12-2023

Letter of the Week – “whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

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

Hey Tom, 

That latest S&G album — BOTW — is absofuckinglutely blowing my mind tonight. Wow. Those deep horns (?) blasting at times (end of Keep the Customer Satisfied, chorus of Why Don’t You Write Me, end of The Boxer… whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound. Hard to sit down!!

Dear C.

The power of those horns is exactly what I was telling you about –  they cannot be reproduced properly until you have speakers with dynamic drivers large enough to play the full weight of the brass.

TP

We discuss the idea of Big Speakers in this boilerplate commentary all over the site:

Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

You’ve blown my mind yet again. This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC… I’m just glad I didn’t blow up my hi-fi; there should’ve been a warning label!

Best,

Ben

Ben,

You are right about that. This album is powerful like few others we have the pleasure to play regularly.

This is Demo Disc quality sound by any measure, especially on big speakers at loud levels.

You’ve got to hand it to Bruce Botnick — he knows how to get real rock-’em, sock-’em bottom end onto a piece of magnetic tape.

And sometimes that bottom end whomp* actually makes it onto the record, as is the case here, making for one helluva demo disc for bass (if you have speakers big enough to play it, of course.)

Waiting for the Sun

The track to play to hear massive amounts of bass and energy is one we should all know well: Waiting for the Sun.

If you’re looking for Demo Quality song on this album, that’s the one. Prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic as well.

*For whomp factor, the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp.

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Question – Where Are All Your New Wave and Post Punk Titles?

Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob

Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records

One of our good customers wrote us a letter recently

Hey Tom, 

Just a quick message to let you know that I really enjoyed reading those two recent pieces on the Dangerous Minds blog (“Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob” and “Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records”).  As always, it is a total pleasure to read anything in which you are interviewed at length, as you articulate ideas about sound and music so much better and more eloquently than anybody else.

Very kind of you to say, we try! I did an interview with a colleague which you may enjoy: detail versus weight

Loved some of the nuggets I had never heard you speak about before (the lack of any hot stampers for Then Play On, the difficulty with the first CSN album, and your hilarious take on the live Fleetwood Mac album).  Hearing those kinds of insights from you gives me a total buzz for hours afterward! 

Awesome. We do a lot of that stuff on the blog. Do a search for any record and something will usually come up. Also we have a “never again” tag for some of the records that probably won’t go into shootouts now that I have retired.

The only point you offer in the whole interview with which I would quibble at all is your take on new wave and post-punk titles.  Your sense is that there wouldn’t be a market for $200 pressings of records by Nick Cave, Joy Division, et al., but I suspect the exact opposite is true.  I for one would leap at Hot Stampers by both of those artists, as well as many others from their time (Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Blue Nile, The Psychedelic Furs, Public Image Ltd., etc.), and I’m certain that there are many others like me.  What’s more, I suspect we would pay a lot more than $200 for each title.  Your point about the sound quality of some of those albums being less distinguished than records from previous eras could certainly be true.  Nonetheless, as we’ve talked about before, people don’t expect every record they buy from you to sound like Aja or Dark Side of the Moon.  Rather, they want the albums they love to sound the best they possibly can.

While not precisely analogous, I might mention your recent success with Hot Stampers of Beck’s Sea Change as indicative of the untapped market that awaits you.  By my count, at least three copies of that title (two White Hot Stampers and a Super Hot Stamper) recently flew off the shelves of Better Records.  I have no doubt that Sea Change is an exceptionally well recorded album and perhaps—as your write-ups indicated—an especially analog-sounding one.  But all of the records on your website have those qualities.  The copies of Sea Change went so fast because that title and that artist had never been available from your store before.

Having said all of that, I completely get your point about the time, money, and hard work that would be involved in introducing new titles to the Better Records inventory.  Given that you and your team are working full time as it is, and given that you are massively successful with the existing pool of titles, there doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive to change course for an unproven commodity.  Nonetheless, if you ever do decide to test the waters with some of these other artists, I would gladly share my two cents as far as artist/album selection goes, and I would gladly share my thousands of dollars for the shootout winners.

All good points. The reason it was easy for me to get Beck going was that I owned both Sea Change and Mutations and knew the sound was excellent. The R and D had already been done.

I have played albums by The Blue Nile, Psychedelic Furs and Public Image and found them all to be unacceptable, along with a host of others. Ultravox is a good sounding band, but who will buy them if we have trouble selling Roxy Music? We can hardly do Roxy Music these days for cryin’ out loud. One of the greatest bands ever.

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On Fillmore East, Transparency Is Key

More of the Music of Frank Zappa

We’re big fans of this album, and Zappa in general, but it’s incredibly difficult to find copies that do justice to the music. 

So many pressings don’t let you hear INTO the music. This is a live recording with musicians sprinkled all over the stage — three-dimensional transparency is absolutely KEY to the best pressings, the ones that let you immerse yourself in the spectacle, never losing sight of the individual performances of Zappa and his merry band of obscene nut jobs. This band works BLUE. It will have you in hysterics if you get into the down and dirty spirit of the show. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, steer clear of this one. It’s raunchy as hell, and the raunchiest bits are the most hilarious.

The Greatest Rock Opera Ever

As for the music, it’s a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. This to me is the ultimate rock opera. In point of fact it’s actually a parody of a rock opera, which makes it doubly enjoyable.

The two former leaders of The Turtles (aka Flo and Eddie) variously play groupies (What Kind Of Girl Do You Think We Are) and members of the band. As the saying goes, hilarity ensues.

What makes this album so special is that the rock songs that are generated out of this story are actually great rock songs. They’re not filler. They’re not connecting tissue. They’re good songs with strong melodies that stand up on their own. Moreover, connected to each other through this crazy story sung by men pretending to be women, they become something even greater: a True Rock Opera. Better than that: A True Rock Opera Parody that’s as hilarious as it is musically satisfying. Zappa missed his calling — he should have dedicated himself to musical theatre. He has a real gift for it. This album is proof.

The entertainment value of this record is as good as it gets. Off the scale. If you’re a fan of The Firesign Theater, Zappa, improv comedy and such like, you will love this album.

Fillmore East – June 1971 checks off some important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Before and After Science – Rules Are Made to Be Broken

Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Recordings Available Now

The domestic pressings of Before And After Science are typically grainy, low-rez and hard sounding — they’re simply not competitive with the smoother British Polydors.

But our best Hot Stamper pressing isn’t an import; it was made right here in the good old US of A.

Say what? Yes, it’s true. We were SHOCKED to find such hot stamper sound lurking in the grooves of a domestic Eno LP. It’s the One and Only.

In thirty plus years of record playing I can’t think of any domestic Eno LP that ever sounded this good.

Now hold on just a minute. The British pressings of Eno’s albums are always the best, aren’t they?

For the first three albums, absolutely. But rules were made to be broken. This pressing has the knockout sound we associate with the best British originals of Eno’s albums, not the flat, cardboardy qualities of the typical domestic reissue.

Kinda Blind Testing

Since the person listening and making notes during the shootouts has no idea what the label or the pressing of the record is that he is evaluating — this is after all a quasi-scientific enterprise, with blind testing being the order of the day — when that domestic later label showed up at the top of the heap, our jaws hit the floor.

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Gilbert and Sullivan Overtures – How Did They Do It?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The hall is HUGE: spacious and open as any you will hear, but not at the expense of richness or fullness. The orchestra is solid and full-bodied, yet the woodwinds and flutes soar above the other sections, so breathy and clear.

How did the Decca (recording) and RCA (mastering) engineers succeed so brilliantly where so many others have failed, failed and failed again, right up to this very day?

Who knows? It’s still a mystery that has yet to be explained, to my satisfaction anyway.

Essential Music – And No Singing

The music of Gilbert and Sullivan belongs in any serious classical collection. This is without a doubt the best way to get the most Gilbert and Sullivan music with the best sound. And no singing.

If for some reason you don’t have a good recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Overtures, you are really missing out. This is some of the most wonderful music ever composed. It’s the kind of music that will immediately put you in a good mood. Here the Overtures are played to perfection. For music and sound, this one is hard to fault.

As the liner notes say, “…immense charm, good-natured energy and the ‘rightness’ that announces the influence of a superb musical command”.

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Donny Hathaway Lives On Through His Masterful Live Album from 1972

More of the Music of Donny Hathaway

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues and R&B Albums Available Now

This live recording has YOU ARE THERE sound. The soundstage is wide and deep. It’s so natural, rich and transparent, what is there to fault? 

Within moments of the needle hitting the groove your speakers disappear and the music just flows into the room.

On the best original domestic pressings you can immediately understand and appreciate the honest, emotive quality of his singing that made Donny Hathaway the tremendous performer he was known to be.

I’ve been playing this record regularly since I first heard it back in the mid-’90s and even after twenty years it has never failed to thrill. If I could take only one soul album to my desert island, it would be this one, no doubt about it.

Listening Test — Don’t Be Fooled

Pay close attention to the audience chatter and clapping. Most copies, being compressed and veiled, have no hope of reproducing the handclaps and audience shout-outs correctly. Only those copies with transparency and presence let you “see” the crowd clearly.

But don’t be fooled by thinner, leaner sounding copies. There is tons of low end and lower midrange in this recording — it’s one of its prime strengths, and it’s what it would have sounded like if you were there — so make sure you have plenty going on in the lower frequencies before you start evaluating the audience participation.

Many audiophile recordings and remasterings are leaner and cleaner, producing a phony kind of transparency and detail at the expense of the fullness and richness of the original recording.

This is almost never a good thing.

Listening Test — Conga Energy

The copies where the congas are up-front, punchy and full-bodied were the ones where the rhythmic energy really carried the day. You know it when you hear it, that’s for sure. Most copies failed in this regard to some degree. If you have more than one copy, see if you don’t hear quite a bit more energy on the copies with more prominent, solid-sounding congas.

Congas, like drums and pianos, are good for testing specific pressings as well as stereo equipment.

If these instruments get lost in the mix, or sound smeary or thin, it’s usually fairly easy to hear those problems if you are listening for them. Most of what you will read on this blog is dedicated to helping you do that kind of listening.

The richness of analog is where much of its appeal lies. Lean drums, congas and pianos are what you more often than not get with CDs.

These three instruments are also exceptionally good for helping you to choose what kind of speakers to buy. (We recommend big ones with dynamic drivers.)

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Carlos Santana Knows: Louder Is Better

santasanta_1401s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

Santana’s debut is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

The commentary below refers to an experience I had playing the album on my Legacy Whisper speakers in the late-90s.

This album needs to be played loud. I mean really loud. Years ago I used to demonstrate how important it was to have the level up good and high on the song Waiting.

Back in the mid-90s, I had somehow lucked into my first shockingly good Hot Stamper copy.

As a demonstration of what the Legacy Whisper system and its 8 fifteen inch woofer/midrange drivers could do, I would play the first minute or so of the track at a pretty good level. There’s lots of ambience, there’s a couple of guys who shout things out from way back in the studio, there’s a substantial amount of deep bass, and the whole recording has a natural smooth quality to it, which is precisely what allows you to play it at loud volumes.

Then I would turn it up a notch, say about 2-3 DB. I would announce to my friends that this is probably louder than you will ever play this record, but listen to what happens when you do. The soundstage gets wider and deeper, all those guys that shout can be heard more clearly, you start to really feel that deep bass, and when the song gets going, it really gets going. The energy of the music would jump to another level.

Then I would turn it up another 3 DB or so. At this point I would say that “this is how loud it should be played.” All the effects I mentioned earlier would become even more pronounced — wider, deeper, more clear, more powerful. The record was actually starting to sound like live music in my living room.

But of course, I was showing off a system that few could afford and that nobody in his right mind would put out in the middle of his living room. You would need a custom sound room, and a big one at that, to fit such a massive speaker and be able to turn it up.

But I was a bachelor at the time, and my live-in girlfriend at the time knew that she would have to go before the stereo did.

Unboosted

It was pointed out to me one day that the reason this record can be played loud is that, unlike most popular recordings, this album has a natural, unboosted top end, which means that the louder you play it, the more real it sounds. You can’t do that with most records. Many records have a top end that’s boosted to sound good at lower volumes. Not so with the first album by Santana. [For more records with the kind of vintage smooth sound we find so appealing, click here.]

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In the Market for New Speakers? – Will They Handle the Size and Energy of Take It Easy?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

Take one of our killer Hot Stamper pressings with you when you go shopping for speakers. The speaker that gets the POWER and ENERGY of this music right is the one you want.

This record will separate the men from the boys thirty seconds into Take It Easy.

It will be glaringly obvious who’s got the piston power and who doesn’t.  

With big bass and huge scope, this may become your favorite disc for showing your friends just what analog is really capable of. No CD ever sounded like one of our killer Hot Stamper pressings.

When the big chorus comes in on Take It Easy — one of the toughest tests for side one — you will be amazed by how energetic and downright GLORIOUS these boys can sound. Believe us when we tell you, it’s the rare copy that can pass that test.

Choruses Are Key

The richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality is most apparent on Breakfast in America where you most always hear it on a pop record: in the biggest, loudest, densest, climactic choruses.

We set the playback volume so that the loudest parts of the record are as huge and powerful as they can possibly grow to be without crossing the line into distortion or congestion.

On some records, Dark Side of the Moon comes instantly to mind, the guitar solos on Money are the loudest thing on the record. On Breakfast in America the sax toward the end of The Logical Song is the biggest and loudest element in the mix, louder even than Roger Hodgson’s near-hysterical multi-track screaming “Who I am” about three quarters of the way through the track.

Those are clearly exceptions though. Usually it’s the final chorus that gets bigger and louder than anything else.

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These Are Just Some of the Stampers to Avoid on Catch Bull at Four

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

The domestic pressings of Catch Bull at Four with the stampers shown below, and others similar to them, have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of Catch Bull at Four than you have ever heard.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, a subject we discuss below, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and decidedly mediocre sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

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.

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