thrill-seeking

When We First Started Doing Shootouts, They Would Sometimes Go on for Days

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Our first Hot Stamper listing for After the Gold Rush from back in 2005 talked about what a struggle it was doing them at first.

Back then, with not much in the way of staff, I often had to put the records on the table one at a time and do all the listening and note-taking myself.

For our first Hot Stamper listing I wrote:

A record like this might go through 4 or 5 stages of cleaning and listening and cleaning again. I spent many hours listening to the various copies I played over the course of two days, first one track, then another, this copy, then that one. There’s no other way to do it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no substitute for hard work.

If you can call it that. It ain’t too hard playing a great album over and over again. Some people — myself included — might even call it fun. And now I love this album more than I ever did. I feel like I have come to know it. I’m positively thrilled to finally know how good it really is!

Isn’t that why we audiophiles go through all this shite, as the Brits say? When I hear a piece of familiar music sound better than I ever thought I would hear it, better than I ever imagined it, it’s everything to me. It’s the biggest thrill I know of in audio. It’s what I live for. If you like that feeling, this is the record for you!

I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I find another copy that sounds like this one, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a long time. How many bad domestic rock records did I have to play in order to find a record that sounds like this? A hundred? More?! Who knows? It was a lot, that’s for damn sure.

Speaking of Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

It’s precisely the powerful sound found on this album that rocks our world and makes our job fun. It makes us want to play records all day, sifting through the crap to find the few — too few — pressings with truly serious Hot Stamper sound.

There is, of course, no other way to find such sound, and, of course, probably never will be.

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Magical Mystery Tour – “When John sings, ‘I’m crying,’ I’m right there with him.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Seems like our friend ab_ba heard some truly amazing sound on his latest Hot Stamper acquisition, a White Hot Stamper German pressing (the German true stereo pressing being the only version of the album we offer) of Magical Mystery Tour.

Dear Tom,

My WHS of MMT just arrived. This record is a true treasure.

I’ve wanted to hear a copy ever since I read your commentary on how the cellos dig deeper on the best copies of “I Am the Walrus.”

I played the various copies I already had, listening to see if I could hear the string section really sweat on any of them. Nope.

But on this copy, the whole sound of that song is simply stunning. When John sings, “I’m crying”, I’m right there with him.

After I Am the Walrus ended, I turned up the volume and played it again. It only got better. The room was filled with sound, everything present, nothing harsh, nothing lacking.

It’s funny, the experience of listening to it actually reminded me of Welcome to the Machine, which similarly caps side 1 of another of my absolute favorite White Hot stampers. There are a lot of similarities in mood, soundscape, and theme to those two songs.

Anyway, I am glad you turned me on to this one. I would have put it on my want list if I had known just how stupendous it would turn out to be. I’m back in to my afternoon’s meetings now, but what a thrill it is to know that side 2 awaits me once the work day is over.

Aaron

Aaron,

As usual, thanks for writing.

It just occurred to me that the commentary about the cellists digging in on I Am the Walrus is very similar to the comments I made more than fifteen years ago about Norwegian Wood.

Those close-miked guitars can be a bit much unless you have a super-low-distortion copy.

John strums the hell out of his acoustic in the right channel, and on the best copies the sound of the guitar is very dynamic and energetic. No two copies will get that guitar to sound the same, and the more dynamic and lively it sounds, the better in my book.

Did The Beatles ever write a better song?

On the right pressings, those two songs, on two different Beatles albums, serve to make a very strong case for Hot Stampers.

Think about it: on both albums the tonality of the higher quality pressings will be the same. The bass the same, the vocals the same, the space the same, almost everything you can think of to listen for on a recording will be the same.

And yet the energy and drive you hear when playing those two songs on any two pressings is more often than not going to be different, and sometimes that difference is dramatic. When the energy and drive are especially pronounced on the side we’re playing, assuming all other things are equal, we call it a White Hot Stamper and grade that side Three Pluses.

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Turned Up Good and Loud, Carnavalito Is Glorious

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2024

The commentary about Carnavalito you see below was written in 2016. With the 12 foot high ceiling in our new, bigger and quite a bit more spacious studio, I’ll bet this album sounds even more mind-blowing than it did back then.

Ken Perry mastered all the best early pressings — accept no substitutes.

Here in 2024 we’ve just done the shootout again, our first since 2016.

Sky Islands is not an easy record to find as it didn’t sell particularly well, but those of you who treasure the music of Weather Report or Return to Forever or The Mahavishnu Orchestra the way we do here at Better Record (or, to be clear, some of us do) will find much to like here.

Finding customers for music most audiophiles have never heard of, let alone heard, has always been the trick with well recorded, mostly unknown releases such as Sky Islands.

Which means that this is a woefully underrated album that should be more popular with audiophiles.

It’s also one of those difficult-to-reproduce records that I credit with helping me make real progress in audio (along with a great many others.).

Carnavalito is a track that really comes alive when you crank up the volume. I played it full blast on two different occasions for audiophile friends of mine just to show them what happens when a big speaker system meets a large scale recording with absolutely amazing audiophile quality sound — big and bold, wall to wall and then some!

It’s my favorite track not only for the album as a whole but for the band’s entire recorded output. It just doesn’t get any better than this if you have the system for it.

Hearing the megawatt energy in the section when the soprano saxophonist jumps in, right into an ongoing orgy of wild percussion, who then proceeds to blow his brains out — now that is a thrill beyond belief. Played REALLY LOUD it’s about the closest to The Real Thing, the Live Event, that you will ever hear in your living room. (Unless you have a very large living room and lots of latin jazz musician friends.)

Even a year ago there was no way I could get that music to play that LOUD, that CLEANLY, and that CORRECTLY in terms of tonality, from the deepest bass to the highest highs, with the wild swings in dynamics that the recording captures so well.

The audio revolution is alive and well. It’s never too late to join in the fun.

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The Thrill of Discovering Great Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

Robert Fine was one of the greatest audio engineers who ever lived. He is the man responsible for recording this audiophile gem for Command, as well as much of the Mercury catalog.

Unfortunately, we rarely have any Command records in stock, but we do make an effort to have a good selection of the most amazing sounding Mercury titles available in the form of Hot Stamper pressings.

If you have the system for it, it’s very possible you have never heard most of these instruments sound this real on any other recording. It’s as if you were standing right in the studio with them. Yes, it’s that crazy good.

Let Me Ask You This

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking:

Who is finding incredible Demo Discs like this Command from 1961 nowadays?

Harry Pearson used to.

Sid Marks reviewed plenty back in the day (reviews which I mostly disagreed with, but still, at least he wrote them).

Jim Mitchell (now long-forgotten) wrote about them back in the 80s.

Moon and Gray published a book full of the best sounding Deccas and Londons.

Anybody else?

Are the audiophile reviewers of today picking up the baton that the giants of the past have dropped at their feet?

I see little evidence of it. [1]

Not to worry. Better Records has taken on the job that no one else seems to want to do. For example, here are 200+ records we’ve discovered with (potentially) excellent sound.

And that’s not all. Not only have we set a higher standard for audiophile-quality records with our vintage vinyl Hot Stamper pressings, but we’ve endeavored to provide a great many other benefits to the audiophile community as well.

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Chicago and The Hottest Sounding Vinyl – Are You a Thrillseeker Too?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

I want to hear the music I love LOUDER and BETTER, with more ENERGY and EXCITEMENT, and the reason I spent an ungodly number of hours over the last 40+ years working on my stereo is that the kind of sound that can give me thrills doesn’t happen by accident.

You have to work your ass off to get it.

And spend a lot of money.

And search for those pressings that have the sound you are looking for.

And be very lucky.

I don’t play records to sip wine and smoke cigars. I play records to ROCK. Whether the music is rock, jazz or classical, I want to feel the power of the music just as you would feel it at the live event.

To me that means big speakers and loud levels.

Naturally, for our last shootout we played Chicago VII as loud as our system could without distorting.

“(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long” just KNOCKED ME OUT on this Hot Stamper copy, which had the best Side Three we played during the entire shootout. Exhilaration and adrenaline rush is right. As we said in our review:

How can you write a better song than (I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long? That track, with its huge buildup of strings and wall to wall brass, just KILLS. It’ll send shivers up your spine at the live music levels we were trying to play it at. It actually has some real dynamics built into the mix, which is not something pop songs are even supposed to have.

But sometimes they do; the best copies are proof that that kind of sound is actually on the master tape. Not many audiophiles (besides the listening panel here at Better Records) will ever get the chance to hear it sound as powerful as we heard it that day. I built a stereo system dedicated to playing records like Chicago VII. It was a thrill all right.

The above commentary was prompted by Ed’s letter about the Hot Stamper pressing he had recently bought.

What follows is Ed’s story of looking for love (or a good sounding record, whichever you prefer) in all the wrong places, and finally finding that special feeling, the feeling you get when you hear something right, which to us is the very definition of a Hot Stamper. Now to Ed’s story.

Dear Tom,

As you know, Chicago is one of my all time favorites. I relate having played trumpet along with the albums blaring when they were first released. So I couldn’t resist the opportunity to grab your recent Hot Stamper of Chicago 7. It arrived yesterday and I rushed up to my “music room” and dropped the needle on “Wishing You Were Here”. Oh Wow……never heard it like this. The tonality was just simply beautiful. The three dimensionality was incredible. The extension of bass to highs was simply total and balanced. The voices were “right there”. I thought that this is what happens when you are hearing through to the master tape on an LP that hasn’t destroyed or even impaired the original sound. It pulls you from the first song to the next and on. It draws you into the music and makes you forget about all the “stuff” around it.

This journey to the Hot Stamper level of audio reminds me of skiing. You wake-up having packed carefully for your trip. You travel hours, maybe even fly to the mountain. Then you drive up the mountain to the lodge and haul everything to the changing room. After struggling to put on the ton of clothing and equipment you trek across to the lifts and travel to the very top of the mountain. At the top you are now temporarily exhausted and wonder if all this effort and work could in any way be worth it… Then you jump off and fly down the mountain and realize that yes, it was worth it. The exhilaration and adrenaline rush is an immediate flash back to why you do this. It’s the Holy Grail!

Well, getting a Hot Stamper gives me a similar feeling. The work to build a great sounding stereo system: the mixing and matching of components and voicing of the sound to your room and your preferences is part of the “trip to the mountain.”

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Carlos Santana Knows: The Louder His Guitar Gets, the Better It Sounds

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

Abraxas is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

For me, a big speaker guy with a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better than Abraxas.

This is a true Demo Disc in the world of rock records. It’s also one of those recordings that demands to be played LOUD. If you’ve got the the big room, big speakers, and plenty of power to drive them, you can have a LIVE ROCK AND ROLL CONCERT in your very own home.

When Santana lets loose with some of those legendary monster power chords — which incidentally do get good and loud in the mix, unlike most rock records which suffer from compression and “safe” mixes — I like to say that there is no stereo system on the planet that can play loud enough for me. (Horns maybe, but I don’t like the sound of horns, so the point is moot.)

You may have heard me say this before, but it’s important to make something clear about this music. 

It doesn’t even make sense at moderate listening levels. 

Normal listening levels suck the life right out of it. You can tell by the way it was recorded — this music is designed to be played back at LOUD levels, and anything less does a disservice to the musicians, not to mention the listener, you.

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Confessions of a Thrill Seeking Audiophile

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert was on a panel of audiophile record collectors not long ago, and he wrote about it here.

Some comments I made at the time:

Robert and I have many things in common. The most important one, from my point of view, is the fact that we are not much interested in records that sound good, or are musical and enjoyable, or are priced fairly, as seems to be the case with these fellows and their channel.

No, we are looking for the kinds of records that sound amazing, like live music sounds amazing. Records that blow our minds.

Robert spent a fair amount of time trying to explain this concept to his fellow panel members. None of them seemed to understand or appreciate his recent Way Out West experience. He told them how exhilarated he felt after having just played a ‘I can’t believe it’s a record” record, but they apparently were not interested as no one followed up.

Based on what I’ve seen on youtube lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are thrill seekers and there are record collectors, and that these two groups do not seem to overlap much.

He and I correspond regularly. Recently I mentioned an idea I had for a blog post that I thought would clarify which camp an audiophile might fall into:

To have a clearer picture of the depth of someone’s audio experience, I would ask this basic question:

What are five records that blew your mind and made you rethink how good music could sound in the home?

I could easily name fifty. I’ve played thousands and thousands of pressings over the last 30+ years, the famous ones as well as the not-so-famous, and quite a number of them managed to blow my mind. The better my stereo and cleaning system got, the more often that would happen. We used to call them outliers and award them grades of Four Pluses, but we stopped doing that years ago.

Are there any records on heavy vinyl that would qualify as mind-blowing?

None that I know of. But if someone thought there were, that would tell me a lot about the standards that person was setting for his playback quality. You need one helluva good system and one helluva good record to have the experience that Robert and I are talking about, and those two things are not easy to come by in the world of audio and records.

Most audiophiles are fine with settling for less, and this is why the Tone Poets records, just to take one example, give these audiophiles what they want, a record they can enjoy, at a price they find affordable enough to collect them by the dozen.

They just don’t give Robert and me and our Hot Stamper customers what we want. Not even close. [1]

Robert discusses his love for thrilling records in his latest post. Please click to read more.

AUDIOPHILE RECORDS and the THRILL SEEKER!

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Huge, Powerful Choruses Like These Are a Thrill

Hot Stamper Pressings with Huge Choruses Available Now

This is one of the rare pop/rock albums that actually has actual, measurable, serious dynamic contrasts in its levels as it moves from the verses to the choruses of many songs . The second track on side two, Demon Lover, is a perfect example. Not only are the choruses noticeably louder than the verses, but later on in the song the choruses get REALLY LOUD, louder than the choruses of 99 out of 100 rock/pop records we audition. It sometimes takes a record like this to open your ears to how compressed practically everything else you own is.

The sad fact of the matter is that most mixes for rock and pop recordings are much too safe. The engineers believe that the mixes have to be designed to be played on the average (read: crap) stereo.

We like when music gets loud. It gets loud in live performance. Why shouldn’t some of that energy make it to the record? It does of course, especially in classical music, but all too rarely even then.

We happened to do the shootout for Thick as a Brick the same week as Commoner’s Crown, and let us tell you, those are two records with shockingly real dynamics in the grooves of the best copies. If you like your music loud — which is just another way of saying you like it to sound LIVE — then the better copies of either album are guaranteed to blow your mind with their dynamic energy and power.

It’s the Engineer?

That can’t be a coincidence, can it? Well, it can, but in the case of these two albums it seems it isn’t. The engineering for both records was done by none other than Robin Black at Morgan Studios. Robin co-produced Commoner’s, takes the main engineering credit, and is solely credited with the mix. He is the sole engineer on TAAB (along with lots of other Tull albums, including Benefit and Aqualung).

Apparently he has no problem putting the dynamic contrasts and powerful energy of the live performance into his recordings and preserving them all the way through to the final mix. God bless him for it.

Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

It’s precisely the dynamic sound found on these two albums that rocks our world and makes our job fun. It makes us want to play records all day, sifting through the crap to find the few — too few — pressings with truly serious Hot Stamper sound. There is, of course, no other way to find such sound, and, of course, probably never will be.

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Salvation Is a Tough Test on Honky Chateau

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

We award the Four Plus A++++ grade so rarely that we don’t have a graphic for it in our system to use in the grading scale. So the side two here shows up on the chart as A+++, but when you hear this copy you will know why we gave it a fourth plus.

UPDATE

We no longer give out grades of Four Pluses as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.

When I hear a record with a side this phenomenally good, with the stereo tuned-up and tweaked within an inch of its life to reproduce the album at the highest level I can manage, I will sometimes sit my wife down and play her a track or two. I did it for a Four Plus Deja Vu earlier this year [2016] as a matter of fact, playing Country Girl: Whiskey Boot Hill on side two, with that crazy HUGE organ blasting out of the right speaker — what a thrill!

For this record I played her Salvation, with one huge chorus following another, like powerful waves crashing on the shore, until Elton takes a deep breath and belts out the final, biggest chorus, hitting his peak an octave higher and taking the song to an emotional level neither one of us had ever experienced with it before.

We followed it up with the lovely Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, and that was about as much Elton John live in my listening room at practically concert hall levels we could take in one sitting.

Hearing Elton with such energy, standing right in front of us, with instruments and singers encircling him from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was so powerful and immersive it left us both with tears in our eyes.

That’s what gets you a Fourth Plus around these parts.

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Animal Notes – These Big, Lively Choruses Are a Thrill

Hot Stamper Pressings with Huge Choruses Available Now

The best vintage rock recordings usually have something going for them that few recordings made after the ’70s do: their choruses get big and loud, yet stay smooth, natural and uncongested. 

We’ve mentioned it in countless listings. So many records have — to one degree or another — harsh, hard, gritty, shrill, congested choruses. When the choruses get loud they become unpleasant, and here at Better Records you lose a lot of points when that happens.

This recording, more specifically this pressing of this recording, has exceptionally big, smooth and natural choruses for many of the songs. Rangers at Midnight comes to mind immediately. Credit our man Shelly Yakus below for really getting the choruses right on this album.

Fun tip: Listen for the Elton John-like piano chords on the first track. Can you name that song? (Hint: it’s on Tumbleweed Connection.)

Choruses Are Key

Watch out for too many instruments and voices jammed into too little space in the upper midrange. When the tonality is shifted-up, even slightly, or there is too much compression or distortion, there will be too many upper midrange elements — voices, guitars, drums — vying for space, resulting in congestion and a loss of clarity.

With the more solid sounding copies, the lower mids are full and rich. Above them, the next “level up” so to speak, there’s plenty of space in which to fit all the instruments and voices comfortably, without piling them on top of one another as so often happens. Consequently, the upper midrange “space” does not get overwhelmed with musical information.

Also watch for edge on the vocals, which is of course related to the issues above. Most copies have at least some edge to the vocals — the band wants to really belt it out in the choruses, and they do — but the best copies keep the edge under control, without sounding compressed, dark, dull or smeary.

The highest quality equipment, on the hottest Hot Stamper copies, will play the loudest and most difficult-to-reproduce passages with virtually no edge, grit or grain, even at very loud levels.

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