Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now
Pictured are two Michel Legrand albums we auditioned at some point in the past and found less than impressive.
Without going into specifics — our notes are long gone at this point — we’ll just say these two albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both, and therefore do not deserve a place in most audiophile collections — unless that audiophile happens to be a huge fan of the artist.
My guess is that if these two records are sitting in a record collection, they have not been played in many years, if ever.
Here’s an idea: If you own either of these two albums, pull them out and play them.
You may find that making more room on your shelves for records you may actually enjoy playing is easier than you think.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
Having the wherewithal to audition so many records puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for higher quality sound. (Or, more accurately, that small subset of audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings who also have a great deal of disposable income to devote to them.)
Yes, we have the obvious resources that would be needed: the staff and the budget.
More important than either of those, we came up with a new (sort of) and much more successful (definitely) approach.
We’ve learned through years of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.
The impossibility of predicting the sound of pressings is something that we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I was quick to embrace.
The more time I spend in this hobby, the more I realize it is beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there are apparently a goodly number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it is the undeniable reality underlying the nature of vinyl pressings.
With that in mind, finding better sounding pressings of any given recording can be achieved by following these seven steps:
- Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
- Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
- Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
- Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds better than all the others.
- Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
- Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
- Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.
That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve a higher rate of success.
Further Reading