Acquiring Better Sounding Records – Hot Stampers Versus Collectible Vinyl
Hot Stampers don’t always cause cognitive dissonance because some people never developed much in the way of critical listening skills. There are also other reasons, some of which we discuss below.
Without knowing what to listen for on a record, what are you left with? What aural information can you rely on? None it seems.
If that is the case, all you can really go by are what your heroes — the mastering engineers who make audiophile recors — tell you. And these days you have so many great ones to choose from!
In the letter below I discuss with my good customer Aaron how to help his friend Jack come to a better understanding of the differences between various pressings of records, vintage LPs like the ones we sell, and the ones that have been remastered on Heavy Vinyl, like the one he already owns.
Head to head comparisons are the best way — practically the only way — to determine what a particular LP sounds like relative to another pressing. Basically, we want to know what the various strengths and weaknesses are for each of the pressings we are playing against each other.
Not what they tell you in promotional literature, or what some reviewer says, or whatever you can find on the web.
No, none of that will do. What you actually hear when playing the records for yourself.
As is the case with many of the shootouts that Aaron has run, once again Rumours is the record he chose for testing.
Dear Tom,
Last night I dropped by my friend Jack’s house for some camaraderie and some listening. Jack’s utterly devoted to Steve Hoffman. Thinks he’s a genius. Also buys a lot of Chad’s UHQR pressings, and seems to think Bernie’s still got the magic touch.
Does he read my reviews? Would he like to hear better sounding copies of those albums? We can make that happen.
Jack’s got a gorgeous Linn system from the early 2000s, All in all, his system is light and spacious and really delightful to listen to.
I see some major red flags here.
Light and spacious is what Linn does, and that’s less Hi-Fi and more a kind of sonic trope for people who like that sound but don’t really know what it is not capable of doing. In other words, they don’t know what they are missing.
To be able to recognize the problems with this approach, you must play test records that don’t work with that sound. A recording with lots of low brass for example. We created plenty of tests for that sort of thing right here on the blog.
But with no desire to change, no test would help him to see what his system is doing right or wrong, so what would be the point?
And who cares what it sounds like or which records sound better or worse? It’s wrong in important ways. Some records will be aided and some hurt.
This means that your system, the stereo itself, is choosing for you which records you will be able to enjoy.
You simply end up getting rid of the records that don’t sound good due to the colorations and limitations of your system.
And the bad or mediocre records that need those colorations to sound good are the ones you are more likely to play.
This is what inaccurate systems do — they favor some records over others, in the process disguising the actual sound quality of the pressing.
At Jack’s request I brought along some Hot Stampers. We focused on Rumours, and we compared it to my Steve Hoffman 45. Jack had to confess that the white Hot Stamper was more “exciting.”
I’m good with that!
He said, “that sounds gorgeous, Aaron.” And, “the vocals are more forward.” And, “the bass is different.”
Anytime someone says that the sound is “different,” that is a huge red flag. Different how? Different better or different worse? Everything is different from record to record. You need to know how to tell more right from less right.
I’ve been running into these kinds of guys for forty years. If you’re going to make improvements to your playback, you have to know what direction you are going in with whatever change you’ve made. Different is not a direction.
Seneca summed it up perfectly: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”
He commented that the Hoffman copy put the snares and cymbals more forward than the Hot Stamper does.
That was not my experience with the Hoffman recut, but there are lots of things that could account for that effect.
Body language says perhaps more about somebody’s experience while listening than the words coming out of their mouth. Jack was pretty silent and still – uncharacteristic for him – while the WHS played, but pretty animated and chatty when we had the Hoffman on.
Good point. Good sound makes everybody stop talking. Exceptional records make their listeners go silent so that they can listen even more intently because the music is sounding so good.
Maybe because preconceptions are hard to shatter, once we wrapped up a lengthy back-and-forth listening session, Jack commented that the Hoffman sounds to him more like being at a live concert than the WHS does, even if the latter is more exciting, and that that “live music” sound must be what Hoffman was going after.
In my experience, Hoffman goes after the opposite of live music sound. He likes it smooth and relaxing, and he will take out anything that upsets his ability to chill with whatever is playing. For incontrovertable evidence, just listen to the disastrous CCR series he mastered. Garbage, but smooth and relaxing I guess.
And studio recordings do not sound like live music and were never supposed to. Why spend a year recording Rumours when you could just get the band together in the studio and play all the songs live?
So, Hoffman can STILL do no wrong in Jack’s eyes. He just made some different choices with the sound is all.
Jack needs to be tested blind. If he doesn’t know who made the record, he might listen with his ears instead of his mind.
Jack’s a guy with good judgement and discernment, and he knows his music and he recognizes good sound when he hears it.
Based on your letter, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Our Hot Stampers wipe the floor with that remastered pressing. It is no contest. He has some major playback issues if he can’t hear that. And probably a shelf full of Heavy Vinyl to boot. The two go together.
But, his sense of loyalty runs deep enough to color even his sensory impressions. Quite a fascinating psychological study, and I’m sure it’s just one of the myriad reasons why 1/10th of 1/10th of vinyl lovers are Better Records customers…
But hey, MY records on HIS system are a truly potent combination, and if nothing else, he can enjoy his stereo sounding its very best whenever I come over.
Steve Hoffman has a cult following, and cults are very common in music (rabid fandom for one band to the exclusion of all others), records (Mobile Fidelity), equipment (McIntosh), stocks (Tesla), and a world of other things.
They are always and everywhere a sign of lazy thinking as far as I am concerned. I have little respect for such people. I’ve known a lot of them, and once I caught on to their approach to music, audio and records, I never wanted to spend another moment with them.
I have a section on the blog for bad audiophile thinking. Jack suffers from it, ruinously, and he can’t process the sound he hears even when you make it clear to him. No progress is possible until your mind is free to let your ears do the listening.
Next time you go over there, take a blindfold with you, along with some records he doesn’t know and their Heavy Vinyl counterparts. That’s the best way to compare pressings. In every shootout we do, the person listening to the record does not know what pressing is playing. This is the only way it should be done.
Thanks for writing,
Best, TP