Month: December 2023

Is It All About the Music or Is It All About the Sound?

Top Quality Audio Is Key to Finding Good Records 

There is a truism (a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting) that frequently pops up in the comments section commonly found on audiophile forums.

Working similarly to Godwin’s law, the longer an audiophile thread goes on, the more likely it is to be said. A quick recap of Godwin’s law:

“Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

The truism I’m talking about is commonly phrased, “It’s the music, stupid,” an echo of James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” from Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign of 1992. (I prefer not to use the word “stupid” when discussing my fellow audiophiles’ comments, but the play on words does not work without it, so there it is.)

Who would be foolish enough to take up the other side of this “argument,” if we can call it that?

Allow me to have a go at it.

So, if I understand correctly, it’s all about the music, right? Not the sound?

What about other kinds of art? What is it about with respect to them?

Christopher Nolan shoots on IMAX film, which in its current iteration is either 65 or 70mm.

If his movies are about a story and its characters, why not shoot them on 35mm? Or 16mm. Or Super 8? Or, gasp, HD-digital?

Same story, same characters.  But it sure wouldn’t be the same experience.

And nobody has trouble understanding that. Here’s Nolan on 70 mm.

“[The] sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled. The headline, for me, is by shooting on IMAX 70 mm film, you’re really letting the screen disappear. You’re getting a feeling of 3-D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You are immersing them in the world of the film.“

But music is different for some reason? To paraphrase Joe Pesci, different how?

Music is nothing but sound, so without good sound, what do you really have?

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Letter of the Week – “While the loud parts rock in an unbelievable way, the quiet bits reveal the magic…”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

Wanted to say thanks for the Led Zep III, fantastic and beyond expectation. While the loud parts rock in an unbelievable way the quiet bits reveal the magic, the surreal presence, space and uncanny realism. Brilliant!

I have an OK copy of Led Zep IV and the first section of Stairway to Heaven is similar in that I love hearing the acoustic guitar and then the breathy recorders (oh those recorders) and then Plant’s voice seems to appear from nowhere right before your ears.

I am so lucky to have the Zep III so thanks again.

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Eddie Money – One and Done

A Well Recorded Album that Should Be More Popular with Audiophiles

More Debut Albums of Interest

This is clearly Eddie Money’s best sounding album. Roughly 100 other listings for the Best Sounding Album by an Artist or Group can be found here.

In our opinion, his debut is the only Eddie Money record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call One and Done

The average copy is way too compressed, which kills the top end (by making the cymbals aggressive) and the vocals too midrangy. When you’ve got a copy of Eddie Money’s debut that’s doing what it’s supposed to do, you know pretty quickly. The highs are sweet and extended, the vocals are present, but without any spit or strain, and there is solid bass and low end propelling everything forward.

Eddie Money has only made one good record in our opinion — this one. Fortunately, it’s a GREAT one and we don’t have to play any of his others. This guy had so much promise, based solely on his debut here. He lost his brilliant guitarist and arranger, Jimmy Lyon, soon after this first album was made, and that may account for his slide into mediocrity.

But this record is outstanding from first note to last. If at the end of the second track — a cover of You Really Got A Hold On Me — you are not rockin’ out, then Eddie Money is just not for you. I love this album and I played it countless times back in the day.

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

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Some Questions Just Don’t Have Good Answers

Yes, that is indeed a real puzzler all right!

Further Reading

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go here.

People sometimes ask us how come we don’t like Half-Speed mastered records?

Below you will find our breakdown of the best and worst Half-Speed mastered records we have auditioned over the years.

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Beethoven / ‘Appassionata’ – Kamiya

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings

  • This rare and wonderful TAS-approved Japanese import LP boasts INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Demo Disc sound on both sides
  • You will have a hard time finding a better recording of the piano than this – it’s one of the all time great Direct-to-Discs
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more REAL than all of what we played
  • A famous resident of the TAS list, this album offers excellent music, performed with feeling, and recorded properly, the best of all possible worlds for us audiophiles
  • A friend of ours tells me that Kamiya plays this piece exactly the way Horowitz did, and that’s probably a good thing – good luck finding a Horowitz recording that sounds like this

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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.)

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Listening in Depth to John Barleycorn Must Die

More of the Music of Traffic

More of the Music of Steve Winwood

The toughest test on side two is the first track, Stranger to Himself.

Getting the voices right is practically impossible. If the voices are full, smooth, yet breathy and clear, you have that rare copy that actually gets the midrange right. Not many do.

Side One

Glad

The last portion of this track has some really interesting percussion and organ effects. Traffic were trying to break out of the standard pop song format by letting this song wander into psychedelic territory for a few minutes at the end. It’s now become my favorite part of the song.

The reason you want to pay close attention to this part is because it helps you to judge the transparency, immediacy, and top end extension for the whole side. It should be amazingly clear and open-sounding. On too many pressings, the percussion instruments are blurred and lost in the mix. On a Hot Stamper copy they’ll be right in front of you, allowing you to appreciate the interplay among the musicians as they contributed their various parts.

Freedom Rider

You’ll need lots of top end extension for this song to sound right. On many copies the double tracked flute solo in the middle of the song will be aggressive and irritating, but on a Hot Stamper pressing, the flutes will sound airy and breathy with a reasonably good sustain.

Empty Pages

The quality of the voice is what really sets the best copies apart. Winwood is much more present on the better copies. He’s recessed on most and that’s just not where he needs to be for the song to work musically. He needs to be right up front, surrounded by the air and ambience of the studio. The transparency found on the better copies will give you precisely that.

Side Two

Stranger to Himself

John Barleycorn

The acoustic guitars that open up this song are absolute perfection on the best copies — this is the sound of Tubey Magical analog at its best.

This is the real test for side two.

The acoustic guitars should sound rich and sweet. You’ll notice at the beginning of the song that they are a little dull. The last thing in the world you want to do, however, is to brighten them up, because when you do that, as some mastering engineers have in the past, the harmony vocals and the percussion and the tambourine become much too bright later on in the song.

You have to strike a balance between all the elements. That means Steve’s voice at the beginning needs to be a little reserved so that the harmony vocals later on will come in right.

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Lowell George – Thanks I’ll Eat It Here

More Little Feat

More Lowell George

  • A stunning copy and only the second to hit the site in years, here with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • We’re huge fans of this album and a pressing like this lets the natural quality of the recording shine through
  • We don’t imagine we’ll be tracking down too many copies of this so if you’re a fan, scoop this one up!
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Lowell’s style is so distinctive and his performances so soulful, it’s hard not to like this record if you’ve ever had a fondness for Little Feat.”

This kind of recording quality was abandoned decades ago, but there was a time — I’m old, I remember it — when engineers actually tried to produce recordings with this kind of rich, sweet, thoroughly analog sound. 1979, the year of this album’s release, is right at the tail end of it. Why do you think so much of our Hot Stamper output covers the decade that stretched from the late ’60s to the late ’70s? Only one reason: that’s where some of the best sound can be found. (It’s a bit like Willie Sutton’s famous answer to why he robbed banks, “because that’s where the money is.”)

Which is taking the long way round in saying that this recording has a healthy dose of analog Tubey Magic, in places maybe even a bit too much, as the sound can sometimes get too thick and overly rich, like a cake with too much frosting.

The better copies keep that wonderful analog smoothness and freedom from artificiality, adding to it the life and energy of classic rock and roll. Yes, you can have it all — rich analog sound that jumps out of the speakers! Just listen to those horns on “Honest Man” — that is the sound we are looking for on an album like this.

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A Killer Can’t Buy a Thrill (and Some Lessons We Learned)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

During our shootouts, when we drop the needle on a copy and don’t hear that “Hot Stamper” sound, we toss that one and move on to the next. The difference between a truly Hot Stamper and most copies is so obvious that we rarely waste time on the pressings that clearly don’t have any real magic in their grooves.

Like we’ve said after some of our other Steely Dan Hot Stamper shootouts, you would never imagine how good this album can sound after playing the average copy, which is grainy, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail. It’s positively criminal the way this well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP.

And how can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right? The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is we know how hard it is to appreciate good music through bad sound. Bad sound is a barrier to understanding and enjoyment, to us audiophiles anyway.

We Was Wrong About the Sound

Years ago – starting with our first shootout in 2007 for the album as a matter of fact – we had put this warning in our listings:

One thing to note: this isn’t Aja, Pretzel Logic or Gaucho (their three best sounding recordings). We doubt you’ll be using a copy of Can’t Buy A Thrill to demo your stereo.

We happily admit now that we got Can’t Buy a Thrill wrong. It’s actually a very good sounding record – rich, smooth, natural, with an especially unprocessed quality.

In that sense it is superior to most of their catalog; better than Countdown to Ecstasy, Katy Lied, Royal Scam and maybe even Gaucho (which is a bit too artificial and glossy for our tastes, although it might make owners of less revealing equipment or those who find that kind of sound more appealing positively swoon).

You could easily use Can’t Buy a Thrill to demo your stereo, depending on what you were trying to demonstrate. A realistic, solidly-weighted piano comes to mind — there are many songs with an exceptionally well recorded piano on the album.

Mistakes Were No Longer Made

We used to think it sounded flat, cardboardy, veiled and compressed. It’s actually none of those things on the best copies. The reason we didn’t find those problems during our most recent shootouts is that we must have improved our playback. Precisely how I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better. Or maybe it was that in combination with the few new room tweaks. Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know. 

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Strauss – Death and Transfiguration / Till Eulenspiegel / Karajan

More of the music of Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

  • This original Stereo London pressing of Karajan and the Vienna Phil’s performance of these classical pieces boasts stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from first note to last – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Our notes for the two top copies mention how special some stampers are: “these are so tubey with tons of room and space — the massive tympani really shine”
  • These are superb readings of the works, and we know of no others that can compete with the sound of this Decca recording
  • Clear, transparent, rich, big, spacious, tonally correct, with Tubey Magical textured strings, this record is doing practically everything right, and that makes it a very special pressing indeed
  • Some old record collectors (like me) say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be – here’s all the proof anyone with two working ears and top quality audiophile equipment needs to make the case

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