nfg/no

For a record to end up on this list, our review notes must say NFG or NO on at least one side.

Sometimes one side of the record will be passable, but the other side will be so awful it earns the “no f-ing good” grade.

Those of you who own these records may want to compare the two sides and listen for the differences we ascribe to them.

A Hopelessly Bad Capitol Reissue of Blowin’ the Blues Away from 1985

Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Clearly this is a Must Own album from Horace Silver.

During our most recent shootout we ran into an early pressing that blew our minds.

Finding early pressings of Blue Note titles in audiophile playing condition is both difficult and expensive. Perhaps there is some other pressing worth a try?

Not that we know of, but we admit we have played none of the Heavy Vinyl reissues flooding the market these days. If you want to go that way, more power to you. Just don’t make the mistake of buying the 80s reissue that Capitol put out.

As you can see from our notes, it’s terrible — so thin, flat and dry.

It has the kind of sound we refer to as “modern,” and we do not mean that as a compliment.

CAUTION: Two of the pressings we played in our shootout were noisy, with a defective right channel. Both were mastered by Rudy Van Gelder. Unlike many of the other Blue Note titles we do, Rudy was still cutting pressings all the way into the White B Label era of the early 80s.

If you buy any of these later pressings, make sure you have the right to return them. The sellers who grade their records visually will not be able to recognize the invisible defects their pressings may suffer from and are unlikely to want to take them back.

Horace Silver Is The Man

If you don’t know the man’s music, this is a good place to start. It’s yet another triumph for engineering maestro Rudy Van Gelder – he refined a “live-in-the-studio” jazz sound that’s still fresh today, even after 65 years.

The really good RVG pressings (often on the later labels) sound shockingly close to live music — uncompressed, present, full of energy, with the instruments clearly located on a wide and often deep soundstage, surrounded by the natural space and cool air of his New Jersey studio.

As our stereo has improved, and we’ve found better pressings and learned how to clean them better, his “you-are-there” live jazz sound has come to impress us more and more.

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Could This Be the Sound Audiophiles Complain About with RVG’s Mastering?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

A rare and expensive early mono pressing that we put into our most recent shootout was dreadful sounding.

Our main listening guy owns the record and made the note you see below, saying that his personal copy is every bit as bad.

The sound of the original was painfully midrangy and crude. It was not the worst of all the pressings we played, but it was nevertheless pretty bad, sounding nothing like our shootout winners.

We had a pressing on an early Prestige label in stereo, also mastered by Rudy Van Gelder, that was reasonably good sounding, earning grades of 1.5+ to 2+. It was sweet and relaxed, but relatively small and lacked the weight of the best.

For this music, we’ve found the best sound on the better Two-Fer pressings and the right OJC.

That Two-Fer budget reissue pressing, remastered by David Turner in 1972, can do very well in a shootout, but it can also fall far short of the mark on some sides, as you can see from the grades for these three other copies.

If you have the Two-Fer, how does yours sound compared to the four we auditioned (a shootout we were doing for the third or fourth time I might add), and how could you possibly know such a thing without a great many more copies at hand to clean and play?

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On Porgy and Bess, Stick with the Early Pressings on the Black Label

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Belafonte Available Now

A Living Stereo knockout! We sometimes forget to spend time with records like this when there are so many Zeppelin and Floyd records waiting to be played (and a lot more customers waiting to get hold of them to add to their collection).

We’ve always enjoyed Belafonte At Carnegie Hall, but when we’ve dug further into his catalog we’ve been left cold more often than not. However, when we finally got around to dropping the needle on a few of these many years ago we were very impressed by the music and blown away by the sound on the better pressings.

Just make sure that you avoid the orange label reissues.

They are dry, gritty and spitty. The notes below show a side one earning a single plus (1+) not-quite-Hot Stamper grade. We discuss its faults on the far right, and the other orange label pressing we played was even worse, earning a grade of NFG.

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Chad and Bernie Step on Another Rake

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Just in time for Record Store Day — what could be better?

In the interest of streamlining the process of getting reviews like this up on the blog, we’ll try to stick mostly to the facts and let the description of the strengths and weaknesses of the pressings speak for themselves.

One quick note: the sonic qualities you see described below are the ones we heard with the mono switch on our EAR 324P phono stage activated.

Without the switch set to mono, the sound is even thicker and darker.

Yes, as bad as this pressing sounds, you can make it worse if you don’t switch your preamp or phono stage to mono. Hard to believe but it’s true!

The notes for side one can be seen below. For side one we started with the second track.

Side One

Track Two / Red Pepper Blues

  • Boomy low end
  • Sax is stuck [in the speakers]
  • And lacking in breath and space

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Some Pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 Can Sure Be a Letdown

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

I don’t know of another recording of the work that gets the sound of the piano better. On the properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, the percussive quality of the instrument really comes through.

But that quality (along with lots of others) is only heard on the better copies.

The reissues (one with the later Tulips label, one with the earlier Large Tulips label) described below are at best passable, and some of them were just awful.

The note to the left makes clear that even some of the early Large Tulips label pressings had very bad sound. Watch out especially for 18A/15B stampers. They’re NFG: No F***ing Good.

As you can see from the notes above for this particular recording in the Black and White cover, one side was passable, earning our 1.5+ grade. That makes it a decent sounding record, I suppose, but it’s a long, long, long way from the best.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording this DG can be on the best pressings.

To see more records that earned the 1.5+ grade, please click here. (Incidentally, some of them are even on Heavy Vinyl. The better modern pressings have sometimes, if rarely, been known to earn Hot Stamper grades, and two recently shocked the hell out of us by actually winning a shootout. Wouldn’t you like to know which two!)

One Plus (1+) is a sub-Hot Stamper grade. We do not sell records that do not earn a grade of at least 1.5+ on both sides.

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

Our Favorite Performance with Sound to Match

A recent listing for the album can be found here.

Without question this is a phenomenal piano recording in every way.

On the best copies the rich texture of the strings is out of this world — you will have a very hard time finding a DG with better string tone. This record does not have the shortcomings of the average DG: it’s not hard, shrill, or sour.

DG made plenty of good records in the 50s and 60s, then proceeded to fall apart, like most labels did. This is one of their finest. It proves conclusively that at one time — 1962 to be exact — they clearly knew exactly what they were doing.

It’s amazing how many piano recordings have poorly-miked pianos. The badly recorded pianos are either too distant, lack proper reproduction of the lower registers, or somehow smear the pounding of the keys into a blurry mess.

Are they badly recorded?

Or is it a mastering issue?

Perhaps a pressing issue?

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Sterling Cut By Far the Best Sounding Pressings of I’m Ready

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

Forget the reissue copies that come in the cover you see to the left, the one with a thin black border.

If you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper early domestic pressing is the only way to go.

And take it from us, you need to see the Sterling mark in the dead wax of your pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.

As you can see from the notes above, the two reissue non-Sterling copies we played had hopelessly bad sound.

One was smeary, hard and hot.

The other was the brightest and most spitty.

Note that we didn’t deem it necessary to play side two of either copy. A one plus side one rules out the possibility of it being a Hot Stamper pressing.

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.

Based on our experience, I’m Ready sounds its best:

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Analogue Productions and Sterling Produce a Disastrous Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov Available Now

Wikipedia has a nice entry for some of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ideas behind the final movement of the piece:

These [later] works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups. The final tutti of Scheherazade is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of string patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.

Wikipedia

Could not have said it better myself!

We’ve written at length about the thrills to be had when playing the last movement of Scheherazade — not brilliantly, to be sure, as the writer for Wikipedia has done, but serviceably I hope. Unfortunately, not every pressing of Reiner’s performance is able to communicate the musical values of the work the way the best pressings can.

As you can see from our notes for the this Heavy Vinyl Analogue Productions pressing, the thrill was barely there on the first side, and by the second side it was completely gone.

The notes from our 2024 shootout read:

  • Not dry or squawky
  • Really lacking depth and dynamics.
  • Big, thick bass gets annoying.
  • Big brass not too bright but it is over-textured and flat.

Plenty of modern records suffer from these as well as lots of other shortcomings. For some reason, the writers for The Absolute Sound who put this crappy LP on their Super Disc list didn’t seem bothered by them the way we were.

If you own this pressing, here are the kinds of things you might want to listen for in order to recognize its many, and quite serious, failings.

When played head to head against any properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP, this pressing will fall short in a number of important areas. Linked below are titles we’ve found to be good for testing these same qualities in a recording.

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Sidewinder on the Liberty Label Might Sound Dubby and Weird

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

The top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1500 and, in our opinion, was worth every penny of that amount, being one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played

It probably took us ten years to get this latest shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort — what a record!

The copies that do not have VAN GELDER in the dead wax are very unlikely to be any good. The Liberty label pressing that we played in our shootout was minty and cost us a pretty penny, but the sound was No F***ing Good.

It’s yet another reason we don’t judge records by their labels.

Of course, as all our customers know, we judge records by one thing and one thing only: their sound.

Our shootout winner may have been a reissue, but it sure wasn’t one of those copies you can find on the Liberty label without VAN GELDER in the dead wax.

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It Took Us More than Twenty Years to Figure Out What Was the Problem

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Years ago — precisely how many we can’t really say, the old listings for those records have been deleted — we thought the original pressings in the nameless cover you see pictured had the best sound.

We thought the pressings that came in this early cover were the ones that were made from the original mix, the mix that Neil later disowned. (More on that below.)

We had played a number of copies that came in the original cover, and they sounded better to us than the others we had auditioned.

Our mistake was not understanding that pressings made with the first mix and pressings made with the second mix both came in the early cover, and both were pressed on the Reprise Two Tone label.

Here is what we wrote some years ago:

It turns out the remixed pressings we’d been selling for years were not the way to hear this album at its best. Neil wanted his voice to sound clearer and more present than the first mix, but the approach the engineers took to increase the clarity and presence was simply to boost the middle and upper midrange, a boost that seriously compromises the wonderful Tubey Magic found in the rich lower midrange of the original mix.

Neil may have liked the sound of his voice better on the new mix, played back on whatever mediocre-at-best stereo he was using at the time, but we here at Better Records are of a decidedly different opinion. On a modern, highly-resolving system Neil’s voice will not sound the least bit “buried” on the original mix, not on the better pressings anyway. Of course, the better ones are the only ones we sell.

If you want to hear this album sound right, we strongly believe that the original mix is the only way to go. And if you want to hear this album sound really right, better-than-you-ever-thought-possible right, you need a copy that was mastered, pressed and cleaned properly, and that means a Hot Stamper from Better Records.

It turns out the stampers for the pressings we like are the ones made from the remixed tapes.

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Brain Salad Surgery on Shout Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

If you’re a fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s fifth album, and you know, or at least suspect, that the British original pressings are more than likely to be better sounding than most, you might find yourself in a bit of a quandary, pocketbook-wise.

Early British pressings in audiophile playing condition aren’t easy to find, and they don’t tend to be cheap when you do find them.

Ah, but there is a fairly cheap and exceptionally easy solution: just buy the Shout Heavy Vinyl reissue from 2008.

It says it’s made from the master tape, it has a replica of the original packaging, and even comes with a poster.

What could go wrong?

The sound could be shit — NFG in our shorthand — that’s what could go wrong.

  • The top end could be overly-textured, tizzy and hot, the kind that constantly calls attention to itself.
  • The bass could be smeary and thick.
  • And the overall presentation of the music could be veiled and recessed.

Alas, the money you thought you were saving buying this potentially wonderful flat, quiet pressing made from the master tapes ends up flushed down the tubes. Now what?

Now you have to do what you should have done to begin with: find yourself a real British pressing.

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