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.
Here is Robert’s latest posting.
After making some adjustments to the arm, getting it in the ballpark, Robert writes:
I changed records to a Jascha Heifetz violin concerto that I like to use for tonearm settings. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier article, I particularly like using concertos for adjusting tonearms because of the challenge of getting both the soloist and the orchestra to sound their best. When the azimuth is just right, the soloist will sound full and present, while the orchestra behind them will be clear and distinct.
A few more tweaks and it was sounding right. Robert continues:
Now it was my friend’s turn to play some of his records, most of which I’d heard before adding the shim. On “Mediocre Bad Guys,” Jack Johnson’s voice now sounded more natural, and the thwack of the drum stick had lost its annoying glare. Zeppelin’s “D’yer Mak’er” was now rocking the way it should with the drum kit sounding appropriately huge and the cymbals showing plenty of top end sparkle and with a long decay. And on Eagles “Take It Easy” I could now better make out the many instruments in the mix, as well as the backing vocals, which I’d been struggling to hear clearly before.
Here’s the first question that comes to mind: Could this tonearm/cartridge tweaking and testing have been done using these other albums instead of the violin concerto recording?
Possibly, but it would have taken all day, because nobody really knows exactly how these records actually sound. Were they good recordings? No doubt, at least in some ways. But were these good pressings of those recordings? Who can say? And we have no business assuming.
Houses of the Holy sounds very different from copy to copy to us. We’ve easily played more than fifty of them, maybe closer to a hundred, and we’ve heard them sound every which way.
An aside: One of the first shootouts we struggled to do in the early 2000s was Houses of the Holy. We had lots of RL and other good pressings. (There is a picture of 20 of them on the blog). I had them all cleaned. Then, over the course of about three days I listened to a handful of them for a few hours at a time, this being early days and not a regular part of the work we were doing at the time.
The sound was all over the place, and the surfaces were often too noisy to appeal to audiophiles. I had no choice but to give up. I needed better playback equipment, and better cleaning technologies, which came along in 2007, and I needed more rigorous testing methodologies. Houses was too tough a nut to crack, so tought that we didn’t do our first real shootout for it until many years later, 2010.
If Robert adjusts the arm to get the sound he expects to hear on the copy of Houses his friend owns, not knowing if the copy he is playing is dull, bright, thin, fat, compressed, opaque, edgy, dry, thick, dull, recessed, etc. etc., he might end up causing all sorts of mischief with the setup.
The solution to this problem is two-fold.
- You must use classical music that has been recorded without the use of amplification. Violin (and other) concertos are indeed wonderful for this purpose. Pop, rock and jazz is rarely meant to recreate the kind of live performance one would hear in a concert hall. Once you have heard a number of classical concerts, you know what a real violin sounds like, and that will serve you as an invaluable guide.
- But do you have a good recording to test with? This is the rub. You must buy many such recordings until you find the ones that have the sound of live music. You don’t need to find the best sounding pressings of any given Heifetz record, but if you play enough of them, some of them will be obviously better than others, and those you can probably use until you find others that are even better.
Robert had a good sounding Heifetz record that he had played on his system. The sound quality was not only excellent, it was correct.
The better, the more correct it sounded on his friend’s system, the more he knew he was getting somewhere.
This is much harder to do with other kinds of music because “correct” is rarely what most recordings are going for.
Does Steely Dan’s Aja album sound correct to you? It sure doesn’t to me. It sounds great, don’t get me wrong, but correct? With all the processing they put every instrument through? And that’s assuming you have a good pressing. Not many audiophiles do, or the remastered Heavy Vinyl versions making the rounds would have been laughed out of every room they played in.
And think about this: some of Robert’s friend’s records could have sounded dramatically worse after Robert’s efforts.
The stereo, operating more correctly and truthfully, might now be capable of revealing the shortcomings of the records being played on it.
If the Heifetz record Robert brought over is really right, it should not have mattered what his friend’s records sounded like. There is no evidence they are actually good test records. They are just records his friend likes.
Robert has in fact heard amazing sounding pressings of the first Eagles album. He could have brought his copy to test with, and he could have told his friend how good or bad his copy was relative to what his great copy sounds like, and, even better, demonstrated to his friend just how big the difference might be.
But that is not what Robert was there to do. He was there to get the front end working right, and show his friend how good his system can sound.
But it took a good Heifetz record to get there.
I hope his friend picked up on that fact from the experience. If he did, and he starts testing with good classical and orchestral recordings, assuming he is sufficiently motivated, he should be able to make huge improvements in the quality of his playback.
Robert and I know well that classical and orchestral recordings are the secret to better audio.
They’re a secret because practically no one talks about them outside of the two of us.
If you read the testimonial letters here on the blog, how many of them are about these kinds of recordings? How many of them discuss the work that the letter writer might have done to improve his playback using such records?
The fact is that these recordings work in a way that nothing else can. Finally coming to that realization might be the biggest breakthrough any audiophile reading this commentary will ever make.
P.S.
Robert Brook can get your front end tuned up and really working right. We highly recommend his new service. It might just put you on the path to achieving the next level in audio. (You will definitely struggle to get there with a table, arm and cartridge that aren’t set up with a high degree of precision by a person who knows what they are doing, work that Robert has been doing for years now.)
Please take the time to read some of Robert’s writing on the subject of testing with orchestral music.
Further Reading