Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums from 1964 Available Now
When you look closely at all the great records that were released that year, many of which can be purchased in Hot Stamper form today, you may come to agree with us that 1964 was a wonderful year for recorded music.
The 60+ best titles from 1964 that we’ve auditioned to date can be found here.
The complete list of titles from 1964 (90+) can be found here.
We also have lists for
Blue Note Pressings with Hot Stampers Available Now
Reviews and Commentaries for Blue Note Records
Hello Gentlemen,
I have to commend you once again. I have never heard Maiden Voyage like this before. The transparency on this copy is superb! I gave up listening to my reissue a while back. It had a heavy veil hanging over it that was obvious. Yet as the listener I yearned to hear past it because the music itself is so wonderful. Thanks for digging up this treasure. It will bring many hours of enjoyment now and in the future.
Records are a tangible investment for the listener. When you find a great copy you hang on to it because it engages you. It moves you in a real sense.
A collector who collects for value of first issue is a collector too. However they collect as one would coins, stamps or baseball cards. The value is attributed to what is perceived, not what is experienced. I do not slam anyone for this. If joy is found in this manner then, so be it.
I collect records to enjoy the music and if that means digging thru a number of pressings to find the best one or paying the bucks from someone like Better Records, so be it. If a reissue is better than an earlier pressing I will hold on to the re issue. This is a rarity but does happen. I can think of at least 20 LPs I have that I still favor the reissue over all others.
Both collectors are valid. They simply have different goals in mind.
Thanks,
Mark
Mark,
Thanks for your letter.
We know what you mean by records that have heavy veils hanging over their sound.
Here are some others we’ve found to be similarly veiled and here are some that are good for testing transparency.
Blue Note got into the Heavy Vinyl game back in the ’90s, in the days when we here at Better Records were still selling in-print Heavy Vinyl, but we thought very few of them were of much value to those looking for audiophile sound.
At the time I didn’t know it, but it turns out Maiden Voyage was mastered by that notorious hack, Ron McMaster, which explains our antipathy at the time to the Blue Note series he cut.
As I recall, the sound of his remastered pressings was clean and tonally correct, but his records were missing the analog qualities the better vintage pressings have in such abundance. In other words, his remastered records sounded like CDs.
Who can be bothered to play records that have so few of the qualities we audiophiles are looking for on vinyl?
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now
The answer to the question posed above is almost always going to be “yes,” if only for the simple reason that we rarely have The Original Soundtrack in stock.
On to our commentary.
On any given day a White Hot side one of The Original Soundtrack could very well be the best sounding record we have on the site.
“On any given day” being a day when we don’t have a hot copy of Dark Side of the Moon to offer, or a killer Eagles first album, or a top copy of the self-titled BS&T, or an RL Zep II, or a White Hot Teaser and the Firecat.
Most days we don’t have such records on the site, and on those days this 10cc album is a recording Tour De Force that would be bigger, bolder, more dynamic, and more powerful than anything we could throw against it.
I haven’t run into too many audiophiles who own a hot copy of The Original Soundtrack, or have the kind of system that can play a record like it (almost none in fact). As I am fond of saying, this is the kind of record that is guaranteed to bring any audiophile stereo to its knees.
I’ve been demonstrating my stereo with it for more than thirty years. The extended suite that opens side one, One Night in Paris, has ambience, sound effects, and incredibly dynamic multi-tracked vocals at its climax that will make your jaw drop.
Reinventing The Wall of Sound The Right Way
This is the kind of record that makes you sit up and take notice. It’s classic 10cc everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “Wall of Sound” (minus the Phil Spector distortion), the kind big speaker guys like me live for. Supertramp, Yes, Ambrosia, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Zeppelin, Bowie — to this day I’m a sucker for that Cinerama soundstage these bands like to play on. It’s one of the reasons I am a proud owner of the Legacy Whisper speaker system, complete with its eight fifteen inch woofer driver complement. You need that kind of piston power to produce The Really Big Sound with Super Low Distortion at Really High Levels. The louder the better. (We have a pair of highly modified Focuses set up in our listening room as well. Three twelves per channel moves a fair amount of air too.)
The Original Soundtrack checks off quite a few of our favorite boxes here at Better Records:
Records that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue
Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue
If you think that buying original pressings of an album like this one is the way to find the best sound, you are sorely mistaken. The originals and most reissues on the Monument label are rarely any better than dreadful sounding.
The monos sound bad and the originals sound bad, which means that all the conventional wisdom of record collectors and audiophiles alike has failed to produce the desired result: a good sounding pressing of the album.
What’s a mother to do?
Well, you could do what we did: try them all! If you keep at it long enough eventually you will run into the right pressing, and then you can focus on getting a large enough batch which will allow you to find one that sounds great and plays quietly.
Our Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress
The following letter came to us not long ago:
Hey Tom,
I am trying to make sense of the information on your site and the asking prices for these ‘hot stampers.’
In order to better understand how you assess sound quality, can you let me know what equipment you use for this purpose (what turntable, arm, cartridge, amps, speakers)?
How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?
Bas
Bas,
Thanks for contacting us. We wrote a commentary about it, linked here:
As for our sound signature, we’ve labored mightily over the last forty years to build the biggest, most dynamic, most powerful system, limited by only those colorations we don’t know how to rid ourselves of. Here are some thoughts on what we went through in order to achieve our current level of fidelity:
Having done all that work over the course of decades, we feel we are in a good position to offer our readers:
Even the ones that never asked for it!
A lot of the basics about our Hot Stampers can be found at the top of every page under:
Our customers tend to be very enthusiastic about our Hot Stampers, as you can see by the letters they write us:
Any questions, feel free to write me. Of course, writing is one thing, but
Best, TP
More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel
Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Sounds of Silence. Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.
Sounds of Silence is made from a second generation tape, as we explain below. Since we listen to all the records we sell, we like to point out such things so our customers know what they are getting.
This album is the proverbial tough nut to crack, a mix of folkie tracks and ambitious big production numbers, all recorded on a four track machine and bounced down maybe just a few too many times along the way. Some got handed a troublesome case of Top 40 EQ — hey, this is 1965, it’s the way they thought pop records should sound.
But many of the best tracks survived just fine. They can sound wonderful, it’s just that they rarely do. This is precisely where we come into the picture.
The key to good sounding pressings of this record is to look for the ones with a top end. Now of course you can’t see the top end when you buy the record. But most of the copies of this album you pick up are going to sound like cassettes. There won’t be much over 8K, and that means hard, harsh, transistor radio sound. You need extended highs to balance out the upper midrange.
More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Sonic Grade: F
The last time I played the Classic I thought it was nothing but a smeary mess, as awful as their awful Scheherazade. If I were to play it today, I’m guessing it would join the other Classic Records entries in our audiophile hall of shame.
Here are some other records we played and found had smeary strings. They did not last long on our turntable.
I love Arthur Fiedler‘s performance with the Boston Pops and the 1954 two track RCA Living Stereo sound, but finding an original Shaded Dog pressing in clean condition under $500 with the right stampers is all but impossible nowadays.
If you want to go that way, more power to you.
This 1954 2-track recording is RCA’s first stereo recording of the work. 1954. Can you believe it? A few mics and two channels and it blows away most of the classical recordings ever done! Some old record collectors and tube lovers say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be. This record proves it.
Click on this link to read more reviews and commentaries for Gaite Parisienne.
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:
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.
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.
More of the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim
Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now
Pictured to the left are a couple of the Antonio Carlos Jobim albums we’ve auditioned over the years.
Without going into specifics, we’ll just say these albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both. They may have some appeal to fans of the man, but audiophiles looking for top quality sound and music — our stock in trade — are best advised to look elsewhere.
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling. These are also records you can safely avoid.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
WOWOWOWOW the Please Please Me Beatles is something else. Huge 3D sound, totally organic and clear, never would have expected this from this record. Mind-blowing, so much energy, silent vinyl… great disc from you. It’s like hearing this music for the first time and being back in the ’60s for the privilege.
The hard stereo separation doesn’t even bother me.
C.
Dear C.,
It doesn’t bother me either! Which is why I wrote this commentary and followed it up with this one.