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Room Treatments Bring Out The Big Speaker Whomp Factor

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The first Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 album is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback.

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to grant the listener the privilege of hearing all the elements laid out clearly, each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. 

With recent changes to some of our room treatments, we now have even more transparency in the mids and highs, while improving the whomp factor (the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp) at the listening position.

There’s always tons of bass being produced when you have three 12′ woofers firing away, but getting the bass out of the corners and into the center of the room is one of the toughest tricks in audio.

For a while we were quite enamored with some later pressings of this album — they were cut super clean, with extended highs and amazing transparency, with virtually none of the congestion in the loud parts you hear on practically every copy.

But that clarity comes at a price, and it’s a steep one. The best early pressings have whomp down below only hinted at by the “cleaner” reissues. It’s the same way super transparent half-speeds fool most audiophiles. For some reason audiophiles rarely seem to notice the lack of weight and solidity down below that they’ve sacrificed for this improved clarity. (Probably because it’s the rare audiophile speaker that can really move enough air to produce the whomp we are talking about here.)

But hey, look who’s talking! I was fooled too. You have to get huge amounts of garbage out of your system (and your room) before the trade-offs become obvious.

When you find that special early pressing, one with all the magic in the midrange and top without any loss of power down below, then my friend you have one of those “I Can’t Believe It’s A Record” records. We call them Hot Stampers here at Better Records, and they’re guaranteed to blow your mind. (more…)

The Last Consistently Good Elvis Costello Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis Costello’s Albums Available Now

Some reviewers think that this sprawling album with widely diverse musical styles lacks focus, but that’s precisely what makes it a work of genius.

On Spike, Elvis Costello tries his hand at every style of pop music he can think of and succeeds brilliantly with each and every one of them. This is one of the few compelling albums of the ’80s. I still play mine regularly on CD in the car.

Any King’s Shilling on side two with its authentic Irish instrumentation (fiddle, uilleann pipes, Irish harp, bodhran) has Demo Disc Quality sound of the highest order.

Another song on side two with top audiophile recording quality was Satellite. (For those of you who know Jellyfish, this has to be where they found some of the sound they would put to such good use on Bellybutton and Spilt Milk a few years later.

One side one God’s Comic is Demo Quality — so rich and natural. Where has this kind of sound gone? The way of the Dodo, baby, and it ain’t coming back. Mitchell Froom, the man who gave Crowded House such a polished pop sound, plays some wonderful keyboards here and elsewhere on the album. He’s joined by a slough of notables.

Elvis searched far and wide for this group and managed to find top players for every position on his team. The musicianship is top drawer all the way. Elvis clearly knows talent when he hears it.

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Turned Up Good and Loud, Carnavalito Is Glorious

Records that Must Be Turned Up Good and Loud to Sound Their Best

UPDATE 2024

The commentary about Carnavalito you see below was written in 2016. With the 12 foot high ceiling in our new, bigger and quite a bit more spacious studio, I’ll bet this album sounds even more mind-blowing than it did back then.

Ken Perry mastered all the best early pressings — accept no substitutes.

Here in 2024 we’ve just done the shootout again, our first since 2016.

Sky Islands is not an easy record to find as it didn’t sell particularly well, but those of you who treasure the music of Weather Report or Return to Forever or The Mahavishnu Orchestra the way we do here at Better Record (or, to be clear, some of us do) will find much to like here.

Finding customers for music most audiophiles have never heard of, let alone heard, has always been the trick with well recorded, mostly unknown releases such as Sky Islands.

Which means that this is a woefully underrated album that should be more popular with audiophiles.

It’s also one of those difficult-to-reproduce records that I credit with helping me make real progress in audio (along with a great many others.).

Carnavalito is a track that really comes alive when you crank up the volume. I played it full blast on two different occasions for audiophile friends of mine just to show them what happens when a big speaker system meets a recording with absolutely amazing audiophile quality sound — big and bold, wall to wall and then some!

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Our Four Plus Abbey Road Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This listing is from many years ago, possibly as early as 2010.

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we 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 most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of nowhere, to the surprise of the listening panel, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it fundamentally changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • Breakthroughs often come about because the conventional wisdom we had been relying on up to that time turned out to be wrong. Regardless of how many original UK pressings of Abbey Road we might have cleaned and played, we would never have found one that sounds as good as this pressing does, simply because none of the originals ever came close to winning a shootout, and it’s very unlikely that one ever would.

An exceptional copy of The Beatles’ last and arguably greatest album with THE BEST SIDE TWO WE HAVE EVER HEARD — QUADRUPLE PLUS (A++++)!

If you’ve heard the disastrous new pressing, then you know how important it is to play a real, vintage, analog pressing. A copy this good might just give you a new appreciation for one of the Greatest Rock Albums of All Time.  A permanent member of the Better Records Top 100, and a Desert Island Disc if ever there was one.

Abbey Road checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records. Here are three for starters:

The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as these.

Abbey Road is the very definition of a big speaker album. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is one of the The Beatles’ many audio challenges that await you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic power, don’t expect to hear them the way the band, Geoff Emerick, George Martin and everyone else involved in the production wanted you to.

It’s clear that The Beatles albums informed not only my taste in music, but the actual stereo I play that music on. It’s what progress in audio is all about. I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for close to five decades, precisely in order to play demanding recordings such as Abbey Road, an album I fell in love with “all those years ago.”

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On Trust, the Bass Is (Almost) All

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Notes from a Hot Stamper shootout we did quite a while back.

There’s a TON of low-end on this record. Regrettably, most copies suffer from either a lack of bass or a lack of bass definition. I can’t tell you how much you’re missing when the bass isn’t right on this album. (Or if you have the typical bass-shy audiophile speaker, yuck.) 

It’s without a doubt THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT of the sound on this album. When the bass is right, everything falls into place, and the music comes powerfully to life. When the bass is lacking or ill-defined, the music seems labored; the moment-to-moment rhythmic changes in the songs blur together, and the band just doesn’t swing the way it’s supposed to.

On the best pressings, you get the full-on bottom end WHOMP you paid for, with no loss in control. You can clearly follow Bruce Thomas’s bass lines throughout the songs, a real treat for any music lover. (He and Elvis don’t get along, hence the end of the Attractions as his backing band. I guess we should be thankful for the nine albums on which they were together; many of them are Desert Island Discs for me.)

Not only that, but the drums have real body and resonance, a far cry from the wimpy cardboard drum sound you’ll hear on most copies.

Hey, these are The Attractions: the pro’s pros. You can’t ask for better, and as expected they deliver big time on this album. But the mastering and pressing problems of most British copies typically make them sound half-hearted and uninspired, which is certainly nothing like what they sound like on the master tape. On the master tape, they play GREAT. You need a very special copy of the LP to hear them play that way, and that’s all there is to it. 

The better the pressing, the better the band.

A Must Own Title

This, along with My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, is as good as it gets for Elvis on LP.

All three are absolute Must Owns that belong in any serious rock collection. This is that rare breed of music that never sounds dated (especially considering the era in which it was produced). Music with real depth such as this only gets better with the passage of time. The more you play it, the more you appreciate it, and love it.

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Oscar Peterson’s Best Recording? Sure Sounds Like It to Us

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

It sounded great to me at the time, although I had nothing to compare it to. I was not an Oscar Peterson fan in those days. The CD may be very good, but it is unlikely to hold a candle to any of our Hot Stamper vinyl pressings.

I now realize that this album is clearly one of the best jazz piano recordings ever made. In its own way it’s every bit as good as  another landmark recording we talk about, The Three, recorded in 1975.

This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

The description for the amazing copy we found in our shootout more than a decade ago has been reproduced below.

The Right Sound from the Get Go

Side one starts out with a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. This side was richer and fuller than all the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work. It keeps all the instrumental elements in balance. The natural top on this side is just more evidence that the mastering and pressing are top drawer. Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — this side could not be beat.

And side two was every bit as good! The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge, probably bigger than it would be in real life, but I can live with that. Once again, with this kind of extended top end, the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced brilliantly.

Testing with Oscar

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term)
  • We like them to be solidly weighted
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in the audiophile reviews we read [more on smear at the end of this commentary]

Here are some of our favorite jazz records with top quality piano sound

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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Yes, For Some Records There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music on Island Records Available Now

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Catch Bull at Four shootouts.

We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing in 2016, a copy took the recording to a level we had no idea could even be possible. (We were going to give it Four Pluses, and probably should have, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Since then we have had many copies come in, but none that could compete with the Magic Stamper pressings.

And the best part of this story is that, no, the best stampers are not 1U, or 2U, or even 3U.

As a matter of fact, they are far from the stampers found on the earliest pressings. That’s one reason it took us so long to discover them, because they are much less commonly found than pressings with the earlier stampers. By the time these later pressings were mastered, pressed and released, the album’s biggest selling days were over.

For all we know this cutting may have been done just to keep the record in print, possibly undertaken many years after its initial release.

Who knows? Who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, it does serve to make a point near and dear to our hearts: that the idea (and operational premise of most record collectors) that the originals are always better is just a load of bunk. It might be and it might not be.

If you want better sounding records, you had better open your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressings.

These, for starters, and there are hundreds more you can read about here on the blog.

Of course this is nothing but bad news for the average audiophile collector, who simply does not have the time or money to go through the hassle of buying, cleaning and playing every pressing he can get his hands on.

But good news for us, because we do.

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Dream Weaver – A Good Test Record for Gritty, Grainy Sound

More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain

Most pressings of this album tend to err in one of two ways: either they’re a little bright and get hard and gritty in the upper mids, or they’re wrong in the opposite direction, with sound that is smeary and dull.

Our best copies get the balance right — plenty of texture on the keyboards and drums, with vocals that still have presence and breathiness — and not too much grit.

An all-keyboard pop record like this was a rarity at the time. The only other instruments besides drums (and one track with guitar) are keyboards. Every song is layered with multi-tracked clavinets, organs, and Moogs — it was a remarkable feat in 1975 to create an album with nothing but keys.

Listen to the title track, the most dynamic song on the record, and you will hear just how well all of those stacked keyboards and synths work together. (Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life borrowed a page or two from Gary’s solo debut here.)

  • If you’re a Gary Wright fan, or perhaps a fan of mid-’70s synth-pop, this title, a personal favorite of mine from 1975, is surely a Must Own.
  • In our opinion, Dream Weaver is his best sounding album, and probably the only Gary Wright record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call one and done.
  • The sound may be too heavily processed for some, making it fairly difficult to reproduce, but the best sounding pressings, played at good, loud levels on big dynamic speakers in a large, heavily-treated room, are a fun listen. They sound just fine to us.
  • 1975 was a good year for music on vinyl — here are some excellent pressings of well-recorded albums available for purchase now.

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How Wide and Tall Is Your Copy of Little Queen? Compared to What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Heart Available Now

Little Queen is yet another recording that only truly comes alive when you turn up your volume.

On the right system, this is a classic rock Demo Disc to beat practically anything you could ever throw at it.

Love Alive and Barracuda on this copy will deliver the full rock and roll power your system is capable of.

If you’ve got The Big Sound, this is the record that will show you just how big it is.

You get huge meaty guitars, big bass, a smooth top end, full-bodied vocals, powerful rock energy and dynamics, loads of richness and incredible transparency.

Wide and Tall

A key quality we look for in Hot Stamper copies of Little Queen is wide and tall presentation.

What exactly does that mean you ask? The best copies, the ones that really jump out of the speakers, tend to present some (usually high frequency) information higher and more forward than others. This is not hard to miss.

When you’re playing ten or fifteen copies of the same side of the same album and suddenly a cymbal crashes higher and more clearly than the others did in the part of the track you are testing, you can’t help but notice it. Wow! How did that get there?

Once you hear it you start to listen for it, and sure enough the next copy won’t do it, nor will the next. Maybe the one after that gets about halfway there: the cymbal crashes are higher than most, but not as high as the one that really showed you how high is up.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Progress in Audio

And of course it all ties in with our revolutionary changes in audio commentary. If you’ve been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, maybe ALL the Little Queen pressings do it now. They might ALL do something they never did before, and in fact they SHOULD be doing most things better now. 

Our last shootout was a while back. Since then many, many parts of the chain have undergone improvement. During this shootout we heard things in the recording we’d never heard before. This is the point of all this audio fooling around. It pays off, if you do it right. You have musical information waiting to be unlocked in your favorite recordings. It isn’t going to free itself. You have to do the work to set it free. Do it our way or do it some other way, but do it. You, more than anyone else, will be the one to get the benefit.

Problems Noted More Recently

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After 40 Years, Waiting for the Sun Comes Full Circle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

This commentary was written in 2008, shortly after playing an amazingly magical Gold Label pressing in a shootout.

My favorite of the first three Doors album, Waiting for the Sun is imbued with more mystery and lyricism than previous efforts. The album shows them maturing as a band, smoking large amounts of pot and preparing for the wild ride of their next opus, the ambitious, controversial The Soft Parade.

Actually, as I listen to this album, it reminds me more and more of that one. Now that it sounds as good as The Soft Parade, I find I’ve gained a new respect for Waiting.

More to Come

I started playing these albums in high school on my 8-track tape player. My older stepbrother had the records and I probably played those too.

When I seriously got into audio sometime in the ’70s, I tried every kind of record I could get my hands on — Brits, Germans, Japanese, originals, reissues — but no matter what I did, I couldn’t find good sounding pressings of their albums. Everything I played sounded terrible and I just assumed the band, like so many other ’60s artists, had been poorly recorded.

Then in the early 80s, the MoFi pressing of the first album came out. It sounded amazing to me at the time.

Ten or so years later the DCC pressing on Heavy Vinyl came along and showed me how wrong I — and it — were.

Now we’ve come full circle — back to the right originals. (The operative word there is “right”; some early stampers are terrible. We know, we’ve played them.)

With better cleaning technologies and much better playback equipment, the tables have turned.

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