1+

The pressings listed here earned a not-awful, but not-very-good-either sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1 plus on at least one side.

To qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing, both side must earn grades of 1.5+.

You Say Your Shaded Dog Just Sounds Like an Old Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

The better pressings of LSC 2328 have some of the best sound we have ever heard for The Nutcracker. We’ve played recordings of the work by the dozens, on the greatest Golden Age labels of all time, including the likes of Mercury, RCA and London. (Our current favorites of both the suites and the complete ballet are those conducted by Ansermet for Decca.)

The CSO, as one might expect, plays this work with more precision and control than most others. They also bring more excitement and dynamic contrasts to their performance, adding greatly to our enjoyment of the music.

Some may find the performances a bit rushed. That was our experience during our most recent shootout.

But skip 9s/6s. We had two copies and both of them sounded too much like an old record.

Pressings with those stampers might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they would not be worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with a catalog of obvious shortcomings — obvious to us but not necessarily to others — and we’ve broken them down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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clone me Shaded Dog Stampers to Avoid on XXX passable sheet 1+

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Even though they had the Shaded Dog label, some of the later stampers for this record were not very good sounding compared to the ones that won our shootouts.

15s on side one earned a grade that would prevent it from being sold as a Hot Stamper pressing. There was no reason to play side two (13s) since side one eliminated this copy from the competition.

The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, Shaded Dog label or no Shaded Dog label.

Pressings with these stampers might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they would not be worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

In this case, the conventional wisdom that the original pressings will most likely have superior sound to the later-numbered copies turns out to be right.

The average Shaded Dog may be better than the average classical record, but that certainly doesn’t mean it has any claim to audiophile sound. We’ve played bad early RCA pressings by the hundreds. Now, finally, with this blog we can point some of them out to those record lovers who are more interested in top quality sound than an original label.

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

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How Do the The Mastering Lab Pressings of Sticky Fingers Sound?

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

A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced like this:

If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is.

A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).

After hearing so much buzz about it, we finally broke down and ordered a German TML pressing about a year ago. Having played scores of phenomenally good sounding copies of the album over the past fifteen or so years, we were very skeptical that anyone could cut the record better than the mastering engineers who inscribed Rolling Stones Records into the dead wax on the early pressings. (I could find no mastering engineers credited.)

Well, the results were not good. As we suspected would be the case, we were not impressed in the least with what The Mastering Lab — one of the greatest independent cutting houses of all time, mind you — had wrought.

Their version is not really even good enough to charge money for. It might have earned a grade of One Plus, just under the threshold for a Hot Stamper that we would put on the site these days. Decent, but not much more than that.

Wait, There’s More

We subsequently learned that it is the British TML pressings that are supposed to be the best.

So we got one of those in, an A3/B4 copy.

Better, but good enough? Barely.

Here are the notes for the copy we played. For those who have trouble reading our writing, I have transcribed the notes as follows:

Side One

Track one:

Weighty, a bit veiled or smeary. Backing vox kinda lost.

Track three:

Very full, rockin’ but not the sparkle/space.

Kinda compressed.

Not as huge.

Side Two

Track two:

Not as rich, clear.

A bit pushy/dry vox.

No real space.

Thick drums

Track one:

This works better.

A bit hard, but full and lively.

This Sound?

Is this the sound audiophiles are raving about?

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“KEV” Didn’t Have a Clue How to Master Teaser and the Firecat

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

In 2025, in preparation for a new shootout, we ordered a copy of Teaser from overseas that supposedly had the right stampers — we know what they are and we are only interested in copies with the right ones — and were sent this “KEV” pressing by accident.

Accident is right — whoever KEV is, he sure has no business mastering records if the one we played is anything to go by.

Discogs has an entry for it, current price around $10. (Apparently the word got out about the sound of this miserable pressing.)

  • This release is the pink ring Island Label. No Sterling etchings. (KEV) in matrix.
  • Side 1 has 9514 hashed out and 9154 etched above
  • Matrix / Runout (A-side runout. etched): ILPS 9154A-1K 1 KEV B
  • Matrix / Runout (B-side runout. etched): ILPS 9154B-1K 1 KEV B

Our notes read:

  • Loud, congested and hot.
  • Big, wonky bass.
  • Opaque and so compressed that it pumps.

And the best line of all:

  • Not too different sounding from the 2021 remaster that’s on Spotify. (!)

I looked up that 2021 release, mastered at Abbey Road Studios, and it appears they remixed it for some reason, as those who work at Abbey Road are wont to do, the result of which seems to be one disaster after another.

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There’s a Very Good Chance We Were Wrong about Mulligan Meets Getz

More of the Music of Stan Getz /More of the Music of Gerry Mulligan

This is an album that we were probably wrong about in 2021 when the following Hot Stamper two-pak pressing went up for sale on the site. (The pressings we liked at the time are long gone by now.) Here is what we wrote back then:

Mulligan and Getz’s 1957 collaboration arrives on the site with this superb 2-pack offering Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner

Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory

Practically impossible to find in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces – it took two different pressings to get two good sides, and they are very good indeed

The reissues we discovered in 2025 trounced the originals (in both stereo and mono) as well as the early reissues (on the Verve T Label) we played in our shootout, as you can see from the stamper sheet notes below:

Our mistaken judgment is simply the result of ignorance. In 2021 we simply had no idea just how good this recording could sound on vintage vinyl. We hadn’t done our homework properly, and because of that we came up with the wrong answer.

We only discovered the right pressings, with the right stampers, pressed in the right era, and mastered by the right guy, sometime in 2024 or so. We bought a bunch of those and in 2025 did the shootout with all kinds of copies, just to keep everybody honest.

That was the year much better sounding reissue copies that look like the one you see on the left came along. As we noted in the listing:

  • Leave it to Better Records to figure out a complicated title with a long history such as this one – originals, reissues, monos, stereos, we had to play them all to find a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory.

Some quick notes:

Bowtie Label Stereo

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This Rudy Van Gelder Cutting of Red Clay Is Good but…

xxx

… far from the best we played, earning barely Hot Stamper grades.

And we would be remiss if we failed to point out that the proper cleaning of your records will typically improve their sound quality by at least one half plus, and more often than not one full plus.

It’s very likely that neither of the A3/B3 copies you see below would have qualified as Hot Stamper pressings without the aid of a good cleaning.

Red Clay is one of our favorite CTI albums – Red Clay (the song and the album) is Hubbard’s soul jazz Masterpiece, and it’s a record that belongs in every audiophile’s jazz collection.

Lenny White drums up a storm on this album – on this copy he is playing right in the room with you. If you’re a Hubbard fan, or perhaps a fan of early-70s soul jazz, this title from 1970 is surely a Must Own.

Although Rudy recorded and mastered the album — the only pressings that qualified for the shootout were his — it should be noted that Van Gelder in the dead wax is never a guarantee of high quality sound, on any record.

(It’s easy to criticize the bad pressings of Rudy Van Gelder’s work, but let us not lose site of the countless great ones.)

This A3/B3 pressing was not awful, or even mediocre — the reissues without VAN GELDER in the dead wax would most likely be much worse sounding — but at 1.5+ we would say it has earned good, not great Hot Stamper grades.

The only way to guarantee higher quality sound is to do a shootout with a good-sized pile of cleaned pressings and find the one with the best sound using the rigorous testing methodologies we use.

For this kind of work, top quality playback is a must.

There is of course a way to avoid doing all that work and spending all that money on piles of pressings, most of which you will eventually have no use for, and that’s to buy a Hot Stamper copy of the album from us.

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These Kelly Blue Reissues from the 70s Are a Real Mess

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wynton Kelly Available Now

Sometimes the 70s reissues of vintage jazz recordings that were made in the fifties, sometimes released with different covers similar to the one you see pictured, have excellent sound.

We know that for a fact because we’ve played some very good ones.

In the case of Kelly Blue, we felt we were obligated to play a few to make sure we were hearing as wide a range of different pressings as possible. We wanted to be sure we were hearing the best sounding pressings regardless of what era they were pressed in. (We’re very open minded that way.)

Here are our notes for the Black Label Riverside Stereo pressing with “1971” stampers:

  • Thin,
  • Dry,
  • Honky,
  • Veiled.
  • Severe stereo spread. (Hard left and right, unmusical this way, players are disconnected.)
  • Grade: 1+ on both sides

The other copy we had was even worse:

  • NFG on side one, side two never played.

The Riverside originals we’ve played in the past, like a lot of other Riverside originals from the 50s, such as those by Thelonious Monk, were uniformly terrible.

And trying to find one in audiophile playing condition is as easy as it sounds.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 38 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are rarely better than mediocre, and some of them are just awful, with many of the newest releases being the most awful of them all!

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How Do the Early Pressings of The Poll Winners Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A recent Shootout Winning copy with the early stereo badge cover was described this way:

Stunning sound throughout this vintage Black Label Stereo Records pressing, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them

Roy DuNann always seems to get the real sound out of the sessions he recorded – amazingly realistic drums in a big room; Tubey Magical guitar tone; deep, note-like bass, and on and on

4 1/2 stars: “The choice of material, the interplay between the three players, and the lead work all meld together beautifully on The Poll Winners, making it a classic guitar album in a small-group setting.”

Musically, all true. Sonically, not so much. The early D1/D2 stampers on the early Black Label might be passable on side one (1+), but side two was just a mess (NFG).

Side One

Track Two

  • A bit bright and flat

Track One

  • Very clear but lacking richness, weight and depth
  • Thin, and bright up top
  • 1+

Side Two

Track One

  • Narrow stereo field
  • Weird tape hiss
  • Metallic top end
  • Very recessed and weird
  • Nope

A different Stereo Badge Cover copy sporting a Black Label won the shootout by the way. Go figure.

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Capriccio Italien on Classic Records and How Badly I Missed the Boat

More of the Music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

More of the Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

I thought it was better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned, was unexpected to say the least.

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout.

(Some inside baseball: most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.)

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

Finding the time to do the serious investigation of LSC 2323 that would be necessary to get to the bottom of it was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years.

The title would have to wait until 2024 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records. Every record gets the chance to show us what it can do, to be evaluated fairly without the listener having any way to know which pressing is playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had probably never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings.

Side One, Second Movement (Tchaikovsky)

  • Big, but bright and compressed
  • Gets loud but opaque and hot
  • Good weight

Side One, First Movement

  • Bright and blurry bells
  • Sort of tubey but a mess
  • Grade: 1+ (passable, but no Hot Stamper)

Side Two (Rimsky-Korsakov)

  • Big but boomy and smeary
  • Brass is edgy and opaque
  • No top end or space
  • Peaks are hot and congested
  • Grade: NFG

To recap: In 2005 I was impressed with Classic’s pressing of LSC 2323. That was only twenty years ago, yet I could not have been more wrong. I thought my stereo was great — I’d owned top quality equipment since 1975 by then — thirty sodding years — so my audiophile credentials would surely dwarf those of the vast majority of forum posters who write about audiophile pressings today. How reliable should we expect their reviews to be?

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Another Unimpressive Reissue Pressing of Coltrane’s Music — What Is Going On?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

We had an early Blue Label Prestige mono pressing that was not as awful as the original Yellow Label mono we played, but it’s not very good either. Our grade for a record that earns one plus on both sides is passable.

Which means you could play it, maybe even enjoy it, but you would have no idea just how well Rudy Van Gelder recorded the sessions in 1958 that went into the making of the album, which as you know was not compiled for release until 1962.

As you can see from the notes above, it was crude, smeary and thick. We don’t sell records that sound like that.

I can’t say that most modern remastered records are crude, although some of them are, but a great many we’ve played are smeary, and almost all of them are thick — that is, lacking in transparency — to some degree. That last quality — a lack of transparency — may be the most irritating of all, a subject we discuss here.

(A great many records we’ve auditioned over the years are good for testing transparency. Those wanting to improve this aspect of their playback should consider making use of them.

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