2-2023

Debussy / La Mer / Haitink

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

This is an older review. When we revisited this title recently, we felt it was badly lacking in Tubey Magic, a real deal killer for us here at Better Records.

It’s a decent sounding record, not much more than that, but it does have a top performance. If you see one for cheap in the bins, pick it up and give it a spin.

We prefer Ansermet’s performances for Decca of both La Mer and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

Our review for the album from years ago can be seen below. As for other records we think we got wrong — we may change our minds again! — you can find more under the heading of Live and Learn.

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London Orchestral Records from the 70s and the Problem of Opacity

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

The average copy of this 1976 recording has that dry, multi-miked modern sound that the 70s ushered in for many of the major labels, notably London and RCA.

How many Solti records are not ridiculously thick and opaque? One out of ten? If that. We’re extremely wary of records produced in the 70s; we’ve been burned too many times.

And to tell you the truth, we are not all that thrilled with most of what passes for good sound on Mehta‘s London output either, especially those recorded in Royce Hall. If you have a high-resolution system, these recordings, like those on Classic Records Heavy Vinyl that we constantly criticize, leave a lot to be desired.

Opacity is a real dealbreaker for us. Most of the classical records we play from later eras simply do not have the transparency essential to transporting us from our listening room into the concert hall.

One thing you can say about live classical music, it is never opaque. (It can be dry though. Some concert halls have that sound.)

No recording in our experience — our experience having been informed by playing thousands upon thousand of them — can ever be remotely as transparent as live music.

If you have any doubts, next time you come home from the concert hall, take a moment to put on a favorite recording of the same music. You may be in for quite a shock.

Other Deccas and Londons that we’d cleaned and played and found to be disappointing can be seen here.

For more on the subject of opacity on record, click here.

Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.

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Traveling Back in Time with Cat Stevens on Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Our good customer Roger wrote us a letter years ago about his Tea for the Tillerman on Mobile Fidelity, in which he remarked, “Sometimes I wish I kept my old crappy stereo to see if I could now tell what it was that made these audiophile pressings so attractive then.”

It got me to thinking. Yes, that would be fun, and better yet, it could be done. There are actually plenty of those old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s still around. Just look at what many of the forum posters — god bless ’em — are running. They’ve got some awesome ’70s Japanese turntables, some Monster Cable and some vintage tube gear and speakers designed in the ’50s.

With this stuff you could virtually travel back in time, in effect erasing all the audio progress made possible by the new technologies adopted by some of us over the last 30 years or so.

Then you could hear your Mobile Fidelity Tea for the Tillerman sound the way it used to when you could actually stand to be in the same room with it.

My question to Roger was “What on earth were we hearing that made us want to play these awful half-speed mastered records? What was our stereo doing that made these awful records sound good to us at the time?”

In Search of a Bad Stereo

I know how you can find out. You go to someone’s house who has a large collection of audiophile pressings and have him play you some of them. Chances are that his stereo will do pretty much what your old stereo and my old stereo used to do — be so wrong that really wrong records actually start to sound right! It seems crazy but it just might be true.

Think about it. If your stereo has no real top end extension, then a boosted top end like the kind found on practically every record MoFi ever made is a positive boon.

Down low, if you don’t have good bass reproduction, the bad bass that pretty much all half-speeds evince won’t bother you, it’ll sound bad the way the bass on all your records sounds: bad. And the boosted bass you get on so many MoFi pressings works to your benefit too.

How about those sparkling guitars? For systems that are incredibly opaque and low-resolution, the kind we all used to have, the kind that sound like we added three or four grilles to the front of the speaker, the MoFi guitars actually might start to cut through the veils and may sound — gulp! — right.

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Why don’t you give out the stampers for your Hot Stampers pressings?

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More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of rarely revealing much of this information on the site, for a number of good reasons we discuss in some depth here.

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a popular but mistaken one.

It’s a beautiful idea that must be resisted in order to make progress.

Answers Or Good Answers?

Audiophiles, like most people, want answers. 

But in the world of records, consistently good answers are very hard to come by.

For audiophiles in search of better sound, the only approach with any real hope of success is this: doing the hard work required to find the best answer you can under your present circumstances — your present equipment, your present tweaks, your present room, your present electrical quality, your present listening skills, your present table setup, et cetera, et cetera.

For those who are interested in pursuing audio and records at the highest levels, we explain in this commentary the work it takes: The science of Hot Stampers – incomplete, imperfect, and provisional

We have a section on the website you may have seen called live and learn. This section (115+ strong!) is devoted to the discussion of records we think we got, uh, wrong.

Oh yes, it’s true. But it’s not really a problem for us here at Better Records. We see no need to cover up our mistaken judgments. The process of learning involves recognizing and correcting previous errors. Approached scientifically, the gaining of knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is slow, incremental and riddled with mistakes.

What seems true today might easily be proven false tomorrow.

If you haven’t found that out for yourself firsthand, one thing’s for sure, you haven’t been in this hobby for very long.

We’re so used to the conventional wisdom being wrong, and having our own previous findings overturned by new ones, that we gladly go out of way in listing after listing to point out just how wrong we were. (And of course why we think we are correct now.)

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

Each time we go back and play a 180 gram or half-speed mastered LP we used to like (or dislike), we gain a better understanding of its true nature. 

Record cleaning gets better, front ends get better, electronics get better, tweaks get better — everything in your audio system should be improving on a regular basis, allowing you to more correctly identify the strengths and weaknesses of every record you play. (I almost forgot: your ears get better too!) If that’s not happening, we can help you make it happen.

What follows is a typical excerpt from a recent listing.

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Is This Bill Halverson’s Engineering Masterpiece?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

This listing for the White Hot Stamper pressing we put up years ago was written around 2007. A few points have been added since then.

When all the elements are working together as they do here, the music on Steve Stills’ first album is positively AMAZING. Until I hear something better, I’m going to have to call this Bill Halverson‘s engineering masterpiece.* Yes, on the best copies it’s that good.

*UPDATE 2024: We have now discovered something even better, an album from earlier in the same year in fact, Deja Vu.

What to Listen For

Both sides can be rich and full-bodied, as well as transparent, with lots of separation between the parts. Most copies tend to be murky, thick, and veiled. The overall sound here is airy, open, and spacious, with TONS of ambience.

Check out the sound of Booker T’s big organ solo on Love The One You’re With — you can really hear the air moving through the instrument. That’s what a Hot Stamper pressing is all about.

And that’s not all. Listen for the rosiny texture to the strings, the warmth of the midrange, and the breath in the vocals. These are all signs of a very good pressing.

The bottom end is well-defined and has substantial weight to it, something you won’t hear on most copies. They sure don’t record music that sounds like this anymore, and even if they did I doubt they could press a record from the tapes that sounds as good as this one does. That sound is gone and it shows no sign of coming back anytime soon.

We’ll keep trying to find the unbelievably rare Hot Deja Vu’s, but in the meantime all you CSN fans should consider taking a chance on one of our Stephen Stills Hot Stampers. We guarantee you’ll love it (or your money back of course).

We Can’t Get Enough Of This Stuff

Some of the most sought after records in the world, as well as the most difficult to find with top quality sound, are those involving the various groupings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

This album is no exception. It’s Stills’ masterpiece, a record I’ve been playing since I was in high school. The sound on the LPs I bought over the years has been pretty consistently disappointing. It’s refreshing to actually find a copy like this that lets you hear the album the way you remember it.

There’s a very good chance — bordering on a certainty — that the copy you played back then was no doubt just as poor sounding, but you remember it sounding good.

That, more than anything else, is why we audiophiles keep chasing after so many classic albums from our younger days. We’re trying to find the record that can give us the musical satisfaction now that we achieved so easily then.

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Heavy Vinyl Quality Control? We Put That Proposition to the Test

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Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

Part one of this commentary concerns the random nature of record making processes. It can be found here.

A Heavy Vinyl Shootout

A number of years ago (2011?) the opportunity to crack open two brand new sealed copies of a recently remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing came our way.

At the time, we were told that with this pressing every effort was made to produce the highest quality product and to maintain the utmost in quality control throughout the production process. They were adamant that every copy produced, from first to last, would be indestiguishable from any other. Not just in terms of surfaces, but sound quality too.

To accomplish this feat, the producer used the real master tapes (we were told, no reason to doubt him), had a well known mastering engineer do the mastering at a highly-regarded studio, then had a well-known audiophile pressing plant in Germany make the record, using the finest vinyl compounds available, in presses that meet the highest standards in the industry, operated by skilled individual of the utmost professionalism.

Any stamper would be replaced long before it could possibly be showing any wear.

All the metal mothers and stampers would be made in a way designed to eliminate all variation.

One and only one complete run would be made. If another was needed at some later date the whole process would have to be started over from scratch using the same strict quality controls.

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Robert Brook Digs Deep and “Gets” Down to Earth

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Featuring the Piano

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for a record we had very much enjoyed while doing the shootout for it a few years back, Down to Earth.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are exceptionally good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

DIGGING DEEP Into The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s DOWN TO EARTH

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play an Album Like This?

More Albums that Come Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound?

Not that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

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Crisis? What Crisis? – It Took Us Until 2012 to Finally Beat the Audiophile Pressing We Swore By

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

This listing is from 2012. Since that time we have been able to find and play a great many British pressings of the album, and they tend to win our shootouts.

But the domestic pressings can also do very well, just not well enough to win shootouts these days, a clear case of live and learn.

Our Understanding from 2012

TWO AMAZING SIDES, including an A+++ SIDE ONE! It’s not the A&M Half Speed, and it’s not a British pressing either. It’s domestic folks, your standard plain-as-day A&M pressing, and we’re as shocked as you are. Hearing this copy (as well as an amazing Brit; they can be every bit as good, in their own way of course) was a THRILL, a thrill that’s a step up in “thrillingness” over our previous favorite pressing, the A&M Half Speed.

The best of the best domestics and Brits are bigger, livelier, punchier, more clear and just more REAL than the audiophile pressing something we knew had to be the case if ever a properly mastered non-Half Speed could be found. And now it has. Let the rejoicing begin!

This is only the second White Hot Stamper copy of Crisis to come to the site, and it’s not the A&M Half Speed. It’s an AMAZING sounding British copy. The only other copy that we have ever heard sound this good was the domestic copy we put up a few weeks back.

The best of the best domestics and Brits are bigger, livelier, punchier, more clear and just more REAL than the audiophile pressing — something we knew had to be the case if ever a properly mastered non-Half Speed could be found.

Our previous commentary for our domestic pressings noted:

We’d love to get you some great sounding quiet British copies, but we can’t find any. They either sound bad (most of them) or they’re noisy (the rest). It is our belief that the best Hot Stamper pressings of this Half-Speed give you the kind of sound on Crisis? What Crisis? you can’t find any other way, not without investing hundreds of dollars and scores of hours of your time in the effort. Wouldn’t you just rather listen to the record?

Why did we think Jack Hunt‘s mastering approach for the A&M Half Speed was the right one?

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Wildflowers – Sometimes the Hits Are Mastered from Sub-Generation Tapes…

More of the Music of Judy Collins

And there’s not much you can do about it.

Both Sides Now, the Top Ten hit that finally put Judy on the map, is clearly made from a copy tape and doesn’t sound as good as the songs that follow it on side two. Hey, it happens, and I suspect it happens more often than most audiophiles think. I would wager that back in the day most people who bought this album never even noticed.

One thing I’ve noticed about audiophiles over the years is that they’re pretty much like most people.

The difference of course is that they call themselves audiophiles, and audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality.

They may care about it, but are they capable of evaluating high quality sound? What is the evidence for the affirmative in this proposition?

Are they actually capable of critical listening?

Do they listen critically enough to notice a dubby track on an otherwise good sounding record when they hear it?

Or dubby sound in general?

Or to notice that one side of a record often sounds very different from another?

Or that some reissues sound better than the originals of the album?

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