1-2022

Saxophone Colossus – Why Not Try the DCC CD or LP?

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Our last White Hot gold label mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for?

Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a decent enough record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings from that era, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

(We have many reviews of OJC pressings for those who are interested. We created two sections for the label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the bad sounding ones.)

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer DCC’s CDs to their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-rez, modern-sounding (in the worst way) transistor cutting system, a subject we discuss in some depth here.

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Led Zeppelin / II – A Milestone Event from the 90s

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

More Milestone Events in the History of Better Records

Here’s the story of my first encounter with a Hot Stamper Zep II.

I had a friend who had come into possession of a White Label Demo pressing of the second album and wanted to trade it in to me for the Mobile Fidelity pressing that I had played for him once or twice over the years, and which we both thought was The King on that album.

To my shock and dismay, his stupid American copy KILLED the MoFi. It TROUNCED it in every way. The bass was deeper and punchier. Everything was more dynamic. The vocals were more natural and correct sounding. The highs were sweeter and more extended. The whole pressing was just full of life in a way that the Mobile Fidelity wasn’t.

The Mobile Fidelity didn’t sound Bad. It sounded Not As Good. More importantly, in comparison with the good domestic copy, in many ways it now sounded Wrong.

Let me tell you, it was a milestone event in my growth as a record collector. I had long ago discovered that many MoFi’s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. But this was a MoFi I liked. And it had killed the other copies I had heard in the past.

So I learned something very important that day. I learned that hearing a good pressing is the best way to understand what’s wrong with a bad pressing..

Needless to say, the trade didn’t go through: he kept his copy and I was stuck with mine. But I knew what to look for. I knew what the numbers were in the dead wax. And I started hunting them down.

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Letter of the Week – “Honestly, these LPs make my system sound like I just dropped another $100,000 into it.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Willie Nelson Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

My July 4 weekend was great. I had lots of company this weekend for three days straight. I slayed a bunch of them with my new collection of Hot Stamper LPs from Better Records.

Honestly, these LPs make my system sound like I just dropped another $100,000 into it suddenly.

I played Harry Belafonte (Carnegie Hall Live Concert) and Willie Nelson (Stardust) for some guests that grew up in another part of the world who had never ever even heard of these people. They had no clue about what they were going to hear.

I watched them and they were mesmerized – leaning forward in their seats practically holding their breath – holding themselves still like a deer caught in the headlights. Not a sound spoken – even the females!

The sense of being live was so palpable that most were simply speechless. Confusion was rampant since all that sound was coming from OLD BLACK VINYL.

My smile was a mile wide. Thanks for that satisfying experience.

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Letter of the Week – “The overall tonal balance is fantastic. Big, room filling sound.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jackson Browne Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I am taking my time going through all my hot stampers one by one. Still waiting for my cartridge to break in so I know things will only get better!

This album is amazing. I forgot how good it was. Only had the cassette back in the day and loved playing it in the car. The overall tonal balance is fantastic. Big, room filling sound. Jackson’s voice is just so well centered in the mix. I think your rating may have been a bit conservative. Hard to believe it can sound much better. Side 2 is probably my favorite and sounds even better than side 1 to my ears–but it is close. Another winner for sure!

Thanks!

Rob

Rob,

Glad you liked it!

As for the notes about the grades, we don’t keep them around, but we liked two copies better than that one, which just goes to show you can never know how good it can get until it gets that good. That is the only way to know: to hear it for yourself. That is what shootouts are for.

This is what the forum posters fail to understand. They think they have a Hot Stamper when what they actually have (maybe!) is a good sounding record. They don’t know how amazing the record can sound — so much more amazing than the one they own, probably — so they assume they have something good, maybe even the best.

They probably do not, but who really knows? The shootout would supply the data they need to support their conclusions, and since they could not be bothered to conduct one, they have no data to back up their opinions.

The “probably” you see in the above two sentences is there for a good reason. We make a point of being clear about what we can know and we cannot know, and we cannot know what a record sounds like until we play it.

This is obviously true for those of us who try to listen as critically as possible, but we also know that it is just as important to think about records the right way.

Mistaken thinking keeps audiophiles from making progress in this hobby just as much as bad equipment and bad records do.

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing very little of this information on the site, for a number of good reasons we discuss here.

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers.

But in the world of records, there aren’t many.

There is only the hard work that it takes to come up with the best answer you can under your present circumstances, and by that we mean: your present equipment, your present tweaks, your present room, your present electrical quality, your present listening skills, your present table setup, et cetera, et cetera.

Not to mention the present condition of your ears.

With every change to your system, the record you used to like the best could turn out to be second-rate compared to the record you used to think was second-rate but has now become first-rate. What changed? Who knows?

This, of course, drives most audiophiles crazy, so they ignore or downplay their own inconvenient findings. Instead they refuse to believe their own two ears!

The Biz

Being in the shootout business means we have no way to avoid such realities, which is why it is so easy for us to accept them.

The amateurs and professionals alike who review records for audiophiles want there to be clear-cut answers for every album they write about. Uncertainty and trade-offs upset them no end.

We recognized twenty years ago that the empirical pursuit of record knowledge, practiced scientifically, must be understood as incomplete, imperfect, and provisional.

That is not going to change no matter how upsetting anyone may find it.

Thanks for writing,

Best, TP

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Blue on Heavy Vinyl – We Broke Through in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Thoughts on the so-called definitive vinyl version

Yet another milestone event in the history of Better Records.

In 2007 a customer took issue with our decision to reject the sale of the newly remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing of Blue, the one put out by Rhino and mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray.

We actually used to give the record away for free with every purchase of a Hot Stamper Blue, making it easy for our customers to hear for themselves just how superior sounding our Hot Stamper pressings were.

UPDATE 2024

With every purchase of a Hot Stamper Led Zeppelin II, we give our customers the Page-remastered version for free so that they can hear for themselves why our pressing costs well over $1000 and Jimmy’s a small fraction of that figure, sometimes as small as one hundredth!

We did this partly out of necessity. I had foolishly taken the advice of a Mr. Robert Pincus (the discoverer of Hot Stampers let us never forget) that the new version was indeed all it was cracked up to be and proceeded to put in an advance order for twenty copies to sell to our audiophile customers.

We were still selling Heavy Vinyl in 2007, but it would not be long before we decided to end the practice. Within a few years we were only selling records that we had cleaned and played and could guarantee both their superior sound quality and audiophile-quality playing surfaces.

So we had about twenty copies of Blue we did not think qualified as “better records” and decided to just give them away.

After spending quite a number of hours evaluating the new version, I got fairly worked up over the disappointing sound, worked up enough to write a very long commentary about the album, which I entitled Blue, The Game.

Rather than detailing the shortcomings of the new pressing, in this particular commentary, the first of its kind, I decided to take a different tack.

I implored the reader to do his own shootout for the album and tell me what he heard on the various pressings he might have at hand to work with. (Nothing much came of it of course, and not too surprisingly. Shootouts are hard and the vast majority of audiophiles are averse to them in our experience, hence the sorry state of audiophile records and the systems that fail to reveal their shortcomings — but that’s a horse that gets flogged regularly enough on this site. Enough is enough.)

Tom, 

I find it curious you are not carrying the new Joni Mitchell Blue vinyl issue. Even to the point of saying you can do better… for 25 bucks? After clicking on the LP cover and reading the comments from over the years it makes me wonder what your agenda really is. I paid $250 for a wonderful WLP and this Rhino issue smokes it, even as good as it is. I even have a CD cut from this mastering session off the analog FLAT, not Dolby tapes and this vinyl even beats it…. of course just my opinion.

I have listened on $100,000 systems, all the way down to portable units, solid state and tube and there is no denying this is the definitive vinyl version….. and again for 25.00. What a bargain.

Maybe all you did was look at that Rhino sticker and think back to the Grateful Dead records they did a few years ago (horrible) and just assumed this wasn’t up to Better Records standards.

Thanks for reading. I enjoy your e mails and store….

Tom

Tom,

We don’t review records based on their labels or stickers. And of course we never assume anything about the sound of a record. We talk about this stuff all the time. Here’s a relevant quote:

My approach to reviewing records is pure skepticism: a record sounds good if it sounds good, regardless of how it was made, who made it, or why. I’ve heard lots of expensive so-called audiophile equipment do a pretty poor job of making music over the years, the owners of which had an armful of reasons for why the sound should be truly awe-inspiring. But it just wasn’t. Most fancy gold faceplates are nothing but lipstick on a pig in my opinion.

I once heard Blue poorly reproduced at a friend’s house, and this is probably the best explanation for this letter writer’s inability to understand our position on Blue.

And paying $250 for a White Label Demo that apparently doesn’t sound good is the height of audiophile collector foolishness.

That money should have gone for better equipment or room treatments or tweaks, something, anything, to make this guy’s stereo and room work better than they apparently do.

Actually this brings up a good point. If I had to choose one record that separates the men from the boys, the stereos that really work from the artificial, restricted audiophile systems you might read about in the magazines or hear in a showroom or at an audio show, Blue would be a darn good choice.

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This Tchaikovsky 4th Turned Out to Be Not as Good as We’d Hoped

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

About ten years ago we dropped the needle on this Mehta recording and thought it had potential, so we went about acquiring more copies for an eventual shootout.

A few years back we gave them another listen and found the sound not to our liking.

We have not done a shootout for any of the major Tchaikovsky symphonies (4, 5 and 6) in a very long time, but we hope to do them in the future, although that future could be many years from now. Nothing we have dropped the needle on has knocked us out, and that’s usually what it takes to get the ball rolling.

UPDATE 2024

Actually we quite like this RCA reissue with Monteux, and there are some other recordings we know to be good, but they are turning out to be very hard to find.

These Mehta Londons have revealed themselves to be much more artificial sounding than we thought they were, or, more accurately, could tell they were back in 2011.

Like every Royce Hall recording we’ve ever played, including the one everybody knows, there is too much multi-miking and spotlighting going on for us to suspend our disbelief and feel like we are in the living presence of the musicians, to borrow a phrase. The orchestra in this recording is not presented with anything resembling the experience one would have in the concert hall.

James Lock is a brilliant recording engineer, but his work here in the states leaves a lot to be desired.

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Today’s Heavy Vinyl Mediocrity Is… Fragile

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Yes Available Now

The Analogue Productions 180g reissue shown here is mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray, two guys with reputations for doing good work, but the results of their collaboration [can you believe this record came out in 2006!?] leave much to be desired.

The overall sound is too lean.

This is especially noticeable on the too-thin-sounding guitars and vocals.

Believe me, it’s no fun to play a Yes album with thin guitars and vocals.

Also, there’s a noticeable lack of ambience throughout the record. What comes to mind when I hear a record that sounds like this is the dreaded D word: dubby.

I find it hard to believe they had the actual two-track original master tape to work with. The sound is just too anemic to have come from the real tape. If they did have the real tape, then they really botched the job.
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Are Hot Stamper Pressings Quiet?

More Answers to Your Frequently Asked Questions

They’re about as quiet as vintage LPs ever are.

Some surface noise is always going to be audible on an old record. We believe we sell the quietest vintage pressings in the world, but they are certainly not silent. Lately we’ve been adding the following text to our listings to clarify our position on surface noise:

Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any original pressing will play, and since only the right originals have any hope of sounding amazing on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

We continued:

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals. If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

We do a much better job of cleaning our records than we did years ago. In fact, any record that hasn’t been cleaned recently gets recleaned and replayed in a shootout, and many of them sound better and play quieter than our original grades would indicate.

How to Find Our Quietest Records

This section has the Hot Stamper pressings that earned our highest play grades.

However, for those who like their records to play with minimal surface noise, I recommend a quiet cartridge and very high quality arm and table.

In my experience they should be good for at least one full grade of improvement in the reduction of surface noise. They should be able to take you from “Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus” — the grade a brand new record from the ’70s would play at — to “Mint Minus” or something very close to it.

I have heard many of my quietest pressings play noisy on very expensive equipment owned by friends and I’ve made an effort to help some of them fix their problems.

Some audiophiles have a bad habit of getting married to their equipment, which makes it hard for them to find solutions to their problems.

The solution is more often than not different equipment. I’ve found this especially true in the case of cartridges.

One Further Note

The record cleaning advice we offer lays out the methods and materials we use to get our records to play as quiet as possible while still sounding as good as possible.

There are some fluids on the market that may get records to play quieter than the fluids we use, but we have yet to hear such fluids make the records sound as good as they do with the Walker System that’s at the heart of our cleaning regimen.

Again, it’s a matter of tradeoffs. We want the best sound for our records, period. Apparently our customers do too, as less than 1% of the records we sell are ever returned for excessive surface noise. (more…)

Should You Collect the Original Pressing on Lush Life?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

Should you collect the original pressings on this title?

Absolutely not. Which means we were way off the mark with Lush Life.

It’s yet another case of live and learn. Previously we had written:

“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”

We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our best Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.

Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? No doubt. If you want to spend your day searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league, a league we had no idea even existed until just this year.

By the way, the mono original we played was by far the worst sound I have ever heard for the album.

By far.

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Letter of the Week – Wow, It Beat the Analogue Productions Fantasy 45!

More Contemporary Label Jazz

Many years ago, our good customer Victor sent us this note to tell us how much better his real Contemporary jazz album sounded compared to the Fantasy 45 180g pressing he owns.

We should point out that we sold him a sealed ’70s reissue, something (selling sealed records) we stopped doing a decade or so ago, and that we really have no way of knowing what the record actually sounded like. Given our experience with anything released on the consistently dreadful Analogue Productions label, what were the chances that they could actually beat the real thing? As a practical matter, the answer should be obvious: none, of course.

None? Too harsh you say? Here are two of their worst crimes against jazz-loving audiophiles, crimes they committed using 2 Heavy Vinyl discs mastered at 45 RPM for all the world to hear:

  1. Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus by the Vince Guaraldi Trio
  2. Sonny Rollins Plus 4

Yes, they had the temerity to charge money for their crappy, pointless reissues. The key takeaway here is that any label that would release records that sound as bad as these cannot be trusted to do anything right.

Having played many of their remastered releases, we are still waiting for the record on the AP lable that is not either a disaster or, at the very least, not clearly worse sounding than other pressings which are widely available.

And I will never tire of pointing out how bad the two albums linked below are, so bad that I wrote many hundreds of words about their astonishing awfulness.

  1. Steppenwolf – Gold: Their Great Hits
  2. Cat Stevens – Tea for the Tillerman

After playing the above four, what would possess us to ever play another?

Now to the letter.

Hi Tom,

Wanted to let you know I did a comparison between the yellow label Contemporary label Curtis Counce, Counceltation Vol. 2 (which I bought sealed from you) and a Fantasy 45 rpm from Analogue productions: Curtis Counce – You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce – which is in fact the same album but with a different title and cover. 

Well I was very anxious to try this comparison, but was not expecting the results. The yellow label was so transparent and tonal weight to the Fantasy 45 rpm there was no contest. The 45 rpm sounded like someone turned on a high bypass filter. The yellow label was balanced throughout. Clean.

I am a subscriber of the Fantasy 45s and own all of them. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice sounding ones in the series, but this is a prime example that not all records are as well mastered.

Regards,

Victor

Victor,

I had every confidence that the real Contemporary pressing would trounce that 180 gram reissue, 45 RPM 2 LP pressing or no 45 RPM 2 LP pressing. The more I play these Heavy Vinyl reissues the less I like them. As we say, the real thing just can’t be beat.

Thanks for doing the shootout for us. You can be sure that our Hot Stamper Contemporary jazz pressings will make mincemeat of anything on that Fantasy 45 Series. In fact, we guarantee it.