Our Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress
The following letter came to us not long ago:
Hey Tom,
I am trying to make sense of the information on your site and the asking prices for these ‘hot stampers.’
In order to better understand how you assess sound quality, can you let me know what equipment you use for this purpose (what turntable, arm, cartridge, amps, speakers)?
How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?
Bas
Bas,
Thanks for contacting us. We wrote a commentary about it, linked here:
As for our sound signature, we’ve labored mightily over the last forty years to build the biggest, most dynamic, most powerful system, limited by only those colorations we don’t know how to rid ourselves of. Here are some thoughts on what we went through in order to achieve our current level of fidelity:
Having done all that work over the course of decades, we feel we are in a good position to offer our readers:
Even the ones that never asked for it!
A lot of the basics about our Hot Stampers can be found at the top of every page under:
Our customers tend to be very enthusiastic about our Hot Stampers, as you can see by the letters they write us:
Any questions, feel free to write me. Of course, writing is one thing, but
Best, TP
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
What do the best copies of this album sound like?
The sound is RICH and TRANSPARENT, and unlike a lot of RCA’s chamber recordings, not dry.
The tonality is also Right On The Money.
The performers are present and the transients of their instruments are not in the least bit smeared.
A case of good tube mastering?
On the best pressings, absolutely.
(More on the subject of tubes in audio here.)
Classical Shootouts
RCA is justly famous for its chamber recordings, which tend to be somewhat rare for some reason. Let’s be honest: we did not conduct this shootout with a dozen copies of the album. (It would take us at least twenty-five years to find that many clean pressings.)
What we had were quite a few other Heifetz RCA chamber recordings, as well as some favorites by the Quartetto Italiano and I Musici that we are very fond of and know well.
After thirty two years in business selling vintage vinyl, by now we’ve played scores if not hundreds of good violin recordings. We have no problem recognizing good violin sound (as well as correct violin tone, not exactly the same thing) when we hear it. In the past our top Hot Stamper classical pressings would go directly to our best customers, customers who want classical recordings that actually sound good. not just the kind of Golden Age Recordings that are supposed to. Now that we are able to do classical shootouts on a regular basis, we hope to have enough superb sounding classical recordings for all of our audiophile customers.
I’ve commented often over the years of the benefits to be gained from listening to classical music regularly. Once a week is a good rule of thumb I would say. I love rock and roll, jazz and all the rest of it, but there is something about classical music that restores a certain balance in your musical life that can’t be accomplished by other means. It grounds your listening experience to something perhaps less immediately gratifying but deeper and more enriching over time. Once habituated, the effect on one’s mood is not hard to recognize.
Orchestral Music Is Hard to Record, Master and Press, Apparently
More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel
Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Sounds of Silence. Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.
Sounds of Silence is made from a second generation tape, as we explain below. Since we listen to all the records we sell, we like to point out such things so our customers know what they are getting.
This album is the proverbial tough nut to crack, a mix of folkie tracks and ambitious big production numbers, all recorded on a four track machine and bounced down maybe just a few too many times along the way. Some got handed a troublesome case of Top 40 EQ — hey, this is 1965, it’s the way they thought pop records should sound.
But many of the best tracks survived just fine. They can sound wonderful, it’s just that they rarely do. This is precisely where we come into the picture.
The key to good sounding pressings of this record is to look for the ones with a top end. Now of course you can’t see the top end when you buy the record. But most of the copies of this album you pick up are going to sound like cassettes. There won’t be much over 8K, and that means hard, harsh, transistor radio sound. You need extended highs to balance out the upper midrange.
