Building a Serious Record Collection – Hot Stampers Versus Collector Pressings

I defy anyone who has not made a lifelong study of record collecting to tell me what even 10% of the records shown here sound like.

The owner has no way of knowing either.

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Anyone can amass a collection of records — one this big, ten times its size or one-tenth its size, the process is the same. You just buy whatever you like and organize them whichever way you see fit.

There is no limit to the kinds of records one might collect: originals, imports, audiophile pressings, picture discs, the TAS List – you name it, you can collect it.

There are literally millions of records for sale around the world on any given day. They’re not hard to find, and being so common, collecting them is easy. A single collection for sale as of this writing contains more than 3 million records. That works out to a thousand records each for three thousand collectors. Do you really have time to play more than a thousand records? That’s a different record every day for close to three years!
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Top 100 – Why Not This Amazing Phil Manzanera Record?

Like its brother 801 Live, this album is an amazing SONIC BLOCKBUSTER, with sound that positively leaps out of the speakers. Why shouldn’t it? It was engineered by the superbly talented Rhett Davies at Island, the genius behind Taking Tiger Mountain, the aforementioned 801 Live, Avalon, Dire Straits’ first album and many, many more.
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Val Garay Rocks the Sound of JT

Yet another album we are clearly obsessed with

Click on the link below to pull up the many reviews and commentaries we’ve written, as well as Hot Stamper copies that are currently available on the site.

JT

The good copies REALLY ROCK on a song like Honey Don’t Leave L.A. or I Was Only Telling A Lie, yet have lovely, sweet transparency and delicacy on the ballads such as Another Grey Morning or There We Are.

Just turn up the volume and play the opening to Honey Don’t Leave L.A. — this is James Taylor and his super tight studio band at the peak of their powers. Russ Kunkel hits the drum twice, then clicks his sticks together so quickly you can hardly notice it, then goes back to the drums for the rest of the intro. On a superb copy like this one, the subtleties of his performance are clearly on display. (Until copies like this one came along, we had never even noticed that stick trick. Now it’s the high point of the whole intro!)

Sound Equals Music

As audiophiles we all know that sound and music are inseparable. After dropping the needle on a dozen or so copies, all originals by the way, you KNOW when the music is working its magic and when it’s not. As with any pop album there are always some songs that sound better than others, but when you find yourself marvelling at how well-written and well-produced a song is, you know that the sound is doing what it needs to do. It’s communicating the Musical Values of the material.

The most important of all these Musical Values is ENERGY, and boy do the best copies have it!
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Today’s Cool Record Find from 1966 – Luiz Bonfa’s Softly…

Our White Hot Shootout Winner

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This original Epic pressing has superb Shootout Winning sound, earning a Triple Plus (A+++) grade on side two and close to it on side one
If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1966 All Tube Analog sound can be, this copy is just the record that can do it
The soundstage, depth and height of this spacious recording are as huge and three-dimensional as any you’ve heard
“One of the better early bossa albums by Bonfa, and one that doesn’t have the sleepy quality that you find on some of his other records. Luiz’ guitar is backed by a nice little combo, and the tracks have a lively rhythm, with occasional vocals, and some nice flute solos from time to time.”

See more recordings with especially Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars

This is a simply wonderful Brazilian jazz guitar record, as well as what appears to be a mostly undiscovered gem. As an exceptional recording of excellent Brazilian guitar music from 1966, it is being offered to you by the music loving audiophiles at Better Records, folks who like to think they know a good sounding record when they hear one. (more…)

Our Hall of Shame – Nearly 300 Strong – Thanks Classic Records!

Awful in Every Way

Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition

Classic Records Debunked

Sonic Grade: F

A Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records LP debunked.

The shrillness, the hardness, the sourness, the loss of texture to the strings, the phony boosted deep bass — this is the kind of sound that makes my skin crawl. After a minute or two I’ve had it. And the performance is dreadful as well.

HP put this on his TAS List? Yes he did!

More Pictures at an Exhibition

What do you get with Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue? Dramatically more warmth, sweetness, delicacy, transparency, space, energy, size, naturalness (no boost on the top end or the bottom, a common failing of anything on Classic); in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, in our experience anyway. (more…)

Latest Thoughts on Let It Be

Yet another album we are clearly obsessed with

Click on the link below to pull up the many reviews and commentaries we’ve written, as well as Hot Stamper copies that are currently available on the site.

LET IT BE

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Including:

A top copy, the MoFi, the new Heavy Vinyl pressing, What to Listen For and our take on the Bell Sound domestic original.

The Stones Jazz with Joe Pass and Bruce Botnick

Our Shootout Winner

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With two Triple Plus (A+++) shootout winning sides, this original stereo World Pacific copy simply could not be beat

Huge and rich, here is the kind of Tubey Magical presentation that lets this big group of musicians (four trombones!) come alive
The engineering by none other than Bruce Botnick is brilliant in all respects, as good as his work with The Doors
This is FUN West Coast Pop Jazz built around the superb arrangements of Bob Florence and the great songs of the Stones
We’re so sure you’ll like this music that if for any reason you are unhappy the domestic return shipping is on us!

Another undiscovered gem, brought to you by the folks at Better Records who know a good sounding record when they hear one. And the music is interesting and fun from first song to last. With Joe Pass on guitar how could it not be – the guy’s a genius.

This copy is spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

This is the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. Someday there may well be a CD of this album, but those of us in possession of a working turntable could care less.

Engineering by Bruce Botnick

Botnick is of course the man behind the superb recordings of The Doors, Love and others too numerous to mention.

More recordings by Bruce Botnick

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The Debut of Pretenders II

Our White Hot Shootout Winner

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Off the charts “Triple Triple” (A+++) sound for The Pretenders’ second album – both sides earned our top grade of A+++
With loads of solid, punchy bass and the richest, smoothest vocal reproduction, this pressing simply could not be beat
This original British pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce
“What’s more the unique American voice of Hynde matched with the tribal beat of Martin Chambers and spangly guitar of Honeyman-Scott was as close to perfect as a band could get in the late 70s.”

If any of this commentary looks familiar there’s a simple explanation for that fact; it’s lifted practically wholesale from our listings for the first Pretenders album.

The two albums are twins, with the same engineer, the same producer, even the same band members, something that was regrettably and tragically to change soon enough.

Tubey Magic Is Key

This original British pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

Forget the dubby domestic vinyl, these Brit pressings are the only way to go. (more…)

Boz Scaggs and His Background Singers – How Well Can You “See” Them?

See all of our Boz Scaggs albums in stock

This original (SD-8239) pressing has two excellent sides, which is two more than the typical cardboardy, flat, thin, lifeless copy has. If you like your music dry and clean, try the remixed version (SD-19166), the CD, or perhaps there is a heavy vinyl version out there (at one tenth the price). That’s not our sound here at Better Records.

The best recordings from the era do not have that sound, so when we find that kind of analog richness, sweetness and naturalness on a pressing such as this, we know the record is RIGHT.

What to Listen For — Background Singers You Can “See”

If you have multiple copies of the album and want to shoot them out, here’s an easy test. Listen for how clear and correct the female background singers sound. This is an excellent test because it will hold true for both sides on the album.

On opaque copies they are hard to “see”; on transparent copies they are easy to “see”. On tonally thin copies they will sound edgier and harder than they should. And on Tubey Magical copies they will sound full-bodied, solid and real.

Further Reading

Other recordings that we have found to be especially Tubey Magical can be found here.

Transparency, the other side of the Tubey Magical coin, is also key to the better pressings of this album as well as many of our other favorite demo discs.

Where Cheap Turntables Fall Flat

More of the music of Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Classical music is unquestionably the ultimate test for proper turntable/arm/cartridge set-up. The Liszt recording you see pictured is a superb choice for adjusting tracking weight, VTA, azimuth and the like.

One of the reasons $10,000+ front ends exist is to play large scale, complex, difficult-to-reproduce music such as Liszt’s two piano concertos. You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you choose to, it would surely be the kind of record that can show you the sound your tens of thousands of dollars has paid for.

It has been my experience that cheap tables more often than not collapse completely under the weight of a mighty record such as this.
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