test-rock-pop

Some of our favorite rock and pop test discs.

Piano and Snare Testing with Love Over Gold

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2017 we reviewed a copy of Love Over Gold that really knocked us out. This was sound we had never heard on the album before, so as you can imagine, we had to tell the world -s or at least that small part of the world that accepts the reality of Hot Stamper Pressings — all about it.

Since then we have noted the value of testing albums with pianos and snare drums as those seem to be key part of some recordings that are hard to get right, which of course is makes them good tests.

Telegraph Road does something on this copy that you won’t hear on one out of twenty pressings: It ROCKS. It’s got ENERGY and DRIVE.

Listen to how hard Allan Clark bangs on the piano on side one — he’s pounding that piano with all his might. No other copy managed to get the piano to pop the way it does here, so clear and solid.

Wow, who knew? Maybe this is the reason HP put the record on the TAS Super Disc List. (I rather doubt he’s ever heard a copy this good, but who’s to say?)

Best test for side two?

The snare drum on Industrial Disease. Play five copies of the album and listen on each of them for how much snap there is to the snare. It will be obvious which ones get the transient attack right and which ones don’t. (If none of them do, try five more copies!)

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Love in Vain Is a Great Test Track on Let It Bleed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Love In Vain is our favorite test track for side one on Let It Bleed.

The first minute or so clues you into to everything that’s happening in the sound.

Listen for the amazing immediacy, transparency and sweetly extended harmonics of the guitar in the left channel.

Next, when Watts starts slapping that big fat snare in the right channel, it should sound so real you could reach out and touch it.

If you’re like me, that Tubey magical acoustic guitar sound and the rich whomp of the snare should be all the evidence you need that Glyn Johns is one of the Five Best Rock Engineers who ever lived. Ken Scott, Stephen Barncard, Alan Parsons and a few others are right up there with him of course. We audiophiles are very lucky to have had guys like those around when the Stones were at their writing and performing peak.

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What to Do If a Favorite Record Changes Its Sound

Records We’ve Found Are Good for Testing

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written around 2010. Note that we rarely have this title in stock, for the simple reason that these days it’s just too hard to find with the right stampers and good vinyl.

Our last big shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ debut was back in early 2008. Since we never tire of discussing the revolutionary changes in audio that have occurred over the last quite eventful year (really more like five quite eventful years) , we here provide you with yet another link to that commentary.

Suffice to say, this record, like most good records, got a whole lot better.

(Some records do not, but that’s another story for another day. If your audiophile pressings — especially these — start to sound funny, you are probably on solid ground. They sure sound funny to us.) 

This time around all the best qualities of the best copies stayed the same; this is to be expected.

If records you have known well, over a very long period of time, suddenly start to sound different*, you can be pretty sure that you’ve made an error of some kind in your system, room, electricity, setup or something else.

You need to find it and figure out how to fix it as quickly as possible, although as a rule this process can turn out to be very time consuming and difficult.

The first place I would look is to any changes you might have made in your wiring, whether speaker, interconnect or power cord. (Robert Brook has done some work in this area that you may find helpful.)

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An Open Soundstage Is Key on Get Close

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Pretenders Available Now

Take it from us, it is the rare pressing that manages to get rid of the harshness and congestion that plague so many copies.

Look for a copy that opens up the soundstage — the wider, deeper and taller the presentation, the better the sound, as long as the tonal balance stays right.

When you hear a copy sound relatively rich and sweet, the minor shortcomings of the recording no longer seem to interfere with your enjoyment of the music. Like a properly-tweaked stereo, a good record lets you forget all that audio stuff and just listen to the music as music. Here at Better Records, we — like our customers — think that’s what it’s all about.

And we know that only the top copies will let you do that, something that not everyone in the audiophile community fully appreciates these days, what with one Heavy Vinyl record sounding worse than the next.

We’re doing what we can to change that way of approaching the pursuit of high quality audio playback in the home, but progress has always been, as you can imagine, slow.

This is no Demo Disc by any means — we grade on a curve, and considering the limitations of a heavily-processed pop record designed to be heard over the radio, the best copies are very good sounding for what they are.

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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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Cat Stevens Wants to Know How You Like Your Congas: Light, Medium or Heavy?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

During the shootout for this record a while back [the late 2000s would be my guess], we made a very important discovery, a seemingly obvious one but one that nevertheless had eluded us for the past twenty plus years (so how obvious could it have been?).

It became clear, for the first time, what accounts for the wide disparity in ENERGY and DRIVE from one copy to the next. We can sum it up for you in one five letter word, and that word is conga.

The congas are what drive the high-energy songs, songs like Tuesday’s Dead and Changes IV.

Here is how we stumbled upon their critically important contribution.

We were listening to one of the better copies during a recent shootout. The first track on side one, The Wind, was especially gorgeous; Cat and his acoustic guitar were right there in the room with us. The transparency, tonal neutrality, presence and all the rest were just superb. Then came time to move to the other test track on side one, which is Changes IV, one of the higher energy songs we like to play.

But the energy we expected to hear was nowhere to be found. The powerful rhythmic drive of the best copies of the album just wasn’t happening. The more we listened the more it became clear that the congas were not doing what they normally do. The midbass to lower midrange area of the LP lacked energy, weight and power, and this prevented the song from coming to LIFE the way the truly Hot Stampers can and do.

Now I think I understand why. Big speakers are the only way to reproduce the physical size and powerful energy of the congas (and other drums of course) that play such a big part in driving the rhythmic energy of the song.

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Which Is More 3-Dimensional, Mono or Twin Track?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

With all due respect to George Martin, we’ve played a number of mono pressings of Please Please Me in the past twenty or so years and have never been particularly impressed by any of them.

The monos jam all the voices and instruments together in the middle, stacking them one in front of the other, and lots of musical information gets mashed up and simply disappears in the congestion. 

But is twin track stereo any better?

Yes, when you do it the way Norman Smith did on Please Please Me.

Twin Track stereo (which is actually not very much like two-track stereo, I’m sure Wikipedia must have a listing for it if you’re interested) is like two mono tracks running simultaneously. It allows the completely separate voices to occupy one channel and the completely separate instruments to occupy another, with no leakage between them.

On some stereos it may seem as though the musicians and the singers are not playing together the way they would if one were hearing them in mono. They are in fact recorded on two separate mono tracks, the instruments appearing in the left channel and the singers in the right, separated as much as is physically possible.

Stuck in their individual stereo speakers, so far apart from one another, the members of the band don’t even seem to be playing together in the same room.

That’s on some stereos, and by some stereos I mean stereos that need improvement. Here’s why.

Three-Dimensional Mono?

In the final mixing stage, Norman Smith added separate reverb to each of the two channels, sending the reverb for the sound recorded in each channel to the opposite channel. This has the effect of making the studio, the physical space that The Beatles appear to be in, seem to stretch all the way from the right channel, where the Beatles’ voices are heard, to the back left corner of the studio, where the reverb eventually trails off.

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Thick as a Brick Is a Top Test Disc for System Accuracy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

From 2009 to 2010 this was our single go-to record for testing and tweaking our system.

Although we now use an amazing copy of Bob and Ray (the big band version of The Song of the Volga Boatmen located therein has to be one of the toughest tests we know of), we could easily go back to using TAAB.

Artificiality is the single greatest problem that every serious audiophile must guard against with every change and tweak to his stereo. cleaning system, room, electricity and everything else.

Since TAAB is absolutely ruthless at exposing the slightest hint of artificiality in the sound of the system, it is clearly one of the best recordings one can use to test and tune with. Here are just some of the reasons this was one of our favorite test records back in the day:

Dynamics

The better copies are shockingly dynamic. At about the three minute mark the band joins in the fun and really starts rocking. Set your volume for as loud as your system can play that section. The rest of the music, including the very quietest parts, will then play correctly for all of side one. For side two the same volume setting should be fine.

Bass

The recording can have exceptionally solid, deep punchy bass (just check out Barrie “Barriemore” Barlow’s drumming, especially his kick and floor toms. The guy is on fire).

Midrange

The midrange is usually transparent and the top end sweet and extended on the better pressings.

Tubey Magic

The recording was made in 1972, so there’s still plenty of Tubey Magic to be heard on the acoustic guitars and flutes.

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Jump Into the Fire with Harry Nilsson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

This commentary was written more than ten years ago.

Jump Into The Fire is one of the best tests we use for side two.

Copies that are too smooth make the “just bass and drums” intro sound thick and smeared.

Too bright and the vocals will tear your head off.

The “just right” copies rock from the start and never get too far out of control, even when Harry does. The best we can hope for is that the loudest vocal parts stay tolerable. Believe me, it is not that easy to find a copy that’s listenable all the way through, not at the high volume I play the record at anyway!

Again, with Nilsson screaming at the top of his lungs, you better have a good copy to get through this track, and even then it’s a bit of a problem.

A tough test for the old stereo, that’s for sure. Make sure your equipment is tuned up and the electricity is good before you get anywhere near a pressing of this album.

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies I played this week and the scores I’ve suffered through before.

Let’s face it: Jump Into The Fire will never be smooth and sweet; neither will Down on side one. But other tracks on this album have Demo Disc quality sound, and, of course, the music is to die for.

Side One

Gotta Get Up

A tough one right off the bat. If you have an aggressive sounding copy, you’ll know it pretty quick!

Driving Along (more…)

The Strings on this Album Are a Tough Test

jobimthecomposerHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim Available Now

Credit engineer Phil Ramone for correctly capturing the sound of every instrument here: the guitars, piano, flutes, strings, drums, percussion instruments — everything has the natural timbre of the real thing.

I used to think this recording erred on the bright side, but not the Hot Stamper copies. They are tonally right on the money.

When the balance lacks lower midrange, the sound can get lean, which causes the strings to seem brighter than they really are, a not uncommon problem with some of the pressings we heard.

We had quite a batch of these to play, including imports, originals, reissues (all stereo), and one lone mono, which was so ridiculously bad sounding we tossed it right out of the competition and into the trade pile.

For those of you playing along at home, we are not going to be much help to you here in finding your own Hot Stampers. Every version had strengths and weaknesses and all are represented in the three listings we are putting up today.

The sound of this side one blew our minds — no other copy could touch it. So open and airy, yet with real weight to the piano and a clear and strong bass line, this copy did EVERYTHING right.

The strings are very much part of the ensemble on this album, and getting good string tone, with just the right rosiny texture, the least amount of smear, freedom from shrillness or hardness — this is not easy to do. 

Side two was quite good at A+ to A++, but we found other copies that bested it, including one Triple Plus that was in a league of its own. Even so, this copy on side two would be hard to beat without a number of carefully cleaned pressings to choose from. 

Here are some records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.

Here are some records we’ve discovered that are good for testing midrange tonality.

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