More on the Subject of Pretentious Knowledge
In our twenty-year-old review for the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan we made the following claim, a claim which we obviously had no evidence to back up.
But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.
It was foolish of us to declare any such thing, especially with such certainty. How on earth could we possibly know what tapes were used to master the record, in Germany of all places? The very idea is absurd. We call people out for saying things they have no evidence to support all the time. Running into this review today, I have to call myself out for such nonsense. What I should have said was the following:
This reissue sounds to us as though it has been made from copy tapes.
Just to be clear, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that it sounds like a copy tape was used to master the record, but I am not at all justified in saying that a copy tape was actually used to master the record.
Nor do I have any business talking about about the sound of a master tape I’ve never heard.
I can certainly talk about the sound of the best London pressings. Those I have played. I’ve critically listened to batches of them over the course of many years. They may be expensve but they are not hard to find. We’ve sold dozens of them as Hot Stamper pressings and played plenty of others with sound not good enough or surfaces not quiet enough to offer to our customers.
Whatever approach Decca may have used in the mastering, with whatever tape they may have used to make the records that we’ve auditioned, is information that would be nice to have. But it’s really none of my business, since it doesn’t alter the sound of the pressings we auditioned.
More importantly, it’s none of Better Records’ business.
Our business is about one thing and one thing only: records that sound better than other pressings.
Discussions of master tapes and what they should sound like or what they do sound like is not part of our remit. Nor should it be. At bottom it is nothing but speculation, and it is rarely if ever supported by anything resembling evidence.
We are firmly on record as opposing that sort of thing.
We’ve Been Saying This for Twenty Years
After our dubious claim to knowing that the record was mastered from a copy tape, we went on to say:
Copies in analog or copies in digital, who is to say, but it sure ain’t the master tape we’re hearing, of that we can be fairly certain. How else to explain such mediocrity of sound?
Yes, the cutting systems being used to master these vintage recordings aren’t very good; that seems safe to say.
Are the tapes too old and worn?
Is the vinyl of today simply not capable of storing the kind of magical sound we find so often in pressings from the 50s, 60s and 70s?
To all these questions and more we have but one answer: we don’t know.
We know we don’t like the sound of very many of these modern reissues and I guess that’s probably all that we need to know about them.
If someone ever figures out how to make a good sounding modern reissue we’ll ask them how they did it. Until then it seems the question is moot.
We’re shocked to have to admit that as of 2024 we actually do know of a couple. Here’s one we wrote about, but the funny part of the story is that no mastering engineer was credited, so we can’t ask anyone how they did it because we don’t know whom to ask!
Before that, we had raved about the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan. Its shortcomings are glaringly obvious to us now, but they weren’t back then. We didn’t have the stereo, we didn’t have the cleaning system, and we didn’t have the critical listening skills to be able to recognize its numerous and serious shortcomings.
Then, in the early 2000s, we started doing shootouts.
These “record experiments” we conducted on thousands of albums taught us some important lessons.
The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and cataloging the differences we heard made us better listeners.
We took our critical listening skills and applied them to our stereo in order to get as many colorations and limitations out of it as possible.
Through all this work we came to have an appreciation for the fundamentals of collecting better sounding records.
However, without a staff of ten finding, cleaning and playing records for you, most audiophiles will have a hard duplicating our results.
But they can certainly do a lot better using our approach than any other, an approach we are confident will put them well ahead of all the audiophile reviewers and forum posters in the world combined.
Further Reading