*Live and Learn

Here we discuss the records we think we got, uh, wrong.

It’s not really a problem for us though. We feel no need to cover up our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting previous errors is how we’ve managed to learn so much about records that no one else seems to know.

Gaining knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is always slow, incremental and riddled with errors and bad judgments.

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

By playing the records grouped here, under rigorously controlled conditions, on top quality equipment, we found out just how much better or worse they are than are we thought.

Sibelius / Finlandia – Live and Learn

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Years ago we noted how much worse the Classic Records pressing of our then current favorite Finlandia sounded when compared head to head with our best RCA Shaded Dog pressings.

We wrote:

Classic Records ruined this album. Their version is dramatically more smeared and low-rez than our good vintage pressings, with almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

Woops.

Turns out the RCA pressing we used to like was not as good as we thought, something we discovered to our chagrin in 2014.

Our current favorite pressing is on a Decca reissue label. Go figure.  When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

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Led Zeppelin – In 2008 We Had a Lot More R&D Ahead of Us

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Letters and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin III

A classic example of live and learn.

In 2008 we simply had not done our homework well enough. I had been an audiophile for at least 33 years by then, and a professional audiophile record dealer for 21, but we still hadn’t cracked the code for Zep III.

Sure, by 2008 we had auditioned plenty of the pressings that we thought were the most likely to sound good: the original and later domestic pressings, the early and later British LPs, some early and later German pressings, maybe a Japanese import or two. In other words, the usual suspects.

We already knew the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl was unbelievably bad; no need to put that in a shootout. It earned an “F” right out of the gate for its bright and harsh sound.

The result? We were roughly in the same position as most serious record collecting audiophiles, if not actually in a better one: who do you know that has played at least ten different pressing Led Zeppelin III, or any other album for that matter?

We had auditioned a number pressings of the album and thought we knew enough about the sound to pick a winner. We thought the best original British Plum and Orange label pressings had the goods that no other copies could or would have. (Years later we would get hold of another one, clean it up and put it in a shootout.)

But of course, like most audiophiles who judge records with an insufficiently large sample size, we turned out to be quite mistaken.

Logic hadn’t worked. None of the originals would end up winning another shootout once we’d discovered the right reissues.

But in 2008, we hadn’t stumbled upon the best pressings because we hadn’t put enough effort into the only approach that actually works.

What approach is that? It’s trial and error. Trial and error would eventually put us on the path to success. We had simply not conducted enough trials and made enough errors by 2008 to find out what we know now.

We hadn’t made the breakthrough we needed to make in order to know just how good the album could sound.

Can you blame us? The pressings that have been winning shootouts for years are from the wrong country (not the UK) and the wrong era (not the original).

We reproduce below the commentary for the 2008 listing that gets it wrong.

The best British originals are good records, but none of them would win a shootout these days up against the superior import pressings we discovered around 2015 or so.

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Mozart – How Do the Early Pressings Sound?

More of the Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Mozart

About fifteen years ago we really liked the original for this title with the rare cover you see pictured.

More recently we were able to acquire quite a variety of different pressings for an upcoming shootout and were fortunate to be able to include one of the stereo originals for the first time in many years. We started out with high hopes, but once it began playing, fairly quickly our hopes were dashed.

Our notes for the ori9inal pressing read:

  • Overly rich and weighty
  • Dynamics/life are gone.
  • Side two has one of the most boomy sounding pianos I’ve ever heard.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

Were we wrong years ago? Hard to say. That copy from many years ago is gone.

Three things we always keep in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound the way we remember it did, or think it should:

  1. Our standards are quite a bit higher now, having spent decades critically listening to vintage classical pressings by the hundreds.
  2. Our stereo is dramatically more revealing and more accurate than it used to be.
  3. Since no two records sound the same, maybe that one from long ago actually did sound as good as we thought at the time.

There are a lot of DG recordings that have this kind of sound. We’ve played them by the score. Most went directly into the trade bin.

We simply do not sell classical records with this kind of sound regardless of how good the performances may be.

Which brings up an assumption that many audiophiles make, especially those who spend time on forums whose members dispense advice about which pressings are most likely to have the best sound. We find such advice to be so often mistaken as to be almost worthless.

We lay out our thinking on the subject in this commentary:

The link below will take you to all the records that can sound better on the right reissue pressing, not the original:

Our Job

Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.

That’s the reason we carry:

  • No Heavy Vinyl of any kind.
  • Exactly one Half-Speed mastered title (John Klemmer’s Touch).
  • Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
  • Almost nothing made in the 21st century.

If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers.

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We Were So Sure We Had The Pink Floyd’s Ticket, But We Were Wrong

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

In a reply to some questions Robert Brook asked about Revolver and Sticky Fingers — see here and here — I made mention of the advice, found on Hoffman’s forum and other sites, that is commonly offered regarding the superiority of specific pressings of albums these posters purport to know well.

This often-arcane advice includes labels, pressing plants, stamper numbers, specific mastering credits, etc. The practice is so common that audiophiles “in the know” are now expected to share their findings with other members for the benefit of all.

That’s the background for my comment below. I was explaining where I stood with respect to the recommendations I often read, in my typically undiplomatic language:

We do not respect the opinions of those who have little understanding of records and their pressing variations. The faulty conclusions they invariably arrrive at lack evidentiary support because they don’t know how to do what we do and can’t be bothered to learn.

Regardless of what these folks believe, by now we’ve heard dozens and dozens of amazing originals [referring to Sticky Fingers]. This made us extremely skeptical that any other mastering house could compete with the right original’s sound. It was just too good.

Yes, we were skeptical, and it has turned out, at least so far, that we were right to be skeptical. Nothing has come close to the best early domestic pressings of Sticky Fingers, the ones that win shootouts and that we have long known to be the best pressings of the album.

But sometimes we are skeptical and we turn out to be wrong.

Specifically we were wrong about some albums by Pink Floyd (but not the title you see pictured). I wrote:

We’re not always correct about these things. We were dead wrong about a couple of famous Pink Floyd albums from the “wrong” country that we’d heard good things about.

They have been winning shootouts for many years now.

Our judgments concerning the best sounding pressings for any given title must be seen in the light of any information arrived at scientifically: it’s considered provisionally true. (We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.)

I felt it was important to point all this out. The impression I did not want to leave in the reader’s mind is that we know all the answers.

We don’t, and we would never pretend to.

If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section.

We regularly learn from our mistakes and we hope you do too.

Best Parts, One and Two

The best part of this job is discovering even better pressings of favorite albums than the ones we thought were the best. Yes, we love it when we are proven wrong.

The other best part of the job is discovering great recordings of wonderful music that most people have never heard of, some of which can be found here.

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This Speakers Corner Pressing Had Us Fooled

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

We were very impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001. We simply could not find a vintage pressing that could beat it. I actually took it over to a good customer’s house so that he could hear how much better the album sounded on Heavy Vinyl when played head to head with whatever vintage pressing he might have had in his collection.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. I could not have been more wrong.

His copy smoked mine right from the get-go. I wiped the egg off my face, wrote down the stamper numbers for his copy, and proceeded to get hold of some good early pressings so that I could find a copy that sounded the way his did — which was awesome, the best it had ever sounded, even on a system (Infinity speakers, Audio Research electronics) that I had never much cared for. (His system is set up in a basement with a low ceiling, a problem that cannot be solved with good equipment, room treatements or anything else for that matter.)

Eventually — eventually in this case being at least five years and maybe more —  we felt we had this album’s number and knew which pressings tended to have the goods and which ones didn’t. All that was left was to do  was to clean up the stock we had and do the shootout so that we could actually be sure, or sure enough, keeping in mind that all knowledge about records is provisional.

This would have been about 2010, and we would learn a lot, but we would keep learning more about the album with every subsequent shootouts, close to ten by now I should think.

Live and Learn

These kinds of Heavy Vinyl pressings used to sound good on older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.

Some of the records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore.

The Speakers Corner pressing is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination would it ever be able to compete with any Hot Stamper pressing you might see on our site.

Problem Solved?

Most pressings of this album are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled, smeary and full of compressor distortion in the louder parts. This is hardly a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.

The Speakers Corner pressing is not grainy, shrill, thin or distorted, but it is veiled, smeary and compressed, and all you need to do to recognize its shortcomings is compare it to a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned early pressing.

They may be rare, but there are good sounding pressings. You just have to work to find them.

Audiophile Sound to Die For

As you may have noticed, we here at Better Records are HUGE Sergio Mendes fans. Nowhere else in the world of music can you find the wonderfully diverse thrills that this group offers. We go CRAZY for the breathy multi-tracked female vocals and their layers of harmonies, the brilliant percussion, and, let us never forget, the critically important piano work and arrangements of Sergio himself.

Brasil ’66, Equinox and Stillness are ALL Desert Island Discs for us, but we enjoy the hell out of their other albums as well. This stuff never sounds dated to us. We love the albums of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao and Astrud Gilberto from the period, albums which no doubt served as templates for the style Sergio wanted to create with his new ensemble, but Brazil 66 is clearly a step up in every way: songwriting, arranging, production, and quality of musicianship.

For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. Almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but the first album and Equinox and specific tracks on their other albums are not far behind.

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After You’ve Played 100 Copies of the Album, What’s Left to Learn?

bloodchildMore of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Child Is Father to the Man

This commentary is at least ten years old. We can’t say that a red label reissue like the one discussed below would do as well under the improved shootout conditions in our new studio, but the possibility exists, which is the point of the story we are telling here.

A common misconception of many of those visiting the site for the first time is that we think we know it all.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We definitely do not know it all. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

Not This Title

Case in point: the record you do NOT see pictured above. (The record we recently learned something new about — this, after having played scores and scores of copies over the years — will remain a secret for the time being. At least until we find another one.)

In 2013 we played a red label Columbia reissue of a famous 60s rock record (again, not shown) that had the best side two we had ever heard. Up to that point no copy other than the 360 original had ever won a shootout, and we’ve done plenty. Lo and behold, here was a reissue that put them all to shame.

I’m still in shock from the experience to tell you the truth, but what a blast it was to hear it!

The recording, which I first played more than 40 years ago at the tender age of 16, was now bigger, less murky and more energetic than ever before. Had you asked me, I would have confidently told you not to waste your time with the second pressing, to stick to the 360s on that title, and I would have been wrong wrong wrong.

How Wrong?

But wait a minute. The 360 original will probably beat 49 out of 50 red label reissue copies on side two, and the best 360 original could not be beaten on side one by any other pressing. When you stop to think about it, we weren’t very wrong at all.

Let’s just say our understanding was incomplete.

This is why we prefer to offer actual physical records rather than just advice, although it’s clear for all to see that we happily do both, and, moreover, we certainly feel qualified — as qualified as anyone can be — to offer up our opinions, since our opinions are based on a great deal of experimental data.

Having big piles of cleaned records at one’s disposal is fundamentally important to this kind of operation. In our experience, shootouts using only a small number of pressings have relatively little value. They are best seen as a guide for the next, more comprehensive attempt to find out what might be the truly killer pressings of any given album.

Sometimes we guess about the sound quality of pressings on Heavy Vinyl, usually when we just can’t be bothered to order up a copy and take the time to audition it. So many labels today produce such consistently second- and third-rate pressings, can you blame us for not wanting to hear where the latest one went wrong? 

Ultimately what makes our case is the quality of the records we sell. And I’m glad to report that we don’t get many complaints, even at these prices. ( Some of our customers seem to think they got their money’s worth, and who are we to argue with our own customers?)

How Do We Do It?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

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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?

We put it right back up on the site to sell to the next customer who might want it. In only two or three cases that I can recall did it ever come back to us again. Two or three out of thousand and thousands of Hot Stampers sold. Not bad.

Best, TP

Further Reading

David Bowie – Years Ago We Foolishly Thought a Domestic LP Could Beat the Brits

More of the Music of David Bowie

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better on the Right Reissue

This shootout listing was written sometime around 2008. 

In 2008 we hadn’t discovered the right imports for this album yet — that would not happen for many more years, hence the error we made in thinking that some especially good sounding domestic copies could win a shootout.

Back then they could, but with the right pressings in the mix there is not a chance in the world that would happen now.

Just another case of live and learn. By the way, Low has much in common with another Bowie record we struggled with for years.

To be fair, some domestic pressings do end up having low-level (1.5+) Hot Stampers, but they’re rare. Our best Brits just kill ’em. We haven’t bothered with the domestic pressings in more than a decade, and why would we? The reissue imports we sell now are just too good.

Our Old Hot Stamper Commentary

This is the first Hot Stamper copy of Low to ever hit our site, and it’s a darn good one — especially on side one, where all the “pop” songs are found. We just had a huge shootout for this album featuring all the copies we’ve picked up over the years, and this domestic (!) pressing shocked us by blowing away our Brit copies on side one.

If you aren’t interested in the instrumental Bowie/Eno synth-heavy soundscapes that fill side two, this is THE copy to own.

I’ve said it on the site numerous time, but I spent a good portion of the 70s playing ar rock records like Taking Tiger Mountain, Crime Of The Century and Deceptive Bends.

I remember being blown away when Low came out, and it was a blast to hear how good a Hot Stamper pressing can sound on a highly-evolved stereo system today. [Maybe not so highly evolved!]

Side one of this album features the more traditional (not really the right word, but I digress) Bowie rockers like Sound and Vision and Be My Wife, while side two sounds more like the instrumental synth music of Kraftwerk or Eno. (more…)

Khachaturian Conducts Spartacus – Not As Good As We Thought

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Probably more than ten years ago we had written the following:

The famous TAS list recording. The Decca 180 gram version is very good, but those of you who appreciate the qualities of the original mastering will want to have this one. 

Now jump ahead five years to five years ago. We played three or four copies of the album and none of them quite worked for us.  The sound was a bit opaque, a bit dry, and not nearly as tubey as we would have liked. (Many Decca recordings suffer from dry strings, a shortcoming that is rarely if ever noticed by audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them.)

A good record, not a great one, and for that reason really not worth cleaning up and doing a shootout for.  The best copy would not pay for the labor to discover it.

There are quite a number of others that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here they are, broken down by label.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

To this day, some of the records on the TAS list seem to me better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an Old School stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore. For a more complete list of those records, not just the ones on the TAS List, click here.

The following three things are best kept in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should:

  1. Our standards are quite a bit higher now, having spent decades critically listening to vintage classical pressings by the hundreds if not thousands
  2. Our stereo is dramatically more revealing and more accurate than it used to be.
  3. Since no two records sound the same, maybe the one from long ago actually did sound as good as we thought at the time.

With all of the above considered, the current consensus is that Spartacus is very unlikely to be as good a record as we used to think it was.

Which means that it’s an example of a mediocre-at-best record that I used to like.

I clearly was not able to judge this record properly back in the day.

  1. I needed better playback quality.
  2. I needed better cleaning technologies.
  3. I needed to learn how to do shootouts properly.

In short, I needed to follow the advice found in a commentary I wrote after finally managing to put all of those things in place:

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Finlandia – Striving for Orchestral Clarity with Decca and Failing with RCA

More of the music of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

More of the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

The original RCA Living Stereo pressings we played in our 2014 shootout were not competitive with the best Deccas and London reissues.

Is the original the best way to go? 

In our experience with Finlandia, not so much.

The budget Decca reissue you see here is yet another wonderful example of what the much-lauded Decca recording engineers were able to capture on analog tape all those years ago. The 1961 master tapes have been transferred brilliantly using “modern” cutting equipment (from 1970, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days), giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer. [Not true, see Two Things below.)

When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from 1970, but that’s precisely what it is.

Even more extraordinary, the right copies are the ones that win shootouts

Side One

Correct from top to bottom, and there are not many records we can say that about. So natural in every way.

The brass is HUGE and POWERFUL on this side. Not many recordings capture the brass this well. Ansermet on London comes to mind of course but many of his performances leave much to be desired. Here Mackerras is on top of his game with performances that are definitive.

The brass is big and clear and weighty, just the way it should be, as that is precisely the sound you hear in the concert hall, especially that part about being clear: live music is more than anything else completely clear. We should all strive for that sound in our reproduction of orchestral music.

The opening track on side one, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, is one of my favorite pieces of orchestral music. Mackerras and the London Proms make it magical.

Side Two

The richness on this side is awesome. So 3-D, with depth and transparency to rival any recording you may own.

Two Things

When you hear a record of this quality, you can be pretty sure of two things: one, the original is unlikely to sound as good, having been cut on cruder equipment.

[UPDATE: I no longer subscribe to this view. There are many original pressings mastered in the 50s that are as hi-rez and undistorted as anything made after them. Here’s one example. It would be easy to name a great many more.]

Live and learn, I say.

And two, no modern recutting of the tapes (by the likes of Speakers Corner for example, but you can substitute any company you care to choose) could begin to capture this kind of naturalistic orchestral sound. [Mostly still true.]

I have never heard a Heavy Vinyl pressing begin to do what this record is doing. The Decca we have here may be a budget reissue pressing, but it was mastered by real Decca engineers (a few different ones in fact), pressed in England on high quality vinyl, and from fairly fresh tapes (nine years old, not fifty years old!), then mastered about as well as a record can be mastered.

The sound is, above all, REAL and BELIEVABLE.

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