blockbuster

The best pressings of these albums, played on the right system, set up properly in a good room, are truly sonic blockbusters of the highest order.

The Three at 45 RPM Has Energy Like No Recording We’ve Ever Heard

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring Shelly Manne Available Now

When it comes to blockbuster sound that jumps out of the speakers, the wind is at your back with The Three because this is one seriously well-recorded album. If this record doesn’t wake up your stereo, nothing will.

We call it a “blockbuster” because it does not sound very much like a jazz trio performing in a club or some such venue.

But where is the harm in that? It’s not trying to.

What it’s trying to be is huge and powerful in your home. Everything has been carefully and artificially placed in the soundfield. Shelly Manne’s cymbals are placed as far left and as far right as possible on the “stage,” making him the longest-armed drummer to have ever sat behind a kit.

The drum solo on side two is full of energy and so dynamic. Why aren’t more drum kits recorded this well?

Check out the pictures inside the fold-open cover to see all the mics that were used on the drums. That’s where that wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sound comes from.

It’s a phenomenal big speaker jazz Demo Disc.

Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

Speaking of Energy

The transients found on this recording are uncannily lifelike. Listen for the huge amounts of kinetic energy produced when Shelly whacks the hell out of his cymbals.

This is a quality no one seems to be writing about, other than us of course, but what could possibly be more important? On this record, the more energetic copies took the players’ performances to a level beyond all expectations. It is positively shocking how lively and dynamic the best copies of this record are.

I know of no other jazz recording with this combination of sonic and musical energy.

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What to Listen For on Birds of Fire

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz-Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

Birds of Fire as a recording is not about depth or soundstage or ambience.

It’s about immediacy, plain and simple.

All the lead instruments positively jump out of the speakers — if you are lucky enough to be playing the right pressing.

This is precisely what we want our best Hot Stampers to do. In most cases, the better they do it, the higher their grade will be.

The main problem with this record is a lack of midrange presence. If the keyboards, drums and guitars are not front and center, your copy does not have the presence it should. On the best copies the musicians are right in the room with you. We know this for a fact because we heard the copies that could present them that way, and we heard it more than once.

Which of course gets to the reason shootouts are the only real way to learn about records.

The best copies will show you qualities in the sound you had no way of knowing were there. Without the freakishly good pressings you run into by chance in a shootout you have no way to know how high is up. On this record up is very high indeed.

A True Demo Disc

Birds of Fire is one of the top two or three Jazz/Rock Fusion Albums of All Time. In my experience, few recordings within this genre can begin to compete with the Dynamics and Energy of the best pressings of the album — if you have the Big Dynamic system for it.

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Finding the Rare Pressing of Heavy Weather with An Extended Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

It has been our experience that the copies with high frequency extension and the clarity, space and percussive energy that results from it are consistently the best sounding. You may have read elsewhere on the site that what separates many of the best Columbia LPs from their competition is an open, extended top end.

For some reason, Columbia, more than most labels, had a habit of making slightly dull records. Dull does not work for this album. 

When the highs on the record are right, it all comes together. Unfortunately, most copies don’t have those highs. There’s more to it than that of course: some copies lack bass, some are a bit grainy and gritty sounding — the normal problems associated with vinyl records are all here to one degree or another.

But when you have good highs you are about 80 to 85% of the way toward a Hot Stamper. Complete the picture with bass, dynamics, etc. (and a big speaker system) and there’s a good chance the sound will blow your mind.

Heavy Weather is a classic case of yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

This is music that doesn’t make any sense unless you play it LOUD. This is a BIG SPEAKER recording. I know this because I was playing it too quietly, which is to say at normal listening volumes, and it just wasn’t thrilling me. As soon as I turned it up, it really started to work, both as a piece of music and as a recording. So much gets lost in a mix as dense as this one at moderate levels. Everything comes out into the open when you give it the volume it needs. Trust me on this one; without a big dynamic speaker this music is never going to do what it wants to do — which is to ROCK YOUR WORLD. (more…)

Pictures At An Exhibition and its Gigantic Organ Sound

More of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Listen to that GIGANTIC organ that plays the fanfare opening of the work.

Honestly, I have never heard a rock album with an organ that stretched from wall to wall and sounds like it’s seventy five feet tall.

No, I take that back. The first ELP album has an organ that sounds about that big, but that’s a studio album. How did they manage to get that kind of organ sound in a live setting without actually having to build one inside the concert hall? I have no idea.

Pictures At An Exhibition has some of the biggest, boldest sound we have ever heard.

It’s clearly a Demo Disc for big speakers that play at loud levels.

Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

The hottest Hot Stamper pressings of Pictures are Demo Discs in two other areas as well, bass and size and space, along with the titles linked below:

Please note that many of our Hot Stamper pressings are only available as imports. It has been our experience that the domestic pressings of these albums are simply not competitive with the better imports.

Advice

Want to avoid paying our admittedly high prices and find a top quality copy for yourself?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

Pictures at an Exhibition should sound its best this way:

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801 Live – None Rocks Harder

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now

I listened to this album from start to finish just yesterday (5/31/2024), so I thought it only fitting that I share my enthusiasm for this absolutely amazing record with those who read this blog.

The best Island copies of this album rock harder than practically any record we’ve ever played. If you have the system for it, this amazing Rhett Davies recording will bring a live art rock concert right into your living room.

This is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s right at the top of the list of my favorite rock albums — a desert island disc if ever there was one. I stumbled across it more forty years ago and I’ve loved it ever since. It all started when a college buddy played me the wildly original Tomorrow Never Knows from the album and asked me to name the tune before the vocals kicked in. Eno’s take is so different from The Beatles version that I confess it took me an embarrassingly long while to catch on.

Demo Disc Quality Sound

This is a true Demo Disc in the areas of sound reproduction listed below. Other records with these important qualities can be seen by clicking on any of these links.

Adventures in Music and Sound

Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno were founding members of Roxy Music. AMG calls Roxy Music the “most adventurous rock band of the early ’70s” and I’m inclined to agree with them.

Those who played in Roxy Music are certainly some of the most influential and important artists in my growth as a music lover and audiophile, joining the ranks of 10cc, Steely Dan, Yes, James Taylor, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, America, Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp, Eno, Talking Heads, The Doors, Jethro Tull, Elton John, The Beatles, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Little Feat, Traffic, Nilsson, Elvis Costello, Sergio Mendes, Neil Young, The Eagles, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, The Cars, Peter Frampton, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and countless others.

These musicians and bands were clearly dedicated to making high quality recordings, recordings that could only come to life in the homes of those with the most advanced audio equipment.

My system was forced to evolve in order to reproduce the scores of challenging recordings issued by these groups in the 60s and 70s.

The love you have for your favorite music has to be the strongest driving force if you actually want to be successful in this hobby.

Some of the records that did the most to help me advance in audio can be found here.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Check Out the Huge Chorus of The Ark

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums with Huge Choruses

Listen to the chorus on the first track, The Ark. On the best copies, it really gets loud without becoming harsh or shrill. So many popular albums have choruses (and guitar solos) that are not much louder, and sometimes not even as loud, as the verses, which rob the songs of their drama.

This recording has the potential to give you a dramatic, powerful, loud chorus and it’s a thrill when you find a pressing that delivers on that promise.

One way we know to listen for these volume changes is that we actually play our records good and loud. When a dynamic recording such as this comes along, we have to watch our levels, otherwise, the chorus will overwhelm the system and room.

When playing this copy, be sure to set the level for the chorus of the first track. Everything should play just fine once that setting is correct, as the artist intended.

The double-tracked vocals on Whatever’s Written in Your Heart are a good test for transparency, resolution and Tubey Magic. There should clearly be two voices heard. The richness and the clarity of the best pressings make it possible to have it all.

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In 2008 We Had a Lot More R&D Ahead of Us

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic example of live and learn.

In 2008 we simply had not done our homework well enough. I had been an audiophile for at least 33 years by then, and a professional audiophile record dealer for 21, but we still hadn’t cracked the code for Zep III.

Sure, by 2008 we had auditioned plenty of the pressings that we thought were the most likely to sound good: the original and later domestic pressings, the early and later British LPs, some early and later German pressings, maybe a Japanese import or two. In other words, the usual suspects.

We already knew the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl was unbelievably bad; no need to put that in a shootout. It earned an “F” right out of the gate for its bright and harsh sound.

The result? We were roughly in the same position as most serious record collecting audiophiles, if not actually in a better one: who do you know that has played at least ten different pressing Led Zeppelin III, or any other album for that matter?

We had auditioned a number pressings of the album and thought we knew enough about the sound to pick a winner. We thought the best original British Plum and Orange label pressings had the goods that no other copies could or would have. (Years later we would get hold of another one, clean it up and put it in a shootout.)

But of course, like most audiophiles who judge records with an insufficiently large sample size, we turned out to be quite mistaken.

Logic hadn’t worked. None of the originals would end up winning another shootout once we’d discovered the right reissues.

But in 2008, we hadn’t stumbled upon the best pressings because we hadn’t put enough effort into the only approach that actually works.

What approach is that? It’s trial and error. Trial and error would eventually put us on the path to success. We had simply not conducted enough trials and made enough errors by 2008 to find out what we know now.

We hadn’t made the breakthrough we needed to make in order to know just how good the album could sound.

Can you blame us? The pressings that have been winning shootouts for years are from the wrong country (not the UK) and the wrong era (not the original).

We reproduce below the commentary for the 2008 listing that gets it wrong.

The best British originals are good records, but none of them would win a shootout these days up against the superior import pressings we discovered around 2015 or so.

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This Recording of The Planets Has “Blockbuster Sound,” For Better and For Worse

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Gustav Holst Available Now

This recording has what we here at Better Records like to call blockbuster sound.

Even on the best copies, the recording does not sound very much like a live orchestra, nor is it actually even trying to sound like a live orchestra in concert.

It’s trying to be huge and powerful in your home.

Which is more in line with a rock Demo Disc such as Crime of the Century or Dark Side of the Moon.

Everything has been carefully and artificially placed in the soundfield. Each instrument or group of intstruments is given its own space and (sometimes ridiculous) location.

It’s clearly not the recreation of a live orchestral event.

No live concert I have ever attended sounds anything like this record.

Instead it’s the actual creation of a unique orchestral sound, with unique staging of its own design.  Lots of microphones were used, which cause instruments and sometimes whole sections of the orchestra to appear in places and take up spaces they could not possibly occupy in reality.

If you have a good-sized listening room and your stereo images well, with realistic three-dimensional staging and depth, you will have no trouble hearing what we are talking about with any pressing of the album.

This is the sound that Bernard Herrmann made such wonderful use of with his series of Phase IV recordings for Decca, rather different than the four mics and two stereo channels of the Fiedler Gaite Parisienne from RCA in 1954.

Which is ironic. HP talked about The Absolute Sound of live unamplified music as being the standard, yet somehow this recording ended up in his Top Twelve all time greats. Makes no sense to me, but neither do many of the records on the TAS Super Disc list.

That said, our current favorite Planets is the other Planets on the TAS List, Previn’s reading on EMI from 1974.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan – Beyond White Hot Stamper Sound

More of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan

Years ago we heard a copy sound so much better than any copy we had ever played that we gave it a grade of Four Pluses on side two.

  • 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 often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “how high is up?”

The Sky Is Crying is one of the best sounding rock records ever made, especially if you are fortunate to have access to the kind of big speaker system that can play it at very loud levels like we do.

The song Little Wing rocks as hard on this pressing as any song we’ve ever heard, with demo disc sound to rival the greatest rock recordings of all time.

The guitar solos on Little Wing are as huge and lively as any we have ever heard (assuming you have a copy that sounds like this one).

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Diamond Head – Astonishingly Good Sound on the Right Island Pressing

More of the Music of Phil Manzanera

When it comes to blockbuster audiophile sound that jumps out of the speakers, the wind is at your back with Diamond Head because this is one seriously well-recorded album. If this record doesn’t wake up your stereo, nothing will.

Like its brother, 801 Live, this album is an amazing sonic blockbuster, with sound that positively leaps out of the speakers. Why shouldn’t it? It was engineered by the superbly talented Rhett Davies at Island, the genius behind Taking Tiger Mountain, the aforementioned 801 Live, Avalon, Dire Straits’ first album and many many more.

If we could regularly find copies of this audiophile blockbuster (and frankly if more people appreciated the album) it would definitely go on our rock and pop Top 100 list. In fact, it would easily make the Top Twenty from that list, it’s that good.

Looking for Tubey Magic? Rhett Davies is your man. Just think about the sound of the first Dire Straits album or Taking Tiger Mountain. The best pressings of those albums — those with truly Hot Stampers — are swimming in it.

Big Speakers Wanted Needed

This isn’t known as an audiophile album but it should be — the sound is GLORIOUS — wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and as rich and dynamic as it gets.

The best pressings of this album, played on big speakers at loud levels, are Demo Discs of the highest order.

Play this one as loud as you can. (801 Live is exactly the same way and needs high volumes to work its magic.)

A Personal Favorite

This album basically became the set list for 801 Live, the concert collaboration between Eno, Manzanera and their fellow travelers. That album is one of my all time favorites too, and a Must Own for anyone who likes British Art Rock from the ’70s.

What both of these albums share is amazing guitar work. Manzanera was the guitarist for Roxy Music, and this album can be enjoyed simply as an exercise in hearing every possible kind of sound the guitar can make. It also helps to have Eno doing electronic treatments for the instrument and coming up with a whole new sound.

One listen to a song like Diamond Head is all it should take to make you a fan. If that song doesn’t do it for you, the rest of the album won’t either, but I can’t imagine how that could be.

The best copies of this album excel in every area we prize.

It’s energetic, dynamic, the sound just jumps out of the speakers, there’s tons of bass, it’s smooth — in short, it’s doing it all.

What’s Good?

Domestic pressings suck.

German pressings too.

Don’t waste your money. We’ve never heard a good one. (And most of the British pressings you can find won’t hold a candle to this one.)

To see more reviews and commentaries for titles that we think sound their best on imported vinyl, please click here.

Want to avoid having to pay our admittedly high prices and find a top quality copy for yourself?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that most often win our shootouts.

In the case of Diamond Head, we like it best this way:

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