Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, resulting in an overall thinning of the sound and lower strings that get washed out.

On some sides of some copies of some titles the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage tube equipment, or modern equipment that is trying to mimic the sound of vintage tubes, you never have to worry that the strings on your London orchestral recordings will sound too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is, from our point of view, a dead end.

If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the much more common second- and third-rate pressings that often look identical to them.

If you have this kind of audio firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get from the electronic overkill you see.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but create a barrier between you and the music you love.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life (and was perfectly happy with myself before the early 2000s.)

The “in-groove” guy you see to the left is the poster child for mistaking a rack of expensive components for the kind that can tell him how bad some records are — for example, the Mobile Fidelity Kind of Blue — which is very bad indeed. (Our review is coming someday, we promise. Until then, Robert Brook’s review is very good and worth reading, with a few of my notes added as well.)

We assume our customers can hear it — our good customer Conrad had no problem appreciating its shortcomings — but we are pretty sure our customers can recognize a good record from a bad one, otherwise they would not see the value in Hot Stampers, right?

But the blue lights look awesome, the stuff costs a fortune, and for those with better eyesight than hearing, it’s impressive as hell.

Good equipment is necessary but far from sufficient to get good sound, a subject we discuss here and at some length throughout the blog in our scores of commentaries about audio equipment.

Why Are Some Common Subjects Concerning the Sound of Recordings Rarely Discussed?

Can we really be hearing all these characteristics of recordings that nobody else seems to be hearing? A few examples:

If audiophiles and audiophile reviewers are hearing these things on the records they review, whether their writings show up in magazines or on audiophile forums, why aren’t they discussing them?

Of course, they may in fact be discussing the hell out of them. I have no way of knowing since I rarely read anything they write.

But I don’t think they are discussing these things much. If they are, and you across any of them, please shoot me a link so that I can see what I’ve been missing.

You may have noticed that few of the audiophiles reviewing records on the web seem to be interested in orchestral and classical recordings.

We doubt that many, if any, have the kinds of systems that can reproduce them properly, hence the lack of commentary.

All of which is by fine by us. We feel more than qualified to go where their colored, limited, over-priced and under-performing systems in untreated rooms prevent them from going.

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