pricing

Letter of the Week – “I would have paid $15,000 for this feeling had I known it was there”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about his Hot Stamper copy of Let It Be that he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Wow, yep! This Let It Be Hot Stamper is doing what it’s supposed to. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. It’s INSANELY good!

I would have paid $15,000 for this feeling had I known it was there. No, I’m not going to. I’m just sayin’.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Billy M.

Billy,

Thanks for writing. That’s exactly what we are going for, feelings that are so powerful they’re like hearing the record for the first time. Those feelings are priceless, although $15k is probably not too far off.

The lifeless reissues they put out year after year do nothing but keep audiophiles from experiencing the record the way it was meant to be heard.

If you want to dig a pony, you can’t do it without a properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage UK LP, which are the only ones we offer. Accept no substitutes. We don’t.

That’s why we think the music of The Beatles is an audiophile wake up call.

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Letter of the Week – “This has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

Picked up your SHS of “Ziggy” last week–my daughter is 13 and starting to get into Mick Ronson, and I got this to show her what I think is his best work, not just on guitar, but in essentially creating the overall sound for the “Ziggy Stardust” album.

What I didn’t expect was how fantastic this album sounds. I’ve had other copies and they sound like I’m wearing a blanket over my head. Alongside my HS copy of “Freak Out” (first record I ever bought from you guys, I think), this has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!

Records like this justify Better Records in spades–wow!!

Stephen F.

Stephen, thanks for your letter.

Let’s face it: the average copy is pretty average. We wouldn’t even bother to play the average copy. Who needs it? Audiophiles want something that sounds good and record collectors can find records like these on ebay for under $10 or thereabouts, so no one in either group needs to come to our site to get some run-of-the-mill pressing of a title as common as this one.

Audiophiles come to us for the best, the copies that beat the Remastered Heavy Vinyl Con Jobs, the Half-Speeds, the whatever Audiophile BS pressing may be out there. We take them all on and beat them with ease.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to get a great record from us. It helps — don’t get me wrong, our Top Dollar copies are OUT OF THIS WORLD. But for the price of a good dinner (maybe an especially good dinner), you can have a record that will give you joy and pleasure far out of proportion to its cost.

UPDATE 2023

The bit about the record costing the price of a dinner is no longer true, unless you are in the habit of spending $1000 or more at dinner. Rarely are Hot Stamper pressings of Ziggy priced under that nowadays. Trying to balance the small supply with the high demand has resulted in the price getting somewhat out of hand, at least for those of us in the middle class.

If we could find more of the good pressings and sell them for cheaper, believe me, we would. At under $1000 the record would probably not last a day on the site. At $1500 and up, it’s there for those who love the album enough to pay the admittedly premium price we’re asking.

Stephen, we look forward to finding you more better sounding pressings of your favorite music.

TP

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Letter of the Week – “I am still amazed by the negativity I read sometimes about your records and prices…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Wonder Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

I also offer my humble apologies for ordering one LP at a time, it started with that (insanely good by the way) 4-star pressing of my wife’s favorite Stevie Wonder record, then, I have been waiting for a solid B-52 pressing for years now, so I had to grab it and just today, I noticed the Bee Gees… just glad nobody snatched it before me, seriously, this is the HARDEST Bee Gees record to get in any condition at all !!

I am still amazed by the negativity I read sometimes about your records and prices… we talked about it before but, for god’s sake, nobody is forced to buy anything. Plus, you have very fair prices for hot stampers that are great pressings of the best records, if the luxury items are not your cup of tea.

Still keeping my eyes open for a 4-star (or maybe 5 stars 😉 Hunky Dory one day. Would not mind a similar grade for a copy of Southern Accent too !!

Cheers,
David

My reply to David, in part:

The lack of curiosity on the part of the audiophile community is really something, but who am I to complain? I held many of the same mistaken ideas about Heavy Vinyl up until about 2000, so let’s be fair and give the audiophile community another twenty years and hope they catch on the way we and our customers have.

(There were so many records I used to like that don’t sound especially good to me now that I felt I needed to come clean about them, so I created a special link to them on the blog. Click here to read more.)

Pardon my cynicism, but we doubt that much of the audiophile community is likely to catch on.

We had to work very hard for more than twenty years to get to where we are now.

Most audiophiles don’t seem very interested in doing that kind of work.

It takes time, effort and discipline to create, tweak and tune a system to be both revealing and accurate.

When it gets to be resolving and accurate enough, such a system can reveal how lacking the modern remastered LP really is.

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Letter of the Week – “The sound was simply amazing! I was listening to the master tapes!”

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

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

Hey Tom, 

The Doobie Brothers album “Livin’ on the Fault Line” has been my favorite album from one of my favorite bands of all time. It is full of great songs, phenomenal musicianship, and Michael McDonald at his best.

As a retiree who has very modest means today I have “shot out” more than a dozen copies of this lp and have a very good copy and backup. So last week Tom put up a double sided Triple Plus White Hot Stamper of “Livin’ on the Fault Line”. Could it be THAT much better than my best copy considering that my copy was the best of over a dozen and when played really sounds great? AND the Better Records copy would be almost 100 times the cost of my used record store “finds”.

But I couldn’t resist so I pushed the button and the Better Records White Hot copy arrived yesterday. I couldn’t wait to play it. It was in minty condition. I heated up the rig and sat down and laid my Jan Allearts “needle” (economy model $3000 cartridge with its Fritz Geiger stylus, ruby cantilever and hand wound gold coils that extract just about everything a record groove contains) on the band of the song “Little Darlin”.

Suddenly Michael McDonald was in the room in front of me. The sound was simply amazing! TOTALLY transparent. Dynamics were fantastic…..harmonics were great without losing the high end or low end to the midrange. I was listening to the master tapes!

Now this record was not one of the Doobies biggies. It’s a sleeper… a lot were made but you can find them easily and the used prices in bins are dirt cheap. Your average copy sounds pretty good and a good one sounds great BUT this White Hot Stamper just put ALL of them to shame!

This makes it a RARE find and Tom has alluded to how he hasn’t found many that sound this good. And that brings me to the thing that is most disturbing about collecting vinyl (forget CDs)… WHY could the record companies do such a really poor job shipping a majority of poor to good records when they also shipped a minority of fantastic Hot Stamper LP’s. I could say it’s the 80/20 rule where 20% of anything is great and 80% of everything is much less to awful. Like you want your car mechanic or your brain surgeon to be in the 20%! Then with vinyl you have to find the small percentage of the 20% that survived stems, twigs, coke, and horrible record players that destroyed most of all the records ever produced including the 20%.

But hey… there’s Tom Port and Better Records to do the hard work of finding a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage.

Are they expensive? Sure.

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Stop Doing These Things and You Too Will Start Finding Better Sounding LPs

Our Guide to Collecting Better Sounding Records

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of individual pressings is one which we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I had never had any difficulty wrapping my head around.

At some point in my audio career, probably in the early-90s, about twenty years into my audio journey, I realized it was in fact beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there apparently is a sizable number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it was simply a fact.

What to Stop

Given the unpredictable nature of records, the five most important aspects of the solution we put into practice were these:

  1. We stopped pretending we could know something that can’t be known. [1]
  2. We stopped relying on theories proven to have virtually no predictive effect. [2]
  3. We stopped paying attention to the experts and so-called authorities. [3]
  4. We stopped assuming and speculating. [4]
  5. We stopped worrying about getting it wrong. [5]

It took many years, decades even, to learn what worked and what didn’t work in our pursuit of better records. We came to realize over that span of time that the five things listed above were hindering us in doing our job, so we stopped doing them.

What remained was the simplest possible approach to the problem. One that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by experimentally-minded record collectors.

  1. Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
  2. Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
  3. Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
  4. Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds better than all the others.
  5. Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
  6. Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
  7. Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.

That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve higher rates of success.

Failing Forward

Edison is said to have failed 10,000 times before inventing a light bulb filament that had a practical use.

Most audiophiles do not have the time and money, not to say patience, needed to fail again and again this way.

For us, having a full-time staff of ten and a rather large record buying budget, we see failures as just another part of the job. Our successes pay for them, since obviously somebody has to, Milton Friedman’s famous remark about free lunches being as true as ever. This partly accounts for our prices being as high as they are.

We don’t make a dime from writing about records that don’t sound good to us. We review them as a service to the audiophile community. We play them so that you don’t have to.

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Ziggy Stardust Broke the Price Barrier in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

UPDATE 2024

The following is our 2007 commentary for the best Ziggy Stardust we had ever heard up to that time. Note that for the most part we were playing early British pressings back in those days, a mistake we did not know we were making. (Heroes was the same way, and it took us another ten years to figure out that one.)

In 2007, all we had to go by was the conventional wisdom that the original UK pressings on the RCA orange label should be the best, so that’s mostly what we were playing. I’m not even sure what pressing won this long-ago shootout. 

Looking back in 2024, it’s obvious to us that we had a great deal more research and development to do.

As best as I can tell, it would take us about ten more years to discover the pressings, like this one, that, based on our database going all the way back to 2017, consistently win our shootouts.

This RCA Import has DRAMATICALLY better sound than any Ziggy LP we’ve ever played here at Better Records. Whatever you think you know about the sound of this record, THINK AGAIN. The sound of this copy is so far beyond any expectation I had that hearing it was nothing short of a REVELATION. It’s TWO FULL GRADES better than any copy we played in our shootout.

After hearing this copy we had to lower our grades for every other pressing we had played. This was a completely new standard. (more…)

What’s the Average Record Worth?

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

What follows is an excerpt from a very old letter (circa 2005) in which the writer attempted to make the case that spending lots of money on records is foolish when a dollar buys a perfectly good record at a thrift store and provides the listener with exactly the same music and decent enough sound.

We think this is silly and, with a few rough calculations, along with a heavy dose of self-promotion and not a little bullying, we set out to prove that the average record is practically worthless. Prepare to confront our exercise in sophistry.

(Yes, we are well aware that our reasoning is specious, but it’s no more specious than anybody else’s reasoning about records if I may say so.)

Jason, our letter writer, points out this fact:

Your records are a poor value in terms of investment. Until you convince the whole LP community that your HOT-STAMPER choices are the pinnacle of sound a buyer will never be able to re-sell B S & T for $300. Even if they swear it is the best sounding copy in the world.

We replied as follows:

If records are about money, then buying them at a thrift store for a buck apiece and getting something halfway decent makes perfect sense. As the Brits say, “that’s value for money.” If we sell you a Hot Stamper for, say, $500, can it really be five hundred times better?

The Math

I would argue that here the math is actually on our side. The average pressing is so close to worthless sonically that I would say that it isn’t even worth the one dollar Jason might pay for it in a thrift store. I might value it somewhere in the vicinity of a penny or two. Really? Yes indeed.

Assuming it’s a record I know well, I probably know just how wonderful the record can really sound, and what that wonderful sound does to communicate the most important thing of all: the musical value.

A copy that doesn’t do that — allow the music to come alive — has almost no value. It’s not zero, but it’s close to zero. Let’s assign it a nominal value. We’ll call it a penny.

What Have You Got to Lose?

You see, when I play a mediocre copy, I know what I’ve lost.

Jason can’t know that. All he knows is what he hears coming from his mediocre equipment as his mediocre LP is playing. To him it sounds fine. To me it sounds like hell. (Hell is in fact the place where they make you listen to bad sounding records all day.)

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El Amor Brujo – Brilliant Decca Remastering from 1967

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2022

In 2012 we were knocked out by this Stereo Treasury Budget Reissue pressing.

We had the temerity to charge $175 for our Hot Stamper copy, a record we’d probably picked up locally for five or ten bucks. Nowadays of course it would go for even more than that, and still be worth every penny, assuming the buyer was looking for wonderful music with top quality sound regardless of the vinyl’s trade-in value, which in this case would probably be a dollar.

It is our strongly held belief that records are for playing and enjoying, not trading-in. Some records (like this one) are perfect for collectors, but their appeal is lost on us and has been since I soured on Mobile Fidelity records back in the 80s. It would take us another twenty years before we were done with other pressings that promised so much and delivered so little.

Decca released this title on their London label as a budget reissue, but that didn’t keep them from mastering it properly and pressing it on high quality vinyl.  The same cannot be said for RCA, which kept many of their golden age recordings in print on the RCA red label as well as others, but with sound that was most of the time clearly inferior to those earlier releases.

Our 2012 Review

Our current favorite El Amor Brujo for sound and performance is this Decca recording from 1967 with De Burgos conducting the New Philharmonia.

The best sound on this album is on side two, where El Retablo de Maese Pedro can be found.

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Cognitive Dissonance, or, I Just Paid $600 for This LP – Was That Too Much?

New to the Blog? Start Here

This letter came to us when we first started selling Hot Stamper pressings on our website way back in 2004-2005. Since that time we have received many other letters like it. Apparently, charging a lot of money for used records upsets people. Who knew?

Don, who wrote us the following letter, applauds us for being able to convince our customers to pay forty times the going rate for some of the records we sell — and like it!

The subject line of Don’s letter is Music.

What a great example of free market capitalism at it’s [sic] finest. Your web site is truly a unique example of marketing. You’ve taken a medium that [sic] completely relative and you can convince someone to pay upwards of 40X the going rate because….well, you said so. That doesn’t mean that the record will sound the same to them or that their experience of music is the same as yours as a reviewer. I guess if someone decides to spend $600 on a record they damn well better find a reason why it’s worth it even if they’re not completely convinced. (I took the time to read some of the other comments on your site.)

Don’t understand why someone would be upset about that or how they could argue that the records aren’t worth the price. They’re worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them as I see it. Maybe because they didn’t think of it first or they have some misplaced sense of ethics….who knows. I know it’s not worth it to me and thankfully there are plenty of other resources available for buying music. Another great example of capitalism…..

Sincerely,

Don L.

Don, honestly, I’m positively blushing at the thought that my “say so” is what gets people to pay the ridiculously high prices we charge for what appear to be fairly common rock records, the kind that might be worth roughly, oh, I don’t know, 1/40th of what we are asking? (Truth be told, probably even less.)

Ah, but here’s the kicker: there’s actually a scientific explanation for it!

It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it works like this. Let’s say someone decides to spend $600 on a record — sound familiar? — yet for some reason they’re not completely convinced it’s worth it — ring any bells? — so they find a way to justify the purchase to themselves by rationalizing one of two things: their actions or their perceptions.

In this case, although the actual record may not sound all that good when they get it home, because it costs so much they must find a way to make it somehow seem better than it really is. Failing to do so, this person, demonstrably $600 poorer, would have to conclude that he, like an idiot, has just let himself get ripped off, in this case by us.

Twisted Logic

The logic at work here is pretty straightforward. The buyer says to himself: I am not an idiot. Only an idiot would pay $600 for a record that doesn’t sound amazingly good, especially one that can easily be had for one-fortieth the amount of money I have paid, therefore the record must sound better than my ears tell me it does.

Which — let’s be honest here — may in fact be happening. I don’t know what these records sound like in my customer’s homes. How could I? They live all over the world. I have certainly taken some of my best sounding pressings with me while visiting customers, and they sure sounded good on their systems. But I can’t vouch for systems I have never heard and people I have never met. That would be silly.

You Are Correct Sir

You are certainly correct in pointing out that musical values are relative. The famous Latin proverb “De gustibus non est disputandum,” roughly translated “There’s no accounting for taste,” is one with which I am very familiar. (When somebody pays $600 for The Hunter on vinyl, you don’t have to tell me there’s no accounting for taste.)

As a skeptic I require evidence for what I believe in order to believe it. Although it’s certainly possible that our customers are willing to pay our admittedly high prices on nothing more than our say so, I see no evidence that this is in fact the case. All things being equal I think they must really like our records. They tell us so all the time, and they keep buying them week after week, so if they really are just fooling themselves, they apparently can’t stop doing it.

Occam’s Razor

The scientist’s and skeptic’s best friend, Occam’s razor, comes into play here. It holds that “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.” It’s often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions…”

Why assume people who buy expensive records are crazy? Why assume that the records they buy aren’t every bit as good as advertised, if not better? Why assume that the “other resources available for buying music” are even remotely as good, absent any evidence?

People assumed that the CD was going to be a cheap and easy resource for their music, and look where that got them.

Assumptions? Us?

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Letter of the Week – “The most expensive record I ever bought but well worth the dough!”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

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

I will share with you guys a few more observations.

You will not be surprised to learn that the Led Zep 2 WHS leads the pack. The most expensive record I ever bought but well worth the dough!

Your description says it all: Freakishly good! Firmly trounced my early UK plum and my German RL (side 1).

No disapointments regarding the sound whatsoever with all others. One has to understand though that a 3/3 is an absolute judgement but a relative one (Bruce Springssteen comes to mind) but if one follows you long enough the prices asked for give a bit of indication so that‘s fine with me.

Christian ended his letter with these thoughts.

You made my life better with your records. I keep learning a lot from you following your site everyday now, enhanced my listening skills and sometimes detect now my own HS (just listening and comparing my two early UK Track Who Tommy inspired by your listing yesterday) and am amazed by the quality but also differences from side to side).

Best.
Christian

Christian,

We are so happy to hear that we’ve made your life better with our records, who could ask for anything more?

It wasn’t hard for us to beat your UK and German pressings, the UK original is a joke next to the good RL pressings. I hope you had a chance to play our Hot Stamper against the Heavy Vinyl reissue. If you did, please let us know what you heard.

As for your copies of Tommy have side to side differences, we’ve been going on about that for three decades, but for some reason audiophiles and those who write for them never notice these things.

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