothing could be more wrong sounding than the new MoFi Kind of Blue, but AP could certainly give it a run for its money in the weird Audiophile Remastering Race to the Bottom that these labels are currently engaged in, owing to their production of one awful Heavy Vinyl LP after another.

What you describe are the trademark sounds of bad mastering choices, which are the only kinds of choices that Analogue Productions makes it seems.

As you may have read elsewhere on this blog:

As long as Analogue Productions is around, at least no one can say that Mobile Fidelity makes the worst sounding audiophile pressings in the history of the world. They are certainly some of the worst, but not so bad that they have never made a single good sounding record, which is the title that Chad Kassem holds (to the best of our knowledge. Obviously we have only played a small fraction of the records released by him. In our defense let me say that that small fraction was all we could take.)

Thanks for your letter. That White Album was indeed killer. For $900 it had better be!

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