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A Random Copy of 52nd Street Tells You What, Exactly?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Sonic Grade:

Side One: F / Side Two: C+

The Impex (Cisco) 180 gram remastering of 52nd Street was cut by Kevin Gray, under the direction of Robert Pincus (aka Mr Record), at the now defunct AcousTech Mastering in Camarillo. We noted the following in a recent review for a much superior (how could it not be?) Hot Stamper pressing:

Side one is a joke (not much ambience, resolution, energy, etc.) but side two is actually quite good. Side two fixes the biggest problem with the album: hard, honky vocals.

In his review appearing in The Absolute Sound, Neil Gader plucks two songs out of the album’s nine as especially worthy of praise. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. If I didn’t know the album as well as I do, I might wonder why. 

In our review we went on to say:

But at a cost. It still sounds like a modern record, with not much in the way of space, transparency, richness, resolution and the like. You know, all that ANALOG stuff that old dinosaurs like us like our records to have.

For those of you who have thirty three dollars to spend, you could do a lot worse on side two. Side one is pretty bad and you would have a hard time doing worse.

Allow me to now quote Mr. Gader from The Absolute Sound, October 2011, Issue 216, Pg. 129

The Impex 180-gram remastering by Kevin Gray is superb. It replaces the spongy timing and dull top of the original Columbia LP with expansive space and sharp details. Its vivid and brightened treble is welcome compared to the warm but smothered original. Listen for Joel’s doubled harmonies, the pennywhistle in “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” and the burning horn section in “Half a Mile Away,” and you’ll hear what a difference a great remastering makes.

Mr. Gader has a bad original pressing, and like most reviewers he makes the mistake of assuming that other originals, and probably all the originals, perforce sound like his. Speaking from experience, they most assuredly do not. We will not be addressing his specific complaints in this commentary for one simple reason.

Nothing in his review describes the sound of the best copies. 

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Energy Is the Key to the Best Sounding Pressings of Let’s Dance

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

With Let’s Dance the name of the game is energy, and boy do the best copies! Both sides of this former shootout winner have the deep, punchy bass, smooth vocals and sweet, extended highs that Bowie’s music needs to come alive.

With that big bass and natural top end, this is one record you can turn up good and loud without fear of fatigue. On a big pair of dynamic speakers, you will get more than your money’s worth from the best of our Hot Stamper pressings. 

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room with jump out of the speakers sound, this is the album for you.

Side One

Modern Love

This track has a tendency to be a bit brighter than those that follow. To find out if your Let’s Dance is killer, see how the title track further down sounds.

China Girl
Let’s Dance

The best sounding track on the album and one of the handful of best sounding Bowie tracks ever recorded. With a truly Hot Stamper copy, try as you might you will be very hard-pressed to find better sound. Demo Disc quality doesn’t begin to do it justice.

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French Overtures with Ansermet Had One Awfully Good Sounding Side in 2009

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jacques Offenbach Available Now

Reviewed back in 2009 in our pre-shootout days.

This Minty London Blueback LP has a WONDERFUL Tubey Magical Super Hot Stamper side one.

I have never heard this music sound better. Of course Ansermet is exactly the right conductor for these light and colorful orchestral pieces; the performances are uniformly superb.

But as audiophiles we want to make sure the sound is what it should be, and here side one does not disappoint. The string tone is perfection. I defy anyone to find a Heavy Vinyl reissue with string tone even remotely as good. In my experience there is simply no such record.

With vintage classical records there are always trade-offs of course. Here the loudest passages suffer from some mild compressor distortion, so common on these early pressings. A small price to pay for sound this lovely I say.

The Zampa overture by Herold is probably the best sound on the album — it’s gorgeous!

Side two is not quite as good. We rated it A Plus, with real weight and energy but a bit too much compression and distorton in the loud passages to be completely satisfying.

UPDATE 2025

Nowadays we would never list a record for sale as a Hot Stamper pressing with a grade of 1+ on either side.

And, more importantly, the grades we awarded these two sides were just estimates.

We did not put this copy in a shootout with a batch of similar pressings.

We played the record, liked what we heard on side one, liked what we heard on side two a bit less, and offered it to our customers with the description of the strengths and weaknesses you read about.

We could not have begun to conduct a shootout for this early London. Back in those days we simply could not find enough copies of such a rare title to make such a thing happen.

As for the compressor distortion on side one that we heard, it’s entirely possible that with better cleaning and better playback that the distortion we thought we heard would disappear. Blaming the record is rarely the ideal approach for making progress in audio.

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Letter of the Week – “…the look on his face when I dropped the needle on my record was absolutely priceless!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,  

I really wanted to thank you for The Cars. What a sweet-sounding record! Everything about that one is so right; the guitars, the bass, the drums, the vocals, everything sounds completely natural.  

I have a good friend whose favourite band are The Cars. He has an expensive high-end system, but doesn’t want the “hassle” of vinyl.

Swears blind that nothing beats the DCC gold CD of ‘The Cars’, so I invited him round at the weekend and asked him to bring his DCC CD with him to compare on my relatively modest system.

After we had heard his CD, the look on his face when I dropped the needle on my record was absolutely priceless! A big thank you for the heads-up on that one.

Owais M.

Thanks, Owais, for writing to us. We enjoy hearing that our records are a shock to the system for some audiophiles. Think how much better off your friend would be if he could put up with the hassle of vinyl. He could hear The Cars sound better than he ever imagined.

He imagined that his Gold CD was sonically as good as it gets, but now that he knows just how much better the sound can actually get, courtesy of Better Records, do you think there is any chance the superior sound will help him get over his reservations about vinyl? My intuition says that it is unlikely. Extremely unlikely. Not-a-snowball’s-chance-in-hell unlikely.

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Axis: Bold As Love Is More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix sounds just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

Further Reading

Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.

Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.

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Ravel / Daphnis et Chloé – Good, Not Great on Decca Jubilee

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available now

The Decca budget reissue you see to the left had passable sonics. It would probably be competitive with the top five percent ot Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve played over the last 30 years. Some of those would earn grades of 1.5+, which turned out to be the case here.

We play every pressing we can get our hands on because you never know just how good one of these budget reissues can sound until you clean it up and give it a spin.

Most don’t pan out — maybe one out of five is any good — but that’s just the nature of the best when it comes to collecting top quality records.

Most OJC pressings of jazz albums aren’t very good, but the best ones clearly are because they win our blinded shootouts.

If you want the best sound, you had better have your mind open to the idea that the originals are not the only ones that were mastered correctly. There are currently 175 records we’ve identified as sounding better on a reissue pressing, and that number probably represents less than half of the ones we’ve encountered over the many years we’ve actively been doing shootouts.

The commentary for the amazing sounding Decca originals below describes just how wonderful they are, worlds better than anything you can find on Heavy Vinyl.

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Albeniz / Falla / Spain / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Spain has been an audiophile favorite for a very long time.

Everybody should know it by now, what with both Chesky and Classic Records having remastered it in the 90s, dismally of course, as neither of these companies have ever demonstrated that the slightest sense how lackluster, if not downright awful, the result of their efforts turned out.

No doubt Analogue Productions will see fit to ruin the recording the way they ruined Scheherazade.

This has never been one of the best Living Stereo titles in our experience.

The highest grade I would give it would probably be a B.

“Our experience” is the key phrase in the above sentence. I can’t say there aren’t amazing sounding pressings of the album, it’s simply the case that we have never played one.

If I saw one for cheap I would of course pick it up, but in the modern world of records, that is very unlikely indeed.

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The Nutcracker on Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

Sonic Grade: B?

Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

Superb! New records just don’t sound any better! This is the complete Nutcracker Ballet as conducted by Ansermet for Decca, a record that sets a standard of performance and sound that is unlikely ever to be equaled, and almost certainly not to be surpassed.

For those of you on a budget, if you can get your hands on one of these for a reasonable price, the Heavy Vinyl reissue would not be a bad way to go.

That’s assuming the copy you buy sounds at least good, similar to the one I played all those years ago, something that cannot be assumed.

But it would make for a good jumping off point.

A Must Own Classical Record (on Vintage Vinyl)

Ansermet breathes life into this ballet as only he can, and the Decca engineering team led by Kenneth Wilkinson do him proud.

It’s an Orchestral Spectacular that should have a place of honor in any audiophile’s collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Connoisseur

 

Writing for Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger recounts his journey though the world of audiophile equipment and his lifelong search for better sounding pressings of his favorite albums.

The first paragraph had me hooked:

Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”

Seems pretty clear he knows what he is talking about.

Later on he adds this bit:

Nothing trumps empirically comparing a stack of different pressings of the same album in a shootout. This is why you should take what Tom Port of Better Records has to say very seriously. Whether or not you’re willing to pay his Hot Stamper prices, Port probably knows more about records than anyone on Earth and his On The Record blog is one of the very best repositories of hard won empirical evidence relating to audiophile vinyl that’s out there. It might take weeks to read everything, but it’s quite an education.

I couldn’t agree more. The whole story can be found here. I suspect that if you’ve spent any length of time on this blog, you will get a lot out of it.

On a side note, I think snob is not exactly the right word he (or I)should be called.

“Connoisseur” (a discerning judge of the best in any field) is a better fit.

“Snob” (a person who claims to be an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field) implies that I disdain those who listen to music I personally don’t happen to like, but music is a very personal thing, so what you like is your business and nobody else’s.

I strongly believe that the more you listen to music, the more joy you will have in your life.

I hope to add a few comments of my own down the road, especially in the form of rebuttals to uncharacteristically bad advice such as this:

Michael Fremer’s Analog Planet website is a great resource for finding out about new and upcoming quality vinyl releases. He is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to vinyl and he’s also produced a handy YouTube guide to AAA mastered new vinyl releases that you should definitely watch.

I guess it makes sense to play nice with the heavy hitters in the audiophile world. Seriously though, Fremer is the last person that anyone should take advice from. He may be one step ahead of the audiophiles who follow him, but that doesn’t mean he can tell a good record from a bad one. I have been reading him off and on (mostly off) for twenty five years and I see no evidence that he has learned much about records in all those years, or improved his critical listening skills in the slightest.

That fact that this list of crap vinyl is still to be found on his site — with neither corrections nor apologies — should tell you that he never had a clue and is not likely to come into possession of one any time soon

I have a section devoted to reviewer malpractice which contains a goodly portion of quotes from this so-called expert. Any attempt to correct the positive things Fremer has written for the kind of third-rate records he tends to review would quickly turn into a full time job. I might even have to hire an assistant.

If Fremer recommends a Heavy Vinyl reissue that we have a corresponding Hot Stamper pressing of, there is not a chance in the world that our record won’t beat the pants off his for sound quality. He has opinions, most of which we think are way off the mark. We have better sounding records, so good they are guaranteed to beat any other copy you have ever heard or you get your money back.

We have to be right, or we wouldn’t still be in business, owing in large part to the fact that we sell records for ten times as much money as the ones he recommends. He has never had to pay a price for getting the sound of record after record wrong.

The only people that suffer for his mistakes are the credulous audiophiles who bought the mediocre-at-best Heavy Vinyl pressings he’s been promoting for years and are now stuck with. They have a collection of junk vinyl he recommended to them and few of them will ever know something better exists because they think they already have the best.

As Richard goes out of his way again and again to make clear in his piece, empirically comparing pressings is the only way to learn anything of real value when it comes to the sound of record pressings.

If you own any Heavy Vinyl LP, it would be my honor to send you the vintage pressing that will help you to hear everything that’s wrong with the sound of it.

It’s what we do. That’s why the business is called Better Records. And we’re still here because we actually do sell the best sounding records in the world. You don’t need to believe a single word of what we say about records, ours or anybody else’s. You just need to put one of our Hot Stampers on your turntable and play it.

Hundreds of audiophiles have done just that and they seem to be pretty darn pleased with the records we’ve sent them.

Want to know more about Hot Stampers? The best place to start is here.

We Was Wrong About this Prestige Two-Fer in 2008

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE

We used to like this record a whole lot more than we do now. Based on what we heard last time we played it, we cannot recommend it.

A classic case of live and learn.

Our previous commentary:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP boasts EXCELLENT SOUND, right up there with some the best sounding copies we’ve played.

Three sides out of four sounded surprisingly good, which is three good sides more than the average copy can claim.

Oddly enough, the stampers are identical. Sample to sample variation? Fresh off the stamper transparency? Who’s to say?

I can’t explain it, but I know a better record when I play one. This copy is clearly more transparent, no pun intended.

It’s also been through our extensive cleaning process, which as you can imagine helps the sound immeasurably. 

For more reviews of Two-Fer pressings, click here.

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