1966-all

Roger The Engineer Is Awful on the Early UK Pressing

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

A hall of shame pressing if there ever was one.

The UK pressing of Roger the Engineer we played was pure crap.

Cool for collectors I suppose, but very bad news for audiophiles.

Your response to this news may depend on which camp you find yourself in. If you love collecting original pressings, we would put you in the record collector camp, not the audiophile one. Audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality, so if the more original pressing is the one you want, then you are a record collector first and an audiophile second, if at all. Harsh? Let’s call a spade a spade.

Regardless, we ask that you please not buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are always going to be the best sounding pressings. The hundreds of reissues listed here prove otherwise.

The original British pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a poor imitation of what was most likely on the master tape, as revealed by the Edsel reissues.

Maybe you have a good sounding one. We can’t say you don’t.  But we would be very unlikely to spend much money on an original import pressing after hearing this one.

And the domestic records we’ve played were clearly made from dub tapes, so they’re a bust too.

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Sorry, This Album of String Quartets Is Not As Good As We Thought

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Maurice Ravel Available Now

UPDATE 2024

About ten years ago we were under the impression that the domestic Philips pressing you see pictured had exceptionally good sound, sound that would be difficult to beat.

Well, that just goes to show how little we knew about the sound of the various recordings of this music back then.

We needed to do a lot more homework, and the reason we started playing other recordings of these two string quartets is simply that the Philips record we liked so much was too hard to find on the domestic pressing.

The imports could be found, sure, but they sounded like a lot of Philips pressings — overly smooth, smeary, lifeless, recessed and veiled, like the Golden Imports Philips had made in the 70s. It was in those bad old days of the early 70s that Philips set about ruining the sound of phenomenally good Mercury master tapes. They should never be forgiven for it.

I bought one and fell in love with it, for both its music and its sound, a classic case of me not having any idea what I was missing.

How clueless was I? I was almost as clueless as the guy who thought the MoFi pressing of Star Wars and Close Encounters was a true audiophile Demo Disc. As foolish a MoFi fan as I was in the late-70s, even I knew was a piece of phony junk that record was.

Now there are dozens of outfits that make it their business to ruin phenomenally good master tapes by dint of their incompetent remastering, a story we never tire of telling.

Breaking Through

The key to our breakthrough was the rediscovery of a record we had played many years before, all the way back in 2005, and had simply lost track of in the ensuing years: LSC 2413. (It’s easy to lose track of rare Shaded Dogs. They’re not usually sitting in the bins of your local record store. Out of sight, out of mind.)

The best pressings of LSC 2413 are dramatically better sounding, and the performances are equal to or better than any we know.

Recently we finally got hold of another copy of the rare Philips pressing above and found to our dismay that the sound was not nearly as good as we remember it from our shootout years ago. The copy that came in was flat and badly lacked the presence and Tubey Magic of the Shaded Dog pressings we played of the RCA.

As the best of the RCA pressings demonstrate beyond all doubt, 1960 was a great year for classical and orchestral recordings. (What the shameful modern masterng engineers operating today do to such wonderful recordings is another thing altogether.)

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Shelly Manne & Jack Marshall – Sounds!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

This is the follow-up to Sounds Unheard Of!, the duo’s 1962 stereo test and demo record released on the Contemporary label.

How did we find the killer Hot Stamper pressings we offered for sale starting in 2023? The same way we learned about every record we list on the site. It is simplicity itself:

For our shootout for Sounds!, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You’ll hear what’s better and worse — right and wrong would be another way of putting it — about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own — those may or may not have Hot Stampers — but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our Hot Stamper shootouts.

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

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Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra (with Shrill Strings)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

We played a short stack of these, the second of two albums Evans made with a symphony orchestra, but we found the strings just too shrill for our taste, so we gave up, at least for now. (And not for the first time has that happened.)

For 34 38 years we’ve been helping music-loving audiophiles the world over avoid bad sounding records.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding LPs so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some records in the Hall of Shame the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

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Lee Morgan / Search For The New Land

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

This QUIET, hard-to-find Blue Note Blue Label LP has EXCELLENT SOUND AND MUSIC!

It’s transparent, open and spacious with deep, tight bass. The piano has nice weight to it and the trumpet has the right amount of bite.

The lineup here is excellent, including Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, and Reginald Workman.

This is an Older Jazz Review.

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

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