Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Robert was on a panel of audiophile record collectors not long ago, and he wrote about it here.
Some comments I made at the time:
Robert and I have many things in common. The most important one, from my point of view, is the fact that we are not much interested in records that sound good, or are musical and enjoyable, or are priced fairly, as seems to be the case with these fellows and their channel.
No, we are looking for the kinds of records that sound amazing, like live music sounds amazing. Records that blow our minds.
Robert spent a fair amount of time trying to explain this concept to his fellow panel members. None of them seemed to understand or appreciate his recent Way Out West experience. He told them how exhilarated he felt after having just played a ‘I can’t believe it’s a record” record, but they apparently were not interested as no one followed up.
Based on what I’ve seen on youtube lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are thrill seekers and there are record collectors, and that these two groups do not seem to overlap much.
He and I correspond regularly. Recently I mentioned an idea I had for a blog post that I thought would clarify which camp an audiophile might fall into:
To have a clearer picture of the depth of someone’s audio experience, I would ask this basic question:
What are five records that blew your mind and made you rethink how good music could sound in the home?
I could easily name fifty. I’ve played thousands and thousands of pressings over the last 30+ years, the famous ones as well as the not-so-famous, and quite a number of them managed to blow my mind. The better my stereo and cleaning system got, the more often that would happen. We used to call them outliers and award them grades of Four Pluses, but we stopped doing that years ago.
Are there any records on heavy vinyl that would qualify as mind-blowing?
None that I know of. But if someone thought there were, that would tell me a lot about the standards that person was setting for his playback quality. You need one helluva good system and one helluva good record to have the experience that Robert and I are talking about, and those two things are not easy to come by in the world of audio and records.
Most audiophiles are fine with settling for less, and this is why the Tone Poets records, just to take one example, give these audiophiles what they want, a record they can enjoy, at a price they find affordable enough to collect them by the dozen.
They just don’t give Robert and me and our Hot Stamper customers what we want. Not even close. [1]
Robert discusses his love for thrilling records in his latest post. Please click to read more.
[1] To be clear, we have never played one of the Tone Poets pressings.
UPDATE 2025
We have now played a couple of the Tone Poets releases, Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up and Lee Morgan’s Cornbread.
The review for One Flight Up went up in May of 2025. Cornbread followed in December.
Incidentally, One Flight Up is actually one of the records I could point to that blew my mind, all the way back in 2007. It was a milestone event at Better Records. Our very enthusiastic review is reproduced below.
Do people write reviews like this for Tone Poets records? I find that hard to believe.
This Blue Note LP is without a doubt one of the best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard. We were auditioning a bunch of jazz records today (4/25/07), and when the needle hit the grooves on this one we were absolutely blown away.
I can’t think of one jazz record we’ve ever played here at Better Records with this kind of whomp. Everything here is so rich and full — nothing like a typical Blue Note album.
Both the sax and the trumpet sound unbelievably good — airy and breathy with lots of body and clearly audible leading edge transients. It’s hard to find a Blue Note where the horns aren’t either too smooth or too edgy, but here they have just the right amount of bite. The overall sound is open, spacious, tonally correct from top to bottom and totally free from distortion. We’ve heard good copies of this album before, but this one is magical.
The presence and immediacy on this copy are stunning. Just listen to the snare drum at the beginning of Coppin’ The Haven — it sounds like someone is bangin’ that thing right in your living room.
We’ve never heard a Blue Note with this kind of clarity, this kind of transparency, and this much life. We rate it an A+++ on both sides — Master Tape Sound, As Good As It Gets.
This copy has the power of live music. When we turned it up loud, it was as if we were right up front at one of the best jazz concerts imaginable. The music is every bit as good — soulful hard bop played superbly and passionately.
Just listen to Donald Byrd blowing his lungs out on his own Tanya, or Gordon’s lyrical solo on Darn That Dream — these guys are pros at the top of their game.
Further Reading
Find it funny that every time somebody mentions Tom and Better Records they seem to add a qualifier. Best I can tell you have the best and most logical process to identify great outlier copies of the albums you traffic in.
It might be instructive if you would consider doing a deep dive into the shootout process for a famous LP like Led Zep 2 or Sticky Fingers, while keeping the confidential information to yourself. I think such could be instructive and if understood might reduce those qualifiers. In fact of the two LP’s above SF could be a great example.
Brad,
We have 113 of those deep dives into what we listen for in our shootouts. Here is a link to them.