30th-street

Letter of the Week – “Better Records has completely transformed my relationship with music listening…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

Our good customer ab_ba decided to write us a letter, this being his third anniversary of being sold on the reality of Hot Stampers. (I have taken the liberty of editing some of it.)

Dear Tom and Fred,

Today marks my third anniversary of being your customer. It’s quite a milestone! Frankly, when I realized it’s only been three years, I was surprised. It has felt longer. I really want to thank you both, and I thought I’d take a moment to look back on it all.

    • Better Records has completely transformed my relationship with music listening, in so many ways it’s hard to enumerate them all. Great sounding records, of course, but so much more.
    • A fantastic stereo that’s so good that for the first time ever leaves me with zero desire to change anything about it.
    • A better understanding of how to attain music worth listening to.
    • Specific albums and musicians I would not have known about, that I now really treasure.
    • And, most surprising of all, some exceptionally good friends who I cherish as people, and not just as fellow travelers along this esoteric path.

For me personally, getting great sound at home was always a somewhat-angsty quest: “there must be something better.”

I sense that others feel that way about it too. But now, for me, my music listening is pure satisfaction. And that is thanks entirely to you.

Looking back on it with some nostalgia, I thought I’d note some of the milestones so far:

My first purchase was a Super Hot Stamper of Mingus Ah Um, for $300. I still viscerally remember the feeling when I made that purchase. I remember putting it on for the first time, and having the sound just explode out of my tiny B&W speakers, like nothing I had heard before.

It was so different from my MoFi One-Step of Ah Um, I instantly had all of my preconceptions shattered.
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How Does the Kind of Blue UHQR Compare to a Hot Stamper Pressing?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

We don’t know what the UHQR sounds like because we’ve never played one, and we certainly have no intention of spending the money to buy one and find out what the strengths and weaknesses might be, something we feel eminently qualified to do, as that is exactly what we do all here at Better Records.

However, one of our customers was at a friend’s house and he had one, one he was very impressed with and wanted him to hear. Our customer owned a Super Hot stamper pressing and thought it might be fun to compare the two.

Here is his story:

I went to my dearest friend’s house yesterday, he was SO excited to play for me his deluxe UHQR version of Kind of Blue.

We listened for a while and then I brought out the Super Hot Stamper of KOB that I got from you and played it.

About 90 seconds in, he was like “uh oh.”  It was about 3 minutes into So What and his exact words were “oh…shit.”

The look on his face!

He’s now selling the UHQR.

Dear Josh,

That is a great story, more evidence that the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?

I was somewhat surprised to read a number of Discogs reviewers who did not find the sound to their liking. If you search for find the UHQR listing on Discogs you can read their critiques, most of which concern the noisy surfaces that plague a fairly high percentage of Chad’s pressing. Others fault the sound. Most love it. That’s Discogs for you.

Thanks again for your letter.  As the proud new owner of an amazing EAR 324p phono stage, it’s likely that all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings you hear in your own system will sound less and less competitive with the better vintage records you will be listening to, the kind you own and the kind we sell.

Six thousand dollar phono stages have a way of tipping the scales, and they always seem to tip them in favor of plain old records. Funny how that works.

The only Analogue Productions UHQR we’ve played to date is the one they did for Aja, and, as you can imagine, we did not find it much to our liking.

UPDATE 2024:

In 2023 we played another Steely Dan UHQR and thought it was passable.]

To read more reviews of records put out by the single worst audiophile label of all time — in our opinion! — please click here.

An Overview of KOB

Kind of Blue is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it.

Some highlights include:

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Letter of the Week – “They may be cheap but they are 100% a waste of money.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Duke Ellington Available Now

Our good customer Conrad had written us quite a while ago asking what we thought about the sound of Analogue Productions’ records. Obviously we had nothing nice to say about them, which you can read here if so inclined.

He thought they were not great but good enough at the price:

I guess we can’t really compare experiences without knowing exactly the records we’ve each heard, and the AP pressings never hold a candle to any of the hot stampers I have received from you. It’s not close; my system and ears clearly know the difference. However, I don’t expect them to, and part of my relatively positive feeling about them is biased by knowing they’re dirt cheap at around $30 a pop.

An excerpt from my reply:

I believe you are trying to find reasons to justify the purchase of these modern remastered records, despite the shortcomings of their sound. My stereo is not forgiving enough of their faults to play them for enjoyment, and my ears are not forgiving enough of their sonic irregularities to find even the best of them much more than passable.

I took off my rose-colored glasses a long time ago, and I certainly have no intention of putting them back on.

Our stereo is designed to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of every record we play. Bad records sound awful on it, and mediocre records are a waste of time.

Years ago we started to notice that most of the new Heavy Vinyl pressings were sounding worse and worse, and by 2007, when Blue came out, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We decided to take a stand and we have never questioned for a moment that decision.

Conrad followed up with this after I had asked him about some titles he might have been impressed with.

I disagree with most of the benefit of the doubt I was giving them then, and haven’t listened to any really since then aside from here and there and always with utter disappointment. System and standards have improved. They may be cheap but they are 100% a waste of money, whereas your records cost the moon but repay in kind and are easy to amortize.

That said, one that did sound decent enough was Blues In Orbit.

Unfortunately, I was never able to get around to discussing that one title Conrad thought sounded decent enough, Blues in Orbit.

When it comes to the records audiophiles think sound good on Heavy Vinyl — especially the ones I’ve never played (or played decades ago and can’t remember their sound all that well) — we have a short question, all of three words, that we like to ask:

“Compared to what?”

Without playing other pressings, doing a proper shootout for the album with some nice Six-Eye stereo originals and maybe some 360s and even a red label 70s pressing or two, you simply have no way of knowing how good the album can sound.

What you have with the Classic Records remaster (or any other Heavy Vinyl reissue for that matter) is what seems like a good sounding pressing, no more, no less.

And how good is it really?

Is it in danger of getting worn out from being played too often?

Has it become a personal favorite?

Are you falling in love with the music and knocked out by the sound?

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1A, or Is 1B Better on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme? Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel Available Now

UPDATE 2024

Speaking of 1A and 1B, the evidence is in. We have now confirmed that one of these sets of stampers (one for each side) can win shootouts. Which of the two it is we will leave to you to discover, as we make it a point never to give out the shootout winning stampers except under the rarest of circumstances. We give out plenty of stamper information, just not the stampers of the winners.

We now return to our commentary from many years ago:

Before we go any further, I have one question:

Why are we guessing?

I received an email recently from a customer who had gone to great pains to do his own shootout for a record; in the end he came up short, with not a lot to show for his time and effort. It had this bit tucked in toward the end:

Some of [Better Records’] Hot Stampers are very dear in price and most often due to the fact that there are so few copies in near mint condition. I hate to think of all the great Hot Stampers that have ended up in piles on the floor night after night with beer, Coke, and seeds being ground into them.

Can you imagine all the 1A 1B or even 2A 2B masters that ended up this way or were just played to death with a stylus that would be better used as a nail than to play a record!

To be clear, it’s extremely unlikely than any Hot Stampers have ever ended up in piles on the floor. Hot Stampers are not just originals or good sounding records.

They are pressings that have been cleaned, gone through the shootout process and found to be superior to their competition. Until they prove themselves, records like the ones whose unfortunate fate this reviewer fantasizes about are just old records that had the potential to sound good but never got the chance to demonstrate they had better sound than other pressings.

As it so happens, shortly thereafter I found myself on Michael Fremer’s old website of all places, where I saw something eerily similar in his review for the (no doubt awful) Sundazed vinyl. I quote below the relevant paragraphs.

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Chicago Transit Authority on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi Chicago debut was at least twenty years ago. The all tube system I had back then was much darker and dramatically less resolving than the one I have now, having made score upon score of improvements in every area of reproduction in the interim.

I actually had some nice things to say about it. I didn’t find it too bright the way so many MoFi pressings are. Here’s what I wrote all those years ago:

What do we like about this MoFi?

For one thing it doesn’t have the phony boosted top end most of their pressings do. It was mastered by Jack Hunt, not Stan Ricker, and Jack Hunt likes to EQ his projects without all the extra top end that made Mobile Fidelity famous. (Great for dull speakers, don’t you know.)

The other thing this MoFi has going for it is tons of weight down where it needs it, in the all-important lower midrange, and extending well into the mid-bass area.

Chicago is about brass and you want that brass to have weight and power.

So many domestic copies are leaned out, and many are hard sounding. On both counts this MoFi excels over copies with those problems. Our White Hot Stamper was definitely better, but we don’t find those very often, not to mention the fact that we happened to charge a ton of money for it.

I did take issue with the MoFi bass though.

This is where your MoFi falls apart, as good as it may be in other areas.

There IS no lower octave of bass on their pressing.

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Reproducing the Phenomenal Size and Space of Time Out

More Columbia 30th Street Studio Recordings

Time Out is a jazz album that’s been a personal favorite of mine for a very long time, as well as a record I’ve been obsessed with for decades. I spent a lot of time working on my system in order to get this album to sound its best.

It taught me a lot, and for that reason it is a recording that deserves a fair amount of credit for helping me become a better listener.

Here is how we described a copy that won one of our shootouts a while back:

Spacious and transparent, this copy has the big three-dimensional soundstage that makes this record such a joy to listen to. The piano has weight and heft, the drums are big and dynamic, and everything is relaxed and sweet — in short, this copy is doing pretty much everything we want a top quality Time Out to do. 

Listen to the drums on Everybody’s Jumpin’. This album was recorded on a big sound stage and there is a HUGE room which can clearly be heard surrounding the drum kit. Add to that that some of the drums are in the left channel and some of the drums are in the right channel and you have one big drum kit — exactly the way it was intended to sound.

Size and Space

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy that does all that, it’s an entirely different listening experience.

More letters, reviews and commentaries for recordings made at Columbia’s 30th Street studio.

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Michael Fremer Says You Should Own the Classic 45 of Time Out

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

Michael Fremer spends two hours and ten minutes on his site going through a list of 100 All Analog In Print Reissued Records You Should Own.

On this list is the 45 RPM Bernie Grundman cutting of Time Out. Fremer apparently liked it a whole lot more than we did. We think it is just plain awful.

The MoFi Kind of Blue is on this same list, another pressing that is astonishingly bad, or, at the very least, really, really wrong.

If you’re the kind of person who might want to give Michael Fremer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to All Analog records he thinks sound good, ones he thinks you should own, try either one of them. If you think they sound just fine, you sure don’t need me to tell you that they’re completely and utterly awful.

There might be some decent records on the list, but if it has two massive failures that I just happened to come across in the five minutes I spent watching the video — I have very little tolerance for the sort of amateurishness he displays — I would suspect the winners are few and the losers many.

As a practical rule, if you want good sounding vinyl, you should avoid anything on his list.

And if you do try some and do like them, let me know which ones you think sound good and I will try to get hold of some copies and listen to them for myself.

Here is what we had to say about the Brubeck that Mikey recommends. We called it:

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records jazz LP poorly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes. Sonic Grade: F.

Our story:

Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of a shootout. My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:

  • Big but hard
  • Zero (0) warmth
  • A bit thin and definitely boring
  • Unnatural
  • No fun
  • No F***ing Good (NFG)

Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.

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We Get It, This Band Is Not For Everyone

Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Records Available Now

To my mind, speaking as both a fan and an audiophile, both the first two Crack the Sky albums succeed brilliantly on every level: production, originality, songwriting, technical virtuosity, musical consistency and, perhaps most importantly for those of you who have managed to make it this far, top quality audiophile sound.

This is simply a great album of adventurous, highly melodic Proggy Arty rock. If you like the well known bands that made the classic albums cited below there’s a very good chance you will like this much less well known band’s second album also. Especially if you have the taste for something different — I know of no other album quite like it. It may have been strongly influenced by many of the 70s Classics of both Prog and Art Rock, but it is stylistically unique.

This is high-production-value rock that pulls out all the stops and then some, with a massive Beatlesque string section, horns, synths, backward guitars and studio effects that rival those of 10cc.

Much like Ambrosia’s debut (another poorly understood band on a small label), such an ambitious project was clearly an effort to make a grand musical statement along the lines of Tumbleweed Connection, Sgt. Pepper, Crime of the Century, Close to the Edge, The Original Soundtrack or Dark Side of the Moon — all albums I suspect this band played countless times in hopes of recreating some of that magic themselves in the studio. I am of the opinion that they succeeded marvelously.

In the 70s I was a huge fan of those albums too. (Still am of course; check out our Top 100 if you don’t believe me. They’re all in there.) I played them more times than I can remember, with Crack The Sky’s albums spending plenty of time — in heavy rotation you could say — on the turntable in those early days.

Fun tip: Listen for the Elton-John-like piano chords on the first track. Can you name that song? (Hint: it’s on Tumbleweed Connection.)

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Listening in Depth to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

Side One

Scarborough Fair/Canticle

Listen carefully to the voices on this track, one of our favorites to test with. On the best copies they sound exceptionally delicate yet full-bodied.

Patterns

The percussion on this track is a great test for smear, a problem that plagues most pressings to one degree or another. On the better copies you’ll distinctly hear the sound of the drummer’s hands hitting the skins of the bongos, as well as lots of ambience and echo around the drums.

Note also that every stereo copy we’ve ever played spits at least a little on this song.

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For the Best Sound, Stick to the 360s on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More superb sound from the legendary CBS 30th street studios in New York!

This album checks off some big boxes for us here at Better Records.

Turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and you’ll have one of the best — if not THE best — folk duos of all time performing right there in your listening room for you. The sound is open, spacious, and transparent with breathy vocals and unusually low levels of spit. The strings are more dynamic than we’re used to hearing and the bottom end has really nice weight to it.

These old Simon & Garfunkel records weren’t often owned by audiophiles who kept their records in pristine condition. 

No, these were the popular records of their day, purchased by the record-buying public, and they were played and played hard, typically on cheap equipment. There are many quiet passages on this album that are going to reveal whatever surface issues might exist, so a copy that plays Mint Minus Minus is about as good as you can hope for.

Since only the right vintage 360 pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell.

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