A typical review of a Classic Records classical release here on the blog might read more or less as follows:
Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played a sampling of their classical reissues would have expected.
Their version is dramatically more harsh and aggressive than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with transistory shrill string tone and almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.
In fact, their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price.
With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, Classic’s remastered classical offerings have managed to sound progressively worse. How could that be, you ask?
Because higher quality playback stops hiding the shortcomings of bad sounding records.
At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths of good sounding records.
Begging the Question
But what actually is a good record? Don’t I have to offer some evidence for what causes a record to be good rather than simply asserting that the original is good and the Heavy Vinyl reissue is bad (or at least worse)?
Luckily for you, dear reader, you are actually on a blog that has much to say about these issues.
The main reason we feel qualified to make these judgments is that we make sure to play the records we review under rigorously controlled conditions in what amounts to “blinded” experiments. (Certainly as blinded as is practical.)
And our approach to finding the best sounding pressings for any given album has gone through a host of changes over the course of decades in order to allow us to carry out this difficult work. Work we actually enjoy doing.
It’s also the kind of work that practically nobody else does.
And certainly no one does it at anything approaching the scale of our efforts, with a full time staff and a monthly record purchasing budget in the tens of thousands of dollars.
An amazingly good stereo set up in a heavily-treated room with clean electricity doesn’t hurt either.
High Quality Audio Could Not Be More Important
There are scores of commentaries on the blog about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the main reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts:
Because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.
With an unrevealing audio system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled twenty and thirty [now forty] years ago.
Audio has improved radically in that time. If you’re still playing audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re currently missing. We know because we’ve been auditioning records practically every day, all day, for twenty years now and we have heard the changes these improvements in cleaning, tweaking, room treatments and better equipment have made in the sound of the records we play.
One amazing sounding orchestral Hot Stamper pressing might just be what it takes to get the ball rolling. Because explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.
Further Reading