obsess

The albums you see here played an important role in helping me improve my stereo, some of them starting as far back as the mid-’70s.

By the 2000s, we had a heavily-treated, dedicated room, and later still a custom built studio. The challenges posed by these recordings were instrumental in helping us make improvements in every aspect of playback.

The better the stereo got, the more these records showed us just how amazing the right pressings (we call them Hot Stampers) could sound.

Having played so many copies of these albums for so many years, I credit them with teaching me most what I know about records and equipment.

Paul McCartney’s Must Own Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

The best tracks on McCartney’s first album have the quality of LIVE MUSIC in a way that not one out of a hundred rock records do. It sounds like it’s recorded live in the studio, but of course that’s impossible, because Paul plays practically all the instruments himself.

It just goes to show how good a multi-track studio recording can sound when it’s done well.

The recording also has an unprocessed quality which we’ve always found attractive, with some songs sounding more like demos than finished takes, about as far from Abbey Road as it would be possible to get.

In our experience, the real McCartney Magic is only found on the best domestic Apple pressings. We’ve never heard an import that did much for us, and the later CBS issues are hardly worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

This album, like Unplugged and Band on the Run (and not a whole lot else) is SUPERB from start to finish. At the end of side two you want MORE. I wish I could say that about the rest of his discography.

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The Best Espana on Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chabrier Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The part down below about Londons numbered from 6400 to 6500 being superior is not something we would agree with any longer.

UPDATE 2021

Ansermet’s performance of Espana is still our favorite — nothing in our experience can touch it, musically or sonically.

As of 2022 we slightly prefer the famous Argenta recording for Decca that’s on the TAS List, CS 6006.

Both are wonderful and both belong in any serious audiophile collection of orchestral music.

We created a special section for recordings of this quality. Classical and orchestral records that we’ve auditioned and found to have the best performances with the highest quality sound can be found here.

This has been a favorite recording of ours here at Better Records for a very long time, since at least the mid-’90s or thereabouts. We’ve mentioned how much we like the sound of Londons with catalog numbers ranging from about 6400 to 6500 or so (which are simply Decca recordings from the mid-’60s), and this one (CS 6438) is one of the best reasons to hold that view.

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This Is Why We Love Rudy Van Gelder’s Recordings from the 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

The really good RVG jazz pressings of All the Kings Horses sound shockingly close to live music — uncompressed, present, full of energy, with the instruments clearly located and surrounded by the natural space of the studio.

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

Obviously the credit must go to Rudy Van Gelder for recording and mastering the album so well.

Contrary to what you may have read, the early-70s were a good time for Van Gelder.

All the King’s Horses from 1973 is an amazing Demo Disc for a large group jazz ensemble, especially when played on big speakers at loud levels.

But it only sounds good on the copies that it sounds good on, on the pressings that were mastered, pressed and cleaned right, a fact that has eluded most jazz vinyl aficionados interested in good sound since the advent of the LP.

But not us. We’ve played the very special pressings that prove the album can sound amazing.

The best early pressings are spacious and full of life, with virtually no distortion. Of special note, our shootout winning copy had amazingly articulate bass which brought out the undeniable funkiness of the music in a way that no other copy did.

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What We Think We Know about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6

More of the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

In our opinion this is the best sounding Beethoven 6th Symphony ever recorded. It is the most beautiful of them all, and has long been my personal favorite of the nine Beethoven composed.

Ansermet’s performance is clearly definitive to my ear as well. The gorgeous hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, possibly of all time; more amazing sounding recordings were made there than any other hall we know of.

There is a richness to the sound that exceeds all others, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

It’s as wide, deep and three-dimensional as any, which is of course all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the weight and power of the brass and the timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

We have a section of classical recordings that we nominate for the best performances with top quality sound, and this record is of course one of its founding members.

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Siren on Import Vinyl? Not So Fast

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Roxy Music Available Now

Siren is one of our favorite Roxy albums, right up there with the first album and well ahead of the commercially appealing Avalon.

After reading a rave review in Rolling Stone of the album back in 1975, I took the plunge, bought a copy at my local Tower Records and instantly fell in love with it.

As is my wont, I then proceeded to work my way through their earlier catalog, which was quite an adventure. It takes scores of plays to understand where the band is coming from on the early albums and what it is they’re trying to do. Now I listen to each of the first five releases on a regular basis.

Somehow they never seem to get old, even after more than forty years.

Of all the Roxy albums (with the exception of Avalon) this is probably the best way “in” to the band’s music. The earlier albums are more raucous, the later ones more rhythmically driven — Siren catches them at their peak, with, as other reviewers have noted, all good songs and no bad ones.

Imports? Not So Fast

The British and German copies of Siren are clearly made from dub tapes and sound smeary, small and lifeless.

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Neil Young and His Crazy Pals LIVE in the Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Hot Stampers are all about finding those rare and very special pressings that manage to represent the master tape at its best.

Notice I did not say ACCURATELY represent the master tape, because the master tape may have faults that need to be corrected, and the only way to do that is in the mastering phase.

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that absolute fidelity to the master tape should never be — and more importantly, rarely is — the goal of the engineer mastering a record.

Which, as a practical matter, means two things:

  1. Flat transfers are most often a mistake.
  2. Talking about the fidelity you think a record has to its master tape, a tape you have never heard, is completely pointless.

Whether we like or dislike the presentation of any given recording is of course a matter of taste. When listening we constantly make judgments about the way we think the recording at any moment ought to sound, based on what we like or don’t like about the sound of recordings in general and how our stereos deal with them.

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Listening in Depth to Houses of the Holy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

You really get an understanding of just how much of a production genius Jimmy Page was when you listen to a copy of Houses on high quality modern equipment, the kind that simply did not exist when the record came out in 1973.

To take just one example, listen to how clearly the multi-tracked guitars can be heard in the different layers and areas of the soundstage. On some songs you will have no trouble picking out three, four and even more guitars playing, each with its own unique character. The clarity of the better copies allows you to recognize — perhaps for the first time — the special contribution each is making to the finished song.

Side One

The Song Remains the Same
The Rain Song

Check out the guitars — the sound should be warm, sweet and delicate. There are some dead quiet passages in this song that are almost always going to have some surface noise. Most copies start out a bit noisy but almost always get quieter as the music goes along.

Over the Hills and Far Away

This is a great test track for side one. It starts with lovely acoustic guitars before the Monster Zep Rock Chords come crashing in. If both parts of the song sound correct and balanced, you more than likely have a winner. And the bigger the dynamic contrast between the parts the better.

Turn your volume up good and high in order to get the full effect, then stand back and let the boys have at it.

The Crunge (more…)

Donald Gets Dynamic on Rikki

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Pretzel Logic is one knockout of a recording.

Having done shootouts for every Steely Dan title, I can say that sonically this one has no equal in their canon. (Click on that link to see two hundred others.)

Which is really saying something, since Becker and Fagen are known to be audiophiles themselves and real sticklers for sound. No effort in the recording of this album was spared, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.

They sweated the details on this one. The mix is perfection.

But you would never know it by playing the average pressing of this album, which is dull, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail.

(We’ve played plenty of records — actually, specific pressings of records — that were dull, compressed, and dead as a doornail. We’ve made links for them by the hundreds here so that audiophiles who do not want records with these problems can more easily avoid them.)

It’s positively criminal the way this amazingly well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP pressing. Hint: avoid all imports and anything not on ABC.) How can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right?

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Expanding Space Itself on The Dark Side of the Moon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pink Floyd’s Albums Available Now

Many years ago, right around 2015 I believe, we played a copy with all the presence, all the richness, all the size and all the energy we could have ever hoped to hear on a pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

It did it all and then some.

The raging guitar solos (there are three of them) on Money seemed to somehow expand the system itself, making it bigger and more powerful than I had ever heard.

Even our best copies of Blood Sweat and Tears have never managed to create such a huge space with that kind of raw power. This copy broke through all the barriers, taking the stereo system to an entirely new level of sound.

Listen to the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage on this copy that I’ve never heard as clearly before. On most copies you can’t even tell they are there.

Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve never heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion on this track.

One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, do no more than hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. When you don’t — the reason we do shootouts in a nutshell — it’s not.

The best sounding parts of this record are nothing less than ASTONISHING. Money is the best example I can think of for side two. When you hear the sax player rip into his solo as Money gets rockin’, it’s almost SCARY! He’s blowin’ his brains out in a way that has never, in my experience anyway, been captured on a piece of plastic. After hearing this copy, I remembered exactly why we felt this album must rank as one of the five best Rock Demo Discs to demonstrate the superiority of analog. There is no CD, and there will never be a CD, that sounds like this.

In fact, when you play the other “good sounding” copies, you realize that the sound you hear is what would naturally be considered as good as this album could get. But now we know better. This pressing took Dark Side to places we never imagined it could go.

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When Did You First Hear that 10k Boost on Sittin’ In?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Loggins and Messina Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It took us a long time to recognize it, I can tell you that. 30 years? Maybe even more.

And how about the boost to the low end?

This commentary is from many years ago, perhaps as far back as 2010.

Of course it could not have been written until the stereo had reached the level where these anomalies and others like them could be easily recognized, the clearest kind of evidence of progress in audio.

If you’re not noticing these kinds of things on the vintage vinyl you play, then it’s probably time for a serious upgrade or two.

The anomalies are there, of that there can be no doubt. They’re everywhere. You just need a more accurate and revealing system and room to show them to you.

In that respect, you my find our shootout notes are helpful at pointing you in the right direction as to what you should be listening for. They are especially helpful in recognizing when one side or another falls short in some specific area.

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