Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z
Not long ago we received an email taking us to task for our bashing of Heavy Vinyl in general and Mobile Fidelity in particular.
Hey Tom,
I think your blanket ‘anything new is not as good as the best of original or vintage’ is totally illogical. Why couldn’t more care and excellence be put in to a new pressing now than the best you can find from an original vintage pressing? Take 70’s rock albums. With the oil crisis tons of vinyl was pretty rubbish and/or recycled, and sounds terrible. That having been said, most of the Jimmy Page remasters sound awful too. If you take somewhere like Craft Recordings and their one steps they are outstanding pressings. You also know RVG mastered records to deliberately avoid records jumping on relatively poor quality equipment and not to reflect the ‘true’ sound. So why can’t Kevin Gray master something now that RTI then presses that sounds ‘better’?
I think your blanket dislike of everything MoFi is also not credible. I listened to the original MoFi one step of Sgt. Pepper on a 2 million dollar plus system and it sounded better than any copy I’ve ever heard or anything else we had to compare it with that evening.
I’m not being critical. Just commenting. You clearly have a business in selling great sounding copies of ‘vintage’ pressings (at least I assume they are all vintage). That’s fine and that’s your prerogative. But it doesn’t render every single version of 60’s and 70’s releases produced in the last 10-15 years not worth listening to but it does support your business proposition. Fair enough.
I think you, your team and frequent shoppers may well be suffering from the one thing you kind of imply everyone who buys MoFi or Tone Poets records of – confirmation bias. But that’s fine. If it brings joy to your listening or that of your staff and customers I can’t argue with that. Well done. I just don’t buy the logic. I too trust my ears! So I will at some point buy a copy that I’ve already got what I think is an amazing copy of and compare it to see for myself.
Nick H.
Nick,
Doing carefully controlled shootouts with large groups of records is the only practical way anyone can learn what to listen for. We wrote about it here in a review for Rubber Soul:
If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.
Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John beats the hell out of on Norwegian Wood just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.
The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but through the experience you will have gained knowledge that you cannot come by any other way.
If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever do in audio.
Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes obvious what they “did to it” in the mastering, and how far short if falls when compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound. This is why we think the three most important words in the world of records are compared to what?
Our critiques are often quite specific about the sound of these records. Here is a good example from 2021: Cat Stevens on 2 Heavy Vinyl 45 RPM discs.
I would be happy to sell you a killer Sgt. Pepper to change your mind, same deal, but I feel at this point you are very unlikely to take me up on that offer for the reasons you list.
The rest of your questions are good ones but have already been answered at length and ad infinitum on our blog. There are 5000 6000 postings. We repeat ourselves a lot.
Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some testimonial letters you may find of interest:
Either way, thanks for writing,
TP
PS
Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are buying vintage pressings in the meantime, not audiophile records, you are probably not wasting much money. Every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something. Any modern record should always be considered a stop-gap, never an answer, something to beat when you finally find a real pressing in acceptable playing condition.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 at this stage of the game in 2025.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still at least somewhat impressed with some of Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them. (Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records.)
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.
Here’s an honest question – have you ever applied your meticulous process to 10-20 heavy vinyl pressings of a given title? Cleaned them up, shoot them out, gave them the same chance you do for vintage titles? Part of the search for hot stampers involves a large enough sample size.
If not, I would imagine its because there was something off about the way these heavy vinyl titles were remastered to begin with, and no pressing variation could save what was rotten from the core. On the other hand, the vintage pressings that you seek are ones with good mastering but with wild variations in the pressing quality, probably due to the mass production of the era. Is that fair to say?
You certainly keep track of which runouts have better potential than others, even if you have to go through 10 copies of that runout to find a hot stamper. Why, I bought a White Hot Stamper of Saxophone Colossus after buying 4 copies of my own to shoot out. Same labels, same runouts, vastly different sound. That would imply good mastering, but production chain variation. Wouldn’t it?
I wonder if modern records have more uniform production chain standards nowadays due to them being a niche product. That is… they’re more likely to sound the same than vintage records. Just curious what you think.
Jonathan,
These are all good questions. I will try to answer them soon.
TP