1957-all

Delibes / Coppelia – A Superb Mono Pressing from 1957

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music Conducted by Ansermet Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old commentary so take it for what it’s worth. We no longer buy mono pressings of orchestral recordings from the golden age. The best stereo pressings are just so much better.

The stereo set (CSA 2201) came out in 1958. We appreciate the sound quality that stereo makes possible after having heard the mono.

However, there is nothing wrong with the recording, which was made for both stereo and mono in 1957.

In fact, 1957 just happens to be a wonderful year for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.

DEMO QUALITY SOUND for this early London Mono pressing. 

Side one of this record sounds incredible! The sound is absolutely top notch. Check out the brass — it has the solid weight of the real thing.

This is the kind of record that the mono cartridge owners of the world worship. And for good reason. But you don’t need to have a mono cartridge to hear how good — in fact, how much BETTER — this copy sounds than the stereo pressing.

(more…)

The OJC of All Night Long Is Just Not that Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Byrd Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on an early OJC copy of the album you see pictured (OJC-427) and thought the sound would not be good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we like need to charge.

As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, All Night Long is not an album that’s worth the costs associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.

It was dry and bright. This is a sound a many OJC pressings tend to have. They more often than not sound more like CDs than vintage vinyl pressings.

This title would be more or less passable, even to some degree enjoyable, if it were being played on the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s. However, it would not begin to cut it on the high quality modern equipment we (and hopefully our customers) use.

Don’t get us wrong. We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding OJC pressings of the album. If we happen to hear a good one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout. Based on what we’ve heard so far, that’s not in the cards for now.

Perhaps you have a pressing of the record you like. If so, please tell us more about it. You can email me at tom@better-records.com

(more…)

Andre Previn – These Two OJC Pressings Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Recordings Available Now

The mastering choices of the cutting engineers for these two recordings did them no favors.

Like so many of the early OJC pressings we’ve played over the years, we found that both of these reissues tended to be somewhat thin tonally, with a brittle top end, which can clearly be heard in the tizzy quality of the cymbals.

This is not remotely the right sound for a vintage Contemporary recording.

When doing the shootouts for these albums, warmth turned out to be key to the sound of the best copies.

When the piano sounds warm and smooth, everything else in the recording seems to fall into place.

The OJC pressings of these two albums were brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.

Above all they badly lacked Tubey Magic, a quality the best sounding pressings are swimming in. Consequently, none of them made the cut for our shootout.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Love Is the Thing – Remixed, Remastered and Ruined

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

Love Is the Thing on DCC was given a “new sound” and I don’t like it.

I really liked the Nat King Cole albums on DCC when they came out back in the 90s. I thought they were a revelation as a matter of fact.  Now I find them insufferable.

Here are some of my reasons for not liking Hoffman’s remix.

Nat’s voice is much too forward and loud in the mix; consequently the orchestra is too soft. The balance is off. At least on my stereo, at the levels I play the record at, the balance seems off. You surely have a different system, in a different room, and may not feel the way I do.

But without a top pressing to compare, how do you know the mix is right or wrong? Like everything in audio, it’s relative.

The balance problem is bad enough, but what really sets my teeth on edge is the fact that the Nat King Cole record on DCC doesn’t sound remotely like any Nat King Cole record I have ever heard, outside of the ones Hoffman worked on of course.

Where is all the Capitol reverb? Nat’s records all have it, and although the reverb may be a bit excessive or unnatural in some ways, at least to some people, when you take it away you end up with a sound that never existed before, and, to my ears, it’s a sound that’s just wrong for the music.

The more I listened to the DCC the less I liked it.

The first full-length commentary I ever wrote in my record catalog in 1994 took Analogue Productions to task for remastering Way Out West and giving it a “new sound,” a sound I had never heard coming from any Contemporary pressing, from any era.

I didn’t like what Doug Sax did with Way Out West, Jazz Giant, Waltz for Debby and many, many others, and I don’t like what Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray did to Love Is the Thing, The Very Thought of You and Just One Of Those Things.

I have tried to listen to the Gold CD in my car, but even in the car I found the sound boring and insufferable.

Is this the kind of sound you hear on your DCC Nat King Cole records? If it is, we recommend you try a Hot Stamper. If it doesn’t kill your DCC you get your money back.

At the very least it will show you some of the things your DCC is doing differently, and, we think, wrong.

(more…)

Tchaikovsky / Romeo & Juliet / Munch

More of the Music of Tchaikovsky

This is a very old review which we ourselves may no longer agree with.

If you see this record in the bins for cheap, give it a try, but don’t pay a lot on our say-so.

This Minty RCA Plum Label Victrola has that BIG BIG BOSTON SYMPHONY SOUND!

It”s big as life — spacious, dynamic, and tonally correct, with the lovely textures of the Boston strings fully intact. This is actually a better recording than the more famous Munch re-recording (which is the one that Classic reissued). 

The Francesca da Rimini on side two is only so-so.

This is an older classical/orchestral review

(more…)

La Boutique Fantasque – Mono Reviewed in 2010

UPDATE 2024

A long time ago I liked a mono pressing of La Boutique Fantasque with Solti.

I doubt I would be impressed by it now, but I can’t rule out the possibility.

Some monos can be amazing. We should know, we’ve played plenty of them.

However, when the stereo pressings are also amazing, as is the case here, wouldn’t you rather hear it in stereo? We didn’t even bother to buy one to put into our recent shootout, which was, shockingly, 14 years in the making.

This London Mono Radio Promotion Copy is a stunner. DEMO QUALITY SOUND.

They even knew it back then — it was given the Hi-Fi Record Of The Month award. The orchestration and the sound of this music are ideal for audiophile listening.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that closes out side two has slightly better sound by the way — it’s quite good.

New Jazz Conceptions Is Not What It Should Be on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

Another weak sounding jazz reissue on Original Jazz Classics from the 80s.

Don’t get us wrong — they are a lot of good ones. Here is the list of the OJCs we’ve auditioned and found to have at least the potential for good sound.

And here are the OJCs we’ve auditioned and found wanting to some degree.

Not all of them are bad; some are just not very good and would not be suitable for an audiophile with high standards.

(more…)

Love Is The Thing – The Breakthrough We Were Waiting For

Hot Stamper Pressings of Our Favorite Vocal Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Nat “King” Cole

Love Is The Thing has long been one of the best sounding Nat “King” Cole recordings we had auditioned over the years. With a large variety of copies to play, including some interesting “finds” among them, we now know it actually is The Best. We have never heard the man sound better than he does on the hottest copies of this very album.

Of course we’re always on the lookout for Nat King Cole albums with good sound. In our experience that is not nearly as easy as one might expect. Far too many of his recordings are drenched in bad reverb and can’t be taken seriously. At least one we know of has his voice out of phase with the orchestra on most of the copies we played, putting a quick end to that shootout. 

If anything the sound on his albums gets even worse in the ’60s. Many of Nat’s albums from that decade are over-produced, bright, thin and shrill.

We assume most audiophiles got turned on to his music from the records that Steve Hoffman remixed and remastered for DCC back in the mid-’90s, For those of you who were customers of ours back then, you know that I count myself among that group. I even went so far as to nominate the DCC of Nat’s Greatest Hits as the best album DCC ever made. (I know now, as I expect you do, that that’s really not saying much, but at the time I thought it was a pretty bold statement.)

Devoting the Resources

Naturally, having long ago given up on Heavy Vinyl LPs by DCC and others of their persuasion, these days we are in a much better position to devote our resources to playing every Nat King Cole album on every pressing we can get our hands on, trying to figure out what are the copies — from what era, on what label, with what stampers, cut by whom, stereo or mono, import or domestic — that potentially have the Hot Stamper sound, the very Raison d’être of our business.

What we discovered with the more than dozen copies we’d pulled together for our shootout was that different pressings from different eras on different labels can all have the right sound. In fact, while listening to one copy after another, all without the benefit of knowing anything about the specific record on the table, it was simply impossible to predict from the sound alone which label the record was printed on.

Some of the earliest pressings were rich and tubey, but so were some of the later ones. Same with copies that were lean, hard or transistory — they could be on a label from any era with that sound.

(more…)