hot stamper vinyl

Amor!: The Fabulous Guitar of Luiz Bonfa – Reviewed in 2005

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Jazz Hall of Fame.

Atlantic Black Label LP with lovely sound! This is a famously rare and collectible jazz record by the amazing Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfa.

1958, the year this record was made, was a very good year for high quality recordings of all types of music.

Click here to see the records currently on the site that were recorded or released in 1958 and here to see the records from 1958 that we’ve reviewed, a substantially larger group as you can imagine, more than 100 in fact. (more…)

Count Basie & Oscar Peterson – The Timekeepers

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Jazz Hall of Fame

Hot Stamper sound on both sides of this Pablo original pressing of the Two Masters in a small group setting. Basie and Peterson recorded five albums together, and this may very well be the best of the bunch, though I have yet to hear one that I didn’t enjoy. I wrote a rave review about this title when I first heard it more than ten years ago. If you like small group piano jazz — here we’re talking two pianists accompanied by Louie Bellson on drums and John Heard on bass — this should be right up your alley.

Side One

Big, rich pianos. Everything here is clear with no smear, with a fair amount of space. This side is a bit opaque compared to the best we heard, and the bass isn’t quite as deep as it was on the top copies, but overall this side is doing most of what we wanted it to.

Side Two

This side is lively and tonally correct — getting the music right — but lacks extension on both ends. (more…)

The Ornette Coleman Trio – At The Golden Circle Vol. 1

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Jazz Hall of Fame.

This is a Blue Note LP with EXCELLENT sound! We didn’t have enough clean copies to do a shootout, but you can be sure that each side rates at least an A+ for sound.

Side one has tons of energy, gorgeous highs and a nice deep bottom end. Side two is rich and full-bodied with wonderfully textured brass. This is a superb copy with sound that does this complex music justice.

Whether you’ll like the music or not is another question — this is free form jazz; not everybody’s into it, that’s for sure. Ornette Coleman, though, is undeniably one of the masters of this genre. If you have a taste for adventurous, avant garde jazz, this is an excellent record for you both musically and sonically. (more…)

Tony Bennett & Count Basie – Strike Up The Band on Emus

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You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on this Emus pressing of Count Basie and Tony Bennett’s 1959 classic collaboration
The originals we have played are uniformly horrible sounding compared to these wonderful reissues – the tonality here is Right On The Money
4 1/2 stars: “… the pairing between Bennett and Basie remains impressive. The band raves through tunes like “With Plenty Of Money And You,” and Bennett matches them, drawing strength from the bravura arrangements, while band and singer achieve a knowing tenderness on “Growing Pains.” This is an album well worth owning…”

This vintage pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds. (more…)

Benny Carter – Jazz Giant – Amazing in Mono

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Jazz Hall of Fame

This Contemporary Yellow Label Mono LP has DEMO DISC QUALITY SOUND! If you like the sound of Contemporary Records, you won’t find a better example than this! Midrange magic doesn’t get anymore magical. I don’t care who remasters this record, I don’t think they can do it as well as it was done in 1958.

I haven’t heard the new 45 RPM version, but I seriously doubt that it sounds like this.

Letter of the Week – Abbey Road, Magical Mystery Tour, Blue Valentine

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

Hi Tom,

Just wanted to provide a little deeply appreciative feedback. A few months back, I ordered 2 White Hot Stampers of Abbey Road and MMT [MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR]. (the German press of MMT is amazing btw).

Abbey Road had a distracting level of surface noise, and it is the first time I have returned a record but I did send that one back. The other day, you had a Hot Stamper ++ copy of Abbey Road, and it was very reasonably priced at $170. It was delivered yesterday, and my goodness, it is truly wonderful. Demo Disc level fantastic. For my ear, it sounds better than the $750 copy I returned. A fine addition to my Beatles collection…Thank YOU!

Also in this order I purchased a Hot Stamper ++ copy of Tom Waits, Blue Valentine. It too is amazing, warm and deeply moving.

Have a great weekend Tom, and thank you to you and your team.

Best,
Rick

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Santana’s Guitar Solos Soar on Inner Secrets

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Another in our series of Home Audio Exercises with advice on What to Listen For (WTLF) as you critically evaluate your copy of the album.

On side two the final guitar solo Santana takes on Well All Right gets LOUDER in the mix than any guitar solo on any rock record with which I am familiar. The sound gets louder after the first chorus, then louder still right before the second solo, and then the solo itself gets even louder until it seems to be as loud as live music. (Operative word: seems.)

Some copies get loud and some do not. Some stereos are dynamic and some are not. If you have the right stereo, set at the right volume, and THIS copy, you will hear something that not one out of one hundred audiophiles (or music lovers) have ever heard on a record — LIVE ROCK SOUND. (more…)

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme – Better Sounding than the Original Pressings?

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Jazz Hall of Fame.

The original Impulse pressings on the brown and orange label are the best, right?

Not in our experience. We think that plays into one of the biggest canards in all of record collecting, that the first pressings are always the best sounding.

For this album, having sampled a large group of pressings from every era, we found the originals to be inferior to the best reissues we played. Naturally the ones we offer here as Hot Stampers will be the best of those reissue pressings. We are not the least bit worried that this vintage Impulse LP won’t beat the pants off of any original as well as any reissue you may have heard. And of course it is guaranteed to be dramatically better sounding than any Heavy Vinyl pressing produced by anyone, anywhere, at any time. (more…)

Letter of the Week – Tapestry, What Were Once Vices…, Sweet Baby James, McCartney, Houses of the Holy, Countdown to Ecstasy and The Nightfly

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

As a newcomer to your business, and to the entire concept of “Hot
Stamper” records, I was naturally skeptical. Many of us have invested in
a wide variety of vinyl that simple failed to live up to expectations.
Initially I was going to order one and only one record from you, and
test your bold promises. Instead, I ended up ordering a nice variety to
truly put it to the test… investing a couple thousand dollars on faith.
In short, I am now your customer for life.

As a point of reference, my system includes a pair of Wilson Audio
Alexia powered by 2 mono-block McIntosh tube Amps and a Mc-tube preamp.
Most importantly, a Brinkmann mag drive turntable with a Sumiko low
output moving coil cartridge. So, not the world’s best system, but
enough to discern what is to follow.

I ordered the following:
* Carole King Tapestry, ((White Hot Pressing)
* The Doobie Brothers, What Were Once Vices (White Hot Pressing)
* James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (White Hot Pressing)
* Paul McCartney, McCartney (Super Hot Pressing)
* Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Donald Fagen, The Nightfly (White Hot Pressing)

I warmed up my amps with the tuner for an hour or so and then sat and
listened to some of my other records and reacquainted myself with the
music from my system. First up was “What Were Once Vices…”. It was
immediately apparent that I was getting a range as wide, if not wider
than anything I had ever heard from my stereo. Then when I got to the
last song on side one, “Road Angel” the guitar and drum interplay in the
instrumental jam completely blew me away. Midway through I took the
volume from loud to louder, and it exposed nothing but pure, sweet rock
and roll. Literally gave me goose bumps. (more…)

Cannonball Adderley – Bill Evans – Know What I Mean? – Our Shootout Winner from 2015

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A distinguished member of the Jazz Hall of Fame.

One of our favorite Cannonball Adderley albums here at Better Records, and the sound is killer on this copy. Both sides are Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’ve never heard the record sound better, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing the album since the ’80s when it was first reissued in its current form.

These guys are playing live in the studio and you can really feel their living, breathing presence on every track — assuming you have a copy that sounds like this one.

Based on what I’m hearing my feeling is that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the master tape, and that all that was needed to get that vintage sound correctly on to disc was simply to thread up that tape on a reasonably good machine and hit play.

Original Vs. Reissue

The original Riverside pressings are the best, right?

Not in our experience. We think that’s just another Record Myth. (more…)