4-2024

You Can Do a Lot Better than this Tchaikovsky 5th

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We played a few copies of the album we had sitting in the backroom and none of them quite worked for us.  The sound was somewhat veiled and dry. (The 1s/1s pressing was the worst of the bunch, by the way.)

A decent record, not much more than that, and not really not worth putting in a shootout with the better pressings of the work we have discovered over the years. The best of the bunch might earn a grade of 1.5+, so why even bother?

Yes, we still have no Hot Stamper pressings of the work to offer, but we know they are coming, someday. Our current favorite is a performance by Mravinsky on DG from 1961.

It’s a “good, not great” vintage classical record, best played on an old school stereo system that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, like the one we employed to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to spot its many faults.

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Are Our Heavy Vinyl Reviews Based on Faulty Reasoning?

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

The short answer is that our reviews aren’t based on reasoning at all.

The full story follows. The comments you see below were left on our listing for the Rhino pressing of The Cars’ first album.

The grievances the writer lists are long and mostly unserious, but I think they have some value, just not the value the writer intended, so of course I am happy to reproduce them here and take a crack at explaining the mistaken audiophile thinking they represent.

If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies, you will have no trouble recognizing all the shortcomings this writer has called us out for in our review of The Cars on Rhino, as well as, we assume, the hundreds of other Heavy Vinyl disasters we take to task on this blog.

Rather that attempt to rebut the individual charges, which seem to be grounded in issues of logic, semantic hair-splitting, a deep misunderstanding of the unwritten rules of criticism, what does and does not constitute an ad hominem attack, my use of injudicious language, and who knows what else, I have an answer that I believe gets to the heart of why none of this matters, which you will find below in my reply to his comments. [Bolding added by me,]

Ad Hominem Attack: The author attacks Kevin Gray personally, suggesting that his work is consistently poor without addressing the specific issues with the remastering process.

Appeal to Authority: The author mentions Steve Hoffman and his successful remastering of The Cars’ first album on Gold CD, implying that because Hoffman did it well, Kevin Gray should have done the same. This disregards the possibility of differences in approach and technique between the two engineers.

Appeal to Popularity: Popularity does not equate to quality.

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Are Hot Stampers exceptionally good sounding records?

New to the Blog? Start Here

Not necessarily. What makes a Hot Stamper hot is reasonably good sound. At the very least a Hot Stamper should sound quite a bit better than any other pressing you have heard.

Not every album was well-recorded. (Here are some examples of records that you are not likely to be playing for your friends in order to show off your system, even if you have one of our White Hot Stamper pressings.)

As a result, the records made from those recordings will display most of the limitations that are baked into the master tape. A good engineer can fix an awful lot of problems in mastering, but, to mix a few metaphors, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is rarely if ever going to be in the cards.

For that reason, the records we review must be graded on a curve.

In our shootouts we compare apples to other apples. There is simply no other practical way to do it.

Out of the pile of pressings we have available, usually comprising six to twelve records, we clean them up and play them in order to find out which are the best sounding ones. If the winners of the shootout have the best sound we heard on both sides, they go into our Top Shelf section, which as of this writing has 13 members.

Any record that has one Shootout Winning side goes into our White Hot Stampers section. (There are more than ten times as many of those as of this writing. If you think a record you have cannot be beat on either side, that is very unlikely to be the case. We are happy to sell you the record that will beat it, and it will probably beat it on both sides, truth be told, and if it doesn’t, you get your money back.

We also guarantee that no Half-Speed mastered record or Heavy Vinyl LP sounds as good as even the lowest-graded Hot Stampers we offer. We’ve played too many of these so-called audiophile pressings to worry about them being competitive with the records on our site.

(One actually was competitive recently, but what a fluke that record was. Another word for fluke is outlier, and we really, really love those, but a Heavy Vinyl pressing winning a shootout? That has happened exactly once.)

It is our strongly held conviction that the better your system gets, the worse — or at the very least the more artificial, veiled, ambience-challenged, frequency-limited and uninvolving — those records will sound.

The question every audiophile who collects records for sound quality must grapple with is “how high is up?”

That’s what shootouts are for. To judge the relative merits of individual pressings, regardless of how well or how poorly the rcording is (as if we could ever know such a thing.).

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Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper – The Live Adventures Of…

More Al Kooper

  • The Live Adventures Of… is finally back on the site after a twenty-six month hiatus, here with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on all FOUR sides of these early 360 Stereo pressings
  • This copy is doing everything right – it’s clean, clear, spacious and present with a big bottom end, just the right sound for this raw, live blues rock music
  • Great material to be found here, including covers of well-known tracks by Paul Simon, The Band, and Traffic
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “One of the seminal live albums of the late 60s… The idea of musical spontaneity both in live performance and in the recording studio had reached a certain apex in 1968… But it was the union of Bloomfield and Kooper that can truly claim an origination of the phenomenon, and this album takes it to another level entirely.”

Outstanding sound for this double LP of superb live blues-rock! We rarely have a copy of this title on the site, so if you’re a fan of Super Session, you should jump on this one right away.

Some of the tracks here (recorded on the second night) feature none other than Carlos Santana. (more…)

Are Hot Stampers original pressings?

Reissue Pressings with Hot Stampers Available Now

They certainly can be, but quite often they are not, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to any serious record collector, and definitely not to any member of our listening crew.

Reissues come out on top in our record shootouts fairly regularly.   

Yes, most of the time the original will beat the reissue, but most of the time is far from always, and since we have to play a big pile of copies anyway (and always with the person doing the grading kept in the dark about the pressing being auditioned), why not evaluate both the originals and the reissues at the same time, on the merits and not on our prejudices?

But this discussion bypasses an important question: What IS an original? Is a record with a 1A stamper an original and a record with a 1B stamper not an original, or slightly less original? Is every copy on the original label an original, and only the copies with the later labels reissues?

To be honest, attempting to lay down strict rules about what constitutes an original is best understood as a fool’s errand, an audiophile parlor game of little use in the real world of records, and one we never cared to play even when we didn’t know how pointless it would turn out to be.

To be blunt about it, we are not the least bit interested in how original a pressing may or may not be.

On this site we are only interested in one thing, the answer to the question: Which copy of the record sounds the best? (Also: In what way? So I guess that’s really two things we are interested in.)

The rest of it we leave to our record collecting brethren.

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Eagles – A Top Ten Title

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

You will be floored by the huge, rich, Tubey Magical guitars exploding out from your speakers on Take It Easy.

One of the best sounding rock records ever made, a member of our Top Ten and without a doubt Glyn Johns’ engineering (and producing) masterpiece.

A Top 100 Tubey Magical Demo Disc that is guaranteed to blow your mind on a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

A Top Ten Title

You may have seen our Top 100 list of the best sounding rock records elsewhere on the site. We picked out a Top Ten from that list and you will not be surprised to learn that this record made the cut. (Top Two or Three is more like it.)

At one time this was my single favorite Demo Disc. A customer who bought one of these one time told me it was the best sounding record he had ever heard in his life. I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s certainly as good as any rock record I have ever heard, and I’ve heard some awful good ones.

There’s an interesting story behind this album, which I won’t belabor too much here. Suffice it to say, one listen to some of the later reissues or — god forbid — a Heavy Vinyl pressing or Greatest Hits album and you’ll know I speak the truth when I say that the tape used to cut this pressing was not the same one that was used to cut those.

It no longer exists. It was lost a long time ago. Most copies of this album are mediocre at best, and positively painful to listen to once you’ve heard the real thing, an early pressing cut from the actual master tape.

Our Checklist

The Eagles’ first album is an album we think we know well. It checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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