break-2011

Our Four Plus Shootout Winner for Dire Straits from 2011

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review for Dire Straits’ first album was written in 2011. We had just discovered that a pressing of the album was clearly superior to every other pressing we had ever played. We were pretty excited about it and wanted to share the news about our breakthrough.

A substantial amount of the time, breakthroughs come about due to the conventional wisdom being wrong — and us not knowing it until an experiment proved it wrong. The needle is the only thing that can give us an answer we can trust, certainly not the pundits or the self-described experts.

What makes them experts? We have no idea and they never say. They just seem to “know” things, but they never tell us how they know them.

We do. We can’t shut up about all the stuff we know!

No concept is more fundamental to collecting the best sounding pressings than to be able to test records to find out if the received wisdom you are using as a guide is right, wrong or something in-between.

At the bottom of the listing for the album you can see a number of links to other records that share the same qualities as the first Dire Straits release does.

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Help – Germans Versus Brits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We used to buy the German pressings of Beatles’ albums like Help, but eventually we discovered that they were simply not competitive with the better Brits.

The lousy Brits, the ones sitting in the bins of your local record store or the ones you find in most BC-13 Beatles box sets, sure, the better German pressings beat those, but at some point many years ago we chanced upon some amazing sounding British pressings.

They forced us to reckon with the reality that even the best German pressings were very unlikely to reach the audio heights that the better British pressings showed us were possible.

Our commentary from 2011 follows.

We’ve heard some excellent German pressings before, but this time [circa 2011] nothing could touch our best Brit copies. What the best British copies have is more of the Tubey Magic that can typically be heard on early pressings, due no doubt to the fact that they are mastered with tube equipment.

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Having a Tough Time Shooting Out Blue from 2005 to 2011

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

UPDATE

This review starts with a killer copy we played in 2011. Further down you can read about our aborted attempt to do a shootout for the album in 2005.

ABSOLUTELY STUNNING TRIPLE PLUS SOUND ON SIDE TWO with a side one that’s nearly as wonderful! You’ve probably heard us say this before, but it is ridiculously tough to find great copies of Blue. It’s not just the toughest nut to crack in Joni’s catalog, it’s one of the most difficult albums in ALL OF POP MUSIC to get to sound right.

So when we find one like this, it’s a BIG DEAL. It’s got Off The Charts breathiness, delicacy, warmth and sweetness, and that’s just Joni’s voice. The sound of the ensemble throughout is amazingly natural, the recording so spacious.

Just check out the piano on The Last Time I Saw Richard: this is not the thin and hard-sounding instrument that accompanies Joni on every pressing you have ever had the misfortune to audition, hoping against hope that someday you would find that “elusive disc” with sound worthy of such extraordinary music. No, this piano has real weight; it has body; and it’s surrounded by real, three-dimensional studio space. No vinyl pressing we have ever played has managed to capture the sound of the piano on this record any better. Exactly no copies. (A few White Hot Stamper copies have done it as well, but none any better.) For those of you with a certain Heavy Vinyl pressing in your collection, we can only say: Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Both sides here are rich, full-bodied and warm with amazing immediacy. The sound is exceptionally DYNAMIC and the clarity and transparency are OFF THE SCALES. Joni’s vocals sound just right — so clear and natural, with lots of breath and texture.

We Promised Not to Talk About It

In the introduction to the Blue Game you may remember reading this:

Down the road when we’ve had a chance to do a shootout amongst all our best copies, we will be offering something more to our liking. I recommend instead — and this is coming from a die-hard LP guy, someone who disconnected his home CD player over two years ago and only plays the damn things in the car — that you pick yourself up a nice used copy of the gold CD Hoffman mastered for DCC. It’s wonderful.”

We then went on to explain that we didn’t want to just tell you what we found lacking in the newly remastered version. We much preferred that you discover it for yourself, an experience we were sure would be both edifying and enjoyable in equal amounts.

We Weren’t Ready in 2005

That first aborted attempt at a shootout for Blue failed because we had neither the specialized cleaning techniques and machinery that we use now, nor the equipment required to play such a challenging recording. We pointed out at the time that our notes contained comments such as “soft, lacks bass, grungy, grainy, thin, hi-fi, bright, so-so, aggressive, hard, thick, groove damage, highs worn away, lacking in bass and extreme top, gritty, swooshy, bad vinyl.”

No doubt that’s what we were hearing.

We also found comments such as “perfection, wonderful, lovely, sweet, transparent, as good as it gets, Joni’s right there, one of the best, wow.”

So there was hope, even way back in 2005. But no Blue to sell.

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It Took Us Until 2011 to Resolve the Studio Ambience on You’re Gonna Get It

More of the Music of Tom Petty

This commentary was written way back in 2011 after playing the best sounding copy of the album we had ever heard up to that point.

For those who may be interested, we offer some unsolicited audio advice toward the end of our review regarding what kind of stereo is not appropriate for Tom Petty’s albums.

Our story from 2011:

This Minty looking Shelter original LP has THE TWO BEST SOUNDING SIDES we have ever heard for this album! It’s a freak in the world of Tom Petty records, which tend to have NO good sounding sides.

And this is the band’s MASTERPIECE to boot, with four or five of their best and Hardest Rockin’ songs.

Both sides come flyin’ out of the gate with straight ahead rockers that have the Big Sound we go crazy for here at Better Records.

Side one was so unbelievable that we had to award it the rare Four Plus (A++++) rating.

Of course the sound is punchy and alive — with Hot Stampers, what else would they be? — but where did all that studio ambience come from?

Simple: the best copies have the RESOLUTION that’s missing from the average pressing. You know the kind of run-of-the-mill LP I’m talking about: punchy but crude and just a bit too aggressive to really enjoy.

Oh, but not this bad boy. Sweetly textured guitars, breathy vocals — all the subtleties of a Top Quality Recording are here, along with prodigious amounts of bass and powerful dynamics. (Check out that drum sound!)

If you can play this one good and loud you will be shocked at how good it sounds.

I’ve paraphrased a bit of commentary from Aja for this listing where we discussed the kind of changes we needed to go through here at Better Records to make it possible to play a hard-drivin’ rock record like this one and get it to sound the way we always wanted it to.

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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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