01-hit

Letter of the Week – “No record I own ever did that.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

This week’s letter came from Dan, a long time customer of ours. When he ordered this album he left the following note in his order comments:

This is one of my favorite albums of all time!! One of my personal desert island discs. Can’t wait to hear it!.

I’m not sure his ears were prepared for what was about to happen though. Read on to see what Dan thought of his Very Hot Who’s Next.

Hey Tom,

Just listened to the Very Hot Stamper of “Who’s Next” and thought I’d drop a little note: Holy F**K that was POWERFUL!

No record I own ever did that!

And I’m talking bone-rattling, earth-shaking, sock-you-in-the-gut POWERFUL. I’ve always known that The Who were one of the most intense bands in the history of rock n’ roll. Hell, everybody knows that and it’s part of the reason we love ’em so much. But with this record, I experienced the sheer physical force of their music like I NEVER have before. I couldn’t believe I heard bass notes hang in the air and resonate for long stretches. Bass notes never just hang like that! No record I own ever did that. (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…)

The Biggest “If” in All of Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right.

That’s a big if.  In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.

But that is not our story for today. Our story today concerns the relationship between more accurate timbre and higher fidelity.

What do we love about vintage pressings like the Ted Heath disc you see pictured above?

The timbre of the instruments is reproduced with wonderful fidelity.

The unique sound of every instrument in this very large ensemble has been recorded accurately. Every instrument sounds the way it would sound if you were hearing it live. Every instrument sounds real.

That’s what we mean by Hi-Fi, not the kind of “Audiophile Sound” (sneer quotes are very much called for whenever the word “audiophile” is used to describe sound quality, mostly because there is so little in the way of quality to be described ) that passes for Hi-Fidelity on some records.

Some of the worst offenders along those lines can be found here.

(more…)

How Is this Title Not on the TAS List?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I wrote this commentary about ten years ago if memory serves. Since then we have done a number of shootouts for Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and have never failed to be impressed with the sound and the music.

Many of Arthur Fiedler‘s recordings are favorites of ours. We may even have a few on the site at the moment. All of them are guaranteed to satisfy.

This copy of  from many years ago was so good on side two it practically left me speechless.

I wondered: How is this title not on the TAS List?

Why is it not one of the most sought-after recordings in the RCA canon?

Beats the hell out of me.

But wait just one minute. Until a month ago I surely had no idea how good this record could sound, so how can I criticize others for not appreciating a record I had never taken the time to evaluate myself?

Which more than anything else prompts the question — why is no one exploring, discovering and then bringing to light the exceptional qualities of these wonderful vintage recordings (besides your humble writer and his staff, of course)?

HP has passed on. Who today is fit to carry his mantle into the coming world of audio?

Looking around I find very few prospects. None in fact.

But then again, I’m not looking very hard. I could care less what any of these people have to say about the sound quality of the records they play.

They all seem to like records that don’t sound very good to us, so why put any faith in their reviews for other records?

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it since 1994..

(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…)

Too Low For Zero – The Last in a Great Run

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

Much of the production — the smooth, sweet harmony vocals, the rich, grungy guitars, the solid, warm piano — reminds me of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, one of the classics from back in the day when Gus Dudgeon was running the show.

Caribou (1974) and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975) have a similarly glossy, perfectionist approach to production as well, of course.

It was 1975’s Rock of the Westies that went off in another direction.

The next six albums, from Blue Moves to Jump Up, at least to these ears, don’t sound good enough or have enough consistently good material compared to the six albums recorded from 1970 to 1973.

Four of those are in our Top 100 Rock and Pop album list, and all four are Must Owns in my book. Pop music just doesn’t get any better.

So if Too Low For Zero reminds us in any way of those albums, especially in the songwriting department now that Bernie Taupin has rejoined team Elton after a too-long hiatus, that is all to the good.

(more…)

This Early Stereo Black Label Pressing of My Fair Lady Sounded Great

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

The piano sounds lifelike right from the start, a beautiful instrument in a natural space, tonally correct from top to bottom.

This copy makes it clear that this is an exceptional Demo Disc quality recording for Contemporary, and that’s saying a lot.

It’s all tube, live-to-two-track direct from the Contemporary studio. It’s pretty much everything you want in a recording from this era.

How can you beat a Roy DuNann piano trio recording? We have a good supply of Hot Stamper pressings of great jazz piano recordings, but the ones we offer on Contemporary set a standard that few other labels have ever been able to meet.

(more…)

Prokofiev / Piano Concerto No. 3 / Graffman

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Not sure if we would still agree with anything we said in the 2008 review you see below.

Back then we only had the one copy to play, and we certainly hadn’t learned how to clean it the way we do now, so who can say what any random copy of the record would sound like?

If you see it for cheap in the bins, pick it up, give it a spin and see.

This Plum Label Original pressing is one of the TOP Victrola titles! The sound is excellent, with real weight to the orchestra, powerful dynamics, deep bass, and solid piano tone.

Add to that a wonderful performance by Gary Graffman and the San Francisco Symphony, and you have one truly OUTSTANDING record. (If you can add 1 or 2 db to the top end, it’s even better.) 

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “I have heard this music a zillion times but it never ever once sounded like this.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Five Star Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased many years ago:

Hey Tom, 

I just listened to Bridge over Troubled Water that arrived while I was on my trip to India. It was really spectacular. I have heard this music a zillion times over the last 40 years but it never ever once sounded like this. Amazing. I have to get Bookends and PSRT also. 

John R.

John,

We love it when customers tell us that our Hot Stamper pressings are a revelation. At these prices they’d better be!

This album has been remastered many times, but as far as we know you just cannot beat the right 360 Label pressings, which is why those are mostly the ones we sell, with an occasional Red Label pressing rarely, and barely, making the grade.

We’ve auditioned many pressings of the album, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS Half-Speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999.

No doubt there have been many more remastered since those three came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days, so we haven’t bothered to audition any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time. If one comes our way, naturally we would love to hear it.

Would we pay good money for whatever crap pressing they’re stocking the bins with these days? Not a chance. If any of the labels currently making records start to make some that sound as good as the ones we sell, please drop us a line with the titles that impressed you.

(more…)

Universal Heavy Vinyl Quadrophenia Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

UIPDATE 2026

These are old notes from many years ago. Take them with a very large grain of salt, and don’t buy this version of the album unless it’s reasonably priced and returnable. A pressing with Hot Stampers is going to be dramatically better, and might sound as good as this pressing.

Wow! This Universal Heavy Vinyl pressing from circa 2000 (the turn of the century!) is superb, not all that far from a good Track original, and quieter for sure. 

Side One rocks incredibly hard from start to finish. What a great album. It has to rank right up there with the best rock of the ’70s, right behind Who’s Next and probably on a par with Tommy, good company indeed, since we LOVE all three of those albums here at Better Records. (Both Tommy and Who’s Next are Top 100 titles, but Quadrophenia is not far behind either of them for sound or music.

Here’s what we wrote about this pressing when it was still in print ten twenty or more years ago.

Thank you Universal! We have almost forgiven you for the Cat Stevens records you ruined. With more great releases like this one, that debacle will fade one day from memory.

Although you can still buy those crappy pressings from my competitors. Have they no shame?

As with any Who album, this is obviously not your average Audiophile Demo Disc. We don’t imagine you’ll be enjoying this one with wine, cigars, and polite conversation. This one is for turning up loud and rockin’ out — in other words, it’s our kind of record.

(more…)