Month: April 2023

Tone Poets and One-Legged Tarzans

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

A tenet of conservatism is that we must all accommodate ourselves to living in the world that exists, not the world we might want to pretend exists, or the world we would like to exist.

The laws of physics are laws — not theories, not recommendations — and they operate independently of how convenient we may find them.

It follows from this — if you will allow me to make the case — that not everybody with a stereo can play Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings properly, and some people cannot play Tarzan at all. (More on that below.)

There is a fellow, rl1856, who made some comments on Robert Brook’s blog, addressing the Tone Poets pressings of RVG’s recordings vis-a-vis vintage pressings that RVG mastered. (Emphasis added.)

rl1856 writes:

An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.

When someone reveals that their equipment is simply not capable of reproducing the sound of live music, we can safely ignore whatever opinions they have offered about the records under discussion.

It’s obvious that they have played them with unacceptably low levels of fidelity. If they want to make the case that they in fact are able to reproduce music with acceptable fidelity, we would need to know more about their system and room in order to take such a claim seriously.

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Hovhaness / Mysterious Mountain / Reiner

More of the music of Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000)

More of the music of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

  • Boasting two stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) Living Stereo sides, this vintage Shaded Dog pressing is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner
  • Tons of energy, loads of rich detail and texture, superb transparency and excellent clarity – the very definition of Demo Disc sound
  • This record will have you asking why so few Living Stereo pressings actually do what this one does.
  • The more critical listeners among you will recognize that this is a very special copy indeed. Everyone else will just enjoy the hell out of it.
  • We’ve reviewed most of the famous recordings Fritz Reiner did for RCA, and those reviews can be found here
  • With the advent of the stereo LP, RCA produced a large number of album titles using the wonderful Living Stereo banner across the top of the jacket. The link above will take you to titles either recorded or released in 1958.

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Wildflowers – Three of Her Best on Side One

More of the Music of Judy Collins

The first three songs on side one alone are worth the price of the album, three of the best Judy ever recorded.

Joni Mitchell’s Michael from Mountains is one of the best songs on her debut album; Judy sings it with comparable taste and skill.

Since You Asked is Judy’s own composition, her first to be recorded in fact. In this writer’s opinion it’s the best song she ever wrote, “as good as it gets” as we like to say.

And of course Leonard Cohen’s Sisters of Mercy is one of his many masterpieces and brilliant in all respects as performed here.

What to Listen for

Most copies were small and veiled, with edgy, dry vocals that often get hard or shrill when loud — definitely not our sound.

We were surprised that so few copies sounded the way we expected them to, that so few had the Tubey Magical qualities that we’ve come to expect from Elektra in 1967.

The label was home to The Doors and Love at the time, so what happened here?

John Haeny, the engineer, worked on Waiting for the Sun, which is an amazing sounding Doors album on the right pressing. Why so few great sounding Wildflowers?

If that’s a legitimate question to pose, then first answer me this: why so few great sounding copies of Waiting for the Sun?

It’s simple — the 1967 Elektra magic of the tape did not make it to the 1967 Elektra vinyl with any consistency. That’s why it’s hard to find good sounding Judy Collins records or good sounding Doors records. This is our first big Judy Collins shootout for precisely that reason.

We can find great sounding Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell records all day long; the site is full of them. Judy Collins, not so much. Almost none outside of this one.

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Rachmaninoff / Three Symphonies / Waart – Reviewed in 2005

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Rachmaninoff

Three Minty looking Philips Import LPs with EXCELLENT SOUND!

The sound is dark and rich. You may prefer it as I do to the famous Previn performances on EMI, which have that mid-hall, vague ’70s EMI sound. That sound never appealed to me. 

The performances are excellent as well. The second symphony belongs in any serious collection and you get a very good one in this box set. This set includes Rachmaninoff’s Symphonies 1-3 and ‘The Rock,’ Op. 7.

This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

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Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies

More of the Music of Alice Cooper

  • A vintage Warner Bros. Palm Trees pressing with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • It’s the impossibly rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on the title track and you’ll see what we mean
  • This copy is proof that finding the right balance of fullness and clarity on this album may not be easy but it can be done
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Song for song, Billion Dollar Babies is probably the original Alice Cooper group’s finest and strongest… It remains one of rock’s all-time, quintessential classics.”

Billion Dollar Babies can sound big and powerful, but not many copies bring the sound to life the way this one does. For once you can hear a big room around the instruments; the bass is tight and well-defined, and there’s plenty of tubey richness.

This was also one of the copies that managed to get real three-dimensional space in the soundfield, bringing Alice up front, with the rest of the band arrayed behind him from wall to wall.

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Dean Martin – Dream With Dean

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dean Martin

One of Our Favorite Titles from 1964

  • This hard-to-find Dean Martin Classic of relaxed, intimate vocals features a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • One of our all-time favorite male vocal LPs – the sound on both sides here is both warm and natural, with excellent presence and transparency
  • The early stereo tri-color label pressings are almost impossible to find in audiophile condition these days, but here’s one, and it is a knockout
  • This is Dean Martin’s Best Sounding Album as far as we know — if you’ve played many of his albums from the ’60s, you know that audiophile sound is not what they were going for in the studio
  • “It sounds as if they tracked the album in one afternoon, and it is not only a very pleasant listening experience, it shows what a tremendous vocalist Dean Martin truly was.”

This is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet (including no less than Contemporary favorites Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell) 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.

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Brahms – Concerto for Violin and Cello on the Masterworks Label

More Recordings Featuring the Violin

More Vintage Columbia Pressings

  • An outstanding reissue of this wonderful Columbia recording with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The right reissues can sound quite good, as is the case here – the best early pressings are better, but plenty of early pressings just sound like old records, which simply means that having a clean original is no guarantee of anything in this crazy record world
  • This copy showed us the balance of clarity and sweetness we were looking for in the violin and cello – not many Columbia recordings from this era can do that
  • Some old record collectors (like me) say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be – here’s the proof
  •  When you hear how good this record sounds, you may have a hard time believing that it’s a budget reissue from the ’70s, but that’s precisely what it is and we don’t mind saying so
  • Even more extraordinary, try wrapping your head around budget reissue pressings for other titles that actually win shootouts, and we’re especially proud of the fact that we’ve discovered quite a number of them

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Crowded House / Woodface – A Desert Island Disc

More of the Music of Crowded House

Reviews and Commentaries for Crowded House

This album easily meets the definition of a Desert Island Disc. I’ve played this album hundreds of times and enjoy it more with each play, which insures that on my desert island I’ll never get sick of it. To my way of thinking it contains some of the most original, melodic, hook-laden, sophisticated popular music recorded in the last twenty years. Astonishingly (to me, anyway) it didn’t even chart here in the states, a sad commentary about the state of the music biz, a state that only seemed to worsen as the decade wore on.

When people ask me what kind of music I like, a common question from non-audiophiles seeing my house full of records and a living room stuffed with stereo equipment, Crowded House is a band I can happily lay claim to as a favorite. Sophisticated Pop with Audiophile Quality Sound makes up a large part of my record collection, with Crowded House taking its place up near the top, not on the same plane as The Beatles, say, but not far below. This is a record that belongs no less in your collection than it does in mine.

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Sly and The Family Stone – Stand

More Sly & The Family Stone

  • Tired of the crude, congested, hard, harsh and otherwise unpleasant sound of most pressings? The solution is right here!
  • Stand, I Want To Take You Higher, Everyday People, You Can Make It If You Try — what a killer lineup of songs
  • 5 stars: “Stand! is the pinnacle of Sly & the Family Stone’s early work, a record that represents a culmination of the group’s musical vision and accomplishment. …everything simply gels here, resulting in no separation between the astounding funk, effervescent irresistible melodies, psychedelicized guitars, and deep rhythms.”
  • This is a Must Own Soul Classic from 1969 that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection

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Hi-Fi Beats My-Fi — If Better Sound Is Your Goal

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

If by record collecting you mean collecting better sounding pressings of the albums you want to play. (If you just want to collect records because you like collecting records, you are definitely on the wrong site.)

Our system is fast, accurate and uncolored. We like to think of our speakers as the audiophile equivalent of studio monitors, showing us exactly what is on the record, nothing added, nothing taken away.

When we play a modern record, it should sound modern. When we play a vintage Tubey Magical Living Stereo pressing, we want to hear all the Tubey Magic, but we don’t want to hear more Tubey Magic than what is actually on the record.

We don’t want to do what some audiophiles like to do, which is to make all their records sound the way they like all their records to sound.

They do that by having their system add in all their favorite colorations. We call that “My-Fi,” not “Hi-Fi,” and we’re having none of it.

If our system were more colored, slower and tubier, a vintage Living Stereo record would not sound as good as it should. It’s already got plenty of richness, warmth, sweetness and Tubey Magic.

To take an obvious example, playing the average dry and grainy Joe Walsh record on our system is a fairly unpleasant experience. Some added warmth and richness, with maybe some smear and some upper-midrange suckout thrown in for good measure, would make it much more tolerable.

But then how would we know which Joe Walsh pressings aren’t too dry and grainy for our customers to play and enjoy on their systems?

How do you tell which ones have the least amount of smear when you’re playing them back through a system that has smear built into it? On some systems, every record is smeary!

(I know smear when I hear it. The Mac 30s I owned in the 90s taught me the pros and cons of tube colorations. More on that subject here.)

How do you tell which pressings have a present, tonally correct midrange when you’re playing records through a system with a sucked out, tonally incorrect midrange?

Enough with the rhetorical questions already.

There is only one approach that works. The first thing you need to get is good sound – then you can recognize and collect good records.

A White Hot copy should have a near-perfect blend of Tubey Magic and clarity, because that’s what we hear when we play it on our system.

We are convinced that the more time and energy you’ve put into your stereo over the years, decades even, the more likely it is that you will hear our Hot Stamper pressings sound the way they should.

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