1-2023

Letter of the Week – “Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

One of our erstwhile customers asked me a question not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

Some audiophile guy professes to me that he prefers his Japan and German pressings of Dire Straits’ 1st LP over the UK press. How can I tell him in a kind way that he is wrong?

Dear Sir,

You can’t, in a kind way or any other way.

You have to play the two pressings for him, on his stereo or yours, and that’s simply not possible unless he lives near you, which is rarely the case, audiophiles being fairly thin on the ground in my experience.

Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

All forums — whatever their benefits — cannot overcome this problem.

Next time someone posts an opinion about a record, ask yourself “What does his system sound like?”

If you don’t know the answer, why on earth would you put any stock in his opinion? For all you know his system sucks and his critical listening skills are non-existent. He might have a pair of JBL 100s in the basement and a Dual turntable (or the modern equivalent of same).

He may hate the records whose sound you love and love the records whose sound you hate.

I Look Forward to Being Proven Wrong

Along those lines, I had a new customer tell me that this record was one of the better Heavy Vinyl reissues he had heard recently. Rather than just paint every Heavy Vinyl pressing with the broad brush of disgust I normally reach for when doing reviews for them, I thought maybe I should actually give this one a listen.

It might change my mind. It might help me see the light. Maybe I could even learn a thing or two instead of being so relentlessly negative about modern reissues. They can’t all be as bad as I say, can they?

So I took his advice and ordered one right then and there.

For thirty bucks, I learned a lesson worth a great deal more than the money I sunk into such a worthless piece of vinyl on the say-so of someone whose stereo I had never heard, which is this: never believe a word you read about audio or records, no matter who says it, or where you read it, except under very specific circumstances.

What circumstances, exactly?

To my mind there is only one circumstance when it makes sense to believe what somebody — anybody — tells you about the sound of a record: If that advice comes with a 100% money back guarantee of the purchase price if you are not happy with the sound.

It can’t get any more simple than that, now can it?

Do any of these guys ever put their money where their mouths are? Not a one of them ever has to the best of my knowledge, and why would they? Plenty of downside, but not a trace of upside. To quote Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther from Victim of Love, “I could be wrong, but I’m not.”

Of course we do things very differently here at Better Records. Yes, we have strong opinions. Lots of them.

But we back those opinions up with a full money back guarantee. The upside for us is huge — a satisfied customer, our favorite kind — and the downside is practically nil — whatever record someone returns just goes back up on the site, sells to someone else and we never see it again.

Voila, another satisfied customer!

I don’t know how Chad Kassem would react to you trying to return his awful Stand Up or his mediocre-at-best Tea for the Tillerman, but I doubt he would take too kindly to the idea.

And speaking of not being wrong, we actually go out of way to point out when we are.

Better to be a scout rather than a warrior.

There are way too many warriors on audiophile forums as it is, don’t you think?

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The Said and the Unsaid – The Firebird on Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

For our shootout years ago of The Firebird we had three minty, potentially hot copies of the Mercury with Dorati, as well as our noisy ref. (We have a noisy reference copy for just about every major title now. We have been doing these shootouts for a very long time. After thirty years in the record business we have accumulated a World Class collection of great sounding records that are just too noisy to sell.)

UPDATE 2024 

This is no longer true. Our customers seem to be able to put up with surface noise on the records we offer if the price is low enough. Not actually low, just low enough. We have a section for records with condition issues, and there are 175 entries in it as of today, which turns out to be more than a quarter of all the Hot Stamper pressings on the site as a matter of fact.

We had one FR pressing and two of the later pressings with the lighter label, the ones that most often come with Philips M2 stampers. This is how we described the winner:

So clear and ALIVE. Transparent, with huge hall space extending wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Zero compression.

Lifelike, immediate, front row center sound like few records you have ever heard.

Rich, sweet strings, especially for a Mercury. This side really gets quiet in places, a sure sign that all the dynamics of the master tape were protected in the mastering of this copy.

What we didn’t say — and what we never say in the listings — is what the second tier copies didn’t do as well as the shootout winner.

We used to. When you read the older entries, most of the time they mention the shortcomings that caused one side or another to be downgraded by some amount, usually something like a half to a full plus.

Not all the top end, not all the bass, not as present, slightly smeary, slightly congested — the list of potential faults for any given pressing is long indeed. These are all the problems we listen for and it’s the rare copy that doesn’t suffer from one or more of them.

We decided years ago that it was better just to let you hear the two sides of the record for yourself and make your own judgments about the sound, rather than make clear to you what areas we felt needed improvement.

Consider this example. If on our system the bass was lacking compared to the very best, perhaps on your system the bass was fine, not an issue, good enough. Without the top copy to compare yours to, how would you know how much better the bass could possibly be?

A classic case of “compared to what?”

Shootouts are the only way to answer that question, which, as we never tire of saying, is THE most important question in all of audio. This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Click on the following link to see more records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific copy.

What We Heard on The Firebird

With all that in mind, only the Triple Plus (A+++) copy, as described above, did everything right.

There were two Double Plus (A++) copies, and each of them fell short in different ways.

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Pros, Cons and Celebrating a Milestone of Audio Progress

More of the music of Jules Massenet

About ten years ago we reviewed a copy of the album that had a sub-optimal side two, a side two that suffered from screechy string tone.

Since that time we’ve made a number of improvements to our cleaning regimen and playback system, and the result has been that our last couple of shootouts went off without a hitch, showing us string tone that was virtually free of screechiness.

(The Greensleeves reissues never had much of a screechy strings problem as they tended to be mastered on the smooth side. They are more forgiving of second-rate playback in that respect, but they can also never win shootouts with that overly smooth sound.) [1]

Problem solved! The records were fine, we just couldn’t play them back then as well as we can now.

In 2012, twelve years ago, I had been selling records to audiophiles professionally for 25 years. I had owned a State of the Art system for 37 years.

But I knew I still had plenty to learn, and I kept at it.

After a decade’s worth of tweaking and tuning, the strings of this recording started to sound the way Stuart Eltham and his fellow engineers undoubtedly wanted them to.

This is how you chart your audio progress, by challenging yourself with difficult to reproduce recordings and building on the improvements you continue to make as the years and decades go by.

If you’re in the market for records that can show you that there is still plenty of work left to be done in this crazy audio hobby we’ve all chosen, we have scores of them on the Better Records site.

If we can get them to sound better, so can you.

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1964 – A Great Year for Top Quality Recordings of Timeless Music

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1964 Available Now

When you look closely at all the great records that were released that year, many of which can be purchased in Hot Stamper form today, you may come to agree with us that 1964 was a wonderful year for recorded music.

The 60+ best titles from 1964 that we’ve auditioned to date can be found here.

The complete list of titles from 1964 (90+) can be found here.

We also have lists for

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Letter of the Week – “…if you want to pay $700 for Aja, go right ahead.” I took his advice, and I’m glad I did!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our good customers recently watched a video on Steve Westman’s youtube channel of an interview Steve conducted with Michael Fremer. (I appeared with Steve back in October of 2022. You can find the interview here.)

This video upset my customer so much that he felt he needed to get a few things off his chest, which he did in the letter you can find right after my commentary below. He does not pull many punches.

I would like to comment on some of the points he makes, points which I hope will be of interest to our readers. That is what you see here at the top.

At the end of my comments I have reproduced the letter, so if you don’t care to see Fremer raked over the coals, please feel free to stop reading at the end of my comments. Mike Esposito, the guy who exposed MoFi’s duplicity, comes in for some criticism as well. (Justified in my opinion, because Mr. Esposito sure likes some bad sounding records. But why pick on him? Modern audiophile reviewers seem to like nothing but bad sounding records, the same way I did in 1982. Except it’s not 1982 anymore, and there is simply no excuse for having equipment that cannot help you tell a good sounding record from a bad one.)

Our customer, let’s call him Mr. A, had this to say in Point No. 2:

[Fremer] says old records in good shape still sound the best. [Which is true.] He says the playback gear back in the day could not even reveal how great those albums actually are. [Also true.] He says that there are significant variations from one stamper to another and you need to get the right stamper. [True again.] (In his view of the world, there’s no variations in pressings within the same stamper. Apart from this detail, he supports every point you make. He even says, “if you want to pay $700 for Aja, go right ahead.” I took his advice, and I’m glad I did!)

I don’t think he says any of these things nearly as often as they need to be said, or with any real conviction. They are footnotes, a kind of anodyne lip service. They’re the fine print that nobody reads. They’re boxes that get checked off so that we don’t have to talk about them anymore.

I don’t think his readers think any of the statements above are relevant to their ongoing pursuit of high-quality vinyl. They want to know how amazing the new pressings are so that they can be assured that buying the record they were going to buy anyway is clearly the right choice. There’s a name for this kind of biased thinking. [1]

Making generalizations about records is rarely of much use. The devil is in the details. Let’s take a look at what Fremer has written recently about originals.

In his review for the new Stand Up on Heavy Vinyl from Chad, he notes that it has great “transient clarity on top and bottom,” and the original has hyped-up mids and upper mids. This is because he is making the most obvious mistake any record collector could possibly make.

He thinks the original pressing is the standard against which the new pressing should be judged.

But this is out and out poppycock, the kind of conventional wisdom that new collectors might fall for, but only the most benighted veterans would still believe nowadays. We discuss this myth here and in hundreds of reviews on the blog.

There are currently about 150 listings for reissues that beat the originals, compared to 700 or so listings for records in which the early pressings — not necessarily first pressings, but the right early pressings — can be expected to win shootouts.

Stand Up is one of the titles we have found to be clearly superior on the right reissue. After playing dozens of copies over the course of about twenty years, something that no individual audiophile could be expected to have the wherewithal to pull off, we’ve heard our share of great Stand Ups and awful ones.

Fremer makes the common mistake of stopping with his one original. Thinking inside the box, he naturally gets it wrong. It’s a mistake that few record collectors don’t make. I should know, I was one of them.

A big part of the fun of record collecting is learning about them, a subject I have devoted all of my adult life to. There is precious little learning going on when you buy an original and simply assume you now know what the album really sounds like. This blog is practically dedicated to the proposition that nothing could be further from the truth.

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Alone Together – What’s with All the Bad Vinyl and Murky Sound?

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dave Mason

What follows is some advice on What to Listen For.

If you are interested in digging deeper, our Listening in Depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums for which we’ve done multiple shootouts.

On to Alone Together.

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound.

This is one of them. We have a section for records that tend to be noisy, and it can be found here.

We struggled for years with the bad vinyl (on the original vomit-colored vinyl pressings, those are the ones that have the potential to win shootouts) and the murky sound of this album.

Finally, with dozens of advances in playback quality and dramatically better cleaning techniques, we have now [circa 2012] managed to overcome the problems which we assumed were baked into the recording.

I haven’t heard the master tape, but I have heard scores of pressings made from it over the years. I confess I actually used to like and recommend the Heavy Vinyl MCA pressing. Rest assured that is no longer the case. Nowadays it sounds as opaque, ambience-challenged, lifeless and pointless as the rest of its 180 gram brethren.

You want to keep what is good about a Tubey Magical analog recording from The Golden Age of Rock while avoiding the pitfalls so common to them:

  • poor resolution,
  • heavy compression,
  • thickness,
  • opacity,
  • blubber,
  • compromised frequency extremes,
  • lack of space and
  • lack of presence.

How’s that for a laundry list of all the problems we hear on old rock records, old classical records, and old jazz records?

All records when you stop to think about it.

What record doesn’t have at least some of these faults? Not many in our experience. A copy with few or none of these problems would do very well in our Hot Stamper shootouts indeed.

This is, of course, a list of all the faults we hear just as often in the Heavy Vinyl pressings we audition.

Records are records. Thick ones have the same problems as thin ones. Why wouldn’t they?

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Billion Dollar Babies Often Suffers from a Case of 70s Warner Bros. House Sound

More of the Music of Alice Cooper

The last White Hot Stamper copy we put up had the two best sides back to back we heard in our shootout, with a killer side two that really brought this music to life.

Which is not easy to do, given that the average copy of this album is a sonic mess —

There are a lot of green label Warner Bros. records from the 70s that sound like that, one might even call it their “house sound.”

When you play most of the later pressings, it’s obvious that they’ve gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inapt and more often than not disastrous.

Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity, especially on this album, may not be easy, but it can be done. This side two was far and away the best we heard and proves that the album can sound good.

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Chad Has Served Poor Jethro Tull Most Barbarously

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

With a nod to our old friend, John Barleycorn.

We were finally able to get our hands on Analogue Productions’ newly remastered Stand Up, an album we know well, having played the British copies from every era by the score. Our notes for the sound can be seen below.

If ever a record deserved a “no” grade, as in “not acceptable,” this new 45 RPM pressing mastered by Kevin Gray deserves such a grade, because it’s just awful. (This link will take you to a great many more records best avoided by audiophiles in search of better sound. Although we’ve only linked to about 75 pressings here on the blog, it should be noted that the world is full of bad sounding records.)

But let’s put that grade in context. The last time a good sounding version of Stand Up was released, as far as we can tell, was 1989, and that version was the Mobile Fidelity Gold CD. I bought mine soon after it came out. I wasn’t even planning on buying a CD player when the Compact Disc was first invented, but then Mobile Fidelity played a dirty trick on me. Instead of releasing Loggins and Messina’s first album on vinyl, they put it out exclusively on CD as part of their Silver MFCD series.

As a die-hard MoFi fan, that sealed the deal: now I had to buy a CD player. I picked up a cheap Magnavox player, the 1040. I think it ran me less than $100, and played my new Sittin’ In CD, which, as I recall, sounded pretty good. (One of my other early CD purchases was Tumbleweed Connection, the regular label release, and it was dreadful.)

I still own Stand Up on Gold CD, and I still find it superb in every way. (Many of the MFSL Gold CDs from this era are excellent and worth seeking out.)

It sounds nothing like this new vinyl release, and that’s a good thing.

On vinyl, Stand Up has rarely been given the care it deserved. The last version of Stand Up to have sound we would want to listen to was pressed in the UK in the early ’70s. That was close to fifty years ago.

We sold some domestic pressings of the album back in the early 2000s, describing them at the time as made from dub tapes with all the shortcomings that entails, but mastered very well from dub tapes. The best domestic pressings are rich, smooth, tonally correct and natural sounding. They’re too dubby to sell as Hot Stampers, but they are not bad records. Some later Chrysalis pressings are big and open, but often they are too thin and bass-shy for the music to work. We’ve never taken them seriously.

It wasn’t long before we’d eliminated everything but the early UK pressings for our shootouts, and we quickly discovered that the earliest of the UK pressings on the older Island label were not good at all. We wrote about the problem with some originals more than ten years ago.

What was surprising about the shootouts we had done in past years was how disappointing most of the early British pressings we played were. They were flat, lacked energy and just didn’t rock the way they should have.

We learned the hard way that most British Pink label pressings aren’t especially rich, that some are small and recessed, and some are just so smeary, thick and opaque that they frustrate the hell out of you as you’re trying to hear what any of the musicians other than Ian Anderson is doing.

So when a reviewer comes along and says something positive about the new pressing compared to some unidentified original, we appreciate the problem that is at the root of his mistaken judgments:

Here’s the deal: if the goal was to duplicate the original pink label Island sound, this reissue misses that, which is good because this new double 45 reissue is far superior to the original in every possible way.

The tape was in great shape, that’s for sure. Clarity, transparency, high frequency extension and especially transient precision are all far superior to the original. Bass is honest, not hyped up and the mastering delivers full dynamics that are somewhat (but only slightly), compressed on the original. Ian Anderson’s vocals are naturally present as if you are on the other side of the microphone. Most importantly, the overall timbral balance sounds honest and correct. But especially great is the transient clarity on top and bottom.

If you’re fortunate to have an original pink label Island, at first you might think the sound is somewhat “laid back”, but that’s only because the mids and upper mids are not hyped up as they are on the original. That adds some excitement, but it clouds the picture and greatly obscures detail.

If you scroll down to our notes, you will see what we thought of the “laid back” sound this reviewer talks about. (Keep in mind that we first read the above review mere moments ago.)

We think “smaller, thick and stuck in the speakers” may be someone’s idea of “laid back,” but, just so there is no misunderstanding, it’s our idea of “awful.”

None of these are good things. Our Hot Stamper pressings are never small, thick or stuck in the speakers. They’re the records with the opposite of that sound. Our records are big, transparent and open. That’s why we can charge so much money for them and have people scooping them up from our Wednesday mailer the moment they become available.

They deliver the big, bold sound that the brilliant engineer for the album, Andy Johns, was known for. Laid back was not in his vocabulary.

Here is more of what we heard on side one.

Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square

“Transients are sharp but body is dull. Kinda phony.”

Phony sound is the key here. Messing with the EQ in the mastering benefits some aspects of the sound at the expense of others.

Nothing new there. Audiophile pressings with wacky EQ are the norm. I would be surprised if any common Reprise pressing from back in the day wouldn’t sound more “right,” more tonally correct, more seamless. I’ve played quite a few and I don’t recall ever hearing one sound “phony.”

On side two we played the first two tracks.

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One of the Great Audio Disasters, Courtesy of Mobile Fidelity

More of the Music of Steely Dan

We recently amended this listing. Scroll down to see what we have to say about it in 2023.

More MoFi bashing, but boy does this MoFi deserve it. In our estimation, it is tied with the Cisco 180g pressing (2007) for the worst version ever.

I remember back in 1977 when Aja was released. I was a big Steely Dan fan by then, having been turned on to their albums with Countdown to Ecstasy in 73. With each new Dan record I became more impressed with their music, from Pretzel Logic to Katy Lied to Royal Scam and finally on to this, their commercial breakthrough.

At the time I thought the album sounded pretty good on my plain old ABC original.

Then I got a copy of the Mobile Fidelity pressing and I thought it sounded much, much better.

Side two of the MoFi had bass that was only hinted at on my domestic copy. Wow! Listen to all that bass!

Sometime in the 80s, I realized that the MoFi was hideously phony sounding, and that all the bass on side two was boosted far out of proportion to what must be (I’m guessing) on the master tape.

If I May

How much bass is on the master tape is of course of no concern to anyone not mastering the record. The bass has to be right on the record, not the tape.

The song Home At Last has at least an extra three or four DBs added around 50 cycles. It’s ridiculous.

And that’s just the bottom end; the highs are every bit as wrong.

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Are Hot Stampers exceptionally good sounding records?

New to the Blog? Start Here

Not necessarily. What makes a Hot Stamper hot is reasonably good sound. At the very least a Hot Stamper should sound quite a bit better than any other pressing you have heard.

Not every album was well-recorded. (Here are some examples of records that you are not likely to be playing for your friends in order to show off your system, even if you have one of our White Hot Stamper pressings.)

As a result, the records made from those recordings will display most of the limitations that are baked into the master tape. A good engineer can fix an awful lot of problems in mastering, but, to mix a few metaphors, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is rarely if ever going to be in the cards.

For that reason, the records we review must be graded on a curve.

In our shootouts we compare apples to other apples. There is simply no other practical way to do it.

Out of the pile of pressings we have available, usually comprising six to twelve records, we clean them up and play them in order to find out which are the best sounding ones. If the winners of the shootout have the best sound we heard on both sides, they go into our Top Shelf section, which as of this writing has 13 members.

Any record that has one Shootout Winning side goes into our White Hot Stampers section. (There are more than ten times as many of those as of this writing. If you think a record you have cannot be beat on either side, that is very unlikely to be the case. We are happy to sell you the record that will beat it, and it will probably beat it on both sides, truth be told, and if it doesn’t, you get your money back.

We also guarantee that no Half-Speed mastered record or Heavy Vinyl LP sounds as good as even the lowest-graded Hot Stampers we offer. We’ve played too many of these so-called audiophile pressings to worry about them being competitive with the records on our site.

(One actually was competitive recently, but what a fluke that record was. Another word for fluke is outlier, and we really, really love those, but a Heavy Vinyl pressing winning a shootout? That has happened exactly once.)

It is our strongly held conviction that the better your system gets, the worse — or at the very least the more artificial, veiled, ambience-challenged, frequency-limited and uninvolving — those records will sound.

The question every audiophile who collects records for sound quality must grapple with is “how high is up?”

That’s what shootouts are for. To judge the relative merits of individual pressings, regardless of how well or how poorly the rcording is (as if we could ever know such a thing.).

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