vin-smooth

These vintage pressings are smooth in a good way.

Elton John / Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy

More of the Music of Elton John

  • With two solid Double Plus (A++) sides, this vintage DJM import will be very hard to beat
  • Forget the domestic pressings, forget whatever lousy reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a killer Hot Stamper early British pressing like this one is the only way to go
  • Includes two of our favorites: “(Gotta Get A) Meal Ticket” and the massive hit “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – those on “Curtains” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
  • 5 stars: “Elton John and Bernie Taupin recalled their rise to power in Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, their first explicitly conceptual effort since Tumbleweed Connection. It’s no coincidence that it’s their best album since then, showcasing each at the peak of his power, as John crafts supple, elastic, versatile pop and Taupin’s inscrutable wordplay is evocative, even moving.”

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Boz Scaggs – Silk Degrees

More Blue-Eyed Soul

  • Solid Double Plus (A++) sound brings Boz’s very well recorded Masterpiece of Soulful Pop to life on this vintage Columbia pressing
  • Both of these sides are punchy, open and clear, with the kind of big bass and rhythmic energy so critical to this music
  • This copy brings out of the mix the solid, weighty piano that’s missing from the CBS Half-Speed and 90% of the reissues
  • 5 stars: “[Scaggs] hit the R&B charts in a big way with the addictive, sly ‘Lowdown’… and expressed his love of smooth soul music almost as well on the appealing ‘What Can I Say.'”

There is excellent sound on the better-recorded tracks, which I’m happy to say are most of them. And why not? This band is basically Toto with Boz Scaggs singing lead. David Paich wrote most of the songs and most of the Toto band (which didn’t exist yet, of course) is in the house. (No Lukather, but the guitarists on hand manage to pull it off without him.) Check out the legendary Jeff Porcaro’s twin hi-hats on “Lowdown,” one per channel, energizing the rhythm of the song big time.

One of the main qualities separating the winners from the also-rans on this title is the quality of the bass. This is rhythmic music, first and foremost. David Hungate just kills on this album; he’s giving a master class on rock and roll bass on practically every track.

And, for us audiophiles, the good news is the bass is very well recorded — big, punchy and well upfront in the mix. The bad news is that only the best copies show you the note-like, clear, rich bass that must be on the master tape. Vague and smeary bottom end is the rule, not the exception, and it’s a veritable crime against well-recorded sophisticated pop such as this.

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Joni Mitchell – Miles of Aisles

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

  • This Joni Mitchell classic (the first copy to hit the site in close to five years) boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides of these vintage Asylum pressings – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Henry Lewy brings the analog richness, smoothness and clarity he achieved on Court and Spark to the recording – it’s some of the best live sound we’ve ever heard
  • Joni reworks some of her best-loved songs for this concert, with five tracks from Blue alone(!), and the new arrangements show us just how vital her early 70s work has turned out to be
  • There is only one pressings plant that produces shootout winning copies, and the lucky buyer of this copy will find out what it is when he opens his box of Hot Stampers
  • “It’s a strong album of her best songs performed mostly informally… Much of the material here is beautiful, replete with the patented Mitchell tension. And a word for engineer Henry Lewy—the sound is terrific, the best reproduced concert album I’ve heard.” – Rolling Stone
  • If like us you’re a big Joni Mitchell fan, then this killer live album from 1974 belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1974 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

We recently had a chance to do another shootout for this album, and when you find a great copy the sound is out of this world. Not many live albums have this kind of “you are there” immediacy. Turn down the lights, crank up the volume, and you’ll be right there in the crowd as Joni and the LA Express (Tom Scott, Robben Ford, and the crew) knock out jazzy versions of some of her best material.

The brass sounds great — you can really hear the breath moving through the horns, with the all-important bite that really brings their various characters to life.

I’d be remiss not to mention the amazing bottom end on this copy. The best sides have big, note-like bass that sets an unusually strong foundation for these great songs. You don’t usually get much bass on Joni’s studio albums, so WHOMP-aholics like myself will find a copy like this to be quite a treat.

Just check out the songs on here: “You Turn Me On I’m A Radio,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” “Circle Game,” “People’s Parties,” “All I Want,” “Woodstock,” “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” and on and on. Those are many of our very favorite Joni songs, and the versions on this album do not disappoint.

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Linda Ronstadt – Simple Dreams

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

  • An original Asylum pressing with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • Linda’s best sounding recording and a proud member of our Top 100 – this is the album that showed us she could do it all
  • Val Garay does it again, filling the grooves with his trademark super-punchy, jump-out-the-speakers, rich and smooth ANALOG sound
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…reconfirms [Rondstadt’s] substantial talents as an interpretive singer…and [her] powerful performance makes the record rival Heart Like a Wheel in sheer overall quality.”
  • If you’re a Linda Ronstadt fan, this undeniable classic from 1977 is surely a Must Own
  • Simple Dreams is our pick for Linda’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.

This is clearly one of Linda’s best albums and I would have to say, based on my fairly extensive experience with her recorded output, that it is in fact the best sounding record she ever made. I love Heart Like a Wheel, but it sure doesn’t sound like this, not even on the Triple Plus copies that win our shootouts. (It is her best album, though.)

I confess to having never taken the album seriously, dismissing it as a commercial collection of pop hits with about as much depth as the L.A. River — but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is a great sounding album on the right pressing, not the compressed piece of grainy cardboard we’ve all been playing for years, unaware of the tremendous sound quality lurking in the grooves of other copies; the ones that were blessed with the right stampers, the right vinyl and a healthy amount of fairy dust wafting over the press that day.

That’s what Hot Stamper shootouts are all about — finding those copies, the ones no one knows exist. (No one but us it seems; who else would think to put this album in their Top 100?)

This Is a Real Band

Until a Hot Stamper found its way onto our turntable, we had absolutely no idea the album could sound like this, or that the music was so good.

The first thing that came to mind when I looked inside the fold open cover and saw all the guys who back Linda up on the album is that this is a real rock band. These are not a bunch of studio cats punching a time card. These guys know how to rock; just listen to the way they come blasting out of the gate on “It’s So Easy.” Linda is with them all the way, giving one of the best performances of her career.

Song after song, this super-tight band with the hot female lead (!) show that they can rock with the best of them. And do beautiful ballads (“Blue Bayou”) too.

Folks, I hereby testify that a Hot Stamper copy of this very album gave me a newfound respect for Linda beyond her work on Heart Like a Wheel. This is the album that shows she can do it all, as the All Music Guide points out, and I’m a believer.

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Stevie Wonder – Innervisions

More of the Music of Stevie Wonder

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Innervisions you’ve heard
  • A Stevie Wonder classic as well as a proud member of our Top 100, but you will need a copy like this one to prove that it belongs there
  • Richness, warmth, Tubey Magic, and clarity are important to the sound, and here you will find plenty of all four
  • 5 stars: “Stevie Wonder applied his tremendous songwriting talents to the unsettled social morass that was the early ’70s and produced one of his greatest, most important works, a rich panoply of songs addressing drugs, spirituality, political ethics, and what looked to be the failure of the ’60s dream – all set within a collection of charts as funky and catchy as any he’d written before.”
  • This is our pick for Free’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best recording by an artist or group can be found here on the blog.
  • If any record can be called a Must Own, Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece from 1973 is one, slotting in nicely right at the top of any list of the greatest soul albums of all time, if not THE greatest

Millions of these were made, but a whole lot of them sure weren’t made right.

Years ago we made some progress with regard to the various stampers and pressing plants we liked best, but trying to find clean copies with the right matrix numbers has proved challenging. Even when you do get the copies with good stampers, they often don’t sound all that amazing. I had practically given up on making this shootout happen until about ten years ago, when a friend dropped off a copy that had seriously good sound.

It didn’t turn out to be the ultimate copy — that’s why shootouts are crucially important to the discovery of the best pressings — but it was so enjoyable that we decided to give Innervisions another try, and since that time we’ve gotten better and better at finding, cleaning and playing Stevie Wonder’s Masterpiece, a record that should be played regularly and one that belongs in any right-thinking audiophile’s collection.

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Traffic – The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

More Prog Rock

  • With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, this UK Island pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in four and a half years) could not be beat
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “rich and dynamic”…”big and tubey”…”great size and energy”…”huge bass”…”tubey and present and 3D vox”…”pretty great!” (side two)
  • Low Spark is clearly one of the best sounding Proggy/Arty Rock records ever made – the space it recreates is huge
  • A Better Records Top 100 album and real Demo Disc on a pressing that sounds as good as this one does
  • This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The commercial and artistic apex of the second coming of Traffic… The standout was the 12-minute title track, with its distinctive piano riff and its lyrics of weary disillusionment with the music business. “
  • Our last shootout for the album was in 2019, and a domestic copy did better back then than it would do now

After doing the shootout for John Barleycorn recently, a record we love in spite of its problematic sound, this album was truly a breath of fresh air. I can honestly and enthusiastically say that the sound we heard on the best pressings was out of this world. This album is a permanent member of our Rock and Pop Top 100, that’s how good it is.

Who knew? We had no idea this recording could sound so incredibly spacious and open. The distortion level is so close to zero that we don’t even want to assign a positive number to it. Let’s just say it’s below the threshold of hearing; does that work for you?

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The Doobie Brothers – Minute By Minute

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

  • A Minute By Minute like you’ve never heard, with superb Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on both sides of this original Warner Bros. pressing
  • If you could only have one Doobies album, assuming you prefer the Michael McDonald era as we do, wouldn’t it have to be this one?
  • An audiophile quality pop music production as close to perfect as one could possibly wish for, thanks to Ted Templeman and Donn Landee
  • 4 stars: “…this is where the ‘new’ Doobie Brothers really make their debut, with a richly soulful sound throughout and emphasis on horns and Michael McDonald’s piano… It’s still all pretty compelling even if its appeal couldn’t be more different from the group’s earlier work. The public loved it, buying something like three million copies, and the recording establishment gave Minute by Minute four Grammy Awards, propelling the group to its biggest success ever.”

This is undoubtedly the band’s masterpiece, assuming you’re a Michael McDonald fan, and we very much are fans here at Better Records. We can now definitively say that the quality of the sound matches the quality of the music. What a wonderful sounding pop record. This is Donn Landee at his best — tonally correct, spacious, clear and sweet, with big bass and vocal choruses that can really take off when called upon. With Ted Templeman running the show this is an Audiophile Quality Pop Music Production that’s as close to perfect as one has any right to expect.

Musically Speaking

The material on this album is the strongest the group ever recorded, and let’s face it, all the best songs are McDonald’s. He really hit his songwriting stride in 1979; there are almost half a dozen classic Michael McDonald songs on this album alone. His 1982 solo album, a Desert Island Disc for us if there ever was one, has about ten more. The guy was on fire in the late 70s and early 80s.

Engineering Excellence

Credit Donn Landee (and producer Ted Templeman, as well) with the full-bodied, rich, smooth, oh-so-analog sound of the better copies of Minute By Minute. He’s recorded or assisted on many of our favorite albums here at Better Records.

Most of the better sounding Doobies albums are his; all of the good Van Halens, of course; Lowell George’s wonderful Thanks I’ll Eat It Here; Little Feat’s Time Loves a Hero (not their best music but some of their best sound); Carly Simon’s Another Passenger (my favorite of all her albums); and his Masterpiece (in my humble opinion), Captain Beefheart’s mindblowing Clear Spot.

Grammys

  • 1979 Record Of The Year for “What A Fool Believes”
  • 1979 Song Of The Year for “What A Fool Believes”
  • 1979 Best Pop Vocal Performance By A Duo, Group Or Chorus for “Minute By Minute”
  • 1979 Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocals for “What A Fool Believes

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Van Morrison – His Band And Street Choir

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • With very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last, this vintage Green Label pressing of Van’s shockingly underrated album from 1970 will be hard to beat
  • It’s richer, fuller and with more presence than the average copy, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • The band is swinging, the material top-notch – “Domino,” “Crazy Face,” “Blue Money” and other classics are right here
  • The Best Sounding Van Morrison Album, a classic of 1970 Tubey Magical analog, and his only title to make our Top 100
  • “As ‘Domino’ opens the album with a show of strength, ‘Street Choir’ closes it with a burst of both musical and poetic energy which is not only better than anything else on the album but may well be one of Van’s two or three finest songs.” – Rolling Stone

This is the album that came out between Moondance (in the same year in fact, 1970) and Tupelo Honey, but for some reason, it don’t get no respect. We think that’s insane — the material on this album is stellar and the sound on the best pressings is out of this world!

Here’s a copy that really makes our case for us. Both sides of this vintage Warner Bros. pressing sound AMAZING! We went through a massive stack of copies and let me tell you — most of them sure don’t sound like this! Take this one home for some of the best Van Morrison sound you will ever hear.

For years I thought that Moondance was the best sounding album in the Van Morrison catalog. His Band And Street Choir is even better. One reason for that would have to be that Robert Ludwig mastered it, and he can usually be counted on to do an excellent job.

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James Taylor / Mud Slide Slim

More James Taylor

  • A wonderful copy of JT’s classic followup to Sweet Baby James with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • This early Green Label pressing demonstrates the Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records almost never reproduce
  • Some of old JT’s strongest material: “You’ve Got a Friend,” “You Can Close Your Eyes,” “Hey Mister, That’s Me up on the Jukebox” and more
  • The sound of most of the tracks on the better pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • 4 stars on Allmusic – it destroys the recent reissue, which lacks the texture and warmth you get in abundance on these killer originals
  • If you’re a James Taylor fan — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this title is clearly one of the best releases of 1971 and a true Must Own for the audiophile

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The Beatles – Abbey Road

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • This vintage UK copy of The Beatles’ last and arguably greatest album boasts two seriously good sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Quiet vinyl is rarely in the cards for Abbey Road, but here it is, and on a great sounding copy too
  • The stereo to play The Beatles magnum opus didn’t exist when the record was made, but it does now
  • If you’ve heard the disastrous new Half-Speed mastered remix LP, or the remastered Heavy Vinyl from a few years back, then you surely know that nothing comes close to a real, vintage, analog Abbey Road
  • This pressing might just give you a new appreciation for one of the Greatest Rock Albums of All Time
  • 5 stars, a permanent member of the Top 100, and a true rock and pop Demo Disc
  • If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers sound, this is the album for you.

Abbey Road Magic

Those of you who follow the site (or do your own shootouts) know that it’s much tougher to find great copies of Abbey Road than it is for MMT or Please Please Me. Most of the copies we’ve played just aren’t good enough to put on the site. For whatever reasons — probably because this recording is so complicated and required so many tracks — Abbey Road is one of the tougher nuts to crack in the Beatles’ catalog.

We’re wild about this album, and here’s a copy that will show you exactly why. Both sides are big, rich, sweet and present with lots of energy, wonderfully breathy vocals, and huge dynamic guitars. You don’t hear too many copies with a massive bottom end like this bad boy. A copy with this kind of transparency really allows you to hear INTO the soundfield and appreciate every last detail — quite a privilege for the lucky person who takes this one home.

This is the final statement from The Beatles. To take away the power of their magnum opus by playing it through inadequate equipment makes a mockery of the monumental effort that went into it. Remember, the original title for the album was Everest. That should tell you something about the size and scope of the music and sound that the Beatles had in mind.

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