turn-up-your-volume-test

Being able to play some records at good loud levels is key to properly evaluating their sound.

It is far and away the toughest test we know of.

If you want to hear the difference between a Hot Stamper pressing and any other pressing, play the two of them good and loud and see which one sounds right.

The better sounding pressing will almost always be the Hot Stamper.

Letter of the Week – “It just begs to be cranked up to sound its best.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

As you know, I have been picking up quite a few live album Hot Stampers recently. Here is another great example of having to turn the volume up loud to get that “I’m at the concert” feeling.

The sound on the LP is so well-balanced tonally top to bottom with absolutely no grittiness. It just begs to be cranked up to sound its best. That Tubey Magic is oozing from the grooves.

And what a performance from Jimi. I play guitar as a hobbyist and there is a reason why we crave the tones from old tube amps and those Marshall cabs with Celestion pulsonic coned speakers.

That Tubey Magic we love in the recordings just accurately captures what was being played. Superb in every way!!

Thanks as always,
Rob

Rob, thanks for writing. We could not agree more — the sound of the best vintage pressings puts you right there in the concert hall like nothing else can.

And of course, as you say, Band of Gypsys is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

The best early Capitol copies of this album rock harder than practically any record we’ve ever played. If you have the system for it, this amazing Eddie Kramer recording will bring a live rock concert right into your living room.

Band of Gypsys is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, Band of Gypsys will never really sound the way it should.

This link will take you to the Hot Stamper pressings of our hardest rockin’ albums currently available.

Here are the titles that have earned a place on our none rocks harder list.

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Dynamic Vocals? Thank John Haeny

More of the Music of Bonnie Raitt

I learned only recently that John Haeny is one of the two engineers on this album, which goes a long way toward explaining the excellent ’70s analog sound. He worked on The Pretender, Don’t Cry Now, and many of the early and quite wonderful sounding albums Judy Collins did for Elektra in the earlier part of the decade. This guy knows sound.

(A good copy of The Pretender is an amazing Demo Disc that will put 99% of all the rock records you’ve ever played to shame. But the truly Hot Stamper pressings are few and far between, so most audiophiles have no idea how well recorded that album is.)

Side One

About to Make Me Leave Home 

This is where you will hear the best sound on the best copies. If it doesn’t sound BIG, you don’t have a Hot Stamper.

Runaway
Two Lives 

This is my favorite song on the album. Many copies get congested when Bonnie and the chorus are singing loudly, but this one plays it fairly clean.

Louise 

This is an easy one. The guitars are sweet and tubey magical.

Gamblin’ Man

Side Two

Sweet Forgiveness
My Opening Farewell

This track has the most dynamic vocals on the album, some of the most dynamic vocals on any pop record. She really gets LOUD on this one.

Three Time Loser
Takin’ My Time
Home 

Possibly the most beautiful song on the album. As I am writing this, it becomes more and more clear to me that this is Bonnie’s strongest album. It has more good songs than any other that I can think of.

Dynamics

The vocal dynamics on this side are the best I have ever heard. We’re not used to hearing singers get loud on pop records. Normally the compressors prevent that from happening, and even most copies of this record do not have the dynamics that this one does. You will need a high quality front end to track this LP, that I can assure you.

And the last quarter inch or so of side one will invariably have some distortion on the vocal peaks, as well as track three on side two which also gets quite loud. These may not actually be groove damage; sometimes the cutting engineer is at fault and sometimes the cutting equipment may not be up to the job of putting so much energy into those slower spinning inner grooves. Practically every copy that was dynamic had breakup to some degree somewhere on the record. We much prefer lively records to compressed ones, and sometimes overcutting is the price you have to pay.

Bonnie’s Best (more…)

Turn Up Your Volume and Rock Out to Dreamboat Annie

More of the Music of Heart

Dreamboat Annie is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.

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 big room, big speakers, and the power to drive them, you can have a LIVE ROCK AND ROLL CONCERT in your very own house. When the boys behind Heart (superb musicians all) let loose with some of those Zep-like 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 there you go.)

Not many records have this kind of big, rockin’ sound, that’s for sure! If you’re an audiophile who loves classic rock, you just haven’t lived until you’ve heard this album on a White Hot Stamper pressing. There is so much more LIFE to this recording than I ever thought possible, and only the best pressings let that energy come through. In a nutshell those are the ones that earn our top Hot Stamper grades.

We’re pretty fond of these ladies here at Better Records. Their second album, Little Queen, has been a favorite test disc around here for years. When Heart is at their best, the music is wonderful. If you’re lucky enough to own the right pressing — this one will do nicely — this band can ROCK with the best of them.

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Loud Levels and Big Woofers Will Rock Your World on Crime of the Century

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

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

The bass on the best copies is AWESOME. Playing a Hot Stamper copy at loud levels with big woofers will have your house quaking. Add to that the kind of ENERGY that the better pressings have in their grooves and the result is an album guaranteed to bring most audiophile systems to their knees, begging for mercy. 

This is The Audio Challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of SONIC POWER, don’t expect to hear Crime of the Century the way the brilliant engineer Ken Scott and the boys in the band wanted you to. The album wants to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are capable of doing.

With sound that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, this is a Big Speaker Rock Demo Disc with very few rivals in my experience, offering the dedicated audiophile the kind of sound I have been lusting after since I first got heavily into audio in the early- to mid-’70s.

The Mobile Fidelity Pressing Used to Be Impressive

The typical Brit copy is dull, and that quality just takes all the magic out of the recording.

The three dimensional space and clarity of the recording rely heavily on the quality of the top end.

The MoFi, on the best copies, shows you what is missing from the typical Brit, domestic or other import LP. This is what impressed me back in the ’70s when I bought my MoFi. It was only years later that I realized what was missing and what was wrong.

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Turn Up Your Volume on Rock Of Ages – Now It Rocks!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Roots Rock Albums Available Now

Yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.

Most copies of this album do not have a boosted bottom or top, which means that at normal listening levels — depending on how you define that term — they can sound pretty flat.

This is one album that needs to be turned up, obviously not to the levels of a live rock concert, but up about as loud as you can until you can get the bass and the highs to come out.

We found ourselves adding more and more level in order to get the sound to come to life, and it was playing pretty loud before the sound was right.  

But it’s SO GOOD when it’s loud. Why the hell would you not want to crank it up and ROCK OUT?

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Every Top Copy of In Through the Out Door Must Pass This Test

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In our review for this album, we debunked the Classic Records pressing using a very simple test which you may want to try at home.

The test we stumbled upon is actually quite an easy one to use.

A copy that makes you want to turn up the volume is likely to be a winner. The Classic does not pass that test.

We threw one on and just couldn’t deal with the edgy vocals and upper-midrange boost. We wanted to turn down the volume as quickly as we could get our hands on the knob. As far as we’re concerned there’s no substitute for The Real Thing. As hard as it is to find great sounding copies of this album, it’s even harder for us to sit through a sub-par version like the Classic.

And boy were our faces red. We used to think the Classic version was pretty decent, but the best originals SLAUGHTER it! We had never done a shootout for this album before 2007. We didn’t feel up to the challenge, because the typical pressing tends to be miserable — gritty, grainy, and hard sounding, with congested mids, dull up top, and on and on.

But 2007 turned out to be a milestone year for us here at Better Records.

Looking back on that year, the discovery of the Prelude Record Cleaning System, along with some system upgrades, allowed us to jump to the next level.

With better cleaning and more revealing and accurate playback, the Zeppelin shootout we conducted in 20o7 made it clear to us that the Classic was all sorts of wrong when played head to head against the best domestic pressings.

Try the Turn Up the Volume Test and see if your copy makes the grade, or makes you want to turn it right back down. I’m guessing the latter, unless you were lucky enough to get one of our Hot Stampers from the last shootout. There sure weren’t enough to go around.

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Shoot Out The Lights – Loud Versus Live

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

Shoot Out the Lights is yet another recording that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

I’ve seen Richard Thompson on a number of occasions over the years, and as loud as my stereo will play, which is pretty darn loud, I’ve never been able to make his guitar solos 20 dB louder than everything else, because they’re simply not on the record that way. That’s why live music can’t be reproduced faithfully in the home: the dynamic contrasts are much too great for the typical listener, or his stereo. 

Having said that, when you actually do turn this record up, way up, you get the feeling of hearing live music, and that’s not easy to do.

Only the best recordings, in my experience, can begin to give you that feeling. (And of course it helps to have big dynamic speakers.)

On the best copies the sound is very dynamic, the soundstage HUGE. The overall presentation in terms of size and weight just makes you want to turn your stereo up as loud as it will go. In that sense, it has some of the qualities of “live” music, because live music is loud.

We do shootouts for this Top 100 title on a regular basis. To see what we might have in stock, please click here. (more…)

Perez Prado (and Better Records) Implore You to Turn Up the Volume

Another in the long list of recordings that sounds its best when you Turn Up Your Volume.

Tube smear is common to most pressings from the late ’50s, and this is no exception. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least amount of smear, or none, yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich. Full sound is especially critical to the horns: any blare, leanness or squawk ruins much of the fun, certainly at the loud levels the record should be playing at.

Which brings up a point that needs making. The tonality of this record is correct when it is playing loud. The trumpets do not get harsh at loud volumes the way they will on, say, a Chicago record. The timbre of the instruments is correct when loud, which means that it was mixed loud to sound correct when loud.

The frequency extremes (on the best copies) are not boosted in any way. When you play this record quietly, the bottom and top will disappear (due to the way the ear handles quieter sounds as described by the Fletcher-Munson curve).

Most records (like most audiophile stereos) are designed to sound correct at moderate levels. Not this album. It wants you to turn it up. Then, and only then, will everything sound completely right from top to bottom.

If you like the sound of percussion instruments of every possible flavor, including some you have never tasted before, you will have a hard time finding a more magical recording of them than this. (more…)

A Space In Time – A Thrill on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

A Space in Time is just one of the recordings that made me pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Speakers right from my earliest days in audio. You need large dynamic drivers with plenty of piston area – the kind that can really move air – in order to bring the power of this music to life.  

If you have big speakers and a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better than A Space in Time.

The Seventies – What a Decade!

Acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this record. The harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum.

This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the ’60s and ’70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and far too many others to list. It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.

Big Production Tubey Magical British Psych Rock just doesn’t get much better than A Space in Time.

Ambrosia – The First Four Plus Copy We’d Ever Heard, Going All the Way Back to 2008

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This White Hot Stamper original LP goes BEYOND DEMO DISC sound. What that means exactly I’m not sure, but I know it when I hear it, and this record has THAT SOUND.

We had no choice but to award this side one the very rare A with FOUR pluses A++++. Side one of this copy has ENERGY and LIFE we have never heard before.

No other copy had this kind of OFF THE CHARTS sound on either side, which means we feel no compunction awarding this side one our Ultimate Rating of A Quadruple Plus (A++++). Only a handful of records over the course of the last few years have earned such a grade, certainly no more than ten, and if memory serves there has never been a record with Four Pluses on both sides; that would be just too extraordinary, the Black Swan incarnate.

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we often place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

This Side One

Going back to our best Hot Stamper Triple Plus contenders for the final shootout round, we dropped the needle on this one and it could not have taken three seconds to know that this copy was BEYOND amazing, truly in a league of its own.

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