Top Producers

Foreigner – Double Vision

More of the Music of Foreigner

  • This vintage copy will show you just how good Foreigner’s second album can sound on vinyl, with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • If you own the Half-Speed or any modern reissue, you won’t believe how much bigger, clearer and more energetic this pressing is
  • Keith Olsen produced and engineered – he’s the man behind the amazing sound of Buckingham/Nicks and Fleetwood Mac (1975)
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “Foreigner promptly followed up its blockbuster debut with the equally successful Double Vision LP in 1978, which featured the FM mega-hits ‘Hot Blooded’ and the driving title track.”
  • If you’re an Arena Rock fan, this title from 1978 is surely a Must Own

As I’m sure you know, there is a Mobile Fidelity Half-Speed Mastered version of this album currently in print, and an older one from the days when their records were pressed in Japan (052).

We haven’t played the latter in years; as I recall it was as lifeless and sucked-out in the midrange as most of the other MoFis of that period, notably The Doors (051) and Trick of the Tail (062). Is there any doubt that the new MoFi will be every bit as bad or worse? If any of our Hot Stamper customers have purchased the current release, I would be interested in hearing how you think it stacks up against this copy. (more…)

Billy Joel – The Stranger

More of the Music of Billy Joel

  • This vintage pressing of Joel’s 1977 breakthrough album (thanks, Phil!) is doing most right, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them
  • Tonally correct, solid, open, clear, with plenty of hard-rockin’ energy and present vocals (particularly on side two), what’s not to like?
  • “The Stranger,” “Only the Good Die Young,” “Vienna,” “Just The Way You Are,” “Movin’ Out,” “She’s Always A Woman” – some of Joel’s strongest songwriting can be found right here
  • We are especially big fans of the songs “Vienna,” a top track that often flies under the radar in body of work
  • 4 1/2 stars: “None of his ballads have been as sweet or slick as ‘Just the Way You Are’; he never had created a rocker as bouncy or infectious as ‘Only the Good Die Young’; and the glossy production of ‘She’s Always a Woman’ disguises its latent misogynist streak… Joel rarely wrote a set of songs better than those on The Stranger, nor did he often deliver an album as consistently listenable.”

We recently completed a shootout for the album and this was one of the better copies we heard. After playing a stack of mediocre Strangers, we are completely confident in saying that you’ll have a very hard time finding a copy that sounds this good.

The Stranger is chock full of some of Joel’s biggest hits, including Just The Way You Are, Movin’ Out, Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, Only The Good Die Young and She’s Always A Woman. AMG raves about this one (4 1/2 stars) and it’s easy to see why — this is the kind of pop music that still sounds fresh 40 years (!) after it was recorded and might just be good for another forty years. (more…)

This Tsar Saltan Is Diffuse, Washed Out, Veiled, and Vague

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at most)

Year ago we cracked open the Speakers Corner pressing of The Tale of Tsar Saltan in order to see how it would fare in a head to head comparison with a pair of wonderful sounding Londons we were in the process of shooting out at the time. Here are the differences we heard.

The soundstage, rarely much of a concern to us at here at Better Records but nevertheless instructive in this case, shrinks roughly 25% with the new pressing. Depth and ambience are reduced by about the same amount.

But what really bothered me was this:

The sound was just so vague.

There was a cloud of musical instruments, some here, some there, but they were very hard to SEE. On the Londons we played they were clear. You could point to each and every one. On this pressing that kind of pinpoint imaging was simply nowhere to be found. (Here are some other records that are good for testing vague imaging.)

Case in point: the snare drum, which on this recording is located toward the back of the stage, roughly halfway between dead center and the far left of the hall. As soon as I heard it on the reissue I recognized how blurry and smeary it was relative to the clarity and immediacy it had on the earlier London pressings we’d played. I’m not sure how else to describe it — diffuse, washed out, veiled — just vague.

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

This particular Heavy Vinyl reissue is more or less tonally correct, which is not something you can say about many reissues these days. In that respect it’s tolerable and even enjoyable. I guess for thirty bucks it’s not a bad deal.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocre sound?

Yes, the cutting systems being used nowadays to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.

Are the tapes too old and worn?

Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?

Could the real master tape not be found, and a safety copy used to master the album instead?

To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.

We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them. If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue, we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot. (Someone did, which proves it can be done!)

Back in 2011 we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl and most other audiophile LPs of all kinds. (These we like.)

So many of them don’t even sound this good, and this kind of sound bores us to tears.

(more…)

Billy Joel – An Innocent Man

More of the Music of Billy Joel

  • This copy was doing everything right, with both sides earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
  • Dynamic and open, with driving rhythmic energy – this early pressing brings this great batch of songs to life
  • Jam packed with hits: “An Innocent Man,” “The Longest Time,” “Tell Her About It,” “Uptown Girl,” “Leave a Tender Moment Alone,” and more – seven singles in all
  • “An Innocent Man remained on the U.S. Pop album chart for 111 weeks, becoming Joel’s longest charting studio album behind The Stranger.”
  • 4 stars: “…he’s effortlessly spinning out infectious, memorable melodies in a variety of styles, from the Four Seasons send-up ‘Uptown Girl’ and the soulful ‘Tell Her About It’ to a pair of doo wop tributes, ‘The Longest Time’ and ‘Careless Talk.’ Joel has rarely sounded so carefree either in performance or writing, possibly due to ‘Christie Lee’ Brinkley, a supermodel who became his new love prior to An Innocent Man.”

(more…)

Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

  • You’ll find INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this early Asylum pressing
  • Lots of Tubey Magic, textured synths, big bass and breathy vocals – this copy brings Joni’s jazzy folky fusion to life
  • Check out the big bottom end on “The Jungle Line,” which features the Drummers Of Burundi
  • Who made a more original, forward looking and interesting album in 1975 than this? I can’t think of anyone, can you?
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records [as difficult as it is brilliant] … a strange and beautiful fusion of jazz and shimmering avant pop.”

Both sides here are airy, open, and spacious, with plenty of ambience. The bottom end is tight and punchy throughout with good solid weight, and the top end is silky sweet. Many copies of this album have a phony hi-fi “glare” that made us wince, but the sound here is warm and natural.

After hearing a few copies that bored us to tears years ago we had pretty much given up on finding good sound for this album, but once we found some truly hot Hot Stampers we found ourselves really enjoying this sophisticated Jazzy Folk Pop music.

(more…)

Remain In Light on Ridiculously Bad Sounding Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this awful pressing shortly after its release in 2006. More proof, as if more were needed, that Heavy Vinyl collectors have lost their minds.

A more accurate formulation might be that such collectors can’t tell a good record from a bad one. If they could, the number owning this pressing would be a fraction of that seen below, as would the number who want it. Let’s take a deeper dive into the actual evidence for its desirability:

More than 10,000 Discogs members have this album, almost two thousand would like to own it, and the consensus is that it is an outstanding reissue, having earned a grade of 4.66 out of 5 from 735 members. (Don’t worry, I won’t show you what they had to say about it, but you are welcome to go to Discogs and read it yourself.)

With an average price of 25 bucks, what is keeping those 1948 potential buyers from pulling the trigger? Seems affordable to me. Inflation has gone up 62+% since 2006, making the album cheaper now than if you had bought it when it came out.

Our 2006 Review

The Rhino Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album was deemed dead on arrival the minute it hit my turntable.

No top, way too much bottom, dramatically less ambience than the average copy — this one is a disaster on every level.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins. 

(more…)

An Amazing Recording Held Back by Truly Awful Mercury Mastering

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

This Mercury 35mm recording was released through Philips after they’d bought the Mercury label back in the 60s.

Philips would go on to release the mostly dreadful Golden Import pressings that were made from all the most famous Mercury recordings, but of course they sounded a great deal more like Philips recordings than Mercury recordings once they had been remastered.

Some things never change. Do you like the sound Steve Hoffman brought to the DCC vinyl releases? You can be sure you will get plenty of that sound and very little of any other. We call that My-Fi. Once we learned to recognize it, something we admit took us longer than it should have, we became ardently opposed to it.

If you think that the right way to remaster records is to make them sound more like you want them to sound and less like the scores of vintage pressings sounded before, you and I are clearly in different camps. (One listen to a Hot Stamper pressing may be all that it takes to get you to switch camps.)

This album was recorded by Robert Fine and Wilma Cozart, then mastered by George Piros, all members of the legendary Mercury team, revered by the audiophile cognoscentias as true giants , and with good reason. We count ourselves among Mercury’s biggest fans.

It is instructive to note that the Philips mastering in this case is dramatically superior to the mediocre Mercury mastering by Robert Fine, which may strike you as counterintuitive, but is nonetheless a fact that cannot be denied once you have played a sufficient number of copies of each version, as we have.

(more…)

Ravel / Concerto in G – Munch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ravel Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We just played a clean, early Shaded Dog pressing of LSC 2271, featuring Ravel’s Concerto in G.

Although it is a good sounding record, we do not believe it is very likely to be a great one.

If you own the record, play it and see if it still holds up. Our latest purchase didn’t.

There may be great sounding pressings of it, but at the price clean copies command these days, $100 and up, we have decided that pursuing this title is no longer in anyone’s interest.

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

(more…)

Queen – A Day At the Races

More of the Music of Queen


  • Boasting INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from top to bottom, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage UK pressing
  • We shot out a number of other imports and the midrange presence, bass, and dynamics on this outstanding copy placed it head and shoulders above most other pressings we played
  • You may be interested in reading about a copy very much like this one that fell short in one aspect of sound important to us (and we hope you as well)
  • Forget the domestic pressings – they may be cut at Sterling, but they never sound like these shockingly good British LPs
  • “A Day at the Races is a bit tighter than its predecessor… its sleek, streamlined finish is the biggest indication that Queen has entered a new phase, where they’re globe-conquering titans instead of underdogs on the make.”
  • If you’re a Queen fan, their 1976 followup to A Night at the Opera is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1976 that we’ve reviewed to date — more than one hundred as of 2026 — can be found here

Forget the dubby domestic pressings and whatever crappy Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days — the UK LPs are the only way to fly.

(more…)

The Rolling Stones – Self-Titled

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last on this outstanding pressing of The Stones’ 1964 release – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness and presence on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • This is the real, honest sound of the early, early Stones
  • “The Stones’ debut knocked The Beatles from the chart summit… They were on their way.” – BBC Review
  • If you’re a fan of the early Stones, their debut from 1964 belongs in your collection.

The best word I could use to sum up both the sound and the music on this record is HONEST. If you want to hear how early Rolling Stones records sound when they sound right, this is the ticket. This is the real sound of the early, early Stones.

Probably what any modern engineer would want to do to the album would only end up making it worse. It is what it is and that’s good enough for us. Since the tapes are now more than 60 years old, no modern reissue will sound remotely as good as this one.

The Stones wanted their stuff to sound like the old Blues albums they grew up on and revered, and with that sound in mind you can’t argue that they didn’t succeed here.

(more…)