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Baby You’re a Rich Man

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Below we discuss listening to Baby You’re a Rich Man from side two of the German MMT.

If you own a copy of the album, play yours and listen for what we describe in this track by track breakdown.

For those of you interested in digging deeper into the sound of scores of other titles, our listening in depth commentaries have track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done shootouts for.

Baby You’re A Rich Man

This track is Demo Disc Quality on the best Hot Stamper pressings. As I was playing this song for the shootout, the thought occurred to me that if I had one track to play to someone to demonstrate what a thrill it is to have a big, expensive stereo, it would be hard to pick a better song than Baby You’re A Rich Man.

The only other one that occurs to me off the top of my head is Sergio Mendes’ For What It’s Worth off of Stillness.

The sound is wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling and big as life. You can’t get that sound with screens and you can’t get it with smaller speakers and their smaller drivers.

Once you’ve heard that sound it’s hard to get too excited about any other.

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The Dark Side of the Moon – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

I admit to some bias when it comes to DSOTM. I must have played more than a hundred copies over the last forty-odd years. Whenever I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, again and again I would be proved wrong.

We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five ten years ago. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think still makes for some good reading twenty years later.

It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality-controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are those without.

Our Take on DSOTM Pressings

The domestic pressings we have auditioned over the years have never made it into a real shootout. They have always sounded far too flat and veiled to be taken seriously. There are some very good sounding Pink Floyd pressings on domestic vinyl — Wish You Were Here and The Wall can both sound amazing on domestic vinyl — but Dark Side is not one of them in our experience.

The Doug Sax-mastered Heavy Vinyl version from 2003 we played when it came out was way too bright and phony to these ears. We hated it and made that clear to our readers at the time.

We came across a very early British pressing about fifteen years ago, the one with the solid blue triangle label, but it was not as good as other pressings we were playing back then and we never bought another one.

We’ve liked a lot of later UK pressings over the years, but we don’t go out of our way to buy those anymore now that we have heard the really amazing pressings we like now.

As I said, we discovered the killer stampers about five ten years ago, and that showed us an out of this world Dark Side we had no idea could even exist.

We have a name for records like those. We call them breakthrough pressings, and we used to award them a sonic grade of more than Three Pluses in some cases.

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Elvis Costello Arrayed His Armed Forces and Produced His Single Best Sounding Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

We consider Armed Forces to be one of the best sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this White Hot Shootout Winner is proof enough to back up our claim. The best copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

The sound of the rhythm section ranks with the best we’ve ever heard. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

The song Oliver’s Army on the first side is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Rock music doesn’t get much livelier than that.

Skip on down to Green Shirt for another track that’s as punchy as they come.

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Lincoln Mayorga Volume 3 – Listen for Strained and Blary Brass

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

Most copies of this album are slightly thin and slightly bright.

They give the impression of being clear and clean, but some of the louder brass passages start to get strained and blary, or glary if you like.

The good copies are rich and full.  The sound is balanced from top to bottom.

The sound is smooth, which allows you to play the album all the way through at good loud levels without fatigue.

On the best pressings, the trumpets, trombones, tubas, tambourines, and drums all have the true tonality and the vibrancy of the real thing. The reason this record was such a big hit in its day is because the recording engineers were able to capture that sound better than anybody else around [not really, but that’s what it seemed like at the time].

That’s also the reason this is a Must Own record today — the sound and the music hold up.

Just listen to that amazing brass choir on Oh Lord, I’m On My Way. It just doesn’t get any better than that. If ever there was a Demo Disc for Brass, this is one!

I used to think the Tower label copies were not as good — that the later pressings were pressed better. Now I know that it doesn’t matter what era the pressing is from: the tonal balance is the key to the best sound.

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With Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy Is Where It All Started for Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Countdown to Ecstasy was the first Steely Dan album I ever bought. The Rolling Stone raved about it in a review — this would have been sometime in 1973 — so I figured I had better find out what they were on about and pick up a copy. (Two years later, Rolling Stone would later rave about a new release from a band I had literally never heard of, Roxy Music. I went right down and picked up a copy of the album, Siren, and that record turned out to be a life-changing experience as well.)

I thought it was pretty good at first, not much more than that really, but I kept playing it and playing it and it wasn’t long before it became one of my favorite albums and Steely Dan one of my favorite bands.

A few years later, the bulk of my listening would be made up of music by Steely Dan, Roxy Music, Supertramp, Bowie, Ambrosia and 10cc. (Yes, no Beatles yet, I hadn’t come back around to them by then. I had to wait for the MoFi Beatles Box from 1982 and what I thought was its superior sound in order to fall in love with their music all over again. Little did I know…)

Then Pretzel Logic was released. I was living in San Diego at the time and I used to go into my local Tower Records across from the Sports Arena as often as I could, just to see what might have come out that week.

There they were. They had boxes full of them, laid out on the floor in front of the cash registers. I grabbed a copy, sped home and threw it on the turntable. As you might imagine, it proceeded to blow my mind, as would happen with Katy Lied and The Royal Scam and Aja when they came out in each of the following years. [1]

Records Like These

And it’s records like these that make us want to improve our stereo systems. I used to play the song Pretzel Logic to demo my system, but I can assure you that there is no way in the world I was reproducing the information on that record even a tenth as well I can now.

This is precisely what is supposed to drive this hobby — the plain and simple desire to get the music you love to sound better so that you can enjoy it more.

If you’re an audiophile, then by definition you love good sound. Pretzel Logic is a very well recorded album and it can have WONDERFUL sound.

Finding a copy of the album that was mastered and pressed properly is the hard part.

Learning how to really get the LP clean and putting together the kind of stereo that can play such a complex recording are also difficult.

All three things combined require the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars and the investment of many thousands of hours of time if the result is to be completely satisfying. Very few audiophiles will ever get there, but some will. We did, and you can too. Just follow our approach and your success is almost guaranteed.

Countdown to Ecstasy checks off a few key boxes for us:

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Is This Bill Halverson’s Engineering Masterpiece?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

This listing for the White Hot Stamper pressing we put up years ago was written around 2007. A few points have been added since then.

When all the elements are working together as they do here, the music on Steve Stills’ first album is positively AMAZING. Until I hear something better, I’m going to have to call this Bill Halverson‘s engineering masterpiece.* Yes, on the best copies it’s that good.

*UPDATE 2024: We have now discovered something even better, an album from earlier in the same year in fact, Deja Vu.

What to Listen For

Both sides can be rich and full-bodied, as well as transparent, with lots of separation between the parts. Most copies tend to be murky, thick, and veiled. The overall sound here is airy, open, and spacious, with TONS of ambience.

Check out the sound of Booker T’s big organ solo on Love The One You’re With — you can really hear the air moving through the instrument. That’s what a Hot Stamper pressing is all about.

And that’s not all. Listen for the rosiny texture to the strings, the warmth of the midrange, and the breath in the vocals. These are all signs of a very good pressing.

The bottom end is well-defined and has substantial weight to it, something you won’t hear on most copies. They sure don’t record music that sounds like this anymore, and even if they did I doubt they could press a record from the tapes that sounds as good as this one does. That sound is gone and it shows no sign of coming back anytime soon.

We’ll keep trying to find the unbelievably rare Hot Deja Vu’s, but in the meantime all you CSN fans should consider taking a chance on one of our Stephen Stills Hot Stampers. We guarantee you’ll love it (or your money back of course).

We Can’t Get Enough Of This Stuff

Some of the most sought after records in the world, as well as the most difficult to find with top quality sound, are those involving the various groupings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

This album is no exception. It’s Stills’ masterpiece, a record I’ve been playing since I was in high school. The sound on the LPs I bought over the years has been pretty consistently disappointing. It’s refreshing to actually find a copy like this that lets you hear the album the way you remember it.

There’s a very good chance — bordering on a certainty — that the copy you played back then was no doubt just as poor sounding, but you remember it sounding good.

That, more than anything else, is why we audiophiles keep chasing after so many classic albums from our younger days. We’re trying to find the record that can give us the musical satisfaction now that we achieved so easily then.

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Jules and the Polar Bears / Got No Breeding – A Forgotten Classic from 1978

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1978 Available Now

More of Our Favorite Titles from 1978

We dropped the needle on this one and heard EXCELLENT SOUND, which is not always what you hear when you play the average copy of this album.

And the music is GREAT. I’m a giant fan of this band, which never got the public acclaim they deserved, although they were critic’s darlings from day one. If you like adventurous pop, this should be right up your alley. If you’re the kind of person that was into the Talking Heads in the ’70s, this band is every bit as original and compelling. 

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

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Vince Guaraldi – Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus

Reviews and Commentaries for Vince Guaraldi

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

    • An outstanding copy of this classic audiophile favorite with Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last – fairly quiet for a vintage vinyl pressing on Fantasy Deep Groove vinyl too
    • You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs
    • Sublime, practically magical jazz trio sound (and music!) that belongs in every audiophile’s collection
    • If you made the mistake of buying any pressing made in the last forty years, on any label, here is your chance to finally hear this wonderful music sound the way it was meant to
    • And if this strikes you as too much money to spend on the album, don’t buy an LP, buy Hoffmann’s Gold CD, it’s wonderful
    • 5 stars: “Here is Vince Guaraldi’s breakthrough album — musically, commercially, in every which way… The whole album evokes the ambience of San Francisco’s jazz life in the 1960s as few others do.”
    • It’s hard to imagine that any list of the Best Jazz Albums of 1962 would not have this record on it

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

    1. It’s a Jazz Demo Disc (on the right stereo pressings)
    2. It’s the best sounding Vince Guaraldi album we know of
    3. It’s a jazz Masterpiece, and, lastly,
    4. It’s a personal favorite of yours truly

Great energy for this jazz classic. This quality cannot be emphasized enough — it’s critically important to the music.

The best copies really get the bottom right. They bring out the contribution of the bass player better, the bass being essential to the rhythm of the music. On these pressings, the bass is so tight and note-like, you can see right into the soundstage and practically watch Monte Budwig play.

This is precisely where the 45 RPM pressing goes off the rails. The bloated, much-too-heavy and poorly-defined bass of the Heavy Vinyl remaster makes a mess of the Brazillian and African rhythms inherent in the music. If you own that $50 waste of money, believe me, you will not be tapping your foot to “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” or “Manha de Carnival.”

If you happen to have a friend with that title in his collection, ask to take a peek at it. I’ll bet it’s pristine. Bad records don’t get played much. Some audiophiles have complained that we spend too much time bashing Heavy Vinyl, but if ever a record deserved it, it’s that one. It’s a failure as a remastering and an insult to the analog buying audiophile public at large. Searching the web, I am glad to see that no one seems to have anything nice to say about it, as of this writing. No one should, but that has not deterred the reviewers and forum posters in the past.

The piano is solid, mostly clear and not hard. Not many copies present the piano this way — correctly in other words. The amazing snare of Colin Bailey in the right channel is LIVELY and fun like you’ve never heard before.

There is no sacrifice in fullness, richness or Tubey Magic in the presentation, and that is the right sound for this music.

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Midnight Blue Is a Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Kenny Burrell

Midnight Blue is our favorite Kenny Burrell album of all time, at least in part because it’s one of the All Time Best Sounding Blue Notes. 

If you already own a copy of Midnight Blue and you don’t consider it one of the best sounding jazz guitar records in your collection, then you surely don’t have a copy that sounds the way our Hot Stamper pressings do. In other words, there is a very good chance you simply don’t know what you’re missing.

Don’t think this is just another 60s jazz guitar album. With Stanley Turrentine on sax and Ray Baretto on congas, this music will move you like practically no other. When Turrentine (a shockingly underrated player) rips into his first big solo, you’ll swear he’s right there in the room with you.

And if you do have one of our better Hot Stampers and it still isn’t the best sounding jazz guitar album in your collection, then you have one helluva jazz collection. Drop us a line and tell us what record you like the sound of better than Midnight Blue. We’re at a loss to think of what it might be.

Midnight Blue checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records.

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Audiophile Wire Testing with Jethro Tull and His Friend Aqualung

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

… who seems to have a rather nasty bronchial condition…

[This commentary is from 2008 or so I’m guessing. Still holds up though.]

Like Heart’s Little Queen album, Aqualung presents us with a Demo Disc / Test Disc that really puts a stereo through its paces, assuming it’s the kind of stereo that’s designed to play an album like Aqualung.

Not many audiophile systems I’ve run across over the years were capable of reproducing the Big Rock Sound this album requires, but perhaps you have one and would like to use the album to test some of your tweaks and components. I used it to show me how bad sounding some of the audiophile wire I was testing really was.

Here’s what I wrote:

A quick note about some wire testing I was doing a while back. My favorite wire testing record at the time (2007)? None other than Aqualung!

Part One

Here’s why: Big Whomp Factor. Take the whomp out of Aqualung and the music simply doesn’t work, at all. To rock you need whomp, and much of Aqualung wants to rock.

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