congest-loud

Pressings that get congested in the louder parts of the music.

Audiophiles Should Give Reiner’s Rossini Overtures a Miss

More of the music of Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)

None of the pressings we played of this RCA were remotely competitive with Maag and the PCO on London.

The sound of this RCA was consistently boxy and congested, a case of the “old record” sound we find on countless vintage pressings. The world is full of bad records. We’ve suffered through them by the thousands.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

There are quite a number of Golden Age pressings that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve auditioned, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.

This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made, through trial and error. It may be expensive and time consuming, but there is simply no other method for finding better records that works. If you know of one, please write me!

We are not the least bit interested in records that are “known” to sound the best.

Known by whom? Which audiophiles — hobbyists or professionals, take your pick — can be trusted to know what they are talking about when it comes to the sound of records?

I have never met one, outside of those of us who work for Better Records. I remain skeptical of the existence of such a creature. The audiophile experts and reviewers I’ve encountered on the web seem hopelessly lost to me.

UPDATE: 2024

Woops, I take that back. I have met one, a certain Mr. Robert Brook. He has been conducting his own shootouts for a few years now and has made his findings available on his blog, The Broken Record. This is information you can trust.

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This Craft Pressing Was Definitely Born Under a Bad Sign

Hot Stamper Pressings of Electric Blues Albums Available Now

About a year ago we played the Craft pressing (CR00513) that had come out in 2023.

We have audition notes for lots of these dreadful Heavy Vinyl pressings sitting around. Sometimes they sit around for years. Obviously we are in no hurry to put them up.

The notes I took for the Craft pressing of Lush Life that Geoff Edgers played me still has not been posted, and he played me that record all the way back in 2022. For those of you who can’t wait for the complete review, I told him it sounded like a CD and proceeded to take it off the turntable.

At the time, I don’t think he understood how that could even be possible. He’d visited Bernie Grundman and read all the rave reviews for his work in the audiophile press. What do you mean his record sounds like a CD? Who the hell do you think you are anyway?

Geoff knows what that means now. I will leave it at that.

We were not surprised to find that the sound of this Craft pressing was terrible. Whoever this Jeff Powell is, I admit I’ve never heard of him, if you see his name on a remastered record, you might want to consider that if he can make a record that sounds this bad, he may not know what he is doing.

This strikes us as a safe bet.

Our notes for the album comprise all of five words. They read:

  • Not good
  • Blurry and congested

As you can see, we didn’t feel the need to spend too much time with it. When a record shows you right off the bat how badly mastered it is, we move on pretty quickly.

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Pros and Cons from a Long-Ago Shootout for Everything But the Beer

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

This shootout was probably done about ten years ago.

This VERY RARE 2 LP Shaded Dog pressing has Super Hot Stamper sound. Much of what’s good about Golden Age recordings is heard here, with side one for example having the sound of a HUGE hall and that Three-Dimensional quality that the best vintage recordings are able to convey so well.

We constantly knock Heavy Vinyl here at Better Records for the simple reason that we play vintage recordings such as this by the score every month and can hear what they do so well.

Unfortunately the huge hall and the 3-D soundstaging they effortlessly reproduce cannot be found on any Heavy Vinyl pressing we know of.

Such qualities allow this record to sound — in some ways, to be sure not all — like live music.

Side One

Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 – Elgar
Mignon Overture – Thomas
Largo from Xerxes – Handel
Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin – Wagner

Sound

A++, with the huge hall and 3-D sound we mentioned above. Very clear, especially when quiet. There’s a big bass drum on one of these tracks that is killer. A little more Tubey Magic would have been nice. As it is, this side sounds REALISTIC, like a real live concert.

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Why Is It So Hard for Mobile Fidelity to Get the Midrange Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity One-Step pressing of Blue and made the notes regarding the sound you see below.

We focussed on the quality of their pressing’s vocal reproduction, for the simple reason that a Joni Mitchell album that gets the vocals wrong is a Joni Mitchell album that no music lover and certainly no audiophile  would ever want to play.

The fact that some audiophiles do want to play this record speaks poorly of their ability to reproduce it properly. Accurate playback will reveal the problems with Joni’s voice described in detail below. The post-it for side one is on the left, for side two on the right.

We try to be very specific about the shortcomings of these records, which is why we reproduce our notes whenever they are available.

Side One

  • Tonally not far off, a bit too stringy and flat. Not awful. Congested vocals at peaks, harsh. 1+

Side Two

  • Vocal peaks like “traveling, traveling, traveling…” or “California” get squashed and harsh, lacking the real dynamics, presence and space of the vocals. No grade. (Awful in other words.)

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Listening in Depth to Bookends

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Musically side two is one of the strongest in the entire Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre (if you’ll pardon my French). Each of the five songs could hold its own as a potential hit on the radio, and there is no filler to be found anywhere. How many albums from 1968 can make that claim?

The estimable Roy Halee handled the engineering duties. Not the most ‘natural” sounding record he ever made — the processing is heavy handed on a number of tracks — but that’s clearly not what neither he nor the duo were going for.

If you want natural, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme has what you are looking for. That said, as of 2022 both are Top 100 Titles.

The three of them would obviously take their sound much farther in that direction with the Grammy winning Bridge Over Troubled Water from 1970.

The bigger production songs on this album have a tendency to get congested on even the best pressings, which is not uncommon for four track recordings from the 60s. Those of you with properly set up high-dollar front ends should have less of a problem than some. $3000 cartridges can usually deal with this kind of complex information better than $300 ones.

But not always. Expensive does not always mean better, since painstaking and exacting setup is so essential to proper playback.

The Wrecking Crew provided top quality backup, with Hal Blaine on drums and percussion, Joe Osborn on bass and Larry Knechtel on piano and keyboards.

Side One

Bookends Theme
Save the Life of My Child

I used to think this track would never sound good enough to use as an evaluation track. It’s a huge production that I’d found practically impossible to get to sound right on even the best original copies of the album. Even as recently as ten years ago I had basically given up trying.

Thankfully things have changed. Nowadays, with great copies at our disposal and a system that is really cooking, virtually all of the harmonic distortion in the big chorus near the opening disappears. It takes a very special pressing and a very special stereo to play this song.

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Billion Dollar Babies Often Suffers from a Case of 70s Warner Bros. House Sound

More of the Music of Alice Cooper

The last White Hot Stamper copy we put up had the two best sides back to back we heard in our shootout, with a killer side two that really brought this music to life.

Which is not easy to do, given that the average copy of this album is a sonic mess —

There are a lot of green label Warner Bros. records from the 70s that sound like that, one might even call it their “house sound.”

When you play most of the later pressings, it’s obvious that they’ve gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inapt and more often than not disastrous.

Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity, especially on this album, may not be easy, but it can be done. This side two was far and away the best we heard and proves that the album can sound good.

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Ravel, Saint-Saens et al. / Tzigane, Havanaise / Kyung-Wha Chung

Hot Stamper Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

This 1979 London original English pressing of violin showpieces (reviewed in 2012) has Super Hot Stamper sound on side two, which came as a bit of a shock to us after playing side one, which is as congested and opaque as one would expect from such a late London recording.

A great many Decca recordings from the Seventies are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.

Side two is fabulous — full-bodied, rich and sweet. Even though it may have been recorded in 1977, the engineer is Kenneth Wilkinson, and the hall is Kingsway — not many bad recordings can be attributed to either.    

But bad mastering or bad pressing quality are surely not the fault of either. When the record doesn’t come out of the oven right, the sound is going to suffer, and the sound on this side one is insufferable all right.

But side two is GLORIOUS, with wonderful music played with skill and feeling. (more…)

Another Dubious Recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

1S/1S Shaded Dog original pressing.

Ooh, let the drooling begin. 

Here is our admittedly very old review for exactly the one copy we had on hand to play, although, to be fair, we have played more than one copy of the album over the years, and it never sounded especially good to us on any of the copies we auditioned.

The violin is very immediate sounding on this recording, maybe too much so.

Either way, the sound of the orchestra is where this record falls short.

It’s congested, thin and shrill in places. The right copy of Heifetz’s performance on LSC 1992 is a much better record overall. Some may prefer Szeryng’s way with this famous piece, which, as a matter of taste, is fine by us.

If you’re listening for just the performance and the sound of the violin, you may find this record to be more acceptable than we did.

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Records Like This Give Decca’s Reissues a Bad Reputation

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Johannes Brahms Available Now

Apparently mastered with no regard to sound quality, this Decca SPA reissue is muddy, dull, congested and full of harmonic distortion in the louder passages.

How do we know that? We go out of our way to play every pressing we can get our hands on, even cheap reissues such as this. That’s our job.  We play everything to find the best sounding records so you don’t have to.

And some of these cheap reissues win shootouts!

But you can’t guess which ones will. You have to play them to find out.

And that’s how we know that some of them are good, some of them are mediocre, and some, like this one, are just awful.

Want to be assured of getting good sounding pressings of the greatest classical recordings of all time?

Step right up and order anything classical or orchestral you see here, Every one of them is guaranteed to please.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

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Identical Stampers and New Vinyl Somehow Produce Clearly Different Sounding Records?

nirvaneverMore Milestone Events in the History of Better Records

In this listing from 2007 we recount our experience with some copies of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. It was an important milestone in the evolution of Better Records.

We learned our lesson – no more sealed records.

Not if you’re the kind of audiophile record dealer who cares what his records sound like (which appears to put us in a class of our own.)

That same year we decided to stop carrying any new Heavy Vinyl release, prompted mostly by the mediocrity of the Rhino reissue of Blue.

So, all in all 2007 was a good year for us. We stopped playing their game and invented a new one all our own. Judging by the enthusiastic response of our customers we think we did the right thing.

Nevermind Circa 2007

The dirty little secret of the audiophile record biz is that the purveyors of these pressings cannot possibly know with any certainty the quality of the sound of any sealed record they are selling. (Whether they can tell what the sound quality is of any record they sell is an open question, and one we would have to answer in the negative based on the hundreds of audiophile pressings we’ve auditioned over the last 40 years.)

They turn a blind eye to the fact that some copies are simply not going to measure up to the sound of the review copy that they auditioned and described.

This is a good reason not to sell sealed records, which, of course, we don’t.

That’s because we’ve done the experiments and found out the things they cannot be bothered to learn.

But wait a minute. Even that’s giving audiophile record dealers far too much credit.  Only a small fraction actually review the records they sell. Most cut and paste a review from the manufacturer and let it go at that. And the few that do write reviews are often so far off the mark that they might as well be talking about another pressing entirely.
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