Frank Sinatra / Swing Along With Me – A Top Sinatra Title (You Probably Never Heard Of)

More Frank Sinatra

  • With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout, this original Reprise pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in over three years) is doing practically everything right
  • Both of these vintage stereo sides are superb — rich, smooth and full-bodied with wonderfully present vocals and all of the Tubey Magic that’s missing from most copies
  • This album is very tough to come by in stereo in anything but beat condition, let alone with this kind of sound
  • Such is the trade-off here, with some bad marks on “Falling in Love With Love” and scattered stitches throughout “I Never Knew” and “Don’t Be That Way,” but once you hear how incredible sounding this copy is, you may be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and stitches and just be swept away by the music
  • “Twelve of the most uninhibited Sinatra things ever recorded!”
  • “Recorded with Billy May, Sinatra Swings was Frank Sinatra’s first straight swing album for Reprise Records. In terms of content and approach, the record is remarkably similar to his final Capitol swing effort, Come Swing with Me.”

Also known as Sinatra Swings.

Five for Five in 1961

Of the five records Sinatra released in 1961 (Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session!!!; Come Swing with Me!; Ring-a-Ding-Ding!; Swing Along with Me; and I Remember Tommy), this is clearly one of our favorites. (And by the way, what’s with all the exclamation marks?)

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Getting It Right When There’s Money on the Line

More Entries in Our Thinking About Records Series

John Stossel wrote a piece about prediction markets shortly after the 2022 midterms, explaining why prediction markets are still a good thing even though many of the predictions for the election that were made there did not come true. His take:

Bettors [may be wrong, but] at least adjust their predictions quickly.

Last night, while clods on TV still said “Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the House (CBS),” those of us who follow the betting already knew that Republicans would win the House.

Historically, bettors have a great track record. Across 730 candidate chances we’ve tracked, when something is expected to happen 70% of the time, it actually happens about 70% of the time.

That’s because people with money on the line try harder than pundits to be right.

As you can imagine, this last line was music to my ears.

We’ve built our record business on the fact that we have the experience, the expertise and the staff needed to find the best sounding pressings of many of the most important recordings of all time, from Dark Side of the Moon to Kind of Blue and everything in between.

And, as everyone knows, we charge a premium price for our Hot Stamper pressings, often ten and twenty times their “market value.”  This has been known to confuse and upset some people.

But can we charge more than our customers are willing to pay and still be in business after 37 38 years?

Some people must think they are getting their money’s worth, at least, that’s what some of them tell us.

We have to back up our opinions and our descriptions with actual records that deliver the sound we say they will, or we would have gone out of business a long time ago. You can fool some of the people all of the time, etc., etc.

Guaranteed?

This is in sharp contrast to the audiophile reviewers who tout one new record after another with no guarantee whatsoever that you will find anything like the superior sound they spent an endless number of words describing when the record finally ends up on your turntable.

Where do you go to get your money back when the record doesn’t have the sound they told you it would have?

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Kenny Loggins – Celebrate Me Home

More Loggins and Messina

  • With a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to an outstanding Double Plus (A++) side one, this vintage pressing is practically as good a copy as we have ever heard (and one of the few to ever hit the site)
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible Triple Plus side two in our notes: “breathy and transparent”…big and tubey”…”extended up top”….”so 3D and rich!”
  • Both sides here are rich, full and Tubey Magical with a massive bottom end and lots of space around the instruments
  • It’s also one of the only Loggins solo albums we’ve ever liked; it’s a favorite from back in the day
  • 4 stars: “Loggins is in good form throughout the record, and if even only the title track entered his readily-acknowledged canon, this has a fine, sustained mood: a soft late 70s vibe that makes it a nice artifact of its time, as well as one of his stronger records, as illustrated by its platinum status — something it achieved without any blockbuster singles.”

This killer copy shows you just how good this record can sound, which is surprisingly good, considering how many copies of the album are just plain awful. Finally, most of the grit, grain, and transitory opacity have fallen away, leaving in its place the rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical ’70s sound one would expect.

As obvious as it may sound (especially to anyone on this site), the master tape is a whole lot better than the average copy of the record would have you believe. This copy is proof positive. Without a doubt this is one of the best pressings of the album we have ever heard.

The better copies take top honors for rhythmic energy and real frequency extension both high and low. Most copies have no real top end; if you own one give it a listen and we think you’ll agree with us.

Great bass, plenty of Tubey Magic, clarity and richness — practically no other copy in our shootout could do what this one was doing.

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Listening in Depth to The Best of Earth Wind & Fire

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Earth, Wind and Fire Available Now

Not many compilation albums offer top quality sound, but this one does, and here are some of the others we’ve discovered.

The best pressings sound amazing, with big-as-life Demo Disc Quality sound.

Luckily for us, EWF was always an audiophile-oriented band. They produced some of the best ’70s multi-track recordings around. With a big speaker system turned up good and loud, the first track is simply mind-boggling. It’s some of the best sound we have heard around here in weeks, and we play a lot of good sounding records.

When the vocals are thin and pinched, as they often are, the edge and overall harshness take all the fun out of the music. Every track has group vocals and choruses, and the best copies make all the singers sound like they are standing in a big room, shoulder to shoulder, belting it out live and in living color.

The good copies capture that energy and bring it into the mix with the full-bodied sound it no doubt had live in the studio. When the EQ or the vinyl goes awry and their voices (and brass) start to take on a lean or gritty quality, the party’s over.

But the richness and fullness must be balanced with TRANSPARENCY. Of course this has to be a multi-miked, multi-tracked, overdubbed pop record — they don’t make them any other way — but it doesn’t have to FEEL like one.

When you get a good copy, it feels like all these guys are live in the studio. You see them clearly. They may have their own mics, and are certainly being placed artificially in the soundfield to suit the needs of the track (kick drum here, hand-claps over there), but the transparency of the killer pressings makes them sound like they are all in the same big room playing together.

Side One

Got to Get You into My Life 

On the best pressings of this album, the groove is so heavy and lively in this song that the typical copy sounds just plain cheap. It may be an original but the sound is pure bargain-bin reissue.

Fantasy
Can’t Hide Love 

This is our favorite EW&F song here at Better Records, a beautiful ballad that is truly a perfect representation of the band’s capability to change pace from blowing doors down to tugging heart-strings. They do both as well as any soul band ever could. This song is a MASTERPIECE.

Love Music
Getaway

Side Two

That’s the Way of the World
September 

EW&F’s biggest hit, but only the best pressings brought out the magic in the powerful horns and layered vocals without being smeary or spitty. Our best copies soared higher than we had ever heard for this song; the sound just leapt out of the speakers. What a great track.

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Two of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make Collecting Records

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

To be clear, it’s only a mistake if you are looking for top quality sound.

If, however, you are a record collector who doesn’t care about the sound of your records and is just looking for music to play, you may want to consider the very real possibility that you are on the wrong site. At the very least you are probably wasting your time.

Do you know many audiophiles who own multiple copies of the same album?

Some? Sure, okay. How many of them are still hunting around for more? Not many, right?

I’ve been buying duplicate copies of my favorite albums for more than three decades, but I’m not exactly your average audiophile record collector.

Fortunately for me, with the advent of Better Records in 1987, I’ve had an outlet for the second- and third-rate pressings I choose not to keep. (What’s left of my audiophile pressings are being sold on ebay these days. Good riddance!)

A few audiophile friends have multiple copies, but most audiophiles I know usually stop after one, or at most two or three.

At least they know not to make the worst mistake of them all: buying an audiophile pressing and figuring that that’s the one to keep.

Tossing out their vintage pressings, or never bothering to buy vintage pressings in the first place guarantees you will never have an especially good sounding collection of records to play.

Those of you who take the time to read our Hot Stamper commentary, whether you buy any of our special pressings or not, no doubt know better. At least I hope you do.

Hearing Is Believing

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo.

Nobody, and we mean nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are on about.

If that’s too much trouble, you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world, the ones who don’t know just how dramatic pressing variations for records and CDs can be. Probably a fairly large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much — this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything — you know the kind — and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even their own two ears.

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Letter of the Week – “This one is great — involving, NOT smeared, 3-D — most of all it invites me in…”

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

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

Hey Tom, 

I bought the Sticky you suggested (seemed like a dare). Like I said, I have several pressings, including the horrible MFSL. This sounds better than all of them, by far. My sense is that it’s a tough album, deliberately a bit muddy and smeared and inconsistent from track to track, which made the quest even more appealing. This one is great; involving, NOT smeared, 3D — most of all it invites me in, instead of saying “OK, this may be a bit cloudy, but try to enjoy anyway.”

I’m on my 5th listen. And Catch Bull at Four is also seriously good. Such an underrated album. I’ll be back, inasmuch as most of my other vinyl sounds flaccid compared to these.

John

John,

Thanks for your letter. 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 on old records 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 figure out how to clean them right.

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Herb Alpert – Whipped Cream & Other Delights

More Sixties Pop Recordings

More 5 Star Albums

  • With seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this vintage A&M pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on this wonderful 1965 release
  • Tubey Magical, punchy, spacious, natural sound (particularly on side two) – this copy has what we love about Larry Levine‘s engineering, with special emphasis on the huge amounts of deep bass that Herb liked to put on his records back in 1965. (Quick question: Where did that sound go?)
  • Not many audiophiles know how well recorded some of these early Herb Alpert albums were, but we count ourselves among the ones that do, going back more than twenty years
  • It’s almost impossible to find clean copies of this album nowadays, but here is an awfully good one
  • Alpert’s most famous album, 5 stars on Allmusic: “Three Grammy Awards alone for the update of the Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow-penned theme ‘A Taste of Honey.'”

The better pressings have the kind of Tubey Magical, big-bottomed, punchy, spacious sound that we’ve come to expect from Larry Levine‘s engineering for A&M. If you have any Hot Stamper pressings of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66’s albums, then you know exactly the kind of sound we’re talking about.

Listen for all the Tubey Magic and space on these recordings. Both sides here were clean and clear, fuller and more solid, with more bite to the brass and separation between parts than the other copies we played.

Both sides are rich and smooth, with practically none of the edgy hardness on the horns that compromises the sound of the average pressing. Here is the kind of sound that really brings to life these funky Mexican-flavored pop tunes.

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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 Desperado

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

This is the second-best sounding Eagles record of all time, no doubt thanks to the engineering of our man Glyn Johns.

In case you don’t know, the best sound on any Eagles record is found on the first album.

It’s a Top Ten rock and pop title and as Tubey Magical a rock record as you will ever hear.

A True Super Disc (Second Only to the First Album in that Respect)

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 our most recent shootout was SYL. A bit of a surprise since our champion for both sides during the last 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.

Side One

Doolin-Dalton

This wonderful song is a great test track for side one. Typical pressings of this album tend to be dark and lack extension up top. When you have no real top end, space, detail and resolution suffer greatly. You need to be able to appreciate each of the stringed instruments being played — guitar, banjo, dobro — and the top end needs to be extended and correct for you to do that. (more…)

Willie Nelson – Me & Paul

More Willie Nelson

More Country and Country Rock

  • Both sides of this copy were doing pretty much everything right, earning excellent Double Plus (A++) grades – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Don’t waste your money on whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size, and energy of Nelson’s 1985 release, an original pressing like this one is the only way to go
  • 4 stars: “The album kicks off excitingly with ‘I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train,’ and there really aren’t any noticeably weak moments. The band is superb and, by the standards of a normal country artist, the record would be considered a masterpiece.”

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