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Some of the more notable breakthrough pressings we’ve discovered are linked here.

Wish You Were Here – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

We have added some helpful title specific advice at the bottom of the listing for those of you want to find your own Hot Stamper pressing.

This is the perfect example of everything we look for in a recording here at Better Records: it’s dynamic, present, transparent, rich, full-bodied, super low-distortion, sweet — good copies of this record have exactly what we need to make us audiophiles forget what our stereos are doing and focus instead on what the musicians are doing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the album, Pink Floyd managed to record one of the most amazing sounding records in the history of rock music. The song Wish You Were Here starts out with radio noise and other sound effects, then suddenly an acoustic guitar appears, floating in the middle of your living room between the speakers, clear as a bell and as real as you have ever heard. It’s obviously an “effect,” but for us audiophiles it’s pure ear candy.   

Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 1-5

Right from the dynamic intro you can tell this is going to be a wild ride. David Gilmour’s haunting guitar line that comes cutting from out of the abyss should be warm with tons of room for his phasers to do their phasing.

After the band comes in and the vocals begin (listen for the man chuckling in the left channel) you should pay attention to the balance of the mix. Most copies tend to be very midrangy which can make the guitars aggressive and harsh, often times taking emphasis away from the vocals. The good copies have lots of transparency and allow everything to sit in their respectively places. This is probably most noticeable during the saxophone solo.

The tenor that starts off this section needs to be breathy, full-bodied, and sitting delicately in the center of your speakers. It does NOT need be be honky and hard sounding without any top extension. As the solo slowly crescendos, notice the guitar line spread across the soundstage that actually bookends the saxophone. The more dynamic copies really let you hear the intricacy and delicacy of his picking that foreshadows the time signature shift about to come.

When the time does change to 6/4, the saxophone player changes to alto, totally changing the sound of the solo! You can clearly hear on the better copies that he is further away from the mic than during the previous section, but if you listen closely, it sounds as though he is moving on and off axis. Whether this is part of his mic technique or him just dancin’ and groovin’ to the music, we may never know. I certainly hope for the latter.

Other Pressings

Most copies of the CBS Half-Speed lack deep bass, and for that matter bass in general.

They’re also consistently brighter. The upper mids and highs call attention to themselves at every turn. When you switch back to a good domestic copy or import, you might not notice as much detail, but everything will sound correct and balanced: less like a recording and more like music.

Phony highs cause listener fatigue for the same reason that bright CDs get tiresome.

Just listen to the sax break on side one. If your pressing is too bright that sax will tear your head off.

The Seventies – What a Decade!

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Big Production Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn’t get much better than Wish You Were Here.

A Big Speaker Record

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

It demands to be played loud. It simply cannot come to life the way the producers, engineers and artists involved intended if you play it at moderate levels.

Obsessed? You Better Believe It

Wish You Were Here is yet another record we admit to being obsessed with.

Currently we have identified about 150 that fit that description, so if you have some spare time, check them out.

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This Is Why We Love Records from the 50s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

From time to time a record comes our way that sounds absolutely amazing, “I can’t believe it’s a record” amazing.

If it’s the kind of record that sounds like the best copy of Fiesta in Hi-fi from our most recent shootout, we might even let our enthusiasm for its superb fidelity get the better of us. That’s the effect a record as good as the copy we played can have. You just can’t stop yourself from saying one great thing after another about it.

Our over-the-top notes, like those you see below, attempt to convey what it’s like to experience the absolutely breathtaking sound we were hearing.

But where is the harm in that? These are notes that no one outside of the staff are ever expected to see. They are helpful to us in writing our commentary and pricing the specific copy we auditioned, but they are practically never quoted in the listings.

Fiesta in Hi-Fi is an example of one of those recordings that doubles as a thrill ride. They come along from time to time in order to show us the kind of sound that we’d almost forgotten was possible on a record.

Oh yes, with the rare properly-cleaned, properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage vinyl LP, played back on top quality equipment in a heavily treated, dedicated soundroom, we can assure you it is very possible indeed. Allow us to make the case with the Shootout Winning original pressing you see below.

The notes read: 

So rich and big / Great space and detail / Everything sweet + clear + breathy / 3D too / Great dynamics / A touch hot but so fun / Deep bass.

You know what’s unusual about these notes?

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A Killer Can’t Buy a Thrill (and Some Lessons We Learned)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

During our shootouts, when we drop the needle on a copy and don’t hear that “Hot Stamper” sound, we toss that one and move on to the next. The difference between a truly Hot Stamper and most copies is so obvious that we rarely waste time on the pressings that clearly don’t have any real magic in their grooves.

Like we’ve said after some of our other Steely Dan Hot Stamper shootouts, you would never imagine how good this album can sound after playing the average copy, which is grainy, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail. It’s positively criminal the way this well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP.

And how can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right? The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is we know how hard it is to appreciate good music through bad sound. Bad sound is a barrier to understanding and enjoyment, to us audiophiles anyway.

We Was Wrong About the Sound

Years ago – starting with our first shootout in 2007 for the album as a matter of fact – we had put this warning in our listings:

One thing to note: this isn’t Aja, Pretzel Logic or Gaucho (their three best sounding recordings). We doubt you’ll be using a copy of Can’t Buy A Thrill to demo your stereo.

We happily admit now that we got Can’t Buy a Thrill wrong. It’s actually a very good sounding record – rich, smooth, natural, with an especially unprocessed quality.

In that sense it is superior to most of their catalog; better than Countdown to Ecstasy, Katy Lied, Royal Scam and maybe even Gaucho (which is a bit too artificial and glossy for our tastes, although it might make owners of less revealing equipment or those who find that kind of sound more appealing positively swoon).

You could easily use Can’t Buy a Thrill to demo your stereo, depending on what you were trying to demonstrate. A realistic, solidly-weighted piano comes to mind — there are many songs with an exceptionally well recorded piano on the album.

Mistakes Were No Longer Made

We used to think it sounded flat, cardboardy, veiled and compressed. It’s actually none of those things on the best copies. The reason we didn’t find those problems during our most recent shootouts is that we must have improved our playback. Precisely how I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better. Or maybe it was that in combination with the few new room tweaks. Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know. 

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Our Search for Shootout Winning Sound on Modern Vinyl Finally Pays Off

Our (Incomplete) List of Potentially Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings

It has finally come to pass. A modern pressing has won a shootout.

Having auditioned more than a dozen modern (post-2000) OJC pressings and having had them fall far short of the mark again and again — when they weren’t just plain awful — we have now discovered one that can win a shootout.

As you imagine, this came as quite a shock.

We weren’t sure precisely which of the many OJC pressings our shootout winner was until we looked up the stamper numbers on Discogs. To our surprise, it had clearly been made sometime in the the 21st century.

That Never Happens

This has never happened before. No record made since 2000 has ever won a shootout against a vintage pressing of the same title.

Modern records range from awful to very good, but one quality they have never had is the ability to be the best of the best.

Now one has.

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We Were Way Off the Mark with Stand Up in 2006

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jethro Tull Albums Available Now

Years ago we wrote:

This Island Pink Label Original British pressing has ABSOLUTELY AMAZING SOUND! We mention that there was a Sunray pressing that may have been even better, but I didn’t have this copy in hand to compare the Sunray to, so I can’t be sure that pressing was any better.

This one sounds as good as any I’ve ever heard. 

It’s amazingly dynamic and powerful, yet full of tubey magic. I played almost ten different pressings of this record today (11/08/06): every domestic label variation and a handful of imports. This copy is clearly the best of the batch.

A textbook case of live and learn.

My stereo was dramatically less revealing back then and also I did not know how to clean records properly. Those two facts, combined with the underdeveloped or yet-to-be-developed listening skills that go with them, allowed me to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

In 2006 we simply had not done our homework well enough. I had been an audiophile for at least 31 years by then, and a legitimate audiophile record dealer for 19.

Sure, by 2006 my staff and I 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: in other words, the usual suspects.

The result? We were roughly in the same position as the vast majority of audiophiles. We had auditioned a sizable number pressings of the album and thought we knew enough about the sound of the album to pick a clear winner. We thought the best pink label Island pressings had the goods that no other copies could or would have.

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

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

But in 2006, 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 2006 to find out what we know now.

We needed a breakthrough, and we hadn’t gotten it yet.

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Magical Mystery Tour – Our Beyond White Hot Copy from 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records, although we certainly did not know that at the time.

Later that same year we swore off Heavy Vinyl for good (prompted by the mediocre sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time. (Please excuse the overuse of capitals.)

Our Commentary from 2007

The best sounding Magical Mystery Tour ever! Hot Stamper copies of this album are a regular feature on this site, but we’ve NEVER heard one like this — on EITHER side.

We had no choice but to award this album the very rare grade of A++++ (Four Pluses!) on both sides.

Our lengthy commentary entitled  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.

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Parallel Lines – We Broke Through in 2016

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blondie Available Now

Can this kind of music get any better? This album is a MASTERPIECE of Pure Pop, ranking right up there with The Cars first album. I can’t think of many albums from the era with the perfect blend of writing, production and musicianship Blondie achieved with Parallel Lines.

As expected, if you clean and play enough copies of a standard domestic major label album like this one, sooner or later you will stumble upon The One, and boy did we ever.

This side two had OFF THE CHARTS with presence, breathy vocals, and punchy drums. It was positively swimming in studio ambience, with every instrument occupying its own space in the mix and surrounded by air.

There was not a trace of grain, just the silky sweet highs we’ve come to expect from analog done right. 

Gone is the compressed muck of the MOFI (and most domestic pressings, to be fair). In its place is the kind of clarity, transparency and pure ROCK AND ROLL POWER previous pressings only hinted at. I became a giant fan of this album the moment I heard it back in 1978, but the sound always left much to be desired.

So many copies were thick and compressed; the music was cookin’ but the sound seemed to be holding it back.

But there are good sounding pressings, and now we know which ones they are.

What We Think We Know about Scheherazade

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Our Favorite Performance of Scheherazade – Ansermet with the Suisse Romande

This post was written in 2014 or so. It’s the story of the breakthrough pressing we discovered that year.

I attended the Dec. 2013 performance of the work at the Disney Hall. Pictured is Mr de Burgos conducting. It was a thrill like no other. (Well, maybe The Planets.)

“Guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos’s attention to detail delivers the razzle dazzle and also discovers renewed radiance in ‘Scheherazade.'”

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2014, one we had been planning for more than two years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London (CS 6212, his second stereo recording, from 1961, not the earlier and noticeably poorer sounding recording from in 1959); the Ormandy on Columbia, and a few others we felt had shown potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the fourth movement being THE Ball Breaker of all time, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Ansermet. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing those ten or so other pressings.

Here it is a year later and we’re capitalizing on what we learned from the first big go around, which is simply this: the Ansermet recording on Decca/London can not only hold its own with the Reiner on RCA, but beat it in virtually any area. The presentation and the sound itself are both more relaxed and natural, even when compared to the best RCA pressings.

The emotional content of the first three movements (all of side one) under Ansermet’s direction are clearly superior. The roller coaster excitement Reiner and the CSO bring to the fourth movement cannot be faulted, or equaled. In every other way Ansermet’s performance is the one for me.

Both Sides

Superb! Big brass, so full-bodied and dynamic, yet clear and not thick or overly tubey. Lots of space as is usually the case with Ansermet’s recordings from this era.

Both sides here are BIG, with the space and depth of the wonderful Victoria Hall that the L’Orchestre De La Suisse Romande perform in. As a rule, the classic ’50s and ’60s recordings of Ansermet and the Suisse Romande are as big and rich as any you’ve heard. On the finest pressings (known around these parts as Hot Stampers) they seem to be the ideal blend of clarity and richness, with depth and spaciousness that will put to shame 98% of the classical recordings ever made.

The solo violin is present and so real you will have a hard time believing it.

This copy is huge in every dimension, just as all the best ones always are, with maximum amounts of height, width, and depth. The transparency is also superb — you really hear into this one in the way that only the best Golden Age recordings allow.

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One Of These Nights – We Broke Through in 2016

More of the Music of The Eagles

This 2-pack contains the best side one we’ve ever heard! The sound is bigger, richer, tubier and livelier than we even thought possible. Side one was so amazing, such an obvious step up over every side of every other copy, we felt it deserved to be awarded our “Four Plus” (A++++) grade. One of These Nights, Too Many Hands and Hollywood Waltz will blow your mind on this side one. 

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & 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?”

A Side One Like No Other

My notes read: ‘hi-rez, super tubey, breathy vocals with much less honk.”

Here is the one comment which really gets to the point of the better pressings: “guitar solos rise above.” The big solo on the title track just soars on this copy like we’d never heard before.

This is the guitar sound that Bill Szymczyk achieved with the band that Glyn Johns had not. Of course, it’s only fair to point out that Johns had never tried. He saw them as a Country Rock band. The Eagles saw themselves as a Rock band, it’s as simple as that.

  • Reviews and commentaries for albums with soaring guitars can be found here.

Also note on side one that the loud choruses and huge guitars on the second track, Too Many Hands, hold up on this side one amazingly well. It’s a great test track as well as the first, providing positive confirmation that what you will hear for the song One of These Nights — the size and the power — will carry all the way through this side one.

When you play side two of the first disc, the disc with the Four Plus side one, you may be rather shocked at how small and opaque it is, especially in comparison to the incredible sound of side one.

Side two in general tends to have worse sound than side one on this album by one half to one full grade, if our experience is any guide.

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Somethin’ Else Sets the Record for Straight Ahead Jazz

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

In 2010 or thereabouts we had this to say about a copy of Somethin’ Else we had just played:

The music here is amazing — as I’m sure most of you know, this is as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball himself — but the good news for audiophiles is that it’s also one of the BEST SOUNDING BLUE NOTE ALBUMS we know of!

When you hear it on a copy like this, it’s about As Good As It Gets.

Setting the Record for Straight Ahead Jazz

After doing this shootout in 2015, I would like to amend the above remarks for being much too conservative. The current consensus here at Better Records is that this album deserves to hold three — count ’em, three — somewhat related titles:

  • One, The Best Sounding Blue Note record we have ever played.
  • Two, The Best Sounding Jazz Record we have ever played.
  • Three, Rudy Van Gelder’s Best Engineering (based on the copies we played).

Our shootout winners had more energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space than any jazz recording we have ever heard. The sound was as BIG and BOLD as anything in our audio experience.

Add to that a perfectly balanced mix, with tonality that’s correct from top to bottom for every instrument in the soundfield and you may begin to see why we feel that the best copies of this album set a standard that no other jazz record we’re aware of can meet.

Have we played every Blue Note, every RVG recording, every jazz record? We would never say such a thing (nor should anyone else).

However, in our defense, who could possibly claim to have critically evaluated the sound of more jazz records than we have?

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