The Better Blog -- Updated 8/29 by Tom and Todd

8/29/10 Classic Records has officially gone under. They will not be missed, not by us anyway, except for this reason: we won't have Classic Records to kick around any more. We've been beating that dead horse since the day they started back in 1994; there are plenty of commentaries about their awful records on the site for those who are interested. The last one we wrote for the remastered Scheherazade (easily found by typing LSC 2446 into the search field found at the top of every page), which fittingly ended up in our Hall of Shame with a sonic grade of F. TAS Superdisc List to this day? Of course it is! With every improvement we've made to our system over the years, their records have somehow managed to sound progressively worse. (This is pretty much true for all Heavy Vinyl pressings, another good reason for our decision to stop carrying them in 2010.) That ought to tell you something. Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of bad records. At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths and beauty of good records. (Which of course begs the question of what actually is a good record -- what it is that makes one record good and another bad -- but luckily for you dear reader, you are actually on a site that has much to say about those very issues. Every Hot Stamper commentary is fundamentally about the specific attributes that make one copy of a given album better than another, and how much of them you're getting for your money with the unique pressing on offer.) There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile as I'm sure you've read by now. It's the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference. With Old School equipment you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled twenty and thirty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you're still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings there's a world of sound you're missing. We would love to help you find it. One Hot Stamper just might be all it takes to get the ball rolling. 8/28/10 It makes me sad when I read a reviewer write something as laughable as this, and I hope you feel the same way: My analog-reviewing ritual dictates that I always play side two of Paul Simon’s Graceland [Warner Bros. 25447-1] to kick things off. I listen for the syncopation of the drums and accordion during the funky, quick-time Zydeco riff at the start of "That Was Your Mother"; the subtle differences in ambience during the Ronstadt-Simon duet on "Under African Skies" that tell me each sang from his or her own booth; the speaker-to-speaker arc laid out by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Simon singing "Homeless" a cappella -- a performance flecked with subtle throat and lip chirrups and trills; the faint background strumming of acoustic guitars from Los Lobos' David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas as they double Simon on "The Myth of Fingerprints." Tim Aucremann / The Audio Beat / August 13, 2010 How bad does a record have to be before a reviewer won't use it as a test disc? This is not a good recording. At best it is passable. If your standards are this low you have no business reviewing equipment or anything else in audio for that matter. 6/26/10 Commentary from our Hot Stamper listing for Linda Ronstadt / Prisoner In Disguise The Middle of the Midrange Is Key Here's what we learned when doing this shootout. So many copies sounded like they were half-speed mastered. They had a little something phony added to the top of Linda's voice, they had a little bit of suckout right in the middle of the midrange, the middle of her voice, and they had a somewhat diffuse, vague quality, with sound that lacked the SOLIDITY we heard on the best pressings. These hi-fi-ish qualities that we heard on so many copies reminded us of the kind of audiophile sound we decry at every turn. We've played literally hundreds and hundreds of MoFis and other half-speed mastered records over the course of the last twenty years, and one thing we know well is That Sound.   But think about it. What if you only had one copy of the album -- why would you have more than one anyway? -- and it had that Half-Speed Sound? You would simply assume the recording had those qualities, assuming you could even recognize them in the first place. (Let's face it, most audiophiles can't, or all of these companies would have gone out of business and stayed out of businesss, and their out of print records would sell for peanuts, not the collector prices they bring on ebay and audiophile web sites, including ours if truth be told.) It's not Really That Hard to Tell One from the Other   Fortunately our customers recognize those phony qualities and are willing to pay top dollar for copies that don't have those phony audiophile BS colorations. If you have a good stereo and two working ears it's not hard to tell right from wrong. It's not rocket science. The records that sound right to us we call Hot Stampers. They're the ones that get all the energy into the grooves, with correct tonality from top to bottom. Audiophile records are the ones that compress the shit out of the sound and have colorations and problems everywhere you look. It's really not that hard to tell one from the other, for us and our Hot Stamper fans anyway. The rest of the world has a way to go in this respect, but we're doing our best to convert them, one audiophile at a time. 4/22/10 A customer alerted me to a review Wayne Garcia wrote about various VPI platters and the rim drive, and this is what I wrote back to him: Steve, after starting to read Wayne's take on the platters, I came across this: That mind-blowing epiphany that I hadn't quite reached with the Rim Drive/Super Platter happened within seconds after I lowered the stylus onto the "Infernal Dance" episode of Stravinsky's Firebird (45 rpm single-sided Classic Records reissue of the incomparable Dorati/LSO Mercury Living Presence recording). That is one of my half-dozen or so favorite orchestral recordings, and I have played it countless times. This is why I have no faith in these reviewers. I played that very record not two weeks ago against a good original and it was at best passable compared to the real thing. If a reviewer cannot hear such an obvious difference in quality, why believe anything he has to say? The reason we say that no reviewer can be trusted is that you cannot find a reviewer who does not say good things about demonstrably bad and even just plain awful records. It's the only real "evidence" we have for their credibility, and the evidence is always damning. I want a reviewer who knows better than to play a bad record and tell us about it. Then I might believe what he has to say. Best, TP 02/25/10 How to tell a Hot Stamper copy of Songs from the Big Chair The sound of most copies is aggressive, compressed, hard, harsh and thin. What do you expect? The album is digitally recorded. Of course it sounds that way. Analog Sound? Say Wha? But wait! Both sides here have smooth, sweet, analog richness and spaciousness I didn't think was possible for this recording. The bass is full and punchy. When it really starts cooking, like in the louder, more dynamic sections of Shout or Head Over Heels, it doesn't get harsh and abrasive like practically every other copy I've heard. It's got energy and life, and it gets loud when it needs to without making your ears bleed. There is wonderful transparency and presence in the vocals that I've never heard before, not to mention a really deep soundstage. This copy trounced nearly all of the other pressings we played in terms of bringing the music to life while still keeping the aggressiveness of the presentation under control. Listen to the opening of I Believe, track one on side two. So spacious and three dimensional -- who ever heard that cut sound so natural? Not me, and I've played dozens of these over the years. The Secret Ingredient There is one quality that the best copies always have and that the worst copies always lack: Frequency Extension, especially on the top end. When you get a copy like this one, with superb extension up top, the grit and edge on the highs almost disappears. You can test for that quality on side one very easily with the percussive opening to Shout. If the harmonics and air are present at the opening, you are very likely hearing a top quality copy. The top end on this side one was positively silky. Add deep well-defined bass and you have a New Wave Rock Record par excellence. 08/19/09 We just finished listening to one of our all time favorite hard-rockin' albums, Straight Shooter, our first shootout since way back in January of '08, and what we were hearing this time around BLEW OUR MINDS. This record got a whole lot better over the course of the last twenty months or so. I'll go out on a limb here and say that the drum sound on this record is the most present, punchy and realistic I have ever heard on a record. I saw a friend's band play recently in a small club and remember thinking how amazingly punchy the snare sounded (with the sound coming from the live instrument itself and the club's speakers) and this record has that kind of drum sound!. There's nothing like live music -- everybody knows that -- but good copies of this album get you a whole lot closer than I ever expected to get. It's a classic case of We Was Wrong. Last time around we wrote "I don't think you'll ever find a copy of this album that qualifies as a True Demo Disc, but make no mistake: on the right pressing there's magic in the grooves." We was wrong: It is a true Demo Disc. (On our system anyway. Our stereo is all about playing records like this, and playing them at good loud levels as nature -- and the artists themselves -- intended.) Next time we revamp our Top 100 List this sucker is going on it, right next to its older brother, the first Bad Company album. 08/19/09 continued We put up some Hot Stampers of the famous Ry Cooder Jazz album today so I thought I would share with you a little checklist we made up from our notes that we use to help separate the Hot Stampers from the Also-Rans. Hot Stamper Checklist Side one is As Good As It Gets (AGAIG) with unbelievable Master Tape Sound -- open, transparent, lively, rich and tonally correct from top to bottom. Most copies suffer from a lack of extension on the top and the bottom, but not this bad boy. It's got the solid bass and the open highs we know should be there. The brass is full-bodied and free of that smeary quality that ruins so many copies. Ry's vocals are present, not veiled and distant, another persistent shortcoming of copies of the album we played. The sound of the stringed instruments (too many to name!) is Right On The Money, with just the right balance of pluck and body. If there is any smearing of transients on this record you will hear it right off the bat. Maybe one out of ten copies manages to get the transients right on either side, and this copy was a touch lacking in that very respect on side two, which is why we downgraded it half a plus to A++ to A+++. Other than that it was doing EVERYTHING right. Last but not least -- we are audiophiles after all -- check out how big, wide, deep and spacious the soundfield is. This copy is 3-D like nobody's business. If your copy has all these qualities, or even most of them, you already have a Hot Stamper and sure don't need to buy one from us! If you think you do have such a copy, drop us a line with your stamper numbers. We know them well and would be interested in knowing yours if you like your copy. Almost all Warner Brothers records from this era are either LW, JW or WW followed by a number. 08/03/09 We're sorry to report that the wickedly engrossing twelve pages of invective aimed at Hot Stampers in general and at me personally have come to an end, stopped by a moderator who summed it up rather nicely this way: "Thread has rapidly turned from a discussion about hot stampers to a non-stop vilification of a single individual, and has now gone into questioning the policies of another forum. 'All Audio, No Attitude' indeed." Even though it's at the top of every page I must confess I had completely failed to notice their motto. Allow me to offer one that seems a better fit: All Opinion, Little Evidence We talk a lot on our site about the need for basing your audio -- whether it be equipment, records, tweaks, cleaning methods or any of the myriad other appurtenances associated with our hobby -- on evidence. In other words, don't believe what you read, believe what you hear. Don't take anything on faith, find out for yourself. To take just one obvious example. I've never been much interested in the putative electromagnetic properties of audiophile wires. I have no background in electrochemistry, electromagnetism or electro-anything-else and therefore have, as a practical matter, no way to judge if such claims have any real scientific merit. But I do have two working ears, and they require no understanding of any theory whatsoever. The wire either sounds good or it does not. Why it should sound good is simply not relevant to the question of whether it does or not. Hot Stampers - We Have No Theory The same is true of Hot Stampers. We don't know why they sound good. We don't pretend to know. Other audiophiles -- Fremer included, click here for his explanation -- will tell you they know exactly why some records sound better than others, this, without an iota of evidence to back it up. Not a shred, not a smidgen, none whatsoever. (Theory of course is not the right word, a theory being an explanation based on hard evidence that accounts for a preponderance of the available facts. What they actually have is an untested hypothesis, untested because they have not bothered to test it, testing being so much more work that typing.) We have no theory, and we don't need one. Hot Stampers either deliver the sound we promised or they do not. We tested them (we call it "playing the record"), we analyzed the evidence (we call it "listening") and we reported our findings (we call it "describing the record and listing it on the site"). If when you test it - by playing it on your rig, whatever that may be -- your findings do not comport with ours - it doesn't sound as good to you as it did to us -- you get your money back. Simple as that. And you certainly don't need us to "sell" you on the idea that no two records sound the same. You can easily run that experiment yourself. (Some Audiokarma members do just that and we say more power to them.) In a recent commentary for an Ambrosia album we wrote: The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo. Nobody, but nobody, who takes the time to perform that little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are on about. Or you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world, the ones who don't know about pressing variations for records and CDs. Some very large percentage of that group also doesn't want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning why such variations can't really amount to much -- this without ever doing a single shootout!. Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything -- you know the kind -- and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even their own two ears. But shooting out multiple pressings of records is work, sometimes hard and frustrating work. You can't do that kind of work and type on a keyboard at the same time. It's not about sitting at a computer and opining. It's about sitting in a listening chair and gathering evidence that can actually back up all that opining. If you haven't done the work you should have nothing to say about the subject until after you have done the work. You can't really talk about the results of an experiment you haven't run, can you? In Defense of the "Beginner Audiophile" Speaking of shootouts, one of our good customers wrote in to tell us of a shootout he did recently. His story. In defense of the beginner audiophile: I am a spoiled owner of many of your Hot Stamper LPs. (So please don’t tell anyone where I live!) You endlessly bash us newbies as not being able to tell the difference in sound between two sides of a record. Fair enough – usually we can’t. In our defense, it is very difficult to tell differences between two sides of an album if BOTH sides sound like s__t! Where I come from this is the norm; two crappy sides. To illustrate: Months ago you put up several Hot Stampers of Zuma. When I opened the mailing, the Hot ones were already sold. So I decided to try the Better Records approach and purchased ten copies of Neil Young’s Zuma to do a weekend shootout. (six originals, two early pressings, two reissues) I would have been happy with a Hot side one, but no. Twenty sides of vinyl yielded: two Side Ones with an A rating and a single Side Two with an A+++ rating. That’s three good sides and seventeen crappy sides. All for $182 plus fourteen hours of comparison listening, with no money back guarantee, etc. I guess it helps to already know the good stampers to look for! By the way, I’m still looking for that magical side one… Cheers! Chris L For the whole Audiokarma Hot Stamper story click here. Another thread was started about Hot Stampers on Vinyl Asylum which appears to be a bit more civil (so far anyway, except for the part about the screaming dorks). My thanks go to one of our good customers who posted as follows: and like many times before i post to all of you screaming dorks about my ongoing positive experiences with Tom and Better Records. I have been buying hot stampers for over 5 years and they are without a doubt the most valuable pieces in my audio existence. The hundreds of records i have bought from Tom sound wonderful and beat the pants off of other pressings i have collected over the years. A small example is The Who's album Tommy. I have 12 other copies, half of them are original UK Trak copies with unique numbers(one is number 138). While i managed to find a good one on my own, Tom's hot stamper beat it to death. I spent years and way to much money trying to find a great copy. This story can be repeated many times with other records. He gathers 10, 20, 30 or more good copies of an album and plays all of them (after a serious cleaning) many times, whittling them down to the winners, pretty straight forward. think about this, is the music itself not the most important thing we own as audio people? Does it not make sense to buy the best quality we can? you do with equipment, and then play milk toast remastered crap. and yes, you need a good system to appreciate a lot of his offerings. ok, now start your rants! 08/01/09 From our review of a Hot Stamper pressing of Hatari High Fidelity What do we love about these Living Stereo Hot Stamper pressings? The timbre of every instrument is Hi-Fi in the best sense of the word. The lovely sound of the instruments in Mancini's arrangements are reproduced in Living Stereo with remarkable fidelity. Now that's what I call Hi-Fi, not the kind of Phony BS Audiophile Sound that passes for Hi-Fidelity these days. There's no boosted top, there's no bloated bottom, there's no sucked-out midrange. There's no added digital reverb (Patricia Barber, Diana Krall, et al.). Furthermore, the microphones are not fifty feet away from the musicians (Water Lily); neither are they inches away (Three Blind Mice). This is Hi-Fidelity for those who recognize Real HI-Fi when they hear it. I'm pretty sure our customers do, and if any of you out there pick this one up you should get a real kick out of it! 07/25/09 Audio Cults Sometime in the mid-'70s I went from the RTR 280DR to Fulton's famous J Speaker, a slightly larger and certainly better version of the RTR. It was the Stereophile State-of-the-Art Cost-No-Object speaker for many years, a distinction it shared with the Infinity Servo Stat 1. After that I was (unofficially, of course) a member of the Fulton cult for more than a decade, owning Fulton brand everything to the extent that it was possible, as if one company could possibly have a lock on good sound. I rail against audio cults partly because all-one-brand systems rarely sound very good, and partly because I know what it's like to "buy into" that kind of thinking instead of learning to listen critically for yourself. Let's face it, sad as it may be: most audiophiles would rather be told what sounds good than figure it out for themselves. How else to explain all the bad sounding equipment and awful audiophile records that are in most audiophile's listening rooms? I have an acquaintance who to this day is in the Audio Research cult. No matter what that company produces, he wants it: the latest version, the new and improved whatever it is. This to me is bad audio if not outright insanity. I haven't liked their gear since I got rid of my SP3-A-1 (which was wonderful and got me even more heavily into audio), but seriously, must all their products be the best? Surely somebody somewhere makes a better sounding something. Not when you're in a cult they don't. You are a believer. As you may have read on the site in a few hundred places, we are not concerned with anything about a record -- who made it, how it was made, when it was made -- except for the sound. The sound is EVERYTHING. This is what being a skeptic is all about -- judging the record by the grooves, just the grooves and nothing but the grooves. The same is true for the equipment we own and the equipment we sell. We like the stuff we sell, which explains why we carry so little. Most equipment doesn't sound good to us, or we have no way to audition it properly, so we stick with what we know works. If it works for us it should work for you. (We can't really know what our records sound like on any system outside of our own, but the people who buy our Hot Stampers seems to really like them, so we have to assume they must sound pretty good, or at least better than what they have. We sure get a lot of nice letters about them, for what that's worth.) 07/22/09 Audio Bad Karma Some Forum guys at audiokarma.org are raking us over the coals these days, questioning the legitimacy of our so-called "hot stampers". If you have an hour to kill check it out. Even though they are calling me every name in the book I find their comments to be so interesting and entertaining as to be positively addicting; I can't stop myself from going back time and time again to see what new nonsense awaits me. No wonder people love these forums -- you get to rant about things you know nothing about! What's more fun than that? Here are some older threads for those who can't get enough Hot Stamper bashing. Please to enjoy! http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=127992 http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/sho....php?p=2539621 http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=185696 And here's one from Audio Asylum along the same lines: http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/t.mpl?f=vinyl&m=690524 There aren't any on Hoffman's forum because discussion of this subject is verboten. If you know of any more threads where we get dragged through the internet mud, send me the links, I'll put them right here in the blog for everyone to read. They are a hoot! As I noted in an email to a good customer who stood up for us: [A] pretty hopeless group over there don't you think? Pioneer turntables? In this day and age? What time warp did these guys fall through anyway? It's as if the last thirty years never happened. He noted in reply Yeah, I rarely have time to look at online forums, partly because I am too busy and would rather spend what little free time I have listening to music or spending time with the family, and partly because the forums are infested with losers with far more testosterone than brainpower. There is a famous passage, "There is none so blind as he that will not see." I doubt that most of these experts could hear the differences between recordings if you pointed it out to them. So true. We wrote a commentary about the very subject entitled Confirmation Bias - Why You Can't Hear What You Don't Want to Hear which went a little something like this: Let's face it: Hot Stampers do not exist for most audiophiles. They simply don't have the system (power, equipment, room, tweaks) to bring them to life. Or the trained ear to recognize one if they heard it. Most analog-oriented audiophiles are quite happy with the sound of Heavy Vinyl pressings, the kind of BS Vinyl that we regularly trash around here. Those records set a pathetically low standard for sound quality, to our ears anyway, so if the typical audiophile is happy with them, what does that tell you about his audio chain and his critical listening skills? But perhaps you may have noticed, as I have, that most audio skeptics do not go out of their way to prove themselves wrong. And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call Confirmation Bias practically guarantees that you can't hear something you don't want to hear. Which is all well and good. At Better Records we don't let that slow us down. Instead we happily go about our business Turning Skeptics Into Believers (one record at a time of course), taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any audiophile LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason. (They're usually so bad it's actually fun to hear how screwy they sound when played back correctly. Who knows -- on a '70s-era Technics turntable running into a Japanese receiver they might sound great. When we buy old audiophile collections that's the sort of table we find collecting dust along with the vinyl. Might be just the system you need to get them to sound their "best".) Another one of these guys took us to task for many of the same reasons, and like the fools we are, we replied to his silly charges, if only in the hope of clearing up a few matters concerning Hot Stampers that might be helpful to those visiting the site. When the Facts Change We Change Our Minds Along with Them which notes that I raved about MOFIs I liked for years, but I also pointed out how awful many of them were. I have catalogs going back to the '80s in which I discuss what a piece of trash the MoFi of Katy Lied is. I started this business selling nothing but audiophile pressings -- as embarrassing as it is to admit it, those actually were the kinds of records I honestly thought sounded good back then. As time went on I liked those audiophile pressings less and less and started selling other kinds of records I liked better -- domestic and import pressings early on, then heavy vinyl as it became more and more available. When DCC came along, again, I honestly thought their pressings were the best. As my equipment and my listening skills improved I found I liked their LPs less and less, and I noticed that the more I played them, the less I liked practically all heavy vinyl pressings. At the same time I started to find that I liked the sound of regular, non-audiophile pressings more and more. There are dozens of commentaries on the site that address this transformation. In our opinion these are simply the stages that any audiophile must pass through in order to recognize, and then acquire, better sounding recordings. You learn from your mistakes. There's plenty about that process on the site as well. It's how we got to where we are. We're not the least bit ashamed of it. On the contrary, we're proud of all the hard work we've done to get to this point. As for Hot Stampers, the guys on AudioKarma were pretty worked up over the idea that we used to like one stamper and now we like a different one. Can you imagine? When you have a thirty-year-old turntable and a system to match, it's clear that words like change, growth -- dare I even utter the word progress -- do not carry much weight in your world. This ties in perfectly to a Hot Stamper listing I just ran into today for one of our favorite Supertramp albums. It's all about the stereo, and the ears, I had in 1977. Check it out. Supertramp Even In The Quietest Moments... After coming up empty-handed in our last shootout for this album, we are thrilled to report that we have finally located a few great copies. We wrote up this album in 2005 as a Hot Stamper Stalled listing; we just couldn't find anything that really sounded right to us. The imports were a smeary mess, the half-speed was and is a complete joke (we used to like it but that just goes to show how wrong you can be), and the domestic copies were so grainy and phony-sounding we knew there was no way to make the case that this was some sort of audiophile recording. As is so often the case, it takes two things to show you the error of your ways. One is the right stereo. It has to be able to show you what is really on the record you're playing, and this means a high quality front end; the best electronics, speakers and all the rest, not to mention a good room, treatments, clean electiricity and too many other things to get into here. The second is the right record, properly cleaned of course. You may have put together the best stereo in the world but that won't keep a bad pressing from making this music sound awful, and the world seems to be full of bad pressings of Even in the Quietest Moments. But this is such wonderful music we had to keep trying. I grew up on this album; the first Supertramp album I even bought was Crisis? What Crisis?, which I quickly fell in love with, and it wasn't long before this one followed in 1977. It too became a staple of my musical diet. Man I played this record till the grooves were smooth. I thought the sound was killer at the time too! Crisis was a demo disc at my house and this was right up there with it. Now the obvious question is, did I have a good sounding copy, or did my stereo not reveal to me the shortcomings of my LP? Or maybe my ears were not well enough trained to hear what was wrong. Those of you who have been doing this for a long time know the answer: any or all of the above, and there's no way to know which. 1977 Ears Even if you could recreate your old stereo and room, and find your original copy, there's one thing you can't do, and that's listen to it with your 1977 ears. Every time you play a record and listen to it critically your ears get better at their job. If you do a lot of critical listening your ears should be very good by now; you no doubt listen for things you never listened for before. This is simply the way it works; you don't really have to try that hard to get better, it happens quite naturally. So now the half speed sucks when it used to sound good. (Such is the case with practically all audiophile records; the better you get at listening the worse they sound.) And now, with your better stereo and better ears, when you drop the needle on some copy you picked up of Even in the Quietest Moments, expecting to hear the glorious sound you remember from your youth, it's a huge letdown -- so grainy, thin, and edgy, with blurry bass. On top of that the whole sordid mess is stuck somewhere back behind the speakers, like the sound you hear from an old cassette. It's not the record you remember, that's for sure. Ah, but we here at Better Records have the answer: a Hot Stamper copy backed with our 100% Money Back Guarantee. If this copy doesn't sound at least as good as you had hoped, send it back for a full refund! 06/24/09 Hey, here's something that would be good to put in the blog, a place where the average CD buyer would never be caught, dead or in any other state. The new Hoffman mastered gold CD of The Band I cracked open was not exactly pleasing to the ear, to my ear anyway. Bass shy, lean and clean. not at all what the good original pressings sound like. Those have a ton of weight down low, it's the one thing that that recording really gets right. To take it away may please most CD-loving audiophiles, a fairly clueless bunch who have nothing but the artificial sound of CDs by which to judge other artificial sounding CDs, but it's a bad idea for those of us who actually have good turntables and good records to play. I have no use for the thing, even in the car. It's not right. Who wants to listen to something that's not right? 06/05/09 We're spending much of our free time these days finding and dressing up records for our new Heavy Vinyl Scorecard section. I managed to find this old dog under a rock and thought I would share my thoughts about it with you all. Toward the end of the commentary we tossed this lovely brickbat at the label who foisted this piece of trash on a (still!) unsuspecting audiophile public. Chesky is one of the WORST AUDIOPHILE LABELS in the history of the world. Their recordings are so artificial and "wrong" that they defy understanding. That some audiophiles actually buy into this junk sound is equal parts astonishing and depressing. Their own records are a joke, and their remasterings of the RCA Living Stereo catalog are an abomination. If there is a more CLUELESS audiophile label on the planet I don't know who it could be, and I sure don't want to find out. While we're digging around through old listings we often run into audiophile records that belong in our Hall of Shame, so check it out to see the latest entries. Of course we would much rather find records to put in our Hall of Fame -- and we do -- a section that currently numbers well over three hundred titles. Hard to imagine it will get much past four or five hundred at the rate we are adding new titles. A few new titles a month is really quite a lot considering that all the best records we know of from the last forty years or so have already been done. And some of the records that we do end up doing, Spike to pick a recent example, bomb so badly with our customers that we can probably never do them again. Not one sold. We love the album; it's one of Elvis' best, but apparenty the rest of you out there don't share our enthusiasm for The Beloved Entertainer. Such a good album, can't understand it. 05/24/09 In our review for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road we mentioned one quality we find unappealing, a quality that causes us to lower the grade of the Hot Stamper pressing in question. This side one was not to our liking. The weakest side here, rating A to A+. Good presence and breathy vocals but no real weight to the sound. (It sounds too much like a modern reissue; they tend to lack weight and be "clean" sounding. We take serious points off when records sound modern, a sound the current spate of reissues cannot get away from and one of the main reasons we carry fewer and fewer of them every day. Not our thing, sorry. All the other major audiophile record dealers sell that junk, so if you like that sound you will have no trouble finding plenty of titles that offer it. It frankly bores us to tears. Why do audiophiles like the sound of records that sound like good CDs? We like to play records that sound like good records. It's the sound that's so real that it makes us forget we're even listening to a record.) 05/10/09 We've taken a new approach to Debunking The Audiophile LP. We started putting Heavy Vinyl pressings in a section we call the Heavy Vinyl Scorecard, wherein we judge their sonics and give them appropriate letter grades. Painful though it is, we are committed to making more of an effort to evaluate the tons of Heavy Vinyl that's being pressed these days. Sure, most of it's junk, just as you would expect, but you can't know for sure until you play them. (So far the results for the latest batch have been fairly dismal as you will see when you visit the section.) We put off buying a copy of The Doors Rhino Box Set until just last week. Here is what we said about it in June of last year, in this very blog. I've noticed lots of new, rather expensive LP Box Sets coming out these days. Some of you are no doubt wondering what they sound like. I'm curious myself. That curiosity is unlikely to be satisfied any time soon however, because as of now we have no plans whatsoever to spend a nickel on a single one of them. When was the last time any of those collections sounded good? It hasn't just been years; it's been decades. We have very little faith in modern mastering techniques, less and less as the years roll on, so I'm afraid we're just going to have let our prejudices get the better of us regarding all those fancy Heavy Vinyl pressings and take a pass. Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but it's unarguably cheaper to stay ignorant of these new Box Sets. They cost an arm and a leg, they never sound good, and we want nothing to do with them. We are still in the process of working through the set, so watch for our commentary coming soon. In the meantime, just for fun I would like to quote a famous know-it-all record reviewer who said this of the set: "First of all, for the most part, the box set's packaging is truly D-luxe and the labels and inserts accurate to the originals." He went on to point out that one of the covers was originally textured but the reissue's is not, ignoring the fact that two of the labels are clearly the wrong labels, appropriate to reissues, not originals. If you have the set (and I sympathize with you if you do) and you know much about Doors records you should be able to spot the imposters immediately. This is rank incompetence of the worst sort. I expect this reviewer to be wrong about the sound -- he almost always is -- but not to know which are the right labels for such famous albums is fairly surprising. Said reviewer regularly goes to great lengths to point out how original his personal copies are, yet somehow he doesn't seem to know much about Elektra record labels from this era, casting serious doubt obout how original his originals really are. Not that we care. Original means nothing to us. We care -- first, foremost and almost exclusively -- with sound quality. Since some originals have the best sound quality and some do not, we don't judge records by their "originality". We don't judge them by any criterion other than their sound. If you want to buy original pressings that's your business. If you want to buy the best sounding pressings, regardless of their labels, country of origin or anything else, that's ours. 05/09/09 This is some advice we gave a customer who had just bought a record cleaning machine and was going to go on a tear cleaning his whole record collection -- many of which were still sealed -- to find the Hot Stampers lurking within. We explained that this was not such a good idea: Since the average record sounds pretty average, and sealed records are unknowns in terms of pressing, mastering, etc., I would say it's always a good move to do a quick needle drop on a record before bothering to clean it. The average record isn't really worth cleaning, because it doesn't really sound very good, so why waste the time? This is what we do around here; few records get cleaned before we know if they sound any good, and most don't. Once you figure out what's good and what's not, you can target better sounding records. This process typically takes about twenty years, but there's no time like the present! If you want to skip all that time and effort, we are happy to get you the good stuff and save you from the bad. This is the service we offer. And one more thing: until you get your system cooking and really set up right, make a point not to buy any audiophile pressing of any kind. Once your stereo is working those pressings will show themselves to be pretty sorry and you don't want to have too much invested in that trash once you know how bad it can really be and have to get rid of it. I've had many many customers complain that they wasted so much money on those kinds of records and now don't know what to do with them. A cautionary tale that every audiophile should be familiar with if they haven't lived through it already. The better your system the worse they sound; this is the key to understanding how you are doing in the hobby. When those audiophile pressings really stink and your plain old records soar, you are on the right road! 04/12/09 The following is a sample from a commentary that we are working on presently, entitled: Outliers & Out of this World Sound - Why Four or Five Copies Won't Get You There Conventional Wisdom Any reason you like for why a record doesn't sound good is as valid as any other, so you might as well pick one you are comfortable with; they're all equally meaningless. Of course the reverse of this is just as true: why a record sounds good is anyone's guess, and a guess is all it can ever be. People like having answers, and audiophiles are no different from other people in this respect. Since there are no answers to any of these questions, answers in this case being defined as demonstrable conclusions based on evidence gained through the use of the scientific method, most people, audiophiles included, are happy -- if not better off -- making up the answers with which they are most comfortable. This is precisely why the term Conventional Wisdom was coined, to describe the easy answers people all-too-readily adopt in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually finding out the truth. 04/06/09 One of our good customers, Ed, had a comment or two regarding the issue of Original versus Reissue he would like to share with you all, as follows. Tom, To further substantiate your comments on the relevance of stamper matrix numbers, I recently found a copy of a popular and often well recorded female popular singer of the mid-seventies. The stamper numbers were 1A and 2B and the surface was virtually mint. So I was very excited for it's potential as I put the "needle" down on the first groove. The immediate feedback......good sound.....no magic. So I went into my collection and extracted my prior copy and there it was, tubey, harmonics, extension, grainlessness, dynamics and everything you want in creating the original event and having the singer "in the room". Soooooo what was the stamper........ It was a reissue that was a "saw cut" discount lp with no relevant stamper information on the dead wax other than the album number hand scribed. As you have said many times, it's not just the stamper number that is predictive. You have to wade through copies and hope for a great one and it costs a lot to do this in money and time. My conclusion about vinyl is that the sound of a particular lp can range from the sound of a bad CD all the way to the sound of a great master tape. And that is just amazing! EdZ 03/14/09 Discussion of some of our recurring themes crop up in this listing for one of my favorite records of all time: Commoners Crown Our Guarantee I can guarantee you there is no CD on the planet that could ever do this recording justice. The Hot Stamper pressings have MAGIC that just can't be captured on one of them there silvery (slivery?) discs. I realized during our shootout that THIS is the sound that you never hear on CD, ever. I've got five hundred of the damn things and none of them can touch the sound of a record like this. That British Sound The sound is rich and full in the best tradition of English Rock, with no trace of the transistory grain that domestic rock pressings so often suffer from. The bass is deep, punchy, full up in the mix and correct. There's plenty of it too, so those of you with less than well controlled bass will have a tough time with this one. But never fear; it's a great record to tweak with and perfect for evaluating equipment. This is some of the best Rock Bass I have ever heard, bar none. There's more to it than that, obviously, but if I had only one record to demo bass with, hard to imagine I could pick a better one than this. Hi-Fi Free Speaking of freedom from grain, notice how there is nothing -- not one instrument or voice -- that has a trace of hi-if-ishness. No grain, no sizzle, no zippy top, no bloated bottom, nothing that reminds you of the phony sound you hear on audiophile records at every turn. Silky sweet and tubey-magical, THIS IS THE SOUND WE LOVE. Bad Female Vocals and Good We bash crap like Diana Krall and Patricia Barber because we've heard records like this and know that THIS is what a good female vocal recording sounds like. Big Speaker Sound We ask that you not buy this record unless you have a BIG pair of dynamic speakers or horns. This demanding and energetic music simply cannot be reproduced otherwise. We want this AMAZING DEMO DISC QUALITY recording to go to a good home, where the sound can be appreciated, its glory and power intact. Nothing else will do justice to this music. 03/13/09 The Best Record Dean Martin Ever Made - Dream With Dean! This Reprise Tri-Color Steamboat Label Stereo LP has EXCELLENT SOUND. It's the first amazing sounding quiet original stereo pressing we've come across in ages, the first one to make it to the site since 2006. It's almost impossible to find quiet copies of this record, and when you do, half of them don't sound good, so this is a rare copy indeed. Without a doubt this is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet behind him doing standards. On the best copies the immediacy is absolutely mind-blowing. It's a shame that there aren't more Frank Sinatra records that sound like this! The sound is wonderfully rich, warm, and full-bodied. The vocals are breathy with lots of texture, and they've got the kind of presence that puts Deano right there in your living room. (Lock up the liquor cabinet!) 03/04/09 Digital Reverb? Ugh. (Some commentary from our most recent Hot Stamper shootout for Sergio Mendes' Equinox) Female Vocals   We audiophiles love female vocals, always have; it's a sound that a high end stereo can reproduce very well. But why do some audiophiles listen to poorly recorded junk like Patricia Barber and Diana Krall? Their recordings are DRENCHED in digital reverb; who is his right mind wants to hear the sound of digital reverb? Rickie Lee Jones may not be my favorite female vocal of all time, but at least you can make the case for it as a Well Recorded Album; it's worlds better than anything either of the two artists mentioned above have ever done. The MOFI pressing of Alison Krauss (5276) is a disaster in the vocal department too. Audiophiles for some reason never seem to notice how bad she sounds on that record. Can't for the life of me understand why. Any of the good Sergio Mendes records will show you female vocals that are practically without equal. Our best Hot Stampers bring the exquisite vocal harmonies of Lani Hall (aka Mrs. Herb Alpert) and Janis Hansen right into your living room. Who can put a price on that? (We can, apparently; all three copies we put up tonight were priced.) 03/01/09 When the Facts Change We Change Our Minds Along with Them This very long commentary, linked above, was written in response to a letter which starts out tantalizingly enough: 6 pts why we do not genuflect and kiss the ring of the all knowledgeable Tom Port Please take the time to read it. There's some good general audio and record biz philosophy discussed. The premise of the letter writer's argument was that we keep changing our minds when it comes to what really are the best sounding records depending on what we have to sell at the time. Changing our minds about which records sound the best is something we do every day. We don't want to know which pressings sound the best before we play them; we want to find out which pressings sound the best by actually playing them. Big difference. JK Galbraith had a wry take on it: "In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof." We, not being capable of that kind of succinctness, wrote: Inconsistent? If that means I've changed my opinions concerning the records I sell over the course of the last twenty years, guilty as charged. Years ago when John Kenneth Galbraith was accused of changing a position he had previously held, he famously replied "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" He later summed it up nicely this way: "In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof." This is why we proudly display our We Was Wrongsection on the site. During the course of our Hot Stamper shootouts and other critical evaluations, it has come to pass that, upon playing some records that we used to think sounded good, we found out that -- wait for it -- We Was Wrong. For whatever reason they just weren't sounding so good to us anymore. We felt no need to hide the fact that we were wrong. There's no shame attached to it. We had simply learned something. And, being good Audiophile Citizens of the World, we promptly set about explaining in our Hot Stamper commentary what it was we had learned, so that other audiophiles could learn too. The fact is, there is only one way to learn about records, and that's to play them. When records you used to like don't sound good to you anymore, you can either pretend they do, or admit you were wrong. We find the latter approach much more rewarding. We're not trying to fool anyone, least of all ourselves. What we're really trying to do is get at one very simple truth: which pressing sounds the best? If our efforts to answer that question require us to change our minds, we change them. The benefit of this approach is obvious: you end up listening to better sounding records. If that's not what interests you, you may be on the wrong site. In my opinion, although I didn't say so in my response to the letter writer's six points, what guys like this are trying to do is pretty obvious. They don't want to pay the price for our records, and they don't want to -- or can't -- do the work themselves to find their own Hot Stampers. So they pretend there's no such thing, and that we obviously don't know what we're talking about. Of course they do so without a shred of evidence to support this assertion. This is a classic case of denial. When you have no evidence to back up your position, attack the messenger, not the message. This is really no different than someone buying a cheap CD player because, let's face it, digits are digits, it's all ones and zeroes, right? This is a very good way to live if you have all of your senses turned off and don't plan on letting the outside world interfere with your thought processes. Those of us with two working ears know that it may theoretically be true that it's all ones and zeroes, but as a practical matter the numbers are much more complicated than that. Really, there is nothing in most people's lives that's nearly as complex, counterintuitive and mysterious as the sound of their stereo. Figuring out how to make mine sound good has taken me about thirty five years so far, and I learn new things almost every week. If you want to pretend all records sound the same, that's your business. Knowing that none of them do is ours. 02/21/09 Here are some comments from our most recent Stand Up shootout, one in which we were wrong and then wrong again (I think). If memory serves, I originally thought the Pink Label pressings were the best, then found some Sunrays that beat them all hands down, and now have found a Pink Label pressing with a side two that vanquished all comers including three Sunray pressings. Which is not to say that the next Sunray would be even better on side two than the Pink label pressing we played, right? Right. Ultimately these shootouts have to rely on the evidence in front of us -- the actual records we have on hand to play -- and nothing else. Our memories of the sound of other copies should have no bearing. Memories are notoriously faulty, as any cognitive scientist worth his salt will tell you. And the stereo changes so much, as we continue to reap the benefits of the various and sundry revolutions that are occurring in audio, that whatever sound we heard before would not be the same sound we would hear today even if we were playing the same record. We do keep some reference records around, usually ones that have amazing sound but serious condition issues, but we didn't really have one for Stand Up. (For Tea for the Tillerman I still have the Pink Label Original I bought for $3.99 about twenty years ago. It has a scratch on the first track and is all but unsaleable because of it, so I keep it as a reference. That's the very same Pink copy that I discovered is so easily beaten by the right domestic pressings. This is actually true for most Pink Label TFTT pressings, the ones we've played anyway, but not all. There is a commentary on the site that goes into that story in some detail for those of you who are interested.) So here is our latest take on Stand Up Our last shootout for Stand Up was over a year ago, early in 2008. By some good fortune we have been able to find a number of fairly clean early British pressings, with both Pink and Sunray labels, as well as some very good sounding domestics. (Yes, they are out there. Few and far between and probably not the ones you would think to buy but out there nonetheless. Buy enough of them and clean them right and you will find some too.) We did make one very important discovery this time around. We found a Pink Label copy with a side two that beat all three of the Sunray pressings we had on hand. Here is our now somewhat mistaken commentary from the listing we did for the 2008 $750 Hot Stamper: The Sunray copies CAN and DO beat the best British originals when you get a good one, and this is a very good one. In our many (25+) years of experience with Stand Up vinyl we can tell you categorically that there is no earlier import pressing, no later import pressing, and no domestic pressing of any era that can compete with the sound of this LP. It was well over a year ago that we found the last one that sounded like this, and we don't expect to find another one anytime soon. They're a fluke. There are many sonic problems with this recording, but most of them disappear when you get a truly Hot Stamper copy like this one. Perhaps categorically was poorly chosen. One should rarely be categorical about record pressings, since one is in no position to play them all or to have perfect equipment with which to play them. Let's not worry about that now. Let's talk about Stand Up. The sound on the best copies is amazingly dynamic and powerful, yet overflowing with tubey magic. We played almost ten different copies of this record this week (February 2009), every domestic Reprise label variation and close to a half dozen Pink and Sunray label British imports. (No more German pressings for us; they never seem to cut it so we are giving up on that country for Jethro Tull. Pink Floyd and The Beatles, yes, German pressings can be amazing. But for Island label records, Gemany was just not getting good tapes, if our experience is any guide.) This copy was CLEARLY the best of the batch on side two. Side two just JUMPS TO LIFE right out of the gate. Master Tape Sound is the only way to describe it. You will simply be amazed at how good this record can sound. It belongs in our Top 100 with sound like this. 02/11/09 We did a big shootout for Tea for the Tillerman this week. It had been over a year since the last one and I'm happy to report things had changed, again: Which brings me to another point I would like to make in this commentary. It's been just over a year since we did the last big shootout for Tillerman, and in that time none of the equipment we own has changed. Added a few things (Talisman), using the Walker fluids now to clean the records, a few other tweaks here and there, but nothing that seemed at the time to make that big a difference. Big Effects But what I'm hearing on this album now is DRAMATICALLY better than what I remember. All kinds of things are happening on this album I never noticed before, happening in ways that are so much more involving and exciting than I remember. Bad memory? Who's to say? My guess: seemingly small changes over time add up to big effects in the end. This of course ties in with our Revolutionary Changes in Audio commentary. If you've been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, you are going to be hearing a Tea for the Tillerman that you never knew existed. It couldn't exist, not until something allowed you to bring it into being. That something is the work you've been doing. If you haven't been doing it, then nothing will have changed. Your only hope of hearing Tillerman better is to find a better sounding record. We're happy to help you in that regard, but there is so much you can do to help yourself. It's a positive shame if you choose to limit your musical enjoyment by ignoring the myriad ways you can improve the playback of these wonderful recordings. We can help you, or you can do it on your own, but whichever way you choose to do it, just do it. This is the record that will show you how much such changes can mean to your listening enjoyment. If any more Tillermans make it to the site, this is where you can find them. Lots of commentaries are attached to the listings that you may want to read as well. Still more from 2/11 We also did a big shootout for Nick of Time this week. Here too it had been over a year since the last one. The change in sound was every bit as extraordinary as it was for Tea, but the main point of this commentary is the ever-widening gulf between Hot Stampers (whether we find them or you find them) and the kind of Heavy Vinyl reissues that are all the rage these days. I call this one Audio Enervation. (Audio Ennui would have worked well too.) The no-longer-surprising thing about these Hot Stamper pressings is how completely they MURDER the DCC LP. Folks, it's really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound very good, but it can't compete with the best original pressings. It's missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we've discovered on these hot copies. Like practically every Heavy Vinyl record pressed at RTI, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a kind of sterility to the sound. These remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing. Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a kind of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music? You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want but they just never seem to want to come to life. We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I've seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can't begin to get her to play as loud in my livingroom as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her a great disservice. The DCC is just too damn smooth. It's an understandable approach for DCC to take, since this recording is more hyped-up than any of Bonnie's earlier work, but this album has loads of personality and nuance. Just because an album sounds polished and maybe a bit too "clean", it's foolish to think that it lacks intensity or ambition. You listen to tracks like "Thing Called Love" on the DCC, and it sounds good -- the tambourine sounds like a tambourine, the bass sounds like a bass. The problem is you don't hear the jingles of the tambourine hitting each other; the bass doesn't smack you in the chest. When these elements are veiled, the life and, for lack of a better term, the point of the music go with them. When I'm listening to Bonnie perform on a Hot Stamper pressing, I'm not merely hearing her singing the songs and nodding along with the beat, I'm being enveloped by her voice and transported to another place, as though she were in my living room, or I in her studio (Newton's third law). Although the DCC is very good, it doesn't give us enough of what we're looking for from an album like Nick of Time. It feels compromised, and you should never compromise the life of the music on an album that you love. (This is why I rail against panels and screens for speakers. Where is the life? The energy? The sound they produce bores me to tears.) 01/30/09 We had a blast shooting out Stevie Ray Vaughn's The Sky Is Crying this week and learned something quite interesting in the process: All of our side ones were Direct Metal Mastered (DMM) but only some of our side twos were. Now, there's plenty of people out there who don't buy the whole Hot Stamper thing, and we understand that skepticism. But you can't tell me that the DMM side twos sound like the regular side twos, because they obviously do not. Nothing on the cover or sleeve here lets you know which kind of pressing is inside. It's just another example of the fact that records are cut differently and sound differently, and the labels putting them out aren't concerned with consistent sound from copy to copy. They couldn't care less, and most record dealers are perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to pressing variations, even when they're as blatant as this. 01/13/09 Happy new year! Here's a report from our recent shootout for Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon: In the early rounds, we dropped the needle on a side one that sounded COMPLETELY WEIRD and WRONG. After pulling it from the turntable and inspecting the dead wax, we realized that somehow a QUAD side one had been pressed onto a standard copy with a standard Stereo side two. We didn't have any more like it, but you have to imagine that they are out there somewhere. Anyone who has doubts about the whole Hot Stamper thing should take a moment to think about that. If quality control at a major vinyl pressing plant is so poor that a Quadrophonic side one can be cut onto a regular domestic record without anyone noticing, why should we expect any kind of uniformity from records? (To answer that question briefly, we shoudn't. Dozens of years of experience have taught us that all records sound different, even seemingly identical pressings of the very same album. If they all sounded the same, we wouldn't be in business! But those of you who frequent our site know it not to be the case, and most of you know for yourselves just how bad the average record sounds -- even when the recording itself is good. How else can you explain people paying us $500 and up for rock LPs that turn up in just about every used record shop?) 10/22 Ran into this little gem whilst perusing the site, thought I would share it with you. The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed Mastered LP is not tonal incorrectness or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn't suffer from both. It's Dead As A Doornail sound, plain and simple. And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the '70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it's playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it. 10/21 More audiophile wire bashing. I did a shootout with six, count 'em, six audiophile power cables over the weekend. I took my current favorite test disc, Houses of the Holy (my copy rates about an A+ like this one), got the system all warmed up and Talisman'd and went to work. (There is a long commentary coming about this record and the important subject of favorite Test Discs. The working title is The Five Most Important Records in the World -- Don't Worry -- You Already Own Them!) Now keep in mind I have a cable I like very much for the EAR 324P phono stage and none of these pretenders could hold a candle to it. So I tried wiring up the different cables to the motor for my Aries table, which goes from the motor to the SDS. Not anywhere near the signal path, mind you. Just feeding electricity to a motor, which then is further filtered and controlled by another device. Well folks, the average audiophile power cable made such a mess of the sound that I wouldn't have recognized my own stereo. Most wires simply eliminated a goodly portion of the deepest bass. Made it disappear. Some took out the extreme highs. Tape hiss -- gone, just like that. None sounded as tonally correct from top to bottom as the wire I had, which means none of them had any business being in my stereo, which may have its faults -- it has plenty, every stereo does -- but incorrect tonality is simply not a fault I can afford, seeing as how I'm in the record judging business. There was one rather shocking finding though. One of the cables was dramatically more transparent than any of the others as well as my current favorite. I heard things in The Rain Song I never heard before. I also heard Robert Plant's voice go all "funny", which drove me crazy. This is a sound I hear a lot in audiophile systems -- super-clear, but wrong, as if nobody knows what the sound is supposed to be and the owner of the stereo just "likes" what it's doing. This is a very bad idea in audio. So now my goal is to find a cable that has the clarity in the mids and highs that I heard, without the drawbacks. Good luck to me, I'm going to need it. 10/01 I sent this email to a customer who was describing his audiophile wire to me as part of his overall system description. As you are about to see I take a very dim view of most audiophile wire. I've always wanted to write a long commentary about this subject, the title of which would be The Most Dangerous Component in Your Stereo -- Every Piece of Wire.I've probably tried more than one hundred interconnects and speaker and power cables in my day, ten times what most audiophiles have tried I would guess, and one thing I've learned -- they can really screw up a stereo if you are not careful.I have a few dozen still in my closets. And the more expensive the wire, the worse it will soundin a good system. This has been my experience over the last thirty five years. The last batch of audiophile power cords a dealer sent me -- $1000 to $1500 each -- ruined my stereo in so many fundamental ways I had to get them out of the house as fast as I could. One of these days I will tell the story of wire wars, but it will have to wait. Some cool new links to click on: Confirmation Bias -- Why You Can't Hear What You Don't Want to Hear and Don't Kid Yourself -- Records Are Not That Kind of Investment and Audio Weekend Warriors and Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale and Sound Improving Devices In which we point out our favorites from top to bottom. and this Dillards album listing, which tells a little of the Herb Pederson story and hearing that real Bluegrass sound from about six feet away, live. 9/24 Some cool new links to click on: The Turn Up Your Volume Test and What We Listen For And here's a DCC LP that we loved recently. We wrote: Whenever we do a shootout for the Eagles or Doors or Bonnie Raitt or Queen or you name it, the DCC pressing almost always gets a serious drubbing from our listening panel. Not so here. This one took TOP HONORS against the other copies we played it against and was head and shoulders better sounding in practically every way. Do all the copies of the DCC sound this good? I would bet money right now they don't. Folks, I'm guessing this is a Hot Stamper. It was pressed just right and all the Hoffman magic is in these grooves. But it's just a guess, and I could easily be wrong. If you have a few copies at home, shoot them out! You don't have a bunch of these? Me neither, so no shootout will probably ever be done. This album is just too rare and pricey these days. Bottom line: We know a good record when we hear one, and this is a very good record indeed! Bravo to Steve for a job well done. 9/20 We have a new section on the site which we created in order to be able to keep a healthy portion of the Audiophile Reviewer bashing we do around here in one easy to find location. We call it Reviewing the Reviewers. I could literally spend most of my day combing through the audiophile rags and websites looking for favorable, and therefore mistaken, reviews of audiophile pressings, new and old, and if I had an unlimited amount of free time I would certainly consider it a public service to do so. (It would take me months to do the Fremer site alone.) But seeing how we are in the business of selling Better Records, not the business of criticizing Bad Records and those who like them, we can only devote a limited amount of time to the pursuit, as entertaining as it may be. But do yourself a favor. Don't buy any new Heavy Vinyl pressing based on a review you read elsewhere. It's very unlikely to be a good record. If you hear a copy at a friend's house or stereo store, okay, I can see that. But to buy one based on some reviewer's opinion -- a person whose stereo may be a godawful mess-- is just asking for trouble. 9/19 Guess those badly recorded Buffalo Springfield records from the '60s weren't so badly recorded after all. Here's some commentary from last week's shootout.                                                                                                                 It Only Takes One Badly mastered, badly pressed, yes, we can all agree on that. But all it takes is an amazing sounding copy like this one to disprove the theory that these are bad recordings -- an inconvenient truth shall we call it? -- and we found more than one. The proposition that this band's records can't sound good has officially and definitively been falsified. We proved it with the album Buffalo Springfield Again and now we've done the same for Last Time Around. And you can take that to the bank. 9/15 This commentary about Hot Stamper Numbers concerns Record Collectors and their silly pursuit of Collectible Records which you may find of interest. It's easy to be a collector; you just collect stuff. To get your stereo and room to sound good, and 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. 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 "collector 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. 9/7 Ran into this commentary today from way back in 2005 about the first record to ever make it to the site priced at -- wait for it -- Five Hundred Dollars. We were testing the waters with that price; to be honest, we had no idea anybody would shell out that kind of bread for an old used rock record, the kind that can be found on ebay for a tenth of that. But it turns out that the water was and is just fine. We think records that sound that good are worth every penny of what we charge (and more, now that top dollar titles sell for hundreds more than that) and we are greatly gratified to know that some of you feel the same. The bit below from the same listing takes a shot at -- what else? -- Heavy Vinyl and its ilk: I can tell you in all honesty that I have NEVER heard better sound than I heard last night while doing these comparisons. It is my contention that there is no audiophile pressing on the face of the Earth that can compete with the best sounding original Teaser and the Firecats. Of ANY music. This is a sound I simply don't experience when playing modern mastered records. There is a magic in these grooves that seems to be impossible to recapture. Perhaps one day I'll be proven wrong, but that day is not yet upon us. Until then, this is the king. Last night I listened to at least fifteen of the best pressings of this album that I had available to me -- we're talking some heavy hitters here, all top quality British and American original pressings -- and this pressing took top honors. In my opinion, it's one of a handful of the best records we have EVER put up on the site. It is without a doubt the best sounding record I have ever played. In that same listing I took Acoustic Sounds to task for defrauding their customers: I remember 15 years ago when Acoustic Sounds was selling the then in-print 25th Anniversary Island pressing (10U stampers as I recall) for $15, claiming that it was a TAS list record. If you've ever heard that pressing, you know it has no business going anywhere near a SuperDisc List. It's mediocre at best and has virtually none of the magic of the good original pressings. I refused to sell it back in those days, for no other reason than it's far from a Better Record. I don't like misrepresenting records and I don't like ripping off my customers. That pressing was a fraud and I was having none of it. And now I would like to give a shout out to my man, Harry Pearson, for putting one of the worst MoFis of all time on his so-called Super Disc List, which, as we all know, is still the delight of nitwits around the world. In case you don't already know, one of the worst sounding, if not THE WORST SOUNDING VERSION OF ALL TIME, is the Mobile Fidelity Anadisq pressing that came out in the '90s. If you own that record, you really owe it to yourself to pull it out and play it. It's just a mess and it should sound like a mess, whether you have anything else to compare it to or not. 9/3 During our latest shootout we found that L&M's Sittin' Inpresented us with a record that broke the rules, a record that has tonality issues but manages to overcome them. We wrote: This LP is the perfect example of a record that is not tonally perfect, yet has other qualities that far outweigh this otherwise serious shortcoming. This record has the LIFE OF THE MUSIC in its grooves like nobody's business. Since the album was sounding so much better than it had any right to, we took the opportunity to discuss how better stereos and Hot Stampers have really changed the game for albums that you might think you know well, when of course you can't know any such thing. Things change, sometimes dramatically, and if you're doing your audio right, they change for the better. We went on to say: The Letters section is full of people who don't want to accept the idea that the special pressings we sell can even exist. On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile -- even a novice -- can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns. You don't have to spend a dime to recognize the undeniable reality of Hot Stampers. But perhaps you may have noticed, as I have, that most skeptics do not go out of their way to prove themselves wrong. And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call Confirmation Bias practically guarantees that you can't hear something you don't want to hear.                               Which is all well and good. At Better Records we are happy to go about our business of Turning Skeptics Into Believers one record at a time and debunking the hell out of practically every audiophile record we run into, for sport if for no better reason. 8/27 We recently debunked the new Heavy Vinyl Pressing of Rickie Lee Jones' first album. Speaking of bad heavy vinyl, during out shootout last week for Santana's First Album we also dropped the needle on the MFSL pressing. Let's just say we were much too kind to that one the first time around. The sound was so compressed and lifeless I practically fell asleep. I thought the Abraxas they did was terrible and saw no reason to carry it, but I have to say that the MoFi of the first album is not much better and really has no business being on our site. At the time we offered this overview: The red label reissues are pretty consistently smeary and compressed. The only pressings that have much potential are the 360 Label originals, and those are a decidedly mixed bag. The good ones will murder this half-speed. The bad ones will be bettered in most ways by it. Nothing new there. It's the Same Old Audiophile Pressing Story we all know. Good Audiophile LPs have better sound than bad non-audiophile LPs, and vice-versa. I feel sorry if I gave anyone the wrong impression about the sound. I did make clear that: Typical for most audiophile pressings, Santana has another quality we find unattractive: politeness. This album lacks the life and energy of the good originals. It doesn'tbegin to rock like they do. On polite sounding stereos, this difference will be minimized. I have never owned a stereo like that -- heard a million of them but never felt the desire to join in the "fun" -- so the difference in sound between the good originals and this pressing on our playback system is quite dramatic, the kind of difference that can be heard from another room. Probably even from the backyard. But now I would have to say that the MoFi LP is far too lifeless to be acceptable to anyone, even those with the worst kinds of audiophile BS systems. 8/24 Vinyl fans, I really have to hand it to the folks on the Steve Hoffman Forum for one of the most entertaining threads I have ever come across. Did I say entertaining? I meant infuriating. Read it yourself and see if steam doesn't come out of your ears. Ah, but toward the end some semblance of sanity prevails, starting around pages six and seven. Seems like not everybody on the Forum is drinking the Kool-Aid, but is it fair to single this forum out when the audiophiles-who-spend-way-too-much-time-typing-and-not-nearly-enough-time-listening at Audiogon, Audio Asylum and the like are every bit as loopy? From our point of view we see the audiophile of today as being just as hopelessly misguided as the audiophile of yesterday. Hey, I used to be one of those misguided audiophiles. I even wrote a commentary about what a fool I was. The difference is, after devoting some serious resources -- both time and money, time much more than money, truth be told -- over the period of the last fifteen years, I got a clue. Most audiophiles do not have the time, the money, or the skills necessary to get a stereo to work at a serious level. Every thread I read, every audiophile I know, and every stereo I visit brings this point home to me more forcefully than it did the day before. And every time I work on my own stereo too. More often than not -- way more often than not in fact -- I screw it up and have to put it back the way it was. I should know better by now, right? Been in this audio game for more than thirty years. With so many thousands of hours of experience behind me, with so much of my life devoted to getting recorded music to sound more like the real thing, why do I still keep making stupid mistakes? Because audio is really really hard. Anybody who thinks otherwise isn't doing it right. (Their posts can be seen on any forum you choose to visit.) And the most dangerous person in the audio world is someone who knows he is right and cannot admit to ever having been wrong. A certain Michael Fremer comes to mind. He cannot get a clue because, to his way of thinking, he doesn't need one. Before we started regularly pointing out the errors of his ways, we had our own We Was Wrong section, explaining the necessity for such in this introduction: We see no need to cover up our mistakes. The process of learning involves recognizing and correcting previous errors. Approached scientifically, all knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting and music reproduction — is incomplete, imperfect, and must be considered provisional. What’s true today might easily be proven false tomorrow. We’re so used to the conventional wisdom being wrong, and having our own previous findings overturned by new ones, that we gladly go out of way in listing after listing to point out just how wrong we were. (And of course why we think we are correct now.) To prevent audiophiles from investing any credibility whatsoever in this mountebank (and throwing good money away in the process), we created a link that brings together Fremerisms of all sorts. Just type the word in the search and up it will come. If steam comes out of your ears when reading his reviews, consider yourself one of us. 8/22 Lots has been happening lately to the system. Over the last few weeks I have spent dozens of hours trying out new power cords, vibration-reducing devices, electrical isolation transformers, tweaks of all kinds, even a different motor drive for my turntable. What I discovered was that a system that has been tweaked to the nines and is sounding better than it has ever sounded -- mine -- is very difficult to improve. There is a scientifically-based reason for this, known as Regression Toward the Mean. The natural state of anything is"average", here referred to as the mean. The long and the short of it as it applies to audio is simply this: if a system is really bad, and you make a change to it, it's likely to make the system better. The system will want to return to its natural state: average. Likewise, when you make a change to a good system, you will most likely end up making it worse. The system will want to return to the state it was in before you made it good, which was likely to have been, if not average, then something akin to a "less good/ somewhat more average" state. All the things you've done to your stereo to make it sound better are the very things that make it harder to improve it; of course, they've already been done. The pool of new things that actually will make it better is smaller. You tried them, some of them worked, and now they are no longer potential improvements, they are actual improvements. Others didn't work, and they are no longer in the pool of potential improvements anymore for that very reason: they don't work. I feel a commentary coming on; this blog is way too long already and there is still much left to say, so watch for the rest down the road. 7/2 Ran across this screed in one of our Fremer's Follies entries, thought I would share it with you if you haven't come across it on your own. Think about it: as you read this, some so-called Audiophile Reviewer is telling the audiophile public that Forever Changes on Sundazed has great sound! And Love's first album on heavy vinyl is one of 157 records you should go out and buy while it's still in print! IT'S AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE. Shame shame shame on you Michael Fremer. You seriously ought to consider a new line of work. This audiophile record reviewing thing is just not for you, unless of course you own stock in Sundazed. Then I guess it makes sense. I doubt you do, so I take that back, it really doesn't make sense. Stop reviewing records if you can't tell junk like the Love LPs on Sundazed from the real thing. You're not doing anybody any favors. And your guarantee isn't worth the virtual paper it's printed on or you would have been bankrupted by now from all the bad sounding records you've recommended over the years being returned to you. But you don't take them back, do you? You just "guarantee" them. Perhaps that term has a different meaning to you than the way we use it on our site. When we guarantee a record, if you don't like it -- for any reason, by the way -- we take it back and get you something else more to your liking. Now that's a guarantee. I get the feeling Mr. Fremer is using the term as a "figure of speech", much in the same way I can "guarantee" that he wouldn't know a good record if it bit him in the ass. 6/23 Ran across this comment we had made in reply to a testimonial one of our best customers sent us concerning the three amazing sounding albums he picked up from us (and paid a pretty penny for): Aja, Fragile and The Yes Album. Thrift Store Junkies and Audiophile Vinyl Devotees will NEVER have the experience you had (and we had -- before you in fact, hah!). It's practically impossible for records to sound like the ones we sent you; we know, we play the damn things all day long. Even with our special cleaning techniques and knowledge of the best pressings, weeks can go by without us hearing the sound you heard on those three vintage LPs. We LIVE for that sound. I cannot remember the last time I played a Heavy Vinyl pressing and felt the kind of thrill you talk about. It's been many, many years. In that time the old stereo has obviously gotten way better. The sad fact of the matter is that those modern virgin vinyl pressings haven't. Face it: they're simply not competitive at this level. Some are better than others, that's for sure, but none are like the records you talk about. None. 4/29 We got a minty copy of Crisis? What Crisis in this week, and although it was tonally correct as expected, it sounded a bit dead to my ear, so I pulled out my own ref copy, which was dramatically better sounding. Same stampers, same everything, night and day different sound. Now what happens when you read on the site that we like the half-speed of that title best, and you go out and buy one somewhere. What do you get, a good one or a not-so-good one? And if you get the latter, what conclusions are you likely to you draw from the fact that we recormmended it? That we don't know what we are talking about, right? You wouldn't say that if you heard my personal copy. It is out of this world. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling, jumping out of the speakers sound like you would not believe. (That's why I can't sell it. It's too good!) This is a problem. No two records sound the same. No one can know the sound of a record that that person has never played. (If you're one of these goofy audiophile reviewers you can't even tell the sound of a record that you yourself have played, but that's another story for another day.) We like to think of the site as a resource for audiophiles, with plenty of commentary to guide you in the building of your record collection, but unless you are buying the copy we are selling, all bets are off. It might sound good and it might not. (Of course if you don't clean the record the way we do it is very unlikely to sound as good as our copy.) Mobile Fidelity, Ouch. On another note, we played some godawful sounding MOFI pressings over the last few weeks: Linda Ronstadt (which appears to be out of phase, more on that down the road); Metallica (with blobby bass at 45 RPM no less; only half-speed mastering can guarantee muddy bass under any and all circumstances!); and Rush (nothing even resembling a top end. How do these things happen?). These three albums have to be some of the worst sounding vinyl I have ever heard in my life. I won't waste any more of your time or mine talking about them. Buy them if you feel the need, and if you like what you hear, drop us a line. Maybe the copy we cracked open was a "bad" one, unrepresentative of the general pressing run in the same way that the latest Crisis half-speed was. Well, maybe so, but we are going to have to leave that conundrum unsolved for the time being. To crack open more copies to see if they are all as bad as the first one we played is not something we are particularly inclined to do. We call that throwing good money after bad around here at Better Records. 4/20 Sorry not to have blogged in so long, been very busy keeping up with the Hot Stamper demand, which I'm happy to report continues apace. We're relieved to know that audiophiles truly are looking for good sound for the music they love (not what the audiophile rags promote), and, as our letters section will attest, they know it when they hear it. As we never tire of saying, the idea that classic recordings can be properly remastered onto Heavy Vinyl turns out to be every bit the dead end that all the other audiophile fads are, were, and forever will be. Why, we even have a section devoted to Debunking the Pseudo-Audiophile LP where we expose a goodly number of them, but there are far too many to keep up with these days; I could spend all my nights and weekends pointing out their shortcomings and still not make much more than a dent. Here's part of the intro to one of the sections: Check back for all the latest entries because this section is very much a work in progress. It will take years to round up all the bad Heavy Vinyl and make listings for them, a task that doesn't generate a nickel in revenue but one that we feel the audiophiles who visit our site can certainly put to good use. Practically every record Acoustic Sounds ever released previous to the new 45 RPM Jazz series would qualify, as would 98% of the Sundazed catalog, 95% of the Simply Vinyl catalog, 95+% of the Classic Records catalog 100% of the Get Back catalog and most of the catalog of most of the other labels out there, too numerous and too painful to bear mentioning. For a good overview, please read The Better Records Manifesto. Back to our story. Every Hot Stamper is an opportunity to learn more about the recording quality and musical quality of the album under investigation, and that's what so much of the commentary is about. What follows is a sampling of some of our commentaries, letters we received, and shootouts that gave rise to interesting observations. First, check out the Sale sections we've just created. Tons of records added monthly. If it's been around for awhile, maybe a bit too long one could even say, it's time to lower the price. Most of the sale sections start at 25% off, and specials in our weeekly emailings sometimes double those discount to 50% off. Also, tell us what you think of the new look for the recently redesigned front page. We're trying to make it easier for you to find the records you are looking for. We probably created too many sections separating out records according to too many criteria, and now we are cutting back the number of sections to make the site more user friendly. 4/19 Found this old review on the site for a mono pressing of Witches' Brew, the stereo pressing being one of HPs most ridiculous TAS List entries. We recently really went after some nitwit with a site devoted to HP's list which I think you will find entertaining -- both his site and our take on it. 4/18 Never knew this Famous Audiophile Record was pressed on Japanese vinyl. The cover and label give no indication whatsoever that this pressing is indeed made in Japan, but anyone who's been collecting records for a while will recognize the unique markings in the dead wax. I'm somewhat shocked that this great sounding recording is not on the TAS List. It seems such an obvious candidate for inclusion. 4/07 The best sounding Traffic album? Not really a tough call, although parts of Mr Fantasy are absolutely breathtaking when you get the right copy. (That album is practically impossible to find in good condition; our last Hot Stamper shootout was in 2006 and it's doubtful we will find enough good copies to do another shootout before 2009.) 4/01 Here's a Power Pop record with Demo Disc sound. Our Top 100 List increasingly appears to be rather too small to hold all the great recordings we expect to be able to find and bring to you. I'm guessing the Top 100 List is going to have another fifty or so titles trying to knock down its door and join the club. (Not sure what to do about that right now but watch for changes to the list coming this year.) 3/25 The best sounding Elton John record we've ever played came our way recently. We love Tumbleweed Connection, but try to find one that doesn't sound mucky. Honky Chateau is another favorite; again, finding the right British copies with quiet vinyl is practically impossible. Same with Madman. Yellow Brick Road is a disaster unlike the others -- is there a good copy? We sure can't find one. We love Elton but finding good sounding pressings of his classic albums is more difficult than many audiophiles appreciate. And this of course causes the price of the good ones to rise dramatically. It's basic economics: the supply is small, the demand great. 03/05 Harry Pearson put this album on his TAS Super Disc List quite a while ago, without even noticing at that time, or since, that it is clearly, demonstrably mastered out of absolute polarity. We take him to task on this point, delighted, as usual, to do so. If this record doesn't sound wrong played in "normal" phase, you have one sick stereo my friend. We discuss the kinds of speakers that have trouble with phase in this commentary. 3/01 Check out our current favorite Demo Disc / Test Disc, a choice not many audiophiles would make but one that works wonders for us. Please to let us explain. 2/15 Two interesting testimonials for Tapestry came our way recently. The first was subtitled A Drastic Improvement to My Music Collection. The second was our good friend Roger's who, once again, did a shootout between his half-speed and our Hot Stamper. 2/01 Once we had installed the Super Platter, we were able to spend some time more carefully evaluating the Peripheral Ring Clamp, which we subsequently found some measure of fault with. In many respects we find the use of this product antithetical to high fidelity, however you define the term. We look forward to the day when the last one leaves the premises. Two of the biggest mistakes VPI has ever made are this clamp and the acrylic platter. We highly recommend you get rid of either or both if you are currently a user. If you have a Scout, there's not much you can do, since the Super Platter is almost as much money as that entire table and arm. But if you do have the bread, you should hear quite an improvement with the upgrade. 1/10 We never thought we'd see the day when the Disc Doctor fluid wouldn't come out on top in a head to head shootout with another record fluid, but that day came recently. We rigoriously tested the Walker Prelude Active Enzyme Cleaning System and -- mirabile dictu -- it actually made our records sound better than cleaning them with Disc Doctor fluid did. Some of the records in our shootouts are now being cleaned with the Walker system as a matter of course, especially those that need all the help they can get, such as Exile on Main Street. If we had the time and labor budget to do it, we would clean every potential shootout record with the Walker enzyme fluid, but the record cleaning machines run constantly as it is, so we have yet to figure out a way to do that given the fact that there are only so many hours in a day and only so many hours that someone can stand over one of the machines and scrub records before they start hallucinating. By the way, at least one of the other products offered by Mr Walker is an absolute home run and indespensible to high fidelity sound, in our humble opinion. After hearing it once, we have not conducted a single shootout without using it on every record to be auditioned. At the price, considering the difference in sound it does make on every record "treated", I would have to call it the biggest bargain in audio today. So there. 11/15/07 I've noticed lots of new, rather expensive LP Box Sets coming out these days. Some of you are no doubt wondering what they sound like. I'm curious myself. That curiosity is unlikely to be satisfied any time soon however, because as of now we have no plans whatsoever to spend a nickel on a single one of them. When was the last time that any of that kind of stuff sounded good? It hasn't just been years; it's been decades. We have very little faith in modern mastering techniques, less and less as the years roll on, so I'm afraid we're just going to have let our prejudices get the better of us regarding all those fancy Heavy Vinyl pressings and take a pass. Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but it's unarguably cheaper to stay ignorant of these new Box Sets. They cost an arm and a leg, they never sound good, and we want nothing to do with them. 11/07 Sorry to be out of touch lately. Lots of new commentaries on the Home Page you might want to check out. Of course one of them is reserved for bashing Fremer, our favorite dead horse to beat, this time for not even bothering to play the Simply Vinyl Tommy in order to hear how much better it is than the Classic. Sad, just sad. It's never too late to take your job seriously, is it? No time like the present, right? Nevermind was an important milestone here at Better Records. Check it out, even if you don't care for the album. Just heard the best sounding copy of Hotel California I ever played in my life. When you get a good copy of that one it really is an amazing Demo Disc. Victim of Love rocks like you would not believe on the copy we just played. Watch for it in Thursday's mailer; it won't last long. And check out our new section devoted to Todd's Picks, a sampling of some of our Main Man's favorite records, many of which are albums he came to appreciate after hearing how good the Hot Stamper copies sounded in the shootouts. When you hear those A Triple Plus copies playing good and loud on a super-high-res, big speaker system in a tricked out dedicated room, it's easy to like records you never cared that much about before. That's what audiophilia is all about: sound this good really brings the music to LIFE. Many of the gushing reviews for our Killer Hot Stamper pressings are written by Todd. Take it from me, his enthusiasm for the sound and the music is not an act. We all get pretty pumped up around here when a good record is playing, and that's the best time to write the commentary, when the music is firing on all cylinders. Some of my own personal favorites are found in our Desert Island Discs section. Before 2008 is out I hope to have copies on the site of all the ones we haven't gotten to yet, like Tarkio, Wind of Change, Zep I (not the Classic), Sittin' In, Roxy Music, Jules and the Polar Bears (both albums) and many, many more. I love those albums and can't wait to hear some Hot Stampers blastin' away. No Woodface or James Taylor for now; can't find any good sounding copies of the latter and any copies at all of the former. We haven't given up but it sure is an uphill battle. 8/22 Three of the Top Five sellers this week at Acoustic Sounds are records we found hard to like: Aja, Aqualung and Blue. Can you really defend the expense and hassle of analog LP playback with records that sound this bad? Why own a turntable if you're going to play records like these? I have boxes of CDs that sound more musically correct and I don't even bother to play those. Why would I take the time to throw on 180 gram records that sound even worse? If I ever found myself in the position of having to sell mediocrities like the above in order to make a living, I'd be looking for another line of work. The vast majority of these newly-remastered pressings are just not any good. We feel a sense of embarrassment selling even the few titles we do. But people who come to the site want them, so how can we make everybody happy? (which, as I'm sure you know if you've read our commentaries, is not exactly high on our list of priorities, but it is on the list, somewhere. I think I saw it on there awhile back anyway.) Truth is, we can't make everybody happy. We never wanted to be the Walmarts of the audiophile record world -- we leave that distinction to our friends at Acoustic Sounds, Elusive Disc and Music Direct (Walmart, Target and Sears perhaps?). They sell anything and everything that some hapless audiophile might wander onto their site and find momentarily attractive, like shiny objects dangling from a tree, like the glitter of fool's gold; they know their market and they know where the real money is. (Hint: it ain't records, dear reader, it's equipment. If you haven't seen one of their thick full-color catalogs lately, count how many pages of equipment you have to wade through at the front before you get to the "recommended recordings.") From here on out we are going to take our job as Gatekeepers of Better Records more seriously. And watch for Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressings going on sale left and right in order to be deleted. We had no business selling Neil Young's Greatest Hits -- the typical dead-as-a-doornail remastering job we've come to expect from Classic over the years -- so let's hope some poor soul takes it off our hands and we can leave it in our Not Recommended section with none to sell. Which, by the way, has a new member: In Through the Out Door. We were doing a shootout for the mailer this week and decided to crack the Classic open to give it another listen, since my review was about five years old at this point, a lifetime in the world of audio (around here anyway). Well, it turned out to be nothing but an absolute piece of crap. Tonally wrong from top to bottom, compressed, lacking presence, life, energy -- an unmitigated disaster, joining the Classic pressings of II, III and Houses, three of the other worst sounding Zeppelin records I have ever had the misfortune to play. It's a perfect We Was Wrong entry -- watch for it soon -- and we owe an apology to anyone who bought one from us. Mea Culpa. 6/24 An observation I would like to make concerns three recent Female Vocal albums we reviewed, if you will permit me to stuff Casino Royale in that category. (HP has written more on Dusty's Look of Love from that album than most audiophile writers have written about practically any subject you can name, so this should not present too much of a problem.) Let's look at the three aforementioned albums: Clap Hands..., Wild Things..., and Casino Royale. What do they have in common? I would say they illustrate perfectly how mediocre even a supposed Super Disc can sound. The typical copy of these three is not an especially enjoyable listen, to put in mildly. Yet each has received great acclaim in the audiophile press. Perhaps you've had the same reaction to the articles written about these albums as I have, to wit: What the hell are they talking about? The commentary for Wild Things and Casino Royale talks about the lousy sound of the average copy, yet both of these are on the TAS List. You would think audiophiles would notice that their copies really don't sound very good, but instead I'm guessing that the power of suggestion plays with their audiophile faculties just enough to make them think that the sound they are hearing is better than what it actually is. Or is it a matter of embarrassment? "Everyone says this is such a great record; I guess my stereo isn't good enough to play it." The truth is the average audiophile's copy is no better than the average copy we evaluated in our shootout -- not so hot. But how many audiophiles have learned what Better Records customers (we hope) know so well -- that you have to go through a lot of copies to find a magic pressing? Not too many. Almost none in fact. So their collections wind up being full of records with good reputations but not the sound to back it up. It's kind of a shame, when you stop to think about it. So how about Ella, what's the deal with her? It's another case where We Was Wrong -- but so was everybody else. And I doubt if many of them even know it to this day. I found out my favorite female vocal album was reversed absolute phase a couple of years ago almost by accident. I had always loved the sound of the LP -- so detailed! But as time went on I became less and less enamored with it. It was phony detail. It was audiophile bullshit detail, not the kind of detail a live person's voice might have. The detail I was hearing was sounding more and more to me like a recording artifact: a peaky mic or an EQ aberration. Then one day I decided just to see if it really was absolute phase, and sure enough the minute I switched the headshell leads in my arm the sound became instantly and dramatically more natural. But I had always loved it the wrong way, the bad way! What a fool I had been. And everybody else -- as far as I know -- still loves it that way. They sure don't know what they're missing. Yes, it's a good record even reversed, but it's an amazing record when the phase is right. What's my point? Don't settle for less. All three of these albums are full of wonderful music. Find yourself a hot copy or let us find one for you; either way you need this music in your life. And next time you go looking for a phono stage, try to get one with a phase reversing switch. It can really come in handy sometimes. TP 6/15 Another exciting week has come to a close here at Better Records. Let me just mention three things that we found especially interesting. 1.) It appears that the best Yes pressings, at least for the albums we like (The Yes Album and Fragile so far) are clearly the domestic copies, not the imports. The evidence at this point is incontrovertible. It was only a year or two ago that I believed just the opposite. Things change very quickly in the world of audio. We like to think we let the records speak for themselves here at the ranch, and they spoke pretty loudly and clearly to the effect that no import was made from the master tape. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own two ears. Lately there's been a slough of top British bands sounding their best on records mastered across the pond (that is, our side): Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed, Zep II, IV and Houses of the Holy, The Yes Album and Fragile, ELP's first, Wish You Were Here, even some Cat Stevens! (Catch Bull at Four; that counts, doesn't it?) The old rule of thumb about Brit bands sounding their best on Brit vinyl, like most rules in audio, turns out to be a crock. The devil is in the details, as they say. I think it's pretty safe to conclude that no domestic Dark Side of the Moon is going to beat our hot imports, and the same is true for Meddle, but the last thing in the world you should conclude from either of the two shootouts we conducted for them is that the Brit (or German) Wish You Were Here is bound to be crowned King of the Hot Stampers anytime soon. For the last shootout it wasn't, and I doubt it ever will be. Records don't work that way. And thinking that it ought to be the best won't make it so. Thinking that will, instead, result in you proceeding to fill up your record collection with second rate pressings that you assume are the best because you never really bothered to find out. Come to think of it, that's a fairly apt description of what we do around here during the day: we bother to find out. About what? About anything that has to do with records and how to play them better. At night, of course, we blog. 2.) Speaking of British bands sounding best on British vinyl, how about Crime of the Century? Last time we tried to do a shootout, we couldn't find a quiet, good sounding Brit copy to save our lives. Just for fun today I decided to play the Speakers Corner 180 gram pressing, a record I doubt I've played in close to ten years. You know what? It's REALLY GOOD! Not perfect, but so right in so many ways that its faults hardly bear mentioning. I would rank it as one of the Top Five Best Heavy Vinyl Reissues currently in print. I put it in my "1 In-Print LP You Should Own!", a work in progress. 3.) You know, there's a reason I put the Eagles first album on the short list of all time best sounding rock records. Every time we play a Hot Copy it positively BLOWS MY MIND. How come nobody else seems to know how good it is. What's that? You say that audiophile reviewers are numbskulls and audiophile record dealers don't play the records they sell? Oh, that's right, I forgot. (Yes, I know that horse is dead but I can't stop beating it. By the way, the "it" in that last sentence refers to a dead horse, in case there's any confusion. See below for an actual beating.) 6/10 Well, it's about that time; time to administer one of my regular well-deserved beatings to Michael Fremer. This one's all about Love, the band, not the emotion. Hey, it's not like he's not asking for it. If you published a list of "157 In-Print LPs You Should Own!" just brimming with bad sounding records, I might come after you too. (So don't do it.) We all make mistakes. Read the commentary below for a perfect example of one of ours. The difference is, we publicly admit our mistakes, and we correct them. His are on his site at this very moment. And when has this guy ever said he was wrong? If you can find me an instance -- like a black swan, all it takes is one to believe it exists -- please forward it to me. This I gotta read. 6/2/07 Two more Heavy Vinyl Pressings officially bit the dust this week. The Classic Zep IV, which I used to consider unbeatable (except for the first two tracks on side one) got its head handed to it by a number of superior pressings, especially a super hot German LP. The better my equipment gets the less I like 180 gram vinyl. The gap between their sound and what I consider to be the "right" sound gets bigger and bigger all the time. We carry them, we sell what we consider to be the best of them, but I wouldn't want to play 80% of them for pleasure, not after listening to amazing sounding pressings all week. Not many of them can handle that kind of scrutiny. Fine for beginners or the budget minded, but that's not exactly the situation I'm in, and I'm guessing that if you are bothering to read this blog, the same is likely true for you too. And the most dismal finding was how wrong I was about the Rhino My Aim Is True. What a piece of crap. Those of you reading this blog can access my old and totally wrongheaded commentary from a few years back. I'm hiding it from everybody else. Please accept my apologies for recommending such a dog. I'm truly embarrassed. It's clear to me now that my stereo had to get a lot better before I was able to realize the error of my ways, but that's no excuse. A bad record is a bad record and I should have known better. The real thing is incredibly hard to reproduce, so don't bother trying to play it on anything but top quality equipment. Now that the album is sounding so good I will be on the lookout for more of those plain old domestic copies I didn't like before. They sure sound better than I remember them! And one of them was out of this world. I can't say enough good things about it. It was a thrill to revisit Elvis' explosive debut. That album hasn't aged a day. (Check out a short discography we just worked up.) So many of the records we sell have that timeless quality. Who will ever tire of Crosby Stills and Nash, My Aim Is True, Led Zeppelin IV, Never a Dull Moment or Wish You Were Here, just to name some of the Hot Stampers that went in this week's mailing! They're the kind of records you'll play until, to quote Elvis, "they turn out the big light". I'm so glad we can find these kinds of amazing sounding pressings, of such important and emotionally powerful music. If I were limited to what the 180 gram reissue labels are putting out, I'd find another line of work. Most of that stuff isn't worth the vinyl it's (often poorly) pressed on. As long as there are audiophiles out there who appreciate what we're doing, we'll keep doing it. And I'll do my best not to recommend any more bad Heavy Vinyl reissues, promise. TP 6/2/07 Tom here. Since Todd is doing the brunt of the shootouts and practically the entire mailing by himself these days, he hasn't been able to find time to start blogging. So, here's some of the latest goings on, both at Better Records and elsewhere. The big news around here is that our new EAR 324P phono stage has broken in, is thoroughly tweaked out and is now sounding FANTASTIC, much better than I ever expected. As in all things audio, you never really know how something really sounds until you hear it in your own system. Having lived with the 324 for a few weeks now, I can honestly say I've never heard better audio reproduction in my life. EAR is a company known for its tube gear; if anyone can design a transistor phono stage with "tubey magic", it would have to be EAR. They know that sound, arguably better than any other company making equipment today. The 324 gives you the warmth and sweetness of tubes, but mates it with the speed, resolution and freedom from coloration of transistors. If that isn't the best of both worlds, I can't imagine what would be. If any of you out there have the kind of dough a serious phono stage like this costs, north of $4k, drop me a line. (Our tweaks make quite a bit of difference, and we are happy to share them with you when you purchase the unit from us.) As much as I loved my 834P, the 324P is a big step up in class. It ought to be for that kind of money I suppose, but more than anything, it's another nail in the coffin for that tired old crock about diminishing returns. In audio there ain't no such thing.