Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now
You can play hard-to-reproduce records all day long if your system is tuned up and working fine.
Ours has to be, all day, every day. Our shootouts require that everything is working properly or we wouldn’t be able to trust the results.
But you can’t play this record on such a system without testing everything, because this is the Single Most Difficult to Reproduce Recording I know of.
This is what makes it such a great test disc; to call it a challenge doesn’t begin to convey the difficulty of playing a record that places such heavy demands on a system.
Which means I had to retweak a lot of my table setup to make sure it was 100% right, by ear. Getting the VTA right on this record was fundamentally critical to hearing it sound its best.
(None of those silly setup tools for us here at Better Records. You can hear when it’s right and if you can’t then you need to keep at it until you can.)
Detail Freaks Beware
This is the kind of record that will eat the detail freaks alive. If your system has any extra presence, or boost in the top end — the kind that some audiophiles mistake for “detail” — this record with beat you over the head with it until blood runs out of your ears.
You need balance to get the most out of this album.
The more your system is out of whack, the more this album will make those shortcomings evident.
Once you have balance, then you can unleash the energy in a way that’s enjoyable, not painful.
When this record is sounding right, you want to play it as loud as you can. It’s pedal to the metal time. This music wants to overwhelm your senses. When the system is up to it, it can, and will.
This is what a Test Disc is all about. It shows you what’s wrong, and once you’ve fixed it, it shows you that now it’s right. We audiophiles need records like this. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become better tweakers. You cannot buy equipment that will give you this kind of sound. You can only tweak the right equipment to get it. At most 20% of the sound of your stereo is what you bought. At least 80% is what you’ve done with it.
Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems .
Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.
This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from even the most serious and dedicated audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process.
Testing and Tuning
Below you can find rather long lists of recordings we’ve found to be good for testing, tweaking and tuning your system, your room and your front end setup, among other things. We encourage you to check them out.
- Favorite jazz test discs
- Favorite orchestral test discs
- Favorite rock and pop test discs
- Still more of our favorite test discs
These are the records that challenged me and helped me to achieve more progress in audio. If you want to improve your stereo, these are some of the best records we know of to help get you to the next level.
Further Reading