top-copy

These Shootout Winning pressings are backed up (in most cases) by the notes we took while playing them.

Our shootouts are always conducted blind, so these notes describe what we heard — only later did we discover which pressing it was that sounded so good.

Many times these very special pressings are not originals, or not pressings that audiophiles know about, or care about, or perhaps they’re not from the country the conventional wisdom says they should be from.

It’s precisely these kinds of records that make our day — they prove to us that the best sounding records in the world can only be discovered, never predicted.

On Our Top Copy of Face Value, How Did We Know that One Side Lacked Weight?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Phil Collins Available Now

We described our most recent shootout-winning pressing this way:

An early UK copy of Phil Collins’s killer solo debut with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a nearly as good side one.

The recording of this album is still analog and the quality is excellent, thanks to hugely talented engineer and producer Hugh Padgham (Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Police, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc.).

Song after song, Collins’s songwriting and musicianship shine with this breakout record, the first and clearly the best of all his solo albums. The sound on the better copies is vibrant, with superb extension on the top, punchy bass, and excellent texture on the drums and percussion, as well as spacious strings and vocals.

Side two was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side two took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

For Those About to Rock

Of special interest to those of you who would like to do your own shootouts for the album are some of the specific notes we took:

The third track is “much less pinched,” with the most warmth and the least hardness.

Those are the areas that set this killer side two apart — it wasn’t as pinched and hard as most copies, and it had more warmth. Listen for those three things on the third track of the second side and you might just find it’s a lot easier to pick a winner.

Side one was doing great in many areas. Track three (again) was punchy, rich and relaxed, with no hardness.

It had most, but not all of the weight.

Same story as side two. Listen for all those qualities, especially hardness and how much weight you can hear on the first side. You will need big speakers to do this shootout, and don’t be afraid to turn them up.

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What the Shootout Winning Copies of A Hard Day’s Night Really Get Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

I wrote this bit of commentary about twenty years ago:

When comparing pressings of this record, the copies that get their voices to sound both present and warm, smooth, and sweet, especially during the harmonies, are always the best.  All the other instruments seem to fall in line when the vocals are correct. This is an old truism — it’s all about the midrange — but in the case of A Hard Day’s Night, it really is true.

Now that we are putting our unredacted (!) shootout notes on the blog for everyone to see, here are the actual notes for the shootout winning pressing we just played (6/2025), notes that back up what we said so many years ago 100%.

What’s does this amazing side one sound like?

  • Very full guitars and vocals for this
  • Less glare
  • More midrange energy
  • Breathy and full vocals
  • Pretty rich and focussed
  • The fullest, most present and breathy vocals

And this amazing side two?

  • Much fuller vocals and drums
  • Great energy
  • Most “tubey” yet
  • Gets very big
  • Fullest and warmest yet
  • Not edgy

Both sides had qualities that did much to set them apart, coupled with fewer of the shortcomings we found in practically all the other pressings we played.

Less glary and less edgy are critical to the better pressings, simply because few copies are not glary and edgy in the midrange to some degree.

But the real keys to the shootout winners are vocals that are full, present, warm and breathy.

For The Beatles in 1964, nothing else about the sound of their recordings could possibly compete with those four qualities.

We could add two more. Energy would probably be the next most important one, followed by Tubey Magic.

That brings the total of most important qualities to a grand total six.

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It’s the Rare Yellow Submarine that Sounds Anything Like This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Here is how we described our best copy of Yellow Submarine from the last shootout:

Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage UK copy could not be beat.

Without a doubt the hardest single side of any Beatles album to find with good sound is side two of Yellow Submarine, and here’s a copy that is as good as it gets.

The only place to find the all-time classic “Hey Bulldog,” as well as “All Together Now” and “It’s All Too Much.” In addition, “All You Need Is Love” debuted in a true stereo mix on this album.

My favorite lines from the notes for the notoriously difficult-to-get-to-sound right side two:

  • Big and clear and 3-D for this
  • Nice string texture — sweet and rich for once

You do the best you can with what you have to work with, and normally side two of this album does not give you much to work with, as most copies are thin sounding and have screechy strings.

One or two out of ten copies — and of course we are only talking about the real vintage UK pressings, nothing else is worth bothering with — will get the strings right on side two. That makes side two a good test for string tone in our book, especially for those of you who don’t have any of our Hot Stamper orchestral pressings.

This is a very difficult album to find good sound for; many pressings are almost unbearably gritty and harsh. Fortunately, these two sides have no such problems. The overall tonality is rich and full-bodied, and there’s plenty of presence and energy as well.

A Tough Title to Play

Side two of this recording, the orchestral side, ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

It took us a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be, involving many of the revolutionary changes in audio we discuss at great length on the blog.

As we’ve said before about these kinds of recordings, they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees. If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the home audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles neglect).

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Our Shootout Winner Needed to Solve Some Common Problems with Mercury Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

We described our shootout winning copy of Szeryng Plays the Music of Fritz Kreisler this way:

With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last, this Plum Label Mercury stereo pressing (the first copy to ever hit the site) is doing everything right.

The violin is so sweet and present, so rich, natural and real, you will forget you’re listening to a record at all.

This recording is not your typical dry, bright, nasaly, upper-midrangy Merc – the sound is rich and smooth like a good London, with a big stage and lovely transparency.

As is sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, there are marks that play, but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind.

Here are the notes that back up what we said above:

Notice that on side one, track four, we mention “not strident,” and the second track we note it’s “not too dry.”

Side has a note to the effect that it’s “kinda rich” and “not too bright.”

This tells you that practically all the other copies had these kinds of problems, something that anyone with a good selection of Mercury violin recordings is sure to know.

Our job is to find the pressings that not strident, not dry, not bright, and richer than others.

When you buy a top copy of an album from us, you don’t hear those problems because they are mostly not there.

What you hear is a side one that is:

  • Much fuller and 3-D, with a
  • Sweet and lively violin, one with
  • The most space

On side two you hear more of the same, and that’s a good thing:

  • 3-D and alive violin
  • Kinda rich
  • More dynamic and jumping out
  • Not too bright

Probably not the best solo violin recording we’ve ever sold, but certainly one of the best.

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On Our Top Copy of Moondance, How Did We Recognize that One Side Was Not as Tubey?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

We described our most recent shootout winning pressing this way:

A Moondance like you’ve never heard, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this early Green Label pressing.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “silky and 3D and present”…”sweet and breathy vox”…”spacious and rich”…”huge and lively”…”jumping out of the speakers.”

Drop the needle anywhere on the album for a taste of early-70s Tubey Magical analog, not to mention the kind of blue-eyed soul that will remind some of you just how good music on vinyl used to be.

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+. However, the side two of another pressing showed us there was even more Tubey Magic in the recording than we’d noticed the first time around.

With another copy earning a better grade for having even more Tubey Magic, the full 3 pluses, we felt the right grade for this side two was 2.5+.

Helpful Advice

To aid you in doing your own evaluations, here is a list of records that we’ve found to be good for testing Tubey Magic.

This is exactly why we do shootouts. If you really want to be able to recognize subtle (and not so subtle!) differences between pressings, you must learn to do them too.

And make sure to take notes about what you are hearing, good and bad.

One more thing: stick with the Green Label early pressings, they are the only way to fly on Moondance.

Mistakes Were Made

If you made the mistake of buying the Rhino pressing of Moondance, I hope you heard what we heard: a complete lack of Tubey Magic! This on one of the most Tubey Magical analog recordings we’ve ever played. You can thank Kevin Gray for helping you flush your record money down the drain. When we first reviewed the remaster in 2014, we wrote:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we reviewed Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

We also complained that the Heavy Vinyl reissue gets the voice wrong.  When the voice is wrong on a Van Morrison record, you have yourself a completely worthless piece of vinyl. 180 grams or 120 grams or any other number of grams, vinyl with sound this bad should hold no appeal to the audiophile. The record collector, maybe, but collecting for the sake of collecting has never been our thing and we hope it’s never been yours.

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This Original British Tarkus Had the Sound Most Audiophiles Can Only Dream Of

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

To be clear, audiophiles who buy a shootout winning White Hot Stamper pressing from us don’t have to dream, but practically everyone else does, because copies that sound as good as this one are few and far between.

It’s an amazing find, the kind of record we live for here at Better Records.

We described the sound of our most recent shootout winning copy this way:

This original UK Island pressing was doing everything right, earning killer Triple Plus (A+++) grades from top to bottom.

Our recent monster shootout produced this incredible sounding British pressing on Island (the only way we offer the title) and it is stone guaranteed to rock your world.

Eddie Offord‘s trademark Tubey Magic, energy, resolution, whomp factor and dynamics are all over this phenomenal recording, and this pressing captured it all.

Here are the notes that back up everything we said, and more. We can’t put all the qualities we rave about into every listing. Who would believe us?

No other copy offered this kind of sound. It’s what we used to call AGAIG — As Good As It Gets.

3+/3+ records like this one go in our Top Shelf section, which currently holds 32 titles.

Records with at least one 3+ side go in this section, and there are 143 of those as of today, almost five times as many.

Eddie Is The Man

Tarkus is clearly a Demo Disc for big speakers that can play at loud levels.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame, we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings will rattle the foundation of your house if you’re not careful. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense. It’s Big Bombastic Prog that wants desperately to rock your world. At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly. At loud levels it actually will rock your world.

All but the best Brit pressings have a tendency to be a bit turgid and many of them lack the bottom end weight that music like this absolutely must have to work its magic. There are some good domestic copies — not in a league with the best Brits at all — but most of them have sub-generation sound that robs the instruments of their immediacy and texture (much the same way that Heavy Vinyl does, truth be told).

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Debussy & Ravel – A Tale of Two Top Copies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Maurice Ravel Available Now

In 2024 we did a shootout for this recording of quartets, LSC 2413, our first in 19 years.

For the shootout winning pressing, we wrote the following:

Juilliard String Quartet’s performance of these wonderful classical works appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this original Shaded Dog pressing.

Having just played some killer copies of Death and the Maiden, we’re tempted to say that this Debussy record has the potential for even better sound — it’s richer and sweeter, but every bit as real and immediate as any chamber recording we know of.

Here are the notes for the actual record we played. Side one really blew our minds, earning a grade of at least 3+.

The second place finisher may not have been quite as good on side one, but it was still so good that it had no problem earning the full three pluses. It had the same stampers as the copy above by the way.

Side two however lacked the space of the very best pressings we played, and we marked it down one half plus for that shortcoming. Although it was “so tubey and 3-D” it did not have “all the space but not hot at all and natural and sweet.”

It’s very unlikely that the person who bought this copy would feel there was any problem with side two. We had two killer side two’s to play against each other back to back, and that’s about the only way these kinds of very subtle differences can be recognized, assuming you have a system that can resolve the space of the recording at an extremely high level to begin with.

The big rooms with high ceilings that systems like those require are not usually found in listening rooms that have not been custom built.

More on this wonderful record:

The Living Stereo sound here is Tubey Magical, lively and clear, with the kind of transparency that puts living, breathing musicians right in your listening room in the way that only the best vintage vinyl pressings can.

Lewis Layton engineered this recording (along with Ed Begley) and he nailed it, perfectly capturing the rich, textured sheen on the strings, the hallmark of Living Stereo sound in the 50s and 60s.

He recorded both the Schubert (LSC 2378) mentioned above and this wonderful Debussy/Ravel record for RCA in 1960 — it would be quite the understatement to say he had a gift for recordings of this kind.

Another superb recording from the 60s, brought to you by your vinyl-loving friends at Better Records.

It’s an exceptional Living Stereo all analog recording from 1960 – nothing else sounds like it.

When you’ve played as many Living Stereo titles as we have (250+ and counting), you’re bound to run into this kind of Demo Disc sound from time to time – it’s what makes record collecting fun.

It’s an amazing find, the kind of record we live for here at Better Records.

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Lee Konitz With Warne Marsh Is Yet Another Amazing Sounding Budget Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Here is how we described this wonderful reissue of the 1955 recording of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh:

Incredible MONO sound throughout this reissue copy of Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh (only the second to hit the site in years).

Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over every other copy we played.

If you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful session from 1955 – originally recorded by Tom Dowd and expertly remastered by George Piros – this pressing will definitely let you do that.

I hope these notes are able to speak for themselves. If you have trouble reading them, please drop me a line and I will translate them for you.

The horns are breathy and clear, yet full and rich as can be. There may be a good reason that this pressing sounds as good as it does: it was remastered by one of the greatest mastering engineers of all time, George Piros.

Tom Dowd is the original recording engineer, and this one album should be all the proof you need that when it comes to jazz in mono, the guy is hard to beat. Rock in stereo, there the record is quite a bit more spotty (see, or better yet, listen to Cream, The Young Rascals, Delaney and Bonnie and too many others to list).

UPDATE 2025

The listening panel for this record listened to it with the mono switch in as well as with the mono switch out on the EAR 324p phono stage we use.

Somewhat surprisingly, the sound got worse on this mono pressing playing with the mono switch activated.

That’s not supposed to be the way works, but in the world of records, when has that ever counted for anything?

Just another reminder to always stay skeptical. Never believe anything anybody tells you about audio. Test everything for yourself, and that includes our Hot Stamper pressings. Play them against the best other pressings you can find. We will happily take back any record that doesn’t trounce anything you have to play head to head with our records.

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This Is Why We Love Hippie Folk Rock from the 60s and 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.

If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums? — you should much to like on Down in L.A.

Here is how we described our most recent shootout winner:

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”vox and guitar jumping out of the speakers”…”big and tubey and weighty”…”HTF [hard to fault]” (side one)…”serious bass and energy”…:”rich and 3D and lively.”

Both of these sides have the smooth sweet analog sound we were listening for – they’re rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear that make it the best of both worlds.

The notes for the top copy from our most recent shootout can be seen below. It us six years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort.

Side one was HTF – Hard To Fault.

Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island Disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre.

It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars.

The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul.

All three are built on the same folk pop sensibilities. Tarkio, album number three, is clearly the duo’s Masterpiece, but this record comes next in my book, followed by Weeds, their second album and first for Kama Sutra. After Tarkio it’s all downhill.

“Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome, strident qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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Why Do So Few Living Stereo Pressings Sound as Good as This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

We introduced our most recent shootout winning copy of The Reiner Sound from 1958 this way:

The Reiner Sound returns to the site for the first time in years, here with big, bold, dynamic Triple Plus (A+++) Living Stereo sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing.

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended up top”…”sweet and rich”…”supremely dynamic and spacious!!!” (side one)…”massive and tubey and 3D”…”like no other” (side two)…”explosive finish.”

These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard.

This record will have you asking why so few Living Stereo pressings actually do what this one does.

The more critical listeners among you will recognize that this is a very special copy indeed.

Everyone else will just enjoy the hell out of it.

And here are the notes to prove it!

Side one was at least 3+.

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