Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
I really wanted to thank you for The Cars. What a sweet-sounding record! Everything about that one is so right; the guitars, the bass, the drums, the vocals, everything sounds completely natural.
I have a good friend whose favourite band are The Cars. He has an expensive high-end system, but doesn’t want the “hassle” of vinyl.
Swears blind that nothing beats the DCC gold CD of ‘The Cars’, so I invited him round at the weekend and asked him to bring his DCC CD with him to compare on my relatively modest system.
After we had heard his CD, the look on his face when I dropped the needle on my record was absolutely priceless! A big thank you for the heads-up on that one.
Owais M.
Thanks, Owais, for writing to us. We enjoy hearing that our records are a shock to the system for some audiophiles. Think how much better off your friend would be if he could put up with the hassle of vinyl. He could hear The Cars sound better than he ever imagined.
He imagined that his Gold CD was sonically as good as it gets, but now that he knows just how much better the sound can actually get, courtesy of Better Records, do you think there is any chance the superior sound will help him get over his reservations about vinyl? My intuition says that such a thing is unlikely.
It seems that some aspects of audio are just too much work for a certain group of audiophiles. They pretend their oh-so-convenient CDs sound great, and they get away with believing it because most of them have no way of discovering disconfirming evidence like the kind you supplied your friend.
Unsurprisingly, Gold CD owners and Heavy Vinyl owners are often one and the same. For most of these CD guys, the Heavy Vinyl in this case can only confirm how much better the Gold CD sounds!
And given the choice between the excellent CDs Steve Hoffman (and others) have mastered and the typical Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, who can be blamed for giving up on vinyl?
The DCC Gold CD is indeed excellent, as are most of Steve’s work. I own one and it sounds right to me. It might even beat most vinyl pressings. It will definitely beat this ridiculously bad sounding Heavy Vinyl pressing, the one ruined by Kevin Gray. (Nothing new there.)
And the MoFi is surely a joke, since all their records are a joke. How this company is still in business is a question we often ask ourselves after playing one of their albums.
And if you are a hard-of-hearing audiophile record reviewer with four copies of the album sitting on your shelves, it will beat at least three of them, and maybe even the fourth, especially if they haven’t been cleaned properly, which is a pretty safe bet for a one man band. I used to be one, so I know whereof I speak. The amount of work required to clean and then shootout the four records you see would take at a minimum two hours, and maybe three. Who can find the time?
But no need to bother. Do a quick needle drop and just tell your readers how great one of the audiophile pressings is, because that’s all they are interested in hearing anyway. Give them the answer and try to make it a record that is still in print so they can afford it. They’ll buy whatever you tell them to buy and they will like it because they don’t know any better, just like Owais’s friend.
Further Reading