service

Not Hearing the Superior Sound We Promised You?

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Not hearing the sound you expected? Just send the record back. We will return your money.

Better Records proudly offers records that no one else can — one-of-a-kind vintage pressings with sound quality verified through the shootout process.

Hot Stamper shootouts, carried out under rigorously controlled conditions, are the only scientifcally valid way to insure that the sound quality of a specific pressing will be superior to others. This being the case, it’s only natural that we’re the only record dealers who can offer such a guarantee.

Without having done a proper shootout, the best a self-described expert can offer is an informed opinion about the sound quality of a given pressing. (And to be honest, what passes as “informed” is rarely more than an appeal to consensus views.)

Without a blinded test, there is little real evidence to support these opinions, informed or otherwise.

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Why Would Anybody Pay Two Hundred Dollars for a Record?

Our Complete Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

Our good customer, Ryan, wrote to tell us just how much he liked the Hot Stamper pressing we sent him of Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints.

I responded with a few points about the service we provide to the well-healed audiophile. We do this by way of offering the best sounding pressings of your favorite albums, assuming that your favorite albums are the ones we offer on our site. (Many of them are favorites of mine.)

Most of the time our customers agree about the superior sound of our records, especially the customers (like Ryan) who do their own shootouts.)

Based on what I am reading, the pressing we sent Ryan is so good it’s practically priceless. But somebody had to put a price on it, and the price we landed on was two hundred bucks.

To some people this is an outrageous amount of money for one record. But not to someone who loves the album and will play it for the rest of his life. Once a month for 40 years comes to $4 a spin. With apologies to Pete Townshend, I call that a bargain.

If The Rhythm of the Saints is a favorite record of yours, you can now enjoy it for the rest of your life, secure in the knowledge that you have a killer copy in your collection waiting to be played whenever you damn well feel like it (assuming the kids and the wife are out of the house).

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