Random Thoughts

Audio Commentary

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Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts

Thoughts and observations on issues that relate to recordings, LP pressings, and practically anything to do with playing records. If you want to collect better sounding records and hear them on better sounding equipment, many of the commentaries contained herein should be of interest.

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				Hall and Oates The Sound of Tubes by Way of Transistors (Item #: hallaaband_tubes) Hot Stamper pressings of this album have the sound of TUBES. I’m sure it was recorded with transistors, judging by the fact that it was made after most recording studios had abandoned that old technology, so how did they accomplish such a feat? more Info


				Building a Seriously Good Sounding Record Collection Step One (Item #: collecting_step_one) Get Good Sound, Then Good Records. Until you get your stereo, room and ears working, collecting good sounding records is all but impossible. You will very likely waste a fortune on "collectible records", the kind with Collector Value and very little else. This is the opposite of a Hot Stamper: All its value is tied up in its Music and Sound, which is where we think it should be. It's easy to be a collector; you just collect stuff. To get your stereo and room to sound good, and to know the difference when they do, that is very, very hard. I've been at it for thirty-five years and I still work at it and try to learn new things every day. I know there's a long way to go. more Info


				Cat Stevens Albums - Lee Hulko Cut Them All Good, Bad and Otherwise (Item #: steveteafo_hulko) Is the Pink Label Island original pressing THE way to go? That’s what Harry Pearson -- not to mention most audiophile record dealers -- would have you believe. But it’s just not true. And that’s good news for you, Dear (Record Loving Audiophile) Reader. more Info


				Still Crazy About Records After All These Years Why Not? They Keep Getting Better! (Item #: simonstill_better) Still Crazy is a perfect example of an album that now sounds far better than we ever thought possible, due mostly to changes to the stereo, the quality of the electricity that feeds it, and last but far from least, the listening room itself. more Info


				Dire Straits - Rhett Davies’ Masterpiece Played It Today as a Matter of Fact (2007) (Item #: diresdires_davies) This Vertigo British pressing of Dire Straits’ wonderful debut has ABSOLUTELY THE BEST SOUND for this album we have ever heard. Folks, this one just can’t be beat. AGAIG is our shorthand for As Good As It Gets, and that’s an understatement when it comes to the sound of this copy. It blew the doors off every record we put up against it; every Vertigo pressing, regardless of country of manufature or era. If you're looking for The World Champion, this copy holds the title and is very unlikely to be giving it up any time soon. more Info


				The Beatles - Please Please Me Which Is More 3-Dimensional Mono or Twin Track? (Item #: beatlpleas_3d) With all due respect to Sir George Martin, we've played a number of mono pressings of this album in the past twenty or so years and have never been particularly impressed with any of them. The monos jam all the voices and instruments together in the middle, stacking them one in front of the other, and lots of musical information gets mashed together and simply disappears in the congestion. But is Twin Track stereo any better? Yes, when you do it the way Norman Smith did on Please Please Me. more Info


				Conducting Your Own Shootouts With Enough Data (Read: LPs), Novel Patterns Emerge (Item #: ambroambro_2011) After doing a big shootout for this album we learned a thing or two (as is often the case) which we would like to share with you. When you sit down to play ten or twelve copies of an album, one right after the other, patterns in the sound are going to emerge from that experience, patterns which would be very likely to pass unnoticed when playing one copy against another or two over the course of the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to do it. more Info


				Making Mistakes Crazy As It Sounds, More Turns Out to Be Better (Item #: mistakes) I was reading an article on the web recently when I came across an old joke Red Skelton used to tell: All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner. Now if you're like me and you play, think and write (hopefully in that order) about records all day, everything sooner or later relates back to records, even a modestly amusing old joke such as this. Making mistakes is fundamental to learning about records, especially if you, like us, believe that most of the received wisdom handed down to record lovers of all kinds is more likely to be wrong than right. If you don't believe that to be true then it's time to really start making mistakes. And the faster you make them, the more you will learn the truths (uncountable in number) about records. And those truths will set you free. more Info


				Heavy Vinyl Production And the Unpredictability of Random Processes (Item #: stochastic) Those in the business of producing the highest quality remastered recordings on LP are crashing smack into a problem endemic to the manufacturing of the vinyl record -- randomness. Record producers can control many of the processes (variables) that go into the making of a high quality record. But they cannot control all of them. The word for such a situation, one with random, uncontrollable aspects, is "stochastic." more Info


				Record Collector News Checks Out A Hot Stamper (Item #: rcn1011) We recently got an email from Jim Kaplan, publisher of Record Collector News. He was eager to try out one of our Hot Stampers and decided to go with a Super Hot copy of Frank Zappa's Waka Jawaka. Scroll down to see what he had to say to his readers in the Oct/Nov 2011 issue of his magazine. If you happen to pick up a paper copy, look for us starting on page six. Thanks Jim! more Info


				30 Years of Bad Sounding Deja Vu's Wiped Away in an Instant! (Item #: crosbdejav_30years) A testimonial from a customer for his Hot Stamper Deja Vu discusses what it takes to get good sound from your stereo. (Hint: it's a good sounding record, duh.) "I have come to a conclusion - no matter whether I had the best $50,000 amps in the world or a $29,000 phono supply or the $150,000 Wilson Alexandria speakers or all that other incredible stuff that audiophiles lust for - not one of those items can make a shit record sound anything but like a shit record. There is no overcoming the original source material that you play on your stereo system." more Info


				Travelling Back in Time with Cat Stevens on MoFi To Hear It on Vintage Equipment (Item #: steveteafo_badstereo) Our good customer Roger wrote us a letter years ago about his MoFi Tea for the Tillerman, in which he remarked, "Sometimes I wish I kept my old crappy stereo to see if I could now tell what it was that made these audiophile pressings so attractive then." It got me to thinking. Yes, that would be fun, and it could be done. There are actually plenty of those Old School systems still around. Just look at what many of the forum posters -- god bless 'em -- are running. They've got some awesome '70s Japanese turntables, some Monster Cable and some vintage tube gear and speakers going all the way back to the '50s. With this stuff you could in effect travel back in time, virtually erasing all the audio progress of the last 30 years. Then you could hear your MoFi Tea for the Tillerman sound the way it used to when you could actually stand to be in the same room with it. Ah, those were the days my friend! more Info

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