1965-all

Isn’t This Supposed to Be a Good Sounding Sonny Rollins Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

It is — or can be — but that’s only possible — as far as we know — on the early stereo pressings. On the mono pressings, the ones originally pressed in 1965 on the black dynagroove label, and never pressed again, not so much. They’re not awful, but they’re not very good either.

Which means that as a general rule, audiophiles should stick to the stereo pressings of this album, in the same way that they should almost always stick to stereo pressings of stereo recordings.

This is a Core Insight we only arrived at after playing hundreds of mono pressings made from tapes originally recorded in stereo. [1] Rarely do the mono pressings of such titles sound remotely as good as the stereo pressings.

Here is how we described a killer stereo copy of The Standard Sonny Rollins we encountered during the course of a shootout in 2025:

The Standard Sonny Rollins is back on the site for only the second time in over four years, here with outstanding sound throughout this original stereo pressing.

Once again the brilliant engineering of Ray Hall for RCA conveys the vitality of live music for these sessions (which were undoubtedly recorded live). Includes superstars like Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, and Bob Cranshaw, who’ve lent their talents to some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

Here is the stamper sheet showing how the mono pressing fared. In the past we’ve had similar luck with the mono pressings of Living Stereo recordings, but this one was cheap and we figured why not?

Collectors often say that the mono pressings of jazz albums are often the best sounding. Well, why not put that proposition to the test? That is after all the business we are in, testing whether something is true or not to the best of our ability.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for La Boutique Fantasque Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rossini Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our current favorite recording of La Boutique Fantasque is the one Solti recorded for Decca in 1957.

It belongs to that very special group of roughly 150 orchestral recordings which have the potential to offer the discriminating (and well-heeled) audiophile the best performances of major works with by far the highest quality sound.

It has been our experience that modern remastered pressings simply cannot compete with the best pressings of these landmark recordings.

The Fiedler (LSC 2084) is still a very good record, but we no longer see much reason to carry it when the Solti is better in almost every way (and quieter as a rule to boot).

Below we have reproduced our full stamper sheet, including the Shootout Winning stampers, which happen to be 3S/4S for this album.

The early pressings for this album tend to be too bright in our experience as seen from one of the stampers sheets below.

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Prokofiev / Piano Concerto No. 3 / Graffman

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Not sure if we would still agree with anything we said in the 2008 review you see below.

Back then we only had the one copy to play, and we certainly hadn’t learned how to clean it the way we do now, so who can say what any random copy of the record would sound like?

If you see it for cheap in the bins, pick it up, give it a spin and see.

This Plum Label Original pressing is one of the TOP Victrola titles! The sound is excellent, with real weight to the orchestra, powerful dynamics, deep bass, and solid piano tone.

Add to that a wonderful performance by Gary Graffman and the San Francisco Symphony, and you have one truly OUTSTANDING record. (If you can add 1 or 2 db to the top end, it’s even better.) 

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What Is There to Say about Mercury Sound This Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

In 2025 we did a shootout for the Mercury you see pictured, SR-90437, having collected a large number of copies with a wide range of stampers, which of course is always the best approach when doing a shootout for the first time. (Once you have a couple under your belt you naturally can start to focus on the pressings that do well and avoid the ones that do badly.)

In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner, we wrote:

Dorati and the LSO’s dynamic performance of these 16 Hungarian Dances debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early Mercury pressing.

These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs.

Some of the above may sound familiar. We say these sorts of things and use these stock phrases to describe many of the amazing sounding records that win our shootouts.

But aren’t these adjectives precisely the ones you should be using when a record is doing everything right? What else could you say about a record that sounds this good?

Our notes are simply the impressions a member of our listening panel wrote down as he critically listened to the record while it was playing.

In this case, his attention was being drawn to the marvelous qualities a large scale orchestral recording can have when everything is working at the highest levels of fidelity.

With the right playback equipment and lots of practice, you could easily find yourself listening this way and taking the same kind of notes.

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RCA’s Daphnis et Chloé with Martinon from 1965 Is Another “Good, Not Great” Title

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

LSC 2806 is not a bad sounding pressing — with grades of 1.5+ on both sides, it belongs in our section for good, not great sounding LPs — but there are other recordings which are substantially better in every way.

Our current favorite is the Decca recording with Monteux from 1959.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 39 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, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better records that works. If you know of one, please write me!

We are not the least bit interested in pressings that are “known” to sound the best.

Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of records.

I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature. We’re looking for the pressings of albums that do sound the best. You know, when you actually play them.

Woops

I take that back. I have met one, a certain Robert Brook. He has been conducting his own shootouts for a few years now and has made his findings available on his blog, The Broken Record. This is information you should consider trustworthy.

If you’re an audiophile with an ear 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 ever heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed to you as an audiophile. Those, with few exceptions, are rarely better than mediocre, and a great many are just awful.

And if we can’t beat whatever LP you own or have heard, you get your money back.  It’s as simple as that.

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