customer-shootout

Letters from customers who did their own shootouts using one of our Hot Stamper pressings.

Letter of the Week – “…the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Dear Tom and Fred,

This is one of those records where I already had a handful of well-regarded pressings. How intriguing that it was such an obscure pressing that won your shootout! [1]

I compared the WHS to my early US pressing (Ken Perry mastered [2]), my MoFi [3], a Japanese “blue triangle” pressing, and of course, the 2016 remaster [4].

Sure, there are tons of sought-after pressings that go for prices even more exorbitant than what I paid you, none of which I’ve heard, so I guess it’s not a proper shootout. But, at least among the ones I have, the WHS bested them all handily. In each of the others I was able to find something that I could appreciate, that on its own compared well to the WHS. This is such a great, and well-recorded, album that any pressing of it is going to have something worthwhile to offer.

The Japanese pressing came closest to the WHS. [Doubtful we would agree with you on the merits of this Japanese pressing. We rarely like them, and we like them less with each passing year.]

At the other end of the spectrum the 2016 remaster, noted for its great bass, just sounded clogged and thudding [5].

Compared to each of them, the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others. Is it 15x better than my next-best copy? Objectively, probably not. But, subjectively, it must be, since I’m keeping it.

Since the hot stamper arrived the day after my Legacy Signature III’s got here, it was one of the first records I played on them. What a great pairing they are! 

This was of course the first mini-shootout I’ve done using the Legacys. What a great window into a record these speakers provide. I switched back to my Bowers and Wilkins 805s and re-ran the shootout, just to see if my impressions would still align. They did, with the hot stamper providing more vividness and a bigger sound than the other pressings did, even on the B&Ws.

But on the bigger speakers the hot stamper stands apart from the others by a wider margin.

Thank you both for all the great records you find, and thank you Tom for the stereo advice. You keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

Aaron

Aaron,

Glad to hear you are a Legacy man now. We love our Legacy Speakers and can’t imagine doing shootouts without them. (The old ones, not the newer models.) The Big Speaker sound, at loud levels, is what allows a record like Dark Side of the Moon to be every bit the immersive experience we know it can be if you have a top quality pressing to play. Now you know it too.

And thanks for doing the shootout so that you know exactly what our best copies of Dark Side are capable of. If you make any improvement to your system, be sure to go back to this Dark Side and hear the change for yourself.

Then play any of these other pressings and note how the gap has widened. That is our experience and we expect you will find the same differences in your listening room as well.

The following notes may be of general interest:

[1} Obscure pressings that sound better than all others are our bread and butter here at Better Records.

There are only two sets of stampers for the record you bought that win shootouts, and without those exact stampers you would not have heard the sound you so clearly heard. There is a stamper for the pressing you bought that has the same cover and the same label, made in the same country, but with sound that is pretty subpar. We bought some because we owed it to ourselves and our customers to try every potentially good stamper we knew was out there. We bombed, but we do that a lot and never worry about it. At these prices the winners more than pay for the losers.

This is why it is difficult to take anyone seriously who thinks they know the right pressings of DSOTM. We had to play a dozen or more different ones in order to find the killer copy you now own. Who in his right mind would do such a thing?

[2] As a rule we very much like Ken Perry‘s work for Capitol, but it is doubtful that anyone ever gave him a master tape of DSOTM to work with.

[3] Many, many years ago we did a little shootout for the MoFi, which you can read about here. We should note that the last time we dropped the needle on one we found it way too bright. The Crime of the Century MoFi that I used to sort of like was the same way, way too bright. Our system ten or twenty years ago used to be darker and much more forgiving. Those dark days are gone and they sure won’t be coming back, which simply means that it is the rare MoFi record that we can tolerate anymore. (Here are some of the ones we found the least irritating.)

[4] The Heavy Vinyl pressing that Doug Sax cut may have been made from the real master tape, but it had to go through Kevin Gray’s cutting system, and it’s the rare record that survives that trip. We reviewed his version here, almost twenty years ago now.

[5] We thought it sounded very bright. I didn’t pay much attention to the lower frequencies, the higher ones were just way too boosted.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile.”

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased back in 2017 [the bolding of the text has been added by us.]

Hey Tom, 

Listening to my very first Hot Stamper purchase was by far the most significant event in my life as an audiophile. I discovered the Better Records website way back in 2007, but being a hardcore skeptic I didn’t purchase anything until almost two years later. Although I agreed with the premise that different pressings have varying degrees of sound quality, I simply could not believe that any record could sound so much better to justify the prices. Frankly, I thought that the buyers of these records were folks with more money than sense.

What finally drove me to purchase my first Hot Stamper was my attempt to find a decent copy of Carole King’s Tapestry album. I had decided to try the Better Records approach and gathered half a dozen copies, as well as the Classic heavy vinyl reissue that I had read good things about. Talk about an exercise in futility. Despite a thorough cleaning with Disc Doctor, no copy sounded significantly better than any of the others. However, Better Records just happened to have a 1+ copy of Tapestry on sale for $75 at the time, so I decided to take the plunge and buy it, even though I still thought the price was outrageous.

What followed next absolutely stunned and amazed me. Although I was prepared to shoot out the Hot Stamper against my own copies, I knew within the first minute of play that it would be totally unnecessary. The Hot Stamper sounded like a completely different recording. I cannot stress this enough. Everything sounded much, much more lifelike and REAL, as if I was listening to the performance inside the recording studio, instead of sitting outside hearing it through the walls. Of particular note was the fact that I could hear the personality in Ms. King’s voice, with all the attendant subtle inflections and timbre; she sounded like a real person, not just a recording of one. The $75 price was suddenly transformed into a real bargain, and the skeptic in me died completely. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “Wanted to drop you a note and let you know [I’m] not a skeptic any more.”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Letters and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin IV

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Wanted to drop you a note and let you know you have me now not a skeptic any more.

Case in point, over the 12 days of Christmas I acquired an [original] Led Zeppelin IV from you. I also received one from a family Member.

You are absolutely correct in that not all pressings sound the same.

I played both copies in a shootout and yours hands down was the better of the two.

The most recent purchase has me sitting staring at my speakers in amazement.

Both the Rumours and the But Seriously Folks are AMAZING!

Kevin

Kevin,

Thanks for taking the time to prove that the stampers are not the end-all and be-all of top quality sound.

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens roughly 99% of the time.

Having an original pressing doesn’t guarantee you the best sound, but we sure as hell do.

Best,

TP

(more…)

Comparing a Hot Stamper of Rumours to an Original and the Nautilus LP

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

This letter from quite a few years ago comes from our good customer Roger, who was blown away by our Hot Stamper pressing of Rumours. Roger did his usual thorough shootout of our Hot Stamper against his own pressings. The results? Another knockout for our Hot Stamper.
Hi Tom,

Just a quick note on the Fleetwood Mac Rumors Hot Stamper I just bought. I have a Nautilus pressing and my original pressing I bought in college when it came out. I have never liked this record as much as Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac, perhaps partly because its sonics were somewhat inferior.

So I played the Nautilus and quickly remembered what a piece of sonic detritus this thing is. How can audiophile labels like Nautilus put out something that is as thin, bright, flat, and compressed as this thing is? It obviously reinforces your point that most audiophiles are lemmings when it comes to audiophile records. If some audiophile guru said the Japanese pressing of Girl Scout Troup #657 singing the Girl Scout Theme Song was sonic nirvana, it would show up on every internet record website for $50 each.

Next up was my original pressing with an F16 matrix on side one, and man, what a relief after following the Nautilus disaster. In fact, I resisted buying a pricey hot stamper because I always felt my pressing to be pretty darned good, which it was. So I was shocked to hear just how much better the hot stamper was.

I played Dreams on side one and it took all of about 5 seconds of hearing the massive bass and startlingly dynamic cymbal crashes on this track to find the hot stamper worth every penny I paid for it. If the drum kit on Oh Daddy doesn’t get your pants flapping, time for a new stereo. Voices were eerily present, guitars had great detail, pianos had weight just like in real life (we have a piano in our house), and best of all, the highs were arrayed in space and were delicate and detailed.

Since the Nautilus is too thin to make a good frisbee and would probably fetch big bucks on ebay I will stuff it back on my shelf forever, unless I need a good laugh, and add the HS Rumors to my favorite recordings.

Roger
(more…)

Letter of the Week – Wow, It Beat the Analogue Productions Fantasy 45!

More Contemporary Label Jazz

Many years ago, our good customer Victor sent us this note to tell us how much better his real Contemporary jazz album sounded compared to the Fantasy 45 180g pressing he owns.

We should point out that we sold him a sealed ’70s reissue, something (selling sealed records) we stopped doing a decade or so ago, and that we really have no way of knowing what the record actually sounded like. Given our experience with anything released on the consistently dreadful Analogue Productions label, what were the chances that they could actually beat the real thing? As a practical matter, the answer should be obvious: none, of course.

None? Too harsh you say? Here are two of their worst crimes against jazz-loving audiophiles, crimes they committed using 2 Heavy Vinyl discs mastered at 45 RPM for all the world to hear:

  1. Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus by the Vince Guaraldi Trio
  2. Sonny Rollins Plus 4

Yes, they had the temerity to charge money for their crappy, pointless reissues. The key takeaway here is that any label that would release records that sound as bad as these cannot be trusted to do anything right.

Having played many of their remastered releases, we are still waiting for the record on the AP lable that is not either a disaster or, at the very least, not clearly worse sounding than other pressings which are widely available.

And I will never tire of pointing out how bad the two albums linked below are, so bad that I wrote many hundreds of words about their astonishing awfulness.

  1. Steppenwolf – Gold: Their Great Hits
  2. Cat Stevens – Tea for the Tillerman

After playing the above four, what would possess us to ever play another?

Now to the letter.

Hi Tom,

Wanted to let you know I did a comparison between the yellow label Contemporary label Curtis Counce, Counceltation Vol. 2 (which I bought sealed from you) and a Fantasy 45 rpm from Analogue productions: Curtis Counce – You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce – which is in fact the same album but with a different title and cover. 

Well I was very anxious to try this comparison, but was not expecting the results. The yellow label was so transparent and tonal weight to the Fantasy 45 rpm there was no contest. The 45 rpm sounded like someone turned on a high bypass filter. The yellow label was balanced throughout. Clean.

I am a subscriber of the Fantasy 45s and own all of them. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice sounding ones in the series, but this is a prime example that not all records are as well mastered.

Regards,

Victor

Victor,

I had every confidence that the real Contemporary pressing would trounce that 180 gram reissue, 45 RPM 2 LP pressing or no 45 RPM 2 LP pressing. The more I play these Heavy Vinyl reissues the less I like them. As we say, the real thing just can’t be beat.

Thanks for doing the shootout for us. You can be sure that our Hot Stamper Contemporary jazz pressings will make mincemeat of anything on that Fantasy 45 Series. In fact, we guarantee it.

Letter of the Week – “I did a proper shootout this morning…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I’m on my fourth Hot Stamper now, and I’m having a wonderful experience overall. I wanted to touch base regarding a Super Hot Stamper (Quiet Vinyl) of Rumours. The sound is overall a delight, and although I have yet to do a head-to-head shootout with my 45rpm “audiophile” copy, I can sense I will prefer the copy I bought from you overall.

However, I really crave absolutely silent vinyl for this album, especially for The Chain. When the band comes to a halt, and there’s nothing but silence, it’s perfect. The particular copy I bought is pretty quiet when the music is playing, but the surface noise during quiet/silent passages is a bit of a disappointment for me. This leads me to believe that if a White Hot Stamper of Rumours popped up on your site, I would definitely want to buy it, in the hopes that the vinyl would be even quieter throughout. Do you think a White-Hot copy of Rumours is on the horizon?

I believe your policy is that I’ve got 30 days to return this one for money back, and then 12 months to exchange it, with some reduction. Knowing me, I’m going to want to get a white hot copy next time I see one listed, and I’d really love to do it sooner rather than later. (I say this assuming that one of the things that would separate a super hot from a white hot would be the level of background noise.)

Thank you
Aaron

Aaron,

Some thoughts:

Firstly, the surface noise grades and the sonic grades are not related.

Some records sound great and are noisy, some records sound great and are quiet, and nobody knows which are which until they get cleaned and played.

My advice would be to return the record so that we can eventually get you one you will be happy with. We do the shootout once or twice a year, so we should be able to find you a better sounding copy. A quieter copy is another matter.

We could do a shootout for 8-10 copies and find none that were any quieter than the one we sold you. 

We know what to listen for now, the quiet parts of The Chain. But that does not mean that out of the copies we play in any given year a copy with Super Hot grades would be quieter than the copy we sent you.

To get you a quieter one is a matter of luck, it might take three or four shootouts to get that lucky.

But if you want to keep the copy we sent you and basically “rent” it until we can find you a quieter one in a year or two, that is one of your options. We are good either way, Rumours sells very quickly, lots of folks waiting for a nice copy to show up on the site.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “A very rewarding day spent visiting a remarkable piece of music.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Gustav Holst Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I spent the day today shooting out various interpretations and sonics of the above, and, I must admit, the Previn leads the field. More decay, transparency, sweetness, magic and imagination than the Mehta, Stokowski and numerous others. If you have an amazing copy, especially re side two, please put my name on it and let me know. [We do this shootout regularly and will be glad to hold the next killer copy for you.]

A very rewarding day spent visiting a remarkable piece of music. The Previn should be used for proper setup of a big system because it does everything right and demands the same of your system.

Best,
Phil
And thank you.

You are preaching to the choir on that one, loved it for at least the last ten years and can find nothing to compare with it.

I was very fortunate to see the work performed at Disney Hall. No record can come close but some come closer than others. (more…)

Letter of the Week – A $100 Hot Stamper Is Now My Reference Album!

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

More Reviews and Commentaries for Tea for the Tillerman

More Reviews and Commentaries for Teaser and the Firecat

[This letter is from a long time ago, 2005 perhaps. A killer copy may have been a hundred bucks back then, but times have changed!]

One of our best customers, Gerardo, who has to have his Hot Stampers shipped all the way to the Philippines where he lives, asked recently about Tea for the Tillerman. He wanted to know if we had something that would beat the MoFi pressing. Having recently played one (for condition; we already know how bad the sound is) we said HELL YEAH!

In fact, about the cheapest clean plain old American copy we can dig up for you will beat the pants of the MoFi. So we charged him $100 and sent it on out. Not having heard back, we followed up with this email:  

Hi Gerardo,

We were just wondering if you ever got to have the Tea For The Tillerman Hot Stamper vs. MoFi / UHQR shootout. Hope it went well.

His reply can be seen below.

Hi Tom and Crew,

I have already listened to my Hot Stamper copy and have forwarded the MFSL pressing to my friend. However, we have not done the shootout because I’m out of Manila now… We should be able to do the shootout as soon as I return.

I have listened to my copy the day it arrived. I’m not very good at describing the sound of an album, that’s why I love reading your commentaries, because it accurately describes what I actually hear. The HS Tillerman is now my reference album where I test all improvements/adjustments I make in my system or my turntable.

All the hot stamper copies I have bought from you really beat all other copies I have. A good example is my Hot Stamper Santana. The instruments sound tonally right, distinctly separate from each other. There is no harshness on the top end and the bass is tight and defined. I had five copies of the album before I got my HS copy, all are”360″ including a WLP copy. None of the five came close to the sound of my Hot Stamper.

I will definitely update you as soon as we finish the shootout next year.

Happy holidays,
Gerardo

Gerardo, so glad to hear you liked your Tea for the Tillerman. It’s always been one of my favorite test discs as well, although I would say Teaser and the Firecat is even better in that respect. [Not really.]

As for Santana’s first album, that is a record that typically sounds terrible — dull and smeary. We have to work very hard to find a good copy like the one we sent you, and the proof of our efforts is that it beat the five you already owned. As far as stampers go, ours was hot, yours were not! No surprise there. Most copies suck, 360 or otherwise. We look forward to hearing your full report on the Tillerman shootout.

Best,
TP

Chicago Transit Authority on MoFi – Or Is It The Glade Spray Mist Septet?

More of the Music of Chicago

UPDATE 2020

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi Chicago debut was about twenty years ago. My all tube system was much darker and dramatically less resolving than the one I have now, having made score upon score of improvements since then.

I suspect I would not be so kind to the MoFi today, and in that way I would surely be much more in agreement with Roger than I was about ten years ago when his letter arrived.

Our good customer Roger wrote to tell us of his Chicago shootout which included the MoFi, some later pressings and our Hot Stamper. Here is his story.

HI Tom

Got a chance to listen to your Chicago Transit Authority hot stamper and compare it to regular US and MFSL pressings. It has been a while since I last listened to this recording, but I listened to a lot of Chicago; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; and The Ides of March when I was in high school and college. I loved this music back then, as short-lived as it was, unfortunately.

Maybe this was because my two brothers played horns in concert bands, as does my youngest son now. A real shame that Chicago, at least, morphed into a whiny, wimpy, sappy Top 40 radio ballad band after their first two records. Anyway, it was fun listening to it again.

I recently picked up a couple of US copies of CTA to compare against my Mobile Fidelity version and the hot stamper. Both regular US copies had later Columbia labels, and had I only heard these, I might never have listened to this record again. Dull, compressed, murky, detail-challenged would be descriptive words for both copies. Muddy bass and absolutely no highs, I mean none.

The MFSL version did not have this lack-of-highs problem. In fact, it sounds like a lot of MoFi’s, the treble completely overcooked, sounding like cans of spray mist being actuated and overwhelming the rest of the music. This has to be one of the most hideous recordings in existence. With the MFSL version, Chicago has been transformed into the Glade Spray Mist Septet, with a psst psst here, a psst psst there, here a psst, there a psst, everywhere a psst psst. Arrggg! I was getting more and more psst off listening to this sonic detritus. Unless you have a Mattel Close-And-Play record player, how can anyone listen to this thing? Did MFSL engineers moonlight as gunnery sergeants on the artillery range? And the MoFi’s complete lack of bass left the overwhelming treble out to hang and dry. Unreal.

So the Hot Stamper was next, and you know what, it sounds like my son’s high school concert band (only a lot better but don’t tell him). After the MoFi, the highs sounded somewhat recessed, but more in line with the rest of the sonic spectrum. There was real bass weight, maybe not the lowest bass, but good just the same, and the midrange was much more full and weighty, something this recording needs. Trombones sounded like trombones and saxes like saxes. So perhaps the hot stamper will make my new regular record rotation now and my listening room won’t smell like a Glade pine forest. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “I own superb copies of the stereo. They both fade into pastel in comparison with this mono.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

The first “Triple Triple” MONO copy to ever hit the site — A+++ from start to finish. Our knockout mono pressing here was fuller, more natural and more involving than any copy we heard in our shootout. with immediacy to put Ella practically in the room with you, it’s her performance that really comes to life. It’s our single Favorite Female Vocal album here at Better Records, one that gets better with each passing year.

Check out what the lucky owner of this copy had to say about it.

PR Writes

As you probably know, I own superb copies of the stereo. They both fade into pastel in comparison with this mono.

The beat on the stereo is present and accounted for, but here it is palpable and driven, giving thrust and holographic dimension to her voice. Here it really swings. There it provides pleasing atmospherics and depth and transparency; here it is compelling, forceful and electric. Here it dances. Here her voice has an intimacy, nuance and projection that is not available in the stereo.

I, too, love this recording. I was blown away by the mono, which I played on my mono system. It reminded me of the wonderful early mono Mercury recordings of Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn and Helen Merrill, which is why I set up the mono system in the first place.

Great find, Tom.

(more…)