Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Robert recently addressed an issue that came up when someone left a comment about the sound of Tone Poets reissues vis-a-vis the the pressings that Rudy Van Gelder mastered, to wit:
“To say anything other than the difference (between the T.P. and the RVG) is subjective is misleading the audience.”
Robert explains in the post linked below that he has worked very hard to make his system as neutral as he possibly can, and why he thinks that is a good idea. He also notes that he isn’t done, that there is plenty of work left to do, and that a more revealing, more truthful system is his one and only goal.
Any piece of equipment, or tweak, or setup adjustment that brings him closer to the sound his critical listening skills tell him are an improvement is to be adopted. They have passed passed the “more truthful” test.
There are scores, maybe even hundreds of posts on this very blog to explain what we do and how we do it.
We tell you about our playback system and why it’s good at its job.
In addition, practically every listing on our site has standardized text detailing the three areas that are key to understanding our vintage vinyl offerings. They include:
- What sonic attributes our Hot Stampers have.
- How we go about finding records with these attributes, and
- What we’re listening for in order to distinguish superior pressings from common ones.
This is what all that looks like on our site:
What The Best Sides Of [Record X] Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
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- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in [insert year here]
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing these records are the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find pressings that sound as good as these three do.
Standard Operating Procedures
What are the criteria by which a record like this should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, and so on down through the list.
When we can get all, or most all, of the qualities above to come together on any given side we provisionally award it a grade of “contender.” Once we’ve been through all our copies on one side we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides matched up.
Record shootouts may not be rocket science, but they’re a science of a kind, one with strict protocols developed over the course of many years to ensure that the sonic grades we assign to our Hot Stampers are as accurate as we can make them.
The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing — or your money back.
What We’re Listening For On [Record X]
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- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
All this boilerplate is there to explain how we go about finding the records we think are superior, the rigorous evaluation protocols we employ and the scientific methods we follow.
Over the last twenty five years, we’ve written hundreds and hundreds of commentaries that get deep into the weeds on specific aspects of the sound we made not of on the albums we auditioned. This is information that, to our knowledge, exists on this blog and nowhere else. (This commentary discusses a handful of the issues we’ve addressed.)
What’s Your Point?
My point is simply this. In order to take the subjectivity out of our reviews, we try to approach records the way Consumer Reports tests blenders: we put them through their paces and we name the names of the winners and losers. We wrote about it another commentary explaining why we had so little respect for the mastering engineers making records today. An excerpt:
Blender X is terrible at making margaritas and blender Y is good at making them. The company that makes bad blenders should be called to account for making blenders that make lousy margaritas. If there is a name attached to that company, then I guess we can say that the person who runs that company should learn how to make better blenders or find something else to do with his time.
I am not the least bit impressed with the quality of the records being made today, and it follows that those who make them, the owners of the labels and the mastering engineers they’ve chosen to employ, are responsible for the poor quality of the remastered LPs they produce. (The complete text is here.)
We don’t test blenders, we test records, and we do that by cleaning and critically evaluating different pressings of the same album in head to head shootouts, using the most revealing equipment available to us.
When we run experiments with Heavy Vinyl records, comparing them to the vintage vinyl pressings we have on hand, the one thing we can say about them is that they are certain to be inferior. Some are a great deal worse than others, to be sure, but they are all inferior to one degree or another.
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 is active on the blog. Cornbread just went up as well.
If you as an audiophile want to make the case for the superior quality of the records put out by this label, we are happy to entertain the possibility. The chances of their records having sound we would find acceptable are vanishingly small, but we can’t say they are zero.
Repeating the tiresome truism that since all reviews are subjective, your review is as credible as any other, will not do.
If you want to be taken seriously, you will need to back up your claims.
Here are some of the things we would like to know.
- Tell us about your system, room, electricity, etc.. What do you feel are its strengths and weaknesses?
- Tell us what specific pressings you compared.
- Tell us if you cleaned them, and if so, by what method.
- Tell us what protocols you used to make sure the comparison was a fair one.
- Tell us how you optimized the playback for each pressing, accounting for the difference in vinyl thickness, playback levels and the like.
- Tell us specifically what you were listening for.
- Tell us what tracks you played and what about those tracks made them good for testing.
- Tell us in as much detail as possible the specific strengths and weaknesses of each of the pressings.
Let’s be honest. You are never going to tell us all these things, because you are never going to do what would be required of you to do this kind of serious testing.
You are simply going to assert that, since your opinion is as good as any other, none of the above effort is required.
But it is required if you want your opinion to be taken seriously by other audiophiles, especially by audiophiles like us, the ones who know the importance of doing all of these things and more.
We encourage everyone who is serious about the sound quality of his records to follow our approach and do the kind of work we do. For us, in order to be sure that the records we offer are objectively superior to all others, we have to follow the strictest protocols and do everything according to the highest standards.
Like Consumer Reports, we design and follow strict protocols and set high standards in our testing because that is what gives the tests we carry out credibility. We are not aware of any other approach that works.
If you’re looking for the best sounding pressings, either we can do the work for you, or you can do the work for yourself, but either way, in order to be successful the work must be done.
Pretending that one opinion has just as much validity as any other is the most obvious kind of motivated reasoning, borne out of pure laziness. It doesn’t get you off the hook. In fact, by giving you a license to be lazy, it insures that you will never get very far in this hobby.
Because audio is hard. So is finding good sounding records. Anyone who thinks otherwise is likely not doing it right.
Robert Brook is showing everyone the way. He’s on the right path. I happen to be very familiar with the path he’s on because I have been on the same path myself for a very long time.
Read his stuff and learn from it. Do the work he’s doing and you will make the advances he’s making.
Musical thrills far beyond any that you might get from Heavy Vinyl await you.
Further Reading