grading-on-a-curve

Hot Stampers and Good Sounding Records Are Not the Same Thing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan Available Now

They are barely even related. Here’s why.

A good customer wrote to us recently to say that he was not happy with the Stevie Ray Vaughan White Hot Stamper pressings we had sent him.

Tom,

I also have a couple more returns for you: SRV Couldn’t Stand the Weather and SRV Soul to Soul. While these are good, they’re just not quite up to White Hot Stamper quality like some of the other records clearly are.

I took the opportunity to reply at length.

Dear Sir,

You appear to be conflating two concepts, Hot Stampers and good recordings. They are not the same thing. They are barely even related.

Hot Stampers are especially good sounding pressings of specific albums that we found through shootouts.

The recordings of these albums may be better or worse than others you are familiar with. That has nothing to do with how hot the stampers are of the pressings we sell.

It works this way: if you had a hundred copies of The Dark Side of the Moon, the median pressing– the one that would have ranked number 50 out of 100 — would sound substantially better than either of those two SRV albums.

Pink Floyd: amazing recording.

SRV: good, not great recording.

We would never sell an average pressing of DSOTM. We only sell the best sounding versions of it.

We would never sell the average version of any SRV album. We only sell the best sounding versions of them.

But no SRV album is ever going to sound like a good Dark Side of the Moon! (more…)

Crosby, Stills and Nash – You Do the Best You Can with What You’ve Got to Work With

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

The founding members of CSN chose the Albert brothers to engineer this 1977 reunion.

Their most famous album is Layla. Ever heard a great sounding Layla? Me neither. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Layla’s — we’ve done the shootout many times — just as there are better and worse CSNs, but we have never played amazing Demo Disc pressings of either and I doubt we ever will.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side some songs have wonderful sound — the midrange magic, the “breath of life” that makes the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album such a special listening experience — and some don’t.

That’s a recording problem.

It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like Shadow Captain and Dark Star, among others.

But Just a Song Before I Go on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best copies do well and the rest do less well and grade them accordingly, on a curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got to work with.

(more…)

For Born In The U.S.A. We Make No Claims of Audiophile Quality Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bruce Springsteen Available Now

We would be foolish to make claims for “audiophile quality” sound on Springsteen’s albums — they are what they are. The simple claim we make for our Hot Stampers is that the best of them sound as good as the album can sound, and we back that up with a 100% Money Back guarantee.

Born in the U.S.A. is yet another example of an album that must be graded on a curve.

(Technically, all Hot Stamper pressings are graded on a curve, since the record shootouts we do are simply our way of comparing one pressings with a slough of others.)

It’s tough to find great sounding copies of this album — or any Springsteen album for that matter — but we played one not long ago that was a HUGE step up, with the kind of clarity and fullness that most copies have in short supply.

Take it from us, it is the rare pressing that manages to get rid of the harshness and congestion that plague so many copies.

When you hear a copy sound relatively rich and sweet, the minor shortcomings of the recording no longer seem to interfere as much with your enjoyment of the music. Like a properly tweaked stereo, a good record lets you forget all that audio stuff and just listen to the music as music. We here at Better Records — like our customers — think that’s what it’s all about.

And we know that only the top copies will let you do that, something that not everyone in the audiophile community fully appreciates to this day. We’re doing what we can to change that way of thinking, but progress is, as you may well imagine, slow.

What To Listen For

The best copies have superb extension up top, which allows the grit and edge on the vocals to almost entirely disappear.

Some of it is there on the tape for a reason. That’s partly the sound Springsteen was going for, this is after all a Bob Clearmountain mix.