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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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Loud Levels and Big Woofers Will Rock Your World on Crime of the Century

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

The bass on the best copies is AWESOME. Playing a Hot Stamper copy at loud levels with big woofers will have your house quaking. Add to that the kind of ENERGY that the better pressings have in their grooves and the result is an album guaranteed to bring most audiophile systems to their knees, begging for mercy. 

This is The Audio Challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of SONIC POWER, don’t expect to hear Crime of the Century the way the brilliant engineer Ken Scott and the boys in the band wanted you to. The album wants to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are capable of doing.

With sound that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, this is a Big Speaker Rock Demo Disc with very few rivals in my experience, offering the dedicated audiophile the kind of sound I have been lusting after since I first got heavily into audio in the early- to mid-’70s.

The Mobile Fidelity Pressing Used to Be Impressive

The typical Brit copy is dull, and that quality just takes all the magic out of the recording.

The three dimensional space and clarity of the recording rely heavily on the quality of the top end.

The MoFi, on the best copies, shows you what is missing from the typical Brit, domestic or other import LP. This is what impressed me back in the ’70s when I bought my MoFi. It was only years later that I realized what was missing and what was wrong.

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The Best Reason to Go Deeper into Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

This is one of the records that convinced me that I needed to actively pursue better quality home audio.

I realized pretty early on that I simply had to devote the time, energy and money into improving my system so that I could play records like Songs for Beginners better. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing — on one at the start does — but I knew I needed to figure out how to get my favorite records to sound more like live music.

I had such irrepressibly deep feelings while listening to the album that I knew I had to do everything in my power to get it to sound as good as I possibly could.

Songs for Beginners is an album that made me want to become a better listener.

And the song that really did it for me on the album was Better Days.

I was originally thinking of calling this commentary “Why I Became an Audiophile,” but I quickly realized that being an audiophile — a lover of sound — doesn’t necessarily involve buying lots of expensive audio equipment or endlessly searching out recordings with the highest fidelity.

No, being an audiophile simply means you love good sound.

Where you find it — at clubs, at home, in the concert hall or the car — should make no difference to anyone.

Songs for Beginners couldn’t make me an audiophile; I already was one. It did, however, make me a more dedicated audio enthusiast. It’s precisely the kind of record that rewards the 40 50 plus years I’ve put into this hobby, trying to get it and hundreds, now thousands, of other wonderful records to sound their best.

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801 Live – It’s All About the Bass (Except for that One Time When It Wasn’t)

Hot Stamper Pressings of 801 Live Available Now

This commentary was written in 2007 or thereabouts.

What’s especially interesting about this copy is that we went crazy for it even though it did not have the best bass of the copies we played, which, as you will see below, clearly contradicts what we had previously written. We thought that the copies with the best bass had the best everything else too, but that was not what we heard this time around.

THIS copy got the music to work its magic, and it did it with most, but not all, of the bass of the best. Not sure how to explain it. Rules were made to be broken maybe?  (more…)

The Greatest Jazz/Rock Fusion Album of Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

In 2011 we discovered a White Hot pressing of Romantic Warrior and just had to share our enthusiasm for the album, It’s been a personal favorite of mine since I first played it back in the 70s, as well as a record I had been obsessed with trying to get to sound better for a very long time.

This is the story of that breakthrough pressing we discovered more than ten fifteen years ago.

Romantic Warrior is my favorite JAZZ/ROCK FUSION album of all time. As good as the music is, the sound is even better. This is the Jazz/Rock Demo Disc that stands head and shoulders above the rest. In my experience, no record of this kind is more DYNAMIC or has better BASS. Not one. Demo Disc doesn’t begin to do this kind of sound justice.

Simply put, not only is this one of the greatest musical statements of all time, it’s one of the great recording statements. Few albums in the history of the world can lay claim to this kind of POWER and ENERGY.

But the Super Sound has a purpose, a raison d’etre. This is the kind of music that requires it; better yet, DEMANDS it. In truth, the sound is not only up to the challenge of expressing the life of the music on this album, it positively ENHANCES it.

Those monster Lenny White drum rolls that run across the soundstage from wall to wall may be a recording studio trick, but they’re there to draw your attention to his amazing powers, and it works! The drums are EVERYWHERE on this album, constantly jumping out of the soundfield and taking the music into the stratosphere where it belongs.
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Songs for Beginners – Greatest “Copy” Ever

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

WHOA! We’ve paired up two FOUR PLUS sides to create this stunning 2-pack with mindblowing Demo Quality sound for the whole album. These A++++ sides will show you just how amazing it can sound: super full-bodied, rich, warm and natural. 

Please note that we award this very special grade so rarely that we don’t even have a graphic to represent it in our sonic grade box. The scale usually only goes to three pluses, but these two sides went up to four!

  • 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 most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it dramatically changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question would have been “how high is up?”

This is an incredible recording, and on a copy like this the sound is truly stunning. When you hear Chicago here you will not believe how CINEMATIC the sound is! It’s everything we love about ANALOG, and then some.

Most of the credit must go to the team of recording engineers, led here by the esteemed Bill Halverson, the man behind all of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young albums. Nash was clearly influenced by his work with his gifted bandmates, proving with this album that he can hold his own with the best of the best.

Some songs (We Can Change The World, Be Yourself) are grandly scaled productions with the kind of studio polish that would make Supertramp envious. For me, a big speaker guy with a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better than this. (more…)

Our First Shootout for Sgt. Pepper’s – 2005

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers… Available Now

We started doing massive shootouts in 2004 — Teaser and the Firecat was our first — and it wasn’t long before we got around to doing one of the most important albums of popular music ever produced.

It was a milestone for us here at Better Records, and there have been quite a number of them since.

Here is our review from 2005. Please excuse all the unnecessary capitalization.

Drumroll please… FREAKISHLY GOOD SOUND ON BOTH QUIET SIDES. This White Hot Sgt. Pepper’s is absolutely stunning with huge amounts of LIFE, ENERGY, PRESENCE, and IMMEDIACY.

The huge soundfield will fill up your living room — and then some.

Side One is a TUBEY MAGICAL MONSTER! We rate the first two tracks an A++ because the bass is a bit more bloated than we would like. But in true champion form, the bass tightens up during “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” to earn its THIRD PLUS and to show the world what correct tonal balance sounds like. 

The vocals here are virtually strain free, which is a miraculous feat for any Beatles album. Unless you happen to be Sir George Martin, we guarantee you have never heard Sgt. Pepper’s sound so good. After the bass tightens up, you’ll be treated to some serious MASTER TAPE SOUND!

Side Two is a heavyweight in its own respect. The voices sound excellent with lots of texture and ambience, really conveying the boys’ performances in the studio. The clarinet on When I’m 64 sounds OUT OF THIS WORLD! There’s lots of texture to the various instruments, particularly the strings, and the piano has nice weight to it. There’s lots of deep, well-defined bass, and the transparency is breathtaking. 

Sgt. Pepper’s checks off a number of important boxes for us:

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