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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If You Want to Hear The Band Playing Live in the Studio, Just Turn Up Your Volume

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

We played the album very loud, as loud as we could, and still we wanted more volume!

That’s what a good record is all about — the louder you play it the better it sounds.

If you like the raw, rockin’ sound of early Zep, you should have a blast with this album. It’s a shockingly good recording, and the music is of course as heavy as it gets for 1970.

This Warner Brothers Green Label domestic pressing DESTROYED the import copies we played it against, with startling immediacy, tons of ambience, and loads of texture.

The soundfield is HUGE — back wall to front wall, floor to ceiling, and WIDE.

The bass is deep, well-defined, and punchy.

If you want to feel this effect:

“Sabbath’s slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness.”

You need a copy that sounds the way our best Hot Stamper pressings do.

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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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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…)

In Through The Out Door – Best Sounding Tracks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In 2007, one of our first shootouts taught us a lot about this album.

On a super-transparent, super-low-distortion copy, all the subtleties really come to life.

Too many copies we played were a bit grainy — you could really hear it on the cymbal crashes. This copy is as smooth and sweet as you could ever ask for.

It’s open and spacious, and the vocals are tonally correct. The bottom end has deep, well-defined bass and an exceptionally punchy kick drum sound. There’s lots of extension up top and a silky quality to the vocals and cymbals.

The presence is staggering — the guitar solo on All My Love positively JUMPS out of the speakers.

Musically this certainly isn’t Zep’s best work, but there is still some really great material.

We found the best sounding tracks to be “Fool In The Rain” on side one and “All My Love” on side two.

“In The Evening” can rock with the best of them, “South Bound Saurez” can be very rich and sweet, and “I’m Gonna Crawl” can sound out of this world.

In fact, after playing two knockout copies we found back to back, I am a bigger fan of this album than I ever was.

Zep II it ain’t, but it’s still Zep, and that oughta tell you plenty.

Leaner and Cleaner Just Won’t Cut It on the Last Record Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

To our way of thinking, this is the kind of record one should bring to one’s favorite stereo store to properly judge their equipment.

They can play female vocals; they do it all day long.

But can they play The Last Record Album and have it sound musical and involving?

Can they get it to ROCK?

Will they even turn it up loud enough to find out? My jaded money is on no, for all three. 

Rockin’ The Last Record Album is a much, much tougher test than what they are used to, one that their systems will struggle to pass. (That’s what makes it a good test, right?)

Leaner and cleaner — the kind of audiophile sound I used to hear everywhere I go — is simply not going to work on this album, or Zuma, or Houses of the Holy, or the hundreds of other Classic Rock records we put up on the site every year. There has to be meat on those bones. To switch metaphors in the middle of a stream, this album is all about the cake, not the frosting.

Bear that in mind when they tell you at your local salon that the record you brought with you is at fault, not their expensive and supposedly “correct” equipment. I’ve been in enough of these places to know better. If you’ve put your audio time in, their excuses should fall on deaf ears. 

Whose Fault Is It?

Most copies of this album are ridiculously dull and compressed. The band itself sounds bored, as if they lack faith in their own songs. But it’s not their fault. Whose fault it is is never easy to fathom; bad mastering, bad tapes, bad vinyl, bad something else — whatever it is, that thick, lifeless sound turns this powerfully emotional music into a major snooze-fest. It’s positively criminal but it happens all the time. It’s the reason we have to go through a dozen copies to find one that sounds like 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.