2-pack-review

Our Previous Shootout Winner for Judith Was in 2014

UPDATE 2025

We finally got this shootout going again, and you can find our latest review here.

White Hot A+++ sound on side two of this 2-pack, with Shootout Winning sound. Great material including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns. Another 2-pack that proves our case – the good sides here are wonderful, the bad sides plainly awful.

The engineer for Judith is Phil Ramone, who went on to win the Grammy the following year for Still Crazy After All These Years. (more…)

Rick Wakeman – The Six Wives of Henry VIII

  • This outstanding 2-pack pair of pressings of Rick Wakeman’s first studio album boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from beginning to end
  • The sound here is big, full, and rich with tons of energy, beautifully showcasing the diverse contributions of Wakeman’s synthesizers
  • This prog-rock collection is spacious and musical, thanks in part to the engineering of Ken Scott
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Not only did this album help pave the way for progressive rock, but it also introduced the unbridled energy and overall effectiveness of the synthesizer as a bona fide instrument.”

Our 2-pack sets combine two copies of the same album, with at least a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade on the better of each “good” side, which simply means you have before you a pair of records that offers superb sound for the entire album.

Audiophiles are often surprised when they hear that an LP can sound amazing on one side and mediocre on the other, but since each side is pressed from different metalwork which has been aligned independently, and perhaps even cut by different mastering engineers from tapes of wildly differently quality, in our experience it happens all the time. In fact it’s much more common for a record to earn different sonic grades for its two sides than it is to rate the same grade. That’s just the way it goes in analog, where there’s no way to know how a any given side of a record sounds until you play it, and, more importantly, in the world of sound everything is relative.

Since each of the copies in the 2-pack will have one good side and one noticeably weaker or at best more run-of-the-mill side, you’ll be able to compare them on your own to hear just what it is that the Hot Stamper sides give you. This has the added benefit of helping you to improve your critical listening skills. We’ll clearly mark which copy is Hot for each side, so if you don’t want to bother with the other sides you certainly won’t have to.

One of the two pressings has the original label and one has the reissue label. (more…)

Lee Michaels – 5th

  • A superb 2-pack, with Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side one and an excellent Double Plus (A++) side two
  • “Do You Know What I Mean” rocks, with prodigious amounts of surprisingly deep bass – it’s a real Bass Demo Track
  • “There are only a few originals on the album, and one, “Do You Know What I Mean” (which really sounded like a cover), was a monstrous hit and cemented Lee Michaels as one of the best white blues performers of the period, along with Joe Cocker and Steve Winwood.”

As is usually the case with our 2-packs, the killer sides are each backed with something much more typical, so you don’t have to take our word for how bad the average pressing is — you can just flip the record over and hear it for yourself. Of course, if you don’t have time to listen to mediocre sounding records you can stick with the killer sides and leave the tedium of hearing bad sound to us. (more…)

The Alan Parsons Project / Eye In The Sky – Our Shootout Winner from 2011

Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons

TWO TOP-NOTCH A+++ SIDES and QUIET VINYL on this Arista two-pack pressing, the first Alan Parsons Project White Hot Stamper to hit the site! Alan Parsons is the engineering guru behind Dark Side Of The Moon, Year Of The Cat and Ambrosia’s debut, among many others, so suffice it to say the man knows a thing or two about audiophile-quality recording techniques. That talent is on full display here, with two sides that give you the kind of sound you want for this music — big and lively with excellent presence and real weight to the bottom.   (more…)

School’s Out – Our Shootout Winner from 2014

More of the Music of Alice Cooper

This White Hot / Super Hot 2-pack is going to rock your world! School’s Out on this A+++ side has never sounded better.

Yet another impossible-to-find record in clean condition with good sound has made it to the site, and those of you who are fans should scoop it up because it takes us about five years to find enough copies to do this shootout. 

We had poor luck with the second and third label copies on this AC title.

It seems — unlike so many records we play — that the originals are the only way to go on School’s Out.

Side One – Record One

A+++. It rocks! Never aggressive or edgy, it’s big, it’s jumpin’, and it’s full of 1972 Tubey Magic. What’s not to like?

Side Two – Record Two

A++, big, clear and energetic – close to side one but not quite.

Notice how “real” the drum kit sounds on track two. The drums as a whole are punchy and solid throughout.

(more…)

Herbie Mann – Latin Mann

This White Hot Stamper 2-pack has Demo Disc Live Latin Jazz sound and crazy fun music. Both sides are so clear, rich, natural and present you’ll have a very hard time finding fault with the sound. And the music is great too – this is a Big Band with a swarm of Latin percussionists added to kick up the heat.

This Columbia recording from 1965 has the sound we love here at Better Records, or at least two of the sides of two of these copies do. When you play the other sides you may be in for quite a shock, especially the bad side two included in this two pack. (more…)

Dionne Warwick – Dionne!

Compiling the strongest material from the first four albums — all produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David — somehow, against all odds if you stop to think about it, this Columbia record club exclusive pressing ended up being mastered exceptionally well, obviously from superb tapes.

This Double Allbum 2-pack is the first of its kind here at Better Records. One copy we played had three amazingly good sides out of four, with a very weak fourth side, and another copy had three no-better-than-decent sides with a shootout winning White Hot side 4. Together the four LPs have the four best sides we have ever listed, with 2 White Hot sides and 2 Super Hot sides. You would need a VERY big stack of copies to find four sides with anything close to the sound of this set.

We’ve played more than our share of bad sounding Dionne Warwick compilations over the course of the last thirty years, so imagine our surprise when so many tracks here were competitive with the best originals we’ve heard.

Which means that the future owner of these records will get to hear classics such as Anyone Who Had a Heart; Don’t Make Me Over ; Wishin’ and Hopin’; and Make It Easy on Yourself, not to mention the nineteen other songs on the album, all of them with SUPERB SOUND.

Of course the pressings we played were all over the map; they always are. You know right away if you’ve got a bad one on the table: The voices get screechier as they get louder (somewhat of a problem on even the best copies), the overall image is small, flat and opaque; the midrange dark, veiled and smeary.

We are of course including all the bad sides so that you can hear how bad the average side really is. Side four of the first set and side three of the second set were two of the worst sides we heard in the entire shootout. They’re positively painful.

There’s plenty of Tubey Magic on these recordings. The good pressings show you a rich, breathy, unbelievably emotional Dionne Warwick. The bad ones dry up her vocals, smear away her breath and take the heartache right out of her voice. (more…)

Barney Kessel / Workin’ Out – Our Shootout Winner from 2013

More Barney Kessel

 Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Barney Kessel

This is a 2-pack set of original pressings that gives you wonderful sound for both sides of this great Contemporary album, A++ for the first and A+++ for the second.

There is a catch, however, one that won’t bother some of you at all but will drive a few of you crazy: the side one pressing is in mono and the side two is in stereo. All that mattered to us was that they both sounded great, and a quick flip to the not-so-hot side of either pressing will quickly show you why we paired these up.    

I imagine there are both mono and stereo copies that sound great on both sides, but we sure haven’t been able to find one! Obviously this is not an easy record to come by these days. (more…)

Songs for Beginners – Greatest “Copy” Ever

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

WHOA! We’ve paired up two FOUR PLUS sides to create this stunning 2-pack with mindblowing Demo Quality sound for the whole album. These A++++ sides will show you just how amazing it can sound: super full-bodied, rich, warm and natural. 

Please note that we award this very special grade so rarely that we don’t even have a graphic to represent it in our sonic grade box. The scale usually only goes to three pluses, but these two sides went up to four!

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it dramatically changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question would have been “how high is up?”

This is an incredible recording, and on a copy like this the sound is truly stunning. When you hear Chicago here you will not believe how CINEMATIC the sound is! It’s everything we love about ANALOG, and then some.

Most of the credit must go to the team of recording engineers, led here by the esteemed Bill Halverson, the man behind all of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young albums. Nash was clearly influenced by his work with his gifted bandmates, proving with this album that he can hold his own with the best of the best.

Some songs (We Can Change The World, Be Yourself) are grandly scaled productions with the kind of studio polish that would make Supertramp envious. For me, a big speaker guy with a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better than this. (more…)

Mussorgsky / The Power of the Orchestra – Awesome In Stereo?

More of the Music of Modest Mussorgsky

UPDATE 2022

This review dates from 2007. We recently played a copy of the album and did not care for the sound much, which you can read about here.

DEMO DISC QUALITY ORCHESTRAL SOUND like you will not believe. We put two top copies together to bring you the ultimate-sounding Pictures At An Exhibition. Folks, it doesn’t get any better than this for huge orchestral dynamics and energy.

One side of each copy rates A Triple Plus — our highest sonic grade. The sound is out of this world. 

We had to do it that way, for one simple reason: Pictures stretches over both sides of this record, and no copy we played had two good sides, which means that if you were to own only one LP of this set, some part of the work would not sound nearly as good as the rest. This is always a problem with classical recordings: one good sounding side is not enough.

On top of that there are always condition issues with old Living Stereo records. So few are quiet. We love the sound but the vinyl leaves much to be desired. Here are some comments from a previous comparison package (with minor changes of course). (more…)