11-2023

Did We Get The Power of the Orchestra Wrong, or Are These Just Bad Stampers?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

More on Mussorgsky’s (and Ravel’s) Masterpiece – Pictures at an Exhibition

In 2007, we wrote the following review for The Power of the Orchestra, VCS 2659:

DEMO DISC QUALITY ORCHESTRAL SOUND like you will not believe. We put two top copies together to bring you the ultimate-sounding Pictures At An Exhibition. Folks, it doesn’t get any better than this for huge orchestral dynamics and energy.

I confess I badly misjudged this record over the course of the last few years. I remember liking it in the early ’90s; at that time it was the only Golden Age recording of Pictures whose performance moved me. I never liked the famous Reiner, LSC 2201, and Ansermet’s performance on London also lacks drive and coherency in my opinion.

I then went on to extoll the many virtues of the recording, making special mention of the brass, dynamics and bass, which you can read about here.

More recently we played a copy of VCS 2659 in one of our regular Pictures at an Exhibition shootouts and were not the least bit impressed by it.

Side One:

Steely and opaque, not that good.

Side Two:

Strings are not very [unintelligible], not much weight.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record.

The world is full of old records. It’s why we are in business. We sell old records, sure, but ours sound good, and, more often than not, amazingly good, better than any pressings you’ve ever heard.

In both cases, the EMI with Muti “kills it.”

Were we wrong years ago? Hard to say. That copy from 2007 is long gone.

Are 6s/4s especially bad stampers, and others might be superior? That is certainly possible.

The following three things should be kept in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound like we remember it did, or think it should:

  1. Our standards are quite a bit higher now, having spent decades critically listening to vintage classical pressings by the hundreds.
  2. Our stereo is dramatically more revealing and more accurate than it used to be.
  3. Since no two records sound the same, maybe the one from long ago actually did sound as good as we thought at the time.

With all of the above considered, the current consensus is that The Power of the Orchestra is very unlikely to be as good a record as we used to think it was. It’s also unlikely we would ever buy another one at anything but a bargain price.

Looking at the big picture, this is probably an example of a record we got wrong.

2007 was a long time ago. It was the year we made many breakthroughs. In fact, we made more breakthroughs in that year than in any other in the history of the company, including this singularly important break with the past.

However, if tomorrow we run into a copy of the album that sounds amazing, with different stampers, or even the same stampers, then all of the above is thrown into the cocked hat that is the reality of the record world: pressing variability.

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Sonny Rollins Plus 4 – Defending the Indefensible

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sonny Rollins

This review is from 2014 or thereabouts.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding pair of audiophile records than this 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl release, and I’ve heard a ton of them. 

Surely someone must have noticed how awful these records sound.

So, being an enterprising sort, with a few idle moments to spare, I did a google search. To my surprise it came up pretty much empty. Sure, dealers are selling it, every last one of the bigger mail-order types.

But how is it that no reviewer has taken it to task for its oh-so-obvious shortcomings?

And no one on any forum seems to have anything bad to say about it either. How could that be?

We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think for the most part they are awful and want nothing to do with them.

But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.

Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?

I’m starting to feel like Mr. Jones: Something’s going on, but I don’t know what it is. Dear reader, this is the audiophile world we live in today. If you expect anyone to tell you the truth about the current crop of remastered vinyl, you are in for some real disappointment.

We don’t have the time to critique what’s out there, and it seems that the reviewers and forum posters lack the — what? desire, courage, or maybe just the basic critical listening skills — to do it properly.

Which means that in the world of Heavy Vinyl, it’s every man for himself.

And a very different world from the world of Vintage Vinyl, the kind we offer. In our world we are behind you all the way. We guarantee your satisfaction or your money back.

Now which world would you rather live in?

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Expanding Space Itself on The Dark Side of the Moon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pink Floyd’s Albums Available Now

More Breakthrough Pressing Discoveries

Many years ago, right around 2015 I believe, we played a copy with all the presence, all the richness, all the size and all the energy we ever hoped to hear from a top quality pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

It did it ALL and then some.

The raging guitar solos (there are three of them) on Money seemed to somehow expand the system itself, making it bigger and more powerful than I had ever heard.

Even our best copies of Blood Sweat and Tears have never managed to create such a huge space with that kind of raw power. This copy broke through all the barriers, taking the system to an entirely new level of sound.

Take the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage on this copy that I’ve never heard as clearly before. On most copies you can’t even tell they are there. Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve NEVER heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion on this track.

One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, do no more than hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. When you don’t — the reason we do shootouts in a nutshell — it’s not.

The best sounding parts of this record are nothing less than ASTONISHING. Money is the best example I can think of for side two. When you hear the sax player rip into his solo as Money gets rockin’, it’s almost SCARY! He’s blowin’ his brains out in a way that has never, in my experience anyway, been captured on a piece of plastic. After hearing this copy, I remembered exactly why we felt this album must rank as one of the five best Rock Demo Discs to demonstrate the superiority of analog. There is no CD, and there will never be a CD, that sounds like this.

In fact, when you play the other “good sounding” copies, you realize that the sound you hear is what would naturally be considered as good as this album could get. But now we know better. This pressing takes Dark Side to places you have never imagined it could go.

To say this is a sonic and musical masterpiece practically without equal in the history of the world is no overstatement. But you have to have a top copy for that statement to be true.

Our Previous Hot Stamper Commentary

Side One

A+++ and should absolutely BLOW YOUR MIND with its HUGE, three-dimensional soundfield. It’s got big-time energy, amazing presence, and wonderful clarity. The bottom end sounds phenomenal, with real weight to the bass. The overall sound is rich, sweet and warm. Listen to how clean and clear the female background vocalists sound on Time. The guitars have a meaty texture that really adds to the life force of this copy — it’s positively ELECTRIC.

Side Two

Side two is every bit as AMAZING! A+++ White Hot sound. The size of the stage on this side is beyond anything in our experience. Check out the incredible transparency and the silky highs, as well as the breathy vocals and tons of energy. Money on this copy will blow your mind. We had a copy with bigger bass than this one but it could not hold a candle to this one is any other way. This was an easy choice for Best Side Two Ever.

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Elvis Costello / Armed Forces

Armed Forces is one of the best sounding rock records ever made. The hottest copies have unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Armed Forces Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Armed Forces

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “The real point for me is that I can keep enjoying these new listening experiences over and over again.”

More of the Music of Peter Gabriel

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Peter Gabriel

Our new customer Michel wrote to tell us how much he likes his Hot Stamper pressing of So.

Hi Tom,

Many of the BR titles I bought I had stopped listening to due to lack of engagement with the music. It just didn’t do it for me anymore. But then I’d buy one of your LPs… it would then destroy my other copies… and now I listen to that LP on a regular basis, enjoying music I love but had stopped listening to.

When I put on a BR record, I am engaged with the music… and of course I keep hearing new nuances, etc. with every play.

Why pay so much for an album?  Well if music floats your boat, then no explanation needed. Just bring your ears to my living room…then you’ll get it!

The real point for me is that I can keep enjoying these new listening experiences over and over again. It is an immeasurable joy really to hear beautiful music reveal itself in all its splendor.

How the f*** does yours sound so much better? Virtually as soon as the music began the difference was obvious.

I remember liking some aspects of the UK… and the same goes for the US… I liked the warmth and rolled back highs in comparison the UK, but it seemed muddy/veiled/mishmashy which was bothersome, so then I stopped listening.

The BR copy somehow has it all. It is by far the most listenable copy of this I’ve ever heard. It can be turned up all the way from start to finish without any worries about what you might hear.

Plenty of shrill-free highs, lots of killer bass… deep low tones with analog warmth, boomy wide room filling sound, etc, etc.  No muddiness in the presentation… clarity with warmth, nothing veiled.

Thank You!!
Michel

Michel,

You make a point that I have been banging on for years. Better sounding pressings are the only way to rediscover music that you’ve lost interest in because the copies you own didn’t have the sound you needed.

If your old copies of So had sounded better, you would have played them, but they didn’t, and so they sat on the shelf.

Knowing the sound was off, you simply stopped playing them. You lost track of So.

Hot Stamper pressings get played. They have the life of the music in their grooves and demand to be heard!

We say music does the driving in this hobby, but that’s not really the whole story for us audiophiles, is it?

Music with good sound is what really does the driving.

Joy to Your World

When you get hold of the pressing that presents the music the way you want to hear it, that’s the record that gets played beause that’s the record that brings joy to the listener.

The other pressings of So sit on the shelf, reminders that badly-mastered, badly-pressed records are the norm, not the exception.

The exceptional pressing is the one that can bring the music you love back from the purgatory of the overcrowded record shelf.

Think of the audiophiles that have thousands and thousands of records on their shelves and never find time to play them. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because there is nothing special about those pressings. Some collectors are so proud of having so many records — look at them all! — but what good are they? To our way of thinking, the man with ten or twenty exceptionally good records is far better off than than the one with a thousand or five thousand mediocrities.

If you want a powerful, immersive, thrilling musical experience, you will need a record that is powerful, immersive, and thrilling.

The thousands of records sitting on your shelf, the ones you haven’t played in years, are the silent reminders that they aren’t nearly as good as you think they are. If they were better, they would call out to you from that graveyard you call a record collection and fight their way back to your turntable.

So Is Back

Now, after all these years, you finally have a pressing of So that demands to be played.

If others of you out there haven’t played your copy of So in a long time, maybe there’s a reason for that.

Thanks for your letter.

Best, TP

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Quote of the Day – “…doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time…”

“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.” — Shane Parrish

Everybody knows that practicing and challenging yourself will make you better at whatever you are trying to do. But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to bettering your own audio skills (other than on our website and blog)?

Just how would you go about challenging yourself as an audiophile?

Easy.

Playing ten copies of the same album back to back and making notes about the sound of each side is one.

Adjusting the turntable sixty six different ways and seeing what the effect is on scores of different records is another.

All these things taught me a lot. No amount of reading or advice was remotely as helpful as just getting down and messing around with anything and everything in my listening room.

As Van Morrison put it: “No guru, no method, no teacher.”

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Crosby Stills & Nash – Critical Listening Exercise

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

This very old commentary from an early Hot Stamper listing (2005?) for CSN’s debut makes note of some specific qualities in the recording that are a good test for midrange transparency and naturalness.

Here are some other albums with specific advice on what you should be listening for.

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young)? 

Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with bad midrange — like most of them — is a worthless record.

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Listen to the section of the song that starts with Stills’ line “Can I tell it like it is,” with Nash and Crosby behind him — it’s clearly a generation of tape down from what came before and what comes after. The voices and the acoustic guitars just seem to lose their immediacy and transient impact for no apparent reason. Wha’ happen?

It’s the mix, folks, and no mastering engineer can fix it. This album is full of parts and pieces of various songs that are occasionally problematical in that way. Recognize them for what they are, little bumps in the road, a road that led ultimately to one of the greatest pop albums ever made.

On the hot copies the best sounding material will sound amazing, and the lesser sounding material (i.e., the more poorly recorded or mixed bits and pieces) will sound as good as they can sound.

That’s the nature of the beast. It is what it is. The more intensely you listen to a record like this — a true Rock Classic from the 60s, and one we listen to very intensely when doing these shootouts — the more you will notice these kinds of recording artifacts. It’s what gives them “character.”

It’s also what allows you to play a record like this on a regular basis and still find something new in it after all these years.

We’ve made some recent improvements to the stereo and room here at Better Records and I can tell you I heard things in this recording I never knew were there.

What could be more fun than that? The music never gets old, and neither does the sound.

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Hearing Is All It Should Take, Right?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Well Recorded Classical Albums – The Core Collection

Some person on some audiophile forum might feel obligated at some point to explain to you, benighted soul that you are, that the old classical records you, and other audiophiles like you, revere so highly have to be recognized these days for what they are: drastically compromised by the limits of their old technology. Simply put, there’s just no way they can sound good.

It’s just a fact. It’s science. Technology marches on and those old records belong on the ash heap of history collecting dust, not sitting on the platter of a modern turntable.

That’s why the audio world was crying out for Bernie Grundman to recut those Living Stereo recordings from the 50s and 60s on his modern transistorized cutting equipment and have RTI press them on quiet, flat, high-resolution 180 gram vinyl, following the best practices of an industry that everybody knows has been constantly improving for decades.

Right?

For those of us who actually play these records, there is little evidence to support this narrative. It’s a story, made up mostly of assertions, along with an unhealthy amount of faith in so-called experts.[1]

(Note that Bernie had no experience cutting classical music. He was a rock, pop and jazz guy. Robert Ludwig was the classical guy, cutting hundreds of albums for labels like Nonesuch in the 60s. What a different world it would be if he was the guy who cut for Classic Records!)

However, the contrarian view outlined above only really holds true for a very small minority of audiophiles of the analog persuasion: those given to empirical testing of such propositions. [2]

For an audiophile to compare the new pressings to the old ones, proper testing requires the following four conditions to be met:

  1. He or she has a revealing, accurate stereo,
  2. A good record cleaning system, and
  3. Knows how to do shootouts using his or her
  4. Well-developed critical listening skills

If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you’ve probably read by now that the first three on this list are what allow you to achieve the fourth.

Compromises?

The best classical recordings of the 50s and 60s, similar to the one you see pictured here, were compromised in every imaginable way.

Yet somehow they still stand sonically and musically head and shoulders above virtually anything that has come after them, now that we have much higher quality equipment on which to play them.

The music lives and breathes on those old LPs. When they are playing, you find yourself in the Living Presence of the musicians. You become lost in the music and the quality of the performance.

Whatever the limitations of the medium, they seem to fade quickly from consciousness. What remains is the rapture of the musical experience.

That’s what happens when a good record meets a good turntable.

We live for records like these. It’s the reason we all get up in the morning and come to work, to find and play good records. It’s what this site is all about — offering the audiophile music lover records that provide real musical satisfaction.

It’s hard work — so hard nobody else seems to want to do it — but the payoff makes it all worthwhile. To us anyway. Hope you feel the same.

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works. Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start. it does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten, you’re probably setting the bar too low, if our experience is any guide.

[1] “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman

[2] “When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it – how did the scientists find out – how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific.” — Richard Feynman

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Letter of the Week – “One begins to notice what is wrong with them — they sound tinkered with”

More of the Music of Elvis Presley

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Elvis Presley

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased in 2017.

Hey Tom, 

Bless You Tom! Much appreciated! Funny thing is, I never had this album or properly heard it before now. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I too was buying audiophile pressings and Half Speed Masters and at first, I thought they were great! But before too long, one begins to notice what is wrong with them– they sound tinkered with! I think that is exactly what MoFi did.

I tried these again when I came back to vinyl in 2009. That first year I began buying audiophile pressings but when I played them back I found they were not the holy grail nor the sound I was looking for at all! Certainly not even the claimed ‘Sourced from the Original Master Tape’ was true! More like, from the digital master/remasters or a third generation master. I spent a whole lot before I put the brakes on and went for original recordings/early pressings such as ED1 or ED2.

Now, when I want a record for serious listening of something special, I know the only place to get what I want first time and every time for the best sounding records– Better Records, of course!

Michael

Michael,

Thanks for your letter. “Tinkering” with the sound is what these audiophile labels do. Apparently they know how to “fix” the recordings that the original producers and engineers got wrong.

Or so they think.

Like you, I was fooled.

It took me a while but eventually I started to see where I had gone wrong.

And don’t write off all reissues. You can stick to first and second editions, but by doing that you will miss out on the superior sound of these 150+ reissues. (If I had time to really go deeper into it, I could probably list three times that many.)

Even better, these superior sounding reissues can actually be bought.

Best, TP

This link will take you to our reviews and commentaries for the more than 140 Half-Speed Mastered pressings we’ve played over the years.

Some audiophile records — Half-Speed Mastered and otherwise — are so dreadful sounding that I got pissed off enough to create this special list for them.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is clearly a mark of progress.

Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.

Further Reading

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Listening In Depth to Catch Bull At Four

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Cat Stevens

If you’re familiar with what the best Hot Stamper pressings of Tea for the Tillerman, Teaser and the Firecat or Mona Bone Jakon can sound like — amazing is the word that comes to mind — then you should easily be able to imagine how good a killer copy of Catch Bull at Four sounds.

All the ingredients for a Classic Cat Stevens album were in place for this release which came out in 1972, about a year after Teaser and the Firecat. His amazing guitar player Alun Davies is still in the band, and Paul Samwell-Smith is still producing as brilliantly as ever.

Side One

Sitting

This track often sounds a bit flat and midrangy, and it sounds that way on most domestic pressings and the “wrong” imports.

The best imports and domestic pressings are the only ones with the sweeter, tubier Midrange Magic that we’ve come to associate with the best Cat Stevens recordings.

Boy With a Moon & Star on His Head

Another very difficult track to get to sound right. The better copies have such amazingly transparent sound you can’t help feeling as though you really are in the presence of live human beings. You get the sense of actual fingers — in this case the fingers of Cat’s stalwart accompanist Alun Davies — plucking the strings of his Spanish guitar.

Angelsea

This is one of the best sounding tracks on the album, right up there with Cat’s most well recorded big productions such as Tuesday’s Dead, Changes IV, Where Do The Children Play and Hard Headed Woman. On Hot Stamper copies this is a Demo Track that’s hard to beat.

The midrange magic of the acoustic guitars is off the scale. Some of Catch Bull At Four has the magic and some of it does not, unlike Tea and Teaser, which are magical all the way through.

Silent Sunlight
Can’t Keep It In

On the best copies this track is as Huge and Powerful as anything the man ever recorded. It’s another one of the best sounding tracks on the album. On our top copies this is a Demo Track that’s hard to beat.

The midrange magic of the acoustic guitars is off the scale. Some of Catch Bull At Four has the magic and some of it does not, unlike Tea and Teaser, which are magical all the way through.

Side Two

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