Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:
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.
Robert gets right to the point here:
I’d say that the biggest misconception that I held about record cleaning previously was that it would not improve the bass. My thinking was that better cleaning would reveal more at the top end and upper midrange, but whatever bass was cut into the grooves was either there or it wasn’t, and cleaning those grooves better wasn’t going to bring it out.
This turned out to be completely wrong. Better cleaning makes it easier for our system to reveal what’s on our records, and this helps us hear more of what sits at the very back of the soundstage. These elements of the recording that reside further from our ears rely on an appropriate amount of bass to give them their correct size and weight. So when a record has more bass, it often has a bigger soundstage, and the performers will tend to sound more fleshed-out and have greater presence.
Robert gets his table and arm dialed in, then realizes:
I thought for a long while that the multi-step cleaning method I had developed using Walker Audio fluids was getting my records as clean as Better Records gets theirs. I had bought or borrowed quite a few Nearly White Hot and White Hot Stampers over the years, and then found and cleaned similar copies that, in several cases, equaled or even bettered the Hot Stampers. Or at least I thought they had.
With a new cartridge installed, Robert has an unexpected insight:
Finally I’d reached the full potential of my front end, and what was my reward? I could now hear that the records I’d cleaned with my method did not in fact sound as good as the ones the folks at Better Records had cleaned. I was forced to determine that the Hot Stampers had a level of transparency, top to bottom end extension and overall integration and cohesiveness that my other records lacked.
The differences Robert hears are not a mystery. They are the result of the way Robert cleans records and the number of copies he goes through to find “the one.”
Part of what makes our records sound better than the copies others own with the exact same stampers — when they do sound better, something that may not always be the case — is that even with the right machines and fluids and our step by step instructions, there is more to it than that.
There are some approaches to record cleaning that we use which we have never revealed to the public. We need our records to be a cut above, and the cleaning secrets we keep to ourselves make that not just a possibility, but a near certainty.
Robert points out that he had to do a lot of work to get to the point where this reality became impossible to ignore. He asks how many other audiophiles have worked so hard and advanced so far so that they too would be able to tell that this gap was real, that the difference between their best copy of a record and the one we sold them would be not just audible but significant.
Not many is our answer, and it’s partly because of some other facts of record production, the kind that we go to great pains on this blog to support with scientific evidence. We may not know why records sound so different, but we are in a very good position to know that they most certainly do.
To wit: There is a great deal more to the huge variation in the sound of record pressings than their labels, stampers and country of origin.
In most of our shootouts, the best sounding copy, the one with at least one White Hot Stamper side, will have the same stampers as a number of copies that did not earn White Hot grades. Some will earn grades of 2.5+, some 2+, some might even get a barely Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, and, although it’s uncommon, some might not get a Hot Stamper grade at all.
There are stamper sheets posted on our blog showing how some records with the same stampers will break down precisely this way.
Consider the possibility that we could have had ten copies for this shootout instead of four. There’s a good chance there would have been a IK/1K copy or two with even worse sound than 1.5+/2+.
Now Robert might have a 1K/1K copy of the same title, but what are the chances that his would be as good as the 3+/3+ Shootout Winner? In this case one out four, with the same cleaning regimen. But, at the risk of bragging, we are quite sure we can clean our records better than he can. I would guess that the real odds would be closer to one out of ten.
And is it conceivable — not possible, not practical, but conceivable — that anyone would go the expense of buying ten copies of the same title with the same stampers? Two or three, sure, but ten? What about all the other stampers for this title? Shouldn’t the hard-core audiophile collector track down some of those? Maybe 2K is better. Maybe 2E is better. Let’s get five of each of those in to clean and play. Such a person might say to himself, “I should be able to get that many in the next two to five years if I apply myself.”
Now we are up to twenty pressings, 20!, and it becomes obvious that no one in his right mind has ever actually gone to such lengths, other than, you guessed it, us.
To be clear, not many times, but at least a few times. 67 is still the record for the highest number of shootout pressings to work with, which we narrowed down to a more manageable three dozen — still far too many, but doable.
The law of large numbers works for us and against anyone who does not have the money, the time and the staff to carry out Hot Stamper shootouts at scale. As hard as Robert has worked, he can never overcome the limitations we site above.
As he says, he can get close, and we would agree with him about that. But look how hard he had to work to get to that point.
Harder than any audiophile I have ever known. A lot harder.
He realized early on that he wasn’t a record collecting audiophile like many of his fellow enthusiasts that was in contact with. He was instead a very different animal.
He was a thrill-seeker obsessed with getting the music he loved to sound its best.
Which is one of the main reasons he can help you get to a higher level. Over the course of many years, again and again he went into his listening room with good records to play, got his hands dirty, and figured all this stuff out for himself.
Please enjoy his latest post.
Further Reading