8-2018

Folk Singer – Another Muddy MoFi

More of the Music of Muddy Waters

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.

The MoFi is thick, fat and murky, with much less transparency than the Classic release (which is no award winner either).

The typical album MoFi remastered on Anadisq suffered from many or most of the long list of shortcomings you see below. If you want to avoid records with these faults, you would be well advised to avoid any of the records we’ve linked to.

Is this the worst sounding pressing of Folk Singer ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be fair warning for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash.

A True Audiophile Pressing at 45 RPM to Shame Them All

More of the music of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Sergei Prokofiev

This Japanese 45 RPM remastering of our favorite recording of Prokofiev’s wonderful Lt. Kije Suite has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND. For starters, there are very few records with dynamics comparable to these. Since this is my favorite performance of all time, I can’t recommend the record any more highly. 

Most of what’s “bad” about a DG recording from 1978 is ameliorated with this pressing. The bass drum (drums?) here must be heard to be believed. We know of no Golden Age recording with as believable a presentation of the instrument as this.

The drum is clearly and precisely located at the back of the stage; even better, it’s as huge and powerful and room-filling as it would have been had you attended the session yourself. That’s our idea of hi-fidelity here at Better Records.

Real Dynamics

Over the course of this and many other shootouts, we’ve discovered that it’s practically impossible to find the right volume setting for this album. It’s so dynamic that no matter what volume you set it at the loud portions get too loud. There is a huge amount of deep bass on this recording and that, coupled with the practically unparalleled dynamics, means that you must have a great deal of amplifier power to reproduce this one properly. Either that or a very efficient speaker such as a horn. I confess I would need a great deal more power than I have at my disposal to get the climaxes of this recording to play cleanly.

The Best DG Recording

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Love Is The Thing – The Breakthrough We Were Waiting For

Hot Stamper Pressings of Our Favorite Vocal Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Nat “King” Cole

Love Is The Thing has long been one of the best sounding Nat “King” Cole recordings we had auditioned over the years. With a large variety of copies to play, including some interesting “finds” among them, we now know it actually is The Best. We have never heard the man sound better than he does on the hottest copies of this very album.

Of course we’re always on the lookout for Nat King Cole albums with good sound. In our experience that is not nearly as easy as one might expect. Far too many of his recordings are drenched in bad reverb and can’t be taken seriously. At least one we know of has his voice out of phase with the orchestra on most of the copies we played, putting a quick end to that shootout. 

If anything the sound on his albums gets even worse in the ’60s. Many of Nat’s albums from that decade are over-produced, bright, thin and shrill.

We assume most audiophiles got turned on to his music from the records that Steve Hoffman remixed and remastered for DCC back in the mid-’90s, For those of you who were customers of ours back then, you know that I count myself among that group. I even went so far as to nominate the DCC of Nat’s Greatest Hits as the best album DCC ever made. (I know now, as I expect you do, that that’s really not saying much, but at the time I thought it was a pretty bold statement.)

Devoting the Resources

Naturally, having long ago given up on Heavy Vinyl LPs by DCC and others of their persuasion, these days we are in a much better position to devote our resources to playing every Nat King Cole album on every pressing we can get our hands on, trying to figure out what are the copies — from what era, on what label, with what stampers, cut by whom, stereo or mono, import or domestic — that potentially have the Hot Stamper sound, the very Raison d’être of our business.

What we discovered with the more than dozen copies we’d pulled together for our shootout was that different pressings from different eras on different labels can all have the right sound. In fact, while listening to one copy after another, all without the benefit of knowing anything about the specific record on the table, it was simply impossible to predict from the sound alone which label the record was printed on.

Some of the earliest pressings were rich and tubey, but so were some of the later ones. Same with copies that were lean, hard or transistory — they could be on a label from any era with that sound.

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