Month: November 2025

What Do Audiophiles Think about Analog?

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

What Do AUDIOPHILES THINK About ANALOG?

Looking at the picture above, I’d say it probably gives a great many of them a headache.

And why shouldn’t it? It sure looks easy, and the fact that everyone who writes about it, reviewers and forum posters alike, seems to think it is easy. They all seem to think that all you have to do to get good sound is to buy the right equipment and play the right records — mastered by the right people, of course — and you are good to go.

But it actually turns out to be hard, so hard that some people — no doubt many of the ones who bought into the idea that it was easy in the first place — want to throw in the towel and move on to something else, preferably something that offers more bang for their hard-earned bucks.

If I had taken the above advice, and bought the remastered records the so-called experts have been recommending to audiophiles like me for decades, who knows, I might have thrown in the towel too.

But I was obsessed with music, and obsessed people don’t give up on anything easily. (The result, for what it’s worth, is hundreds of great sounding records for sale and thousands of blog postings.)

My Two Cents about Robert’s Post

(the slightly edited version taken from the comments)

Robert,
Thanks for taking on some of the more specious arguments — as well as some very good ones, to be sure — advanced by the music lovers you quote.

Job well done, and one that I could never have taken on as it would have made my head explode right at the start.

I wrote a piece recently about what I believe is fundamentally at the heart of the many misunderstandings music lovers of these various persuasions are unable to overcome.

It’s far more esoteric than the many good points you make. I’m assuming that at this stage of the game we can all agree that analog is superior to digital.

What I am trying to do is to get audiophiles to listen critically enough to recognize that no two sides of the same record have the same qualities in the same proportion, that variations in sound quality are almost unavoidable, and that record shootouts are the only way to bring this idea home to the typical analog audiophile enthusiast.

You can find it under the heading of breaking barriers and crossing bridges.

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Turning Skeptics into Believers, One Hot Stamper at a Time

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

About 15 20 years ago we received a letter from a fellow on our email list who found our prices for vinyl curious, as he considered vinyl a bygone technology. (You may have noticed that it has since made quite a comeback.)

Bygone technology? Can’t say I agree with that assessment. It sure would be nice to demonstrate for him how much better records sound than the supposedly superior technologies that have — for most people, perhaps even for this gentleman — replaced them.

Wait, there is a way!

A Hot Stamper, 100% Guaranteed to Satisfy or Your Money Back. One click is all it takes. Which is pretty much what I said in my reply to his letter below.

Tom,

I receive your HTML email regularly. Along with the curious prices of your offerings, I occasionally wonder about the opinions expressed in your e-missives. A Roman senator once said that all mortal things are ‘only perfect in death.’ Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust aside: vinyl (of which I own a considerable library) is merely a bygone technology at this point in time. The opinions expressed on your website rarely credit the writer. Whose words are these? And why should I accept the opinions of someone who only stands to profit from their fanaticism?

Cheers, 
Bruce R. 

Bruce, most of us write the commentary, there are five of us fanatics here. (Six if you count our record cleaning person, but I’m not sure how fanatical she is, so let’s go with five.)

UPDATE 2019

There are ten of us now, a number that has remained constant for about the last ten years. That’s how many people it takes to do the work we do.

If you don’t have a staff of your own, you can still make plenty of progress by doing your own shootouts, one title at a time. It won’t be easy, but you will learn more from doing them than you could from all the audiophile reviews ever written, including the ones on this blog.

Please keep in mind one very important thing: it matters not a whit what we say about a record, it only matters what you hear on your stereo when you play it. If for any reason you are not happy, we give you all your money back.

(Some number of times a year this actually happens and we really do pay up. If we didn’t your credit card provider would make us refund your money anyway, but that’s hardly the point. It’s our written policy; there’s no fine print — that’s not how we run our business — so we pay. The same record, sold to the very next customer, has never in the history of Better Records ever been returned. Hey, we can find you good records, but we sure can’t fix your stereo for you, know what I mean?)

There’s a great deal of commentary on the site about how easy it is to verify the truth of what we say about pressing variations, and the nice thing about it is that you can actually run the tests using records you already own. A good start is to play side one of any record against side two, and of course the best test if to play two different copies of the same record against each other. If your stereo is even halfway decent, the differences should be noticeable, if not pronounced.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Unlike audio reviewers, we actually have something to back up our claims: the record we send you. If you find us to be in error, you get your money back, no two ways about it. This is what makes us unique and successful in the record business — we actually can send you the record that’s as good as we say it is. Would love to have you try one. Like we say, you have nothing to lose.

Hey, I’m a skeptic myself and proud of it. But I know good sound when I hear it. I’ve found it’s best to let my ears guide me in this hobby. If some piece of expensive audio gear sounds good, then it sounds good, whether I like the price or not. I may not be able to afford it — hell, I can’t afford the records I sell either — but that has nothing to do with the fact that it sounds good. Most expensive audio gear doesn’t sound good, but some of it does, and there is no point denying it.

Same goes for our records. They sound amazing. Like you, I wish they were cheaper, but that doesn’t change the fact that they really do sound amazing. If you would let us prove it to you, we would love to be given the opportunity to do so. Even though it happens all the time, we can’t really take credit for turning skeptics into believers. The records do that for us.

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Ravel / Daphnis et Chloé / Monteux

More of the Music of Maurice Ravel

  • Boasting an INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two, this original London pressing of CS 6147 was giving us the sound we were looking for on Ravel’s Masterpiece
  • The sound is big and rich, lively and open, with an abundance of depth and huge climaxes that hold together
  • The voices in the chorus are clear, natural, separate and full-bodied — this is the hallmark of a vintage Golden Age recording: naturalness
  • We know of no other recording of the work that does as good a job of capturing such a large orchestra and chorus
  • Of course, Monteux is a master of the French idiom – his performance of the complete ballet is definitive in our opinion
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performances with the highest quality sound. This record is certainly deserving of a place on that list.

Both sides here are big, with the space and depth of the wonderful Kingsway Hall that the LSO perform in. John Culshaw produced the album, which surely accounts for the huge size and space, not to mention quality, of the recording. The sound is dynamic and tonally correct throughout.

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RCA Produced this Amazing Budget Reissue in 1976

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This review was written in 2011 shortly after our first Hot Stamper shootout for the work.

It still holds up though — I wouldn’t change a thing, other than to add a few links to help audiophiles and record collectors gain a better understanding of the shortcomings of received wisdom when it comes to finding that small subset of pressings capable of offering significantly higher sound quality.

Conventional record collector thinking generally works fine most of the time, but Monteux’s recording of the 6th Symphony in 1955 is a good example of the standard advice for finding better pressings turning out to be completely wrong.

For more on this subject, including the solution we came up with to fix the problem, click here.

Our Original Review

Presenting a first for Better Records: a White Hot Stamper copy of this CORRECTLY remastered version of LSC 1901, which just happens to be a recording from the earliest days of stereo, 1955! It’s guaranteed to KILL any and all original Shaded Dogs, as well as the more common reissues; White Dogs, Red Seals, Victrolas, Classic Heavy Vinyl, you name it, this pressing will beat the pants off of it and in the process show you precisely what is wrong with each and every one of them.

Over the past twenty years we’ve played hundreds of early RCAs and we have sure never heard one sound like this, with so much richness, Tubey Magic, LIFE and CLARITY.

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