Many years ago, right around 2015 I believe, we played a copy with all the presence, all the richness, all the size and all the energy we ever hoped to hear from a top quality pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.
It did it ALL and then some.
The raging guitar solos (there are three of them) on Money seemed to somehow expand the system itself, making it bigger and more powerful than I had ever heard.
Even our best copies of Blood Sweat and Tears have never managed to create such a huge space with that kind of raw power. This copy broke through all the barriers, taking the system to an entirely new level of sound.
Take the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage on this copy that I’ve never heard as clearly before. On most copies you can’t even tell they are there. Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve NEVER heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion on this track.
One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, do no more than hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. When you don’t — the reason we do shootouts in a nutshell — it’s not.
The best sounding parts of this record are nothing less than ASTONISHING. Money is the best example I can think of for side two. When you hear the sax player rip into his solo as Money gets rockin’, it’s almost SCARY! He’s blowin’ his brains out in a way that has never, in my experience anyway, been captured on a piece of plastic. After hearing this copy, I remembered exactly why we felt this album must rank as one of the five best Rock Demo Discs to demonstrate the superiority of analog. There is no CD, and there will never be a CD, that sounds like this.
In fact, when you play the other “good sounding” copies, you realize that the sound you hear is what would naturally be considered as good as this album could get. But now we know better. This pressing takes Dark Side to places you have never imagined it could go.
Somehow we managed to have a Classic Records pressing on hand to play in our most recent shootout for the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.
We knew all the way back in 1997 that Classic had done a good job with the record – we recommended it as one of the best Classic Records pressings in our catalogs at the time — but we sure didn’t expect it to do as well as it did, earning 2 pluses on one side and close to that on the other.
Years ago we wrote:
Here is the kind of sound that Classic Records could not ignore, even though the original was only ever made available as part of RCA’s budget reissue series, Victrola.
Don’t let its budget status fool you — this pressing puts to shame most of what came out on the full price Living Stereo label. (And handily beats any Classic Records reissue ever made.)
The top and bottom are wrong to varying degrees on both sides of the Classic, as you can see from our notes, which read:
Side One:
big,
a little shiny up top
not as rich but weighty
Side Two:
leaned out up top
blurry down low
At least the midrange is more or less correct.
A potentially good Heavy Vinyl pressing, worth picking up if you can find one at a good price.
Note that it comes with different coupling works, as well as on both 180 amd 200 gram vinyl. This is the version with the Leonore Overture.
To sum up, these grades mean that the Classic will beat the lesser Victrola pressings, and be beaten by the better ones, for what that’s worth.
Side One
Symphony No. 4 I. Adagio, Allegro Vivace II. Adagio III. Menuetto: Allegro Vivace – Trio: Un Poco Meno Allegro
You’ll find superb Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides of this famous TAS Super Disc RCA Living Stereo LP
Plays fairly quiet too – about as quiet as these RCA pressings from the early 60s ever will
If you have ever heard one of our luscious Living Stereo Chet Atkins records, you know what to expect – off the charts Tubey Magic unlike anything made in the last fifty years, or more!
Engineer Bill Porter just doesn’t know how not to make an amazing sounding Living Stereo recording – everything the guy touches is gold
If you’re a fan of the smooth guitar stylings of Mr. Atkins, this is a classic from 1962 that belongs in your collection.
This is one of Chet Atkins’ best albums. Sonically, it’s right up there with The Other Chet Atkins and the Hollywood album. It seems like Bill Porter just doesn’t know how not to make an amazing sounding Living Stereo recording. He knocked this out of the park.
I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Harry Pearson for pointing out to us with his TAS List what a great record this is, although I’m pretty sure anybody playing this album can tell after a minute or two that it’s in that very special class of great recordings.
This album is a little more lively than some of his other recordings, which can be criticized for being a little too laid back. For example, try side 2, cut 2 where Chet actually jams.
The last track on side 2 where Chet is joined by a trumpet player is my favorite on the album. That guitar-trumpet combination is pretty magical on that song. And you’ve got to love the kind of sound Bill Porter get from a trumpet. That’s the kind of sound we audiophiles drool over. I do anyway.
You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this Copland Masterpiece – reasonably quiet vinyl too (noted condition issue notwithstanding), with no audible marks and no Inner Groove Distortion (IGD)
A spectacular Demo Disc recording that is clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the big, bold sound we love
The labels are reversed on this copy
“To the ultimate delight of audiences Copland managed to weave musical complexity with popular style.”
If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this recording from 1967 belongs in your collection.
This vintage Turnabout pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for —this sound.(more…)
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
I will share with you guys a few more observations.
You will not be surprised to learn that the Led Zep 2 WHS leads the pack. The most expensive record I ever bought but well worth the dough!
Your description says it all: Freakishly good! Firmly trounced my early UK plum and my German RL (side 1) issues
No disapoimtments regarding the sound whatsoever with all others. One has to understand though that a 3/3 is an absolute judgement but a relative one (Bruce Springssteen comes to mind) but if one follows you long enough the prices asked for give a bit of indication so that‘s fine with me.
Christian ended his letter with these thoughts.
You made my life better with your records. I keep learning a lot from you following your site everyday now, enhanced my listening skills and sometimes detect now my own HS (just listening and comparing my two early UK Track Who Tommy inspired by your listing yesterday) and am amazed by the quality but also differences from side to side).
Best.
Christian
Christian,
We are so happy to hear that we’ve made your life better with our records, who could ask for anything more?
It wasn’t hard for us to beat your UK and German pressings, the UK original is a joke next to the good RL pressings. I hope you had a chance to play our Hot Stamper against the Heavy Vinyl reissue. If you did, please let us know what you heard.
As for your copies of Tommy have side to side differences, we’ve been going on about that for three decades, but for some reason audiophiles and those who write for them never notice these things.
We are not aware of any audiophile reviewer who can play Big Rock Records the way we can play them, the way they should be played, a subject we discussed in this commentary.
Steve Westman invited me to appear again on his youtube channel chat with the Audiophile Roundtable.
At about the 39 minute mark, we discuss my picks for what I would rate as the Five Best Sounding Records I know of.
I wanted to go with more variety, so I picked two rock records, two jazz records and one classical album.
A rough transcription with corrections and additions follows:
Before I did my top five, I wanted to say something along the lines of, if you want to know where somebody’s coming from in audio, you don’t ask them what their stereo is, you don’t ask them what their room is like, and how their electricity is done, and what their history with audio is, because they’re not going to tell you, and they just don’t want to go down that road.
But you can ask them about music, and that will tell you a lot about where they’re coming from, so here are my questions for people if I wanted to know more about their understanding of records (and, by implication, audio):
One: what are the five best sounding records you’ve ever heard?
Two: what are your five favorite records of all time?
Three: what five famous recordings never sounded good to you?
Four: name five recordings that are much better than most of your friends or audiophiles in general think?
In my world, you would have to tell me what pressing you’re listening to. If you said “I love the new Rhino Cars album,” I think we would be done, but if you told me that you love the original, then I would say yes, I love that record too. I bought it in 1978 and I’ve played it about 5000 times. Never gotten tired of it.
At about the 48 minute mark I reveal the best stampers for Ry Cooder’s Jazz album.
At about the 50 minute mark someone asks about my system. This would be my answer:
All that information is on the blog., I actually do a thing about my stereo where I take it all the way from 1976 to the present, which I’m sure bores people to death, but you know, there was a lot to talk about there.
There were a lot of changes that I went through and I even talk about how my old stereo from the 90s, which I had put together after having been an audiophile for 25 years, was dark and unrevealing compared to the one I have now, so all my opinions from 25 years ago are suspect, and rightly so.
I feel the same thing is going on in the world of audiophiles when you have systems that aren’t very revealing and aren’t tonally accurate, yet are very musical and enjoyable the way Geoff would like, but they’re not good for really knowing what your records sound like because your system is doing all sorts of things to the record that you’re playing in order to keep the bad stuff from bothering you.
All the bad stuff just jumps out of the speakers, and that’s why these heavy vinyl records don’t appeal to us anymore, because we hear all the bad stuff and we don’t like it.
At 1:03 I’m asked if I like any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I can think of is Chris Bellman, because he masterered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressing I know of that sounds any good, Brothers in Arms, released in 2021. I played it when Edgers brought it by the studio when he first visited me in preparation for his article.
My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s mostly sounds right, and that surprised me because most of these modern records sound funny and weird and rarely do they sound right.
(Geoff brought over three records that day: Brothers in Arms, the remastered Zep II, and a ridiculously bad sounding Craft pressing of Lush Life, which was mastered by Kevin Gray, and one which I have not had time to review yet. It was my introduction to the Craft series, and let’s just say we got off on the wrong foot. I told Geoff it sounded like a bad CD, and that’s pretty much all I remember of it. The average price for that pressing on Discogs is roughly $69 these days. The CD is cheaper and there is very little doubt in my mind that it would be better sounding to boot.)
At 1:04 I mention the biggest snake oil salesman in the history of vinyl, the man behind The Electric Recording Company.
Patrick mentions an ERC Love record which he likes, but we played one that sounded about as bad as a bad record could sound. That Love record will never get any love from us. He says he’ll never buy another ERC pressing, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing someone who really likes a record would say, does it? I suppose you can ask him in the comments section why that would be.
At some point I talk about the studio we play records in, not exactly spouse-friendly but good for hearing what’s really in the grooves of the records we play:
The reason the sound room is the way it is is because you’re not there to be reading magazines and looking at your phone. You’re just in there to sit in a single chair in front of two speakers, not talking. Nobody else is in there. They have no business being in there. It’s just you and the music and that’s the way I like it.
This next section has been fleshed out quite a bit. I took the question posed and ran with it:
I would answer the question with a question of my own: why would you go to a museum and just look at a painting by yourself?
You don’t need anybody around you to help you understand a painting.
You just look at the painting and that’s the experience of looking at a painting.
When I listen to a record, I want the experience of listening to the record. I don’t need anybody else around. I don’t need anybody talking to me. I just want to hear that record, and as Nathan said, I want it to take me from the beginning to the end. And at the end I should feel like I still want more.
For me, that’s what a good record and a good stereo is all about. That’s the reason some of us describe ourselves as audiophiles.
The shortest definition of an audiophile is a “lover of sound.” I love good sound and I’ve spent more than forty years building a stereo system that has what I think is very good sound. (What others think of it has never been of much concern, nor should it be.)
It’s in a dark room with no windows because music sounds better in a dark room with no windows and the door closed.
There is one chair and it is located in the only sweet spot in the room. (Yes, there can only be one sweet spot.)
I go in there to put myself in the living presence of the musicians who performed on whatever record I choose to play.
Music is loud and so I play the stereo at levels as close to live music as I can manage.
The system creates a soundfield that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. With the speakers pulled so far out into the room, they have often been known to disappear, leaving only three-dimensional imaging of great depth and precision (especially in the case of orchestral music).
By listening this way, I am able to completely immerse myself in the music I play, with no distractions of any kind.
This way of listening is more intense and powerful and transportive than any other I have known (outside of the live event of course).
That’s what I am trying to achieve with my system and the best records I can find to play on it: an experience that is so intense and powerful that I find myself completely transported out of the real world I exist in, and into the imaginary world created by the producers, engineers and musicians responsible for making the record.
If you want this kind of experience, you need more than good music. You need a good recording of that music, and, if you’re an analog sort of person with high standards, you need an exceptionally good pressing of that recording.
At the highest levels of sound quality, for us audiophiles it can’t just be about the music. You really do need all three.
Depending on your tastes and standards, good music can easily be found most everywhere. Good music with good sound, at least on vinyl, is much more rare, and good sounding music reproduced well is, in my experience, very rare indeed.
Some people are upset and put off by what they consider to be our “extreme” approach to records and audio. It bothers them that we constantly say that doing records and audio well is harder than it looks. To them it seems so easy.
Naturally, we believe there is ample evidence to support our views on the subject.
And, to paraphrase Jesus, the upset will always be with us.
I finish up with a talk about the one and only Heavy Vinyl record that has won a shootout, an Original Jazz Classic of all things, and what it would take to find another OJC title that might win the next one. The odds are not good, and the cost to find such a record would be sizable, perhaps prohibitive, but who knows? We might just get lucky again.
Break Every Rule makes its Hot Stamper debut with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this original Capitol pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
These sides are bigger and richer and have more of the rock solid energy that’s missing from the average copy
Turn this one up good and loud (which you can do when the sound is right) and you’ll have a living, breathing Tina Turner singing her heart out right in front of you
“Throughout Break Every Rule, Turner sounds as if she had the time, guidance and confidence to really master these songs. The result is a potent display of passion and control, and that alone would make this record worth discovering.” – Rolling Stone
Aaron has been trying to help his audiophile friends learn the differences between good records and Heavy Vinyl records. This first story concerns Chuck, who sold Aaron the VPI table you see pictured. Aaron writes:
Chuck’s a real record guy. I played him some hot stampers, alongside the same record in heavy vinyl format.
First up was Rumours – white hot up against the Hoffman 45 mastering. He wanted to hear “you make loving fun,” so we did.
The drums on the Hoffman are more prominent, and they grab you right away. Way out of balance to my taste.
He said, “Hoffman’s done a great job with the drums. But it comes at the expense of Christine’s voice. That’s okay, I never loved her as a singer anyway.”
Next I busted out my holy grail, and played him my Zep 2 WHS. Followed up by the Jimmy Page remastering. The latter is indeed a decent record, Tom, as you say. But the clarity on the drums is superior on the Ludwig. [Clarity is not the word I would have chosen, but that’s another story for another day.]
As Chuck put it, “I never thought of this as a vocal record.” Plant’s voice just has so much more emotion on the hot stamper than on the Page version. He said, “the Page version takes out some of the humanity.” I totally agreed with that. Chuck was amazed that you were able to find and sell me a RL copy with such clean vinyl. I took the record off the table and showed it to him – he was amazed to see how scuffed it looked. It’d grade VG at best visually, but man does it play clean.
So, record after record, Chuck could hear what the hot stampers were doing. And, no doubt, the VPI table is making the hot stampers sound better, and in comparison, the heavy vinyl sounds even duller.
That said, this turntable is so much more revealing than my Clearaudio was, that there is always something delightful to listen to on my heavy vinyl records. They don’t sound worse, they sound better than they used to. It’s just that the gap between them and the hot stampers is only continuing to grow wider.
So, my man Chuck, who sold me his VPI turntable, saw the light. But then he shielded his eyes from it. Even though Chuck’s got a stack of 25 benjamins in his hand right now, I don’t think any of that is headed your way, Tom.
Aaron followed up this letter with one about another friend, Bill, who is now, with Aaron’s help, building his first great stereo. Aaron brought along a killer copy of Clap Hands in order to judge the speakers they would be auditioning in various audio salons. When Ella finally sounded right, that was it.
Bill closed the deal on the spot, and we retired to his home to sip some Japanese whiskey and listen to some music. As we chatted, he asked me more about the copy of Rumours I had played for him at my house last week.
It had made him bury his face in his hands and declare, “money can’t buy that sound.”
When he reminded me of how moved he was by what he heard in my listening room, and feeling loosened up by the whiskey, I confessed to him that, in fact, money CAN buy that sound. Just, a whole lot of money. Sure enough, a WHS of Rumours was available on your site, and he bought it without hesitation.
No turntable, buying hot stampers.
I wonder if you’ve ever had another customer who doesn’t own a turntable buy a white hot stamper from you? It’s actually a really good move. I’m now firmly of the opinion that anybody shopping for a stereo should bring along a hot stamper. Pick a favorite album, and buy a hot stamper to bring with you as you listen to equipment. Even if you don’t own a turntable, a hot stamper is going to reveal the character of the equipment you demo, in a way that no streaming or demo CD can do. The price of a hot stamper is small in the context of helping you to avoid making a bad stereo purchase.
Aaron
Aaron,
I’m firmly of that opinion too: buy more Hot Stampers!
In order to judge equipment, you must have a record that is right, and one of our killer copies of Rumours is going to be right in ways that few other records are. We even advise you on what to listen for on practically every track on the album here.
I hope that when Bill finally gets a turntable that our Rumours sounds good on it. Judging equipment or turntable setup solely with female vocals — even vocals as good as Ella’s — is not something we recommend, a subject we discussed in some detail here.
This vintage London Stereo Treasury Import LP of Falla’s wonderful classical works boasts superb Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from first note to last
Side two is big, rich, open, and natural sounding with wonderfully full vocals and a more three-dimensional sound than most other copies we played, and side one is not far behind in all those areas
The Argenta recording of El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show) is High Fidelity Audiophile Demo Disc Quality Gold, with bells, drums, voices, trumpets, strings, woodwinds and more, all sounding so real it will take your breath away.
Our favorite performance with top quality sound is found on a 1967 Decca with Fruhbeck De Burgos at the helm, but the Ansermet we are presenting here is still a very good record if you know what to look for
This Golden Age tape has been mastered brilliantly with “modern” mastering equipment from 1967, not the low-rez junk they’re forced to make do with these days, giving you, the listener, sound that only the best of both worlds can offer.
You can be pretty sure of two things when you hear a record of this quality: one, the original won’t sound as good, having been cut on much cruder equipment.
And two, no modern recutting of the tapes by the likes of Speakers Corner for example could begin to capture this kind of naturalistic sound. I have never heard a Heavy Vinyl pressing begin to do what this record is doing. This STS may be a London budget reissue pressing, but it was mastered by Decca, pressed in England on high quality vinyl, using fairly fresh tapes, and mastered about as well as a record can be mastered. The sound is REAL and BELIEVABLE.
When have you ever heard a modern remastering with this kind of depth and width to the soundstage? I have yet to have the pleasure and I’ve played scores of them, close to a hundred I would guess. We used to carry all that Heavy Vinyl back in the day and I played them and reviewed them as they came out, rejecting a good 80% right from the get go. None, not one, ever sounded like this.
This price for a reissue might seem to be a stretch, but we know an amazing record when we hear one, and we know that the next copy that comes along is very unlikely to sound as good as this one does. That’s simply “regression toward the mean,” a reality we have learned to respect. We don’t sell our records based on their reputations. We sell them based on the sound inscribed in their grooves, and these are some mighty fine grooves on both of these sides.
With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, this original Reprise import pressing is one of the BEST we have ever heard – fairly quiet vinyl too
Richer, warmer, more natural, and more relaxed than all others we played – this is what vintage analog is all about, that smooth sound that never calls attention to itself and just lets the music flow
Of course the main attributes that set the better copies apart from the also-rans are size, energy, weight, vocal presence and an overall freedom from grit and grain, and we guarantee that this copy will do better in all of these areas than any you have ever heard
“The songs [are] wistful, midtempo reflections on stardom, love, and the passage of time. Some were familiar, including ‘Mr. Soul’ and ‘Like a Hurricane,’ and were given new treatments; others were obscure or even previously unrecorded (“Stringman”). But all [are] melodic and inviting, especially the selections from Harvest Moon…”
More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
At least the midrange is more or less correct.
