There Aren’t Many Shortcuts in Audio, But We Might Actually Know of a Couple

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Our last shootout for Pretzel Logic occurred in 2021, more than four years ago. We wrote about our fondness for the album here, along with some advice regarding what the best pressings do better than most.

Any grit or grain will show itself on the title track big time, especially if you like to play this album as loud as I do, which is LOUD. The power of all those voices singing at the top of their lungs should give you chills.

At moderate levels chills are a lot harder to come by.

Most audiophiles play their music much too quietly. Sometimes this is due to obvious system limitations, but often it seems to be merely a preference. (Without a spacious, heavily-treated room, no system, regardless of quality, can hope to be able to get the huge choruses of Pretzel Logic to soar the way they do on the best copies we shootout.)

I want to have a powerful emotional experience when playing an album like this. I want to be thrilled. That just isn’t possible at the kind of comfortable listening levels most audiophiles prefer. This music performed live would be very loud, because rock concerts are very loud.

Why wouldn’t we want to reproduce the sound of the live event?

We followed that up with some advice for the advanced audiophile — our code for one who knows not to waste his money on modern reissues — to allow him to enjoy the hell out of the album in ways that would have been all but impossible before we came along:

We’ve been known to remark that there are no shortcuts in audio.

You have to put in years — decades even — of mostly tedious work to get your stereo and room to be able to reproduce music properly.

But there exists one very obvious shortcut in audio, and another sort-of shortcut, that will allow you to get much better sound than you could on your own without putting in the huge amounts of time that are usually required.

The first one is a Hot Stamper pressing.

We’ve already found the record of your dreams for you. This saves you an awful lot of time — time we think you’ll agree is better spent listening to records rather than digging through dusty record bins in dingy record stores trying to find them. (Or wasting money on some Heavy Vinyl wannabe that will never come close to the experience of playing the real thing.) 

The other is record cleaning.

After years of experimentation, we’ve got the science of record cleaning down to a T. It’s partly why our records sound so good; they’ve been cleaned right. We have available the most important element to proper recording cleaning — the right fluids.

All you need then is a good machine and the time and patience to put it to work.

Further Reading

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