*Making Progress

It’s not easy to make audio progress — nothing is in fact harder. However, if your approach to audio is clear-headed and evidence-based — in other words, scientific — progress is not only possible, it is virtually guaranteed.

Most of the listings compiled here describe lessons we’ve learned from playing so many records over the years. If you play lots of records, while listening to them critically, some of them will teach you things about audio that you cannot learn any other way.

Practically all of our audio philosophy derives from the simple act of trying to get our system to play the greatest recordings of all time with the highest fidelity possible. Every record is a challenge, and every defeat an opportunity to learn something — to see where we may have gone wrong — in order to know more than we did before.

The right vintage pressings have the potential to sound dramatically better than the mostly-mediocre records being made today. If you have made good audio progress in this hobby, this is an obvious truism.

If you doubt any of the above, we hope that the work you take on based on the advice we offer in these commentaries will help take your system to another level, a level where there can be no doubt.

Unfortunately, Some Truly Great Sounding Records Are Almost Always Noisy

More of the Music of Paul McCartney

A Frequently Asked Question: Are Hot Stamper Pressings Quiet?

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. This is one of them. Copies of McCartney’s first album can rarely be found on the site, but if there are any copies available, they are most likely in our section for records with condition issues, which contains about 30% of all the Hot Stamper pressings active on the site at any one time.

Hot Stampers are almost exclusively vintage vinyl pressings — old records you might say — and old records, even after a good cleaning, are rarely quiet. We lay out the particulars of our grading system here.

One of our customers noted that the Hot Stamper we sent him of McCartney’s first album was a bit noisier than he would have liked. We replied:

As for surface issues, we wish we could find them quiet, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. In the listing we noted:

We’ve used every trick in the book to try to get copies of this album to play Mint Minus, but it’s not usually in the cards. Maybe I’m Amazed, in particular, seems to be noisy on nine copies out of ten. If you’re looking for a copy without any surface noise, you’re probably better off tracking down the DCC Gold CD, which is actually quite good.

But no CD is ever going to sound like the record we sent you, not now, not ever. And we feel like throwing many of the copies we play of this album out the window too!

This is where I simply can’t understand how the typical audiophile can make the tradeoff for flat, average sound with quiet vinyl — the sound of these Heavy Vinyl reissues that have sprouted up all over the place, each one worse than the last — and the wonderful, but slightly noisy, sound to be found on the best originals.

You can find more about the subject here.

Counterintuitive Thinking About Front Ends

The better your front end is, the less likely you are to have a problem with noisy vinyl, which is the opposite of what many audiophiles believe to be the case. Some of the cheaper tables, arms and carts seem to make the surface noise more objectionable, not less.

On the other hand, some pricey cartridges — the Benz line comes to mind — are consistently noisier than those by Dynavector, Lyra and others, in our experience anyway.

As long as vintage vinyl is the only vinyl with sound worth pursuing, as is surely the case these days and will be for the forseeable future, a quiet cartridge and a very high quality arm are essential to high quality playback.

Our Dynavector 17Dx gets down deep into the groove, where vintage used records have the least number of problems created by their previous owners.

Mated to the wonderful Triplanar arm you see above, all your records should play more quietly and correctly than you ever thought possible.

We are dealers for both, as well as the Seismic Platform. It too reduces distortion and noise in your system.

The 150 or more records listed here will often be noisy, but based on our experience, the noise will be less objectionable if you make better choices with your table, arm, cartridge and vibration control.

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How We Test Equipment Like the Townshend Seismic Sink

General Audio Advice

A few years back I discovered something wonderful about the Seismic Sink I was using under my turntable to control vibration.

In our experience, vibration control is one of the most important revolutionary advancements in audio of the last twenty years or so.

We sell the Seismic Sink and this is what I wrote to a customer who recently bought one:

Play your most complex test discs, the ones that are the hardest to get to sound right. Classical is the toughest test if you have some, but Pet Sounds is tough too. [I knew he was a fan and had a good copy of the album.]

Listen to one or two for a good while, at least 20-30 minutes, to know exactly what you are hearing on the tracks you know are the most difficult to get to sound right, the ones with the most problems.

Put the sink under the table. (You can also put it under your receiver, that works great too.)

Then play those tracks again.

Go back and forth a few times.

It should be pretty obvious what is going on.

Then read Robert Brook’s post.

Here is a very special tip.

The sound changes depending on how the seismic sink is “loaded.”

This means two things:

Where the weights are sitting on the sink.

For my integrated amp I have it all the way to the front of the sink. Sounds clearly better that way.

For the turntable, I have it weighted down with thin but heavy steel plates, about one quarter inch thick, about 4 inches by 8 inches. You can get them at Home Depot and similar places.

This may be too advanced for your system and your skills [not an insult, he knows he is new to the game], but any amount of weight changes the sound, so you keep adding weights until you get to the top of the hill and start heading down.

Sounds easy enough, takes a lot of critical listening to pull it off, but this is how your ears get good at hearing small changes.

Good luck.

Best, TP

PS

This commentary should help give your tweaking efforts more context.

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Carlos Santana Knows: Louder Is Better

santasanta_1401s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Santana

Santana’s debut is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

The commentary below refers to an experience I had playing the album in the late-90s.

This album needs to be played loud. I mean really loud. Years ago I used to demonstrate how important it was to have the level up good and high on the song Waiting.

Back in the mid-90s, I had somehow lucked into my first shockingly good Hot Stamper copy.

As a demonstration of what the Legacy Whisper system and its 8 fifteen inch woofer/midrange drivers could do, I would play the first minute or so of the track at a pretty good level. There’s lots of ambience, there’s a couple of guys who shout things out from way back in the studio, there’s a substantial amount of deep bass, and the whole recording has a natural smooth quality to it, which is precisely what allows you to play it at loud volumes.

Then I would turn it up a notch, say about 2-3 DB. I would announce to my friends that this is probably louder than you will ever play this record, but listen to what happens when you do. The soundstage gets wider and deeper, all those guys that shout can be heard more clearly, you start to really feel that deep bass, and when the song gets going, it really gets going. The energy of the music would jump to another level.

Then I would turn it up another 3 DB or so. At this point I would say that “this is how loud it should be played.” All the effects I mentioned earlier would become even more pronounced — wider, deeper, more clear, more powerful. The record was actually starting to sound like live music in my living room.

But of course, I was showing off a system that few could afford and that nobody in his right mind would put out in the middle of his living room. You would need a custom sound room, and a big one at that, to fit such a massive speaker and be able to turn it up.

But I was a bachelor at the time, and my live-in girlfriend at the time knew that she would have to go before the stereo did.

Unboosted

It was pointed out to me one day that the reason this record can be played loud is that, unlike most popular recordings, this album has a natural, unboosted top end, which means that the louder you play it, the more real it sounds. You can’t do that with most records. Many records have a top end that’s boosted to sound good at lower volumes. Not so with the first album by Santana. [For more records with the kind of vintage smooth sound we find so appealing, click here.]

One of the reasons I [used to] have speakers with eight 15 inch woofers/ midrange drivers is that you need to be able to move a lot of air without distortion in order to play music at realistic listening levels. If you’ve got one or two 12 inch woofers and you try to play a record like this at loud listening levels, the distortion becomes unbearable as the drivers try to move all the air in your listening room and simply compress and distort in the attempt.

As Bill Dudleston, the designer of the Whisper speaker you see to the left, is famous for saying, paraphrasing of course, “It’s like trying to fan yourself on a hot day with a guitar pick. No matter how fast you wave the pick, it simply can’t move enough air to cool you off.”

The exact same principle applies to the reproduction of music at live listening levels. The drivers are not capable of the kind of motion that is required.

What this record has going for it is huge amounts of depth and a wide soundstage; an octave of bass below what would normally be considered bass (a 20 cycle note that sticks its head up from under the more common 40 cycle bass that drives the music); wonderful transparency and sweetness in the midrange; dynamics; and lastly, the kind of low-distortion, naturally un-hyped sound that this record shares with the Nirvana Nevermind LP that’s on the site.

[Correction: virtually never on the site. And the pressing we used to like happens to be one we no longer consider Hot Stamper worthy since almost any original domestic LP will beat it.]

When you turn up the volume on records like these, assuming you can turn up the volume to the levels we are talking about, you will hear something that approaches the sound of live music. Not many records allow you to do that, but this one does, if your stampers and your system are hot enough.

Obsessed Since 1969

Santana‘s debut is an album we freely admit to being obsessed with for a very long time. I had just turned 15 when this album came out in 1969 and I had never heard anything like it. Naturally, I went crazy for it and played it all the time on my godawful all-in-one stereo system through big-but-no-doubt-terrible-sounding Wharfedale speakers. (At least they had a 12″ woofer, which is more than you can say for a lot of audiophile speakers being made today, and for 100x the price.)

As should be clear from the commentary above, Santana’s debut deserves credit for helping me become a better listener.

  1. It’s a must own record.
  2. It’s a rock and pop masterpiece.
  3. And it’s a personal favorite.

The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as this.

It is the very definition of a big speaker album. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is the audio challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic power, don’t expect to hear them the way the band and those involved in their production wanted you to.

This album wants to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at doing.

Naturally, the band’s debut is also part of our extensive listening in depth series. Any record we get obsessed with we tend to play hundreds and hundreds of times and make notes of what to listen for on specific tracks.

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Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Decca and London Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Making Audio Progress Is Key to Finding Better Records 

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, which thins out the sound and washes out the lower strings.

On some sides of some copies the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage equipment, you never have to worry about the strings on your London orchestral recordings sounding too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is a dead end,  If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the second- and third-rate ones.

If you have this kind of electronic firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed Mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get with this kind of electronic overkill.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but get between you and the music you are playing.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life.

The “in-groove” guy you see to the left is the poster child for mistaking a rack of expensive components for the kind that can tell him how bad some records are, the Mobile Fidelity Kind of Blue in this case, which is very bad indeed. (Review coming someday we promise.)

We assume our customers can hear it — our good customer Conrad had no problem appreciating its shortcomings — but we are pretty sure our customers can recognize a good record from a bad one, otherwise they would not see the value in Hot Stampers, right?

But the blue lights look awesome, the stuff costs a fortune, and for those with better eyes than ears, it’s impressive as hell.

Good equipment is necessary but far from sufficient to get good sound, a subject we discuss here and at some length throughout the blog in our commentaries about audio equipment.

Why Are Some Common Subjects Concerning the Sound of Recordings Rarely Discussed?

Can we really be hearing all these characteristics of recordings that nobody else seems to be hearing? A few examples:

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A Killer Can’t Buy a Thrill (and Some Lessons We Learned)

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Steely Dan

During our shootouts, when we drop the needle on a copy and don’t hear that “Hot Stamper” sound, we toss that one and move on to the next. The difference between a truly Hot Stamper and most copies is so obvious that we rarely waste time on the pressings that clearly don’t have any real magic in their grooves.

Like we’ve said after some of our other Steely Dan Hot Stamper shootouts, you would never imagine how good this album can sound after playing the average copy, which is grainy, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail. It’s positively criminal the way this well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP.

And how can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right? The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is we know how hard it is to appreciate good music through bad sound. Bad sound is a barrier to understanding and enjoyment, to us audiophiles anyway.

We Was Wrong About the Sound

Years ago – starting with our first shootout in 2007 for the album as a matter of fact – we had put this warning in our listings:

One thing to note: this isn’t Aja, Pretzel Logic or Gaucho (their three best sounding recordings). We doubt you’ll be using a copy of Can’t Buy A Thrill to demo your stereo.

We happily admit now that we got Can’t Buy a Thrill wrong. It’s actually a very good sounding record – rich, smooth, natural, with an especially unprocessed quality.

In that sense it is superior to most of their catalog; better than Countdown to Ecstasy, Katy Lied, Royal Scam and maybe even Gaucho (which is a bit too artificial and glossy for our tastes, although it might make owners of less revealing equipment or those who find that kind of sound more appealing positively swoon).

You could easily use Can’t Buy a Thrill to demo your stereo, depending on what you were trying to demonstrate. A realistic, solidly-weighted piano comes to mind; there are many songs with an exceptionally well recorded piano on the album.

Mistakes Were No Longer Made

We used to think it sounded flat, cardboardy, veiled and compressed. It’s actually none of those things on the best copies. The reason we didn’t find those problems during our most recent shootouts is that we must have improved our playback. Precisely how I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better. Or maybe it was that in combination with the few new room tweaks. Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know. 

You have to get around to doing the annual shootout for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Who does annual shootouts except us?

Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they are or when they occurred, were incontrovertible.

Can’t Buy A Thrill in 2015-16 was clearly sounding better than ever before.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of making real progress in this hobby by taking advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last twenty years.

Who’s to Blame?

It’s natural to blame sonic shortcomings on the recording; everyone does it. But in this case we was wrong. The cardboardy grain, lack of frequency extension on both ends and overall veiled sound we thought were endemic to the recording are not heard on the best copies. (On the average copy, sure, which is why we don’t sell those, we trade them in.)

We’ve worked diligently for more than a decade on every aspect of record cleaning and reproduction, and now there’s no doubt that we can get Can’t Buy A Thrill to play at a much higher level than we could before. This is why we keep experimenting, and why we encourage you to do the same. The benefits, in time, will be dramatic.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “The Triplanar is bringing out more of the life and energy in the music than any other change I’ve made.”

Check Out Our New Audio Advice Section

When our customers ask for audio advice, we never hesitate to give it to them. (We also give out plenty of advice that nobody asked for.)

We want to help our customers pursue the kind of equipment that we know through decades of experience is probably superior to most of what is available in audiophile salons, regardless of price.

(In 1976, at the tender age of 22, I heard something at an audio salon that rocked my world: tube equipment. Everything changed that year.)

Robert Brook has taken our advice and ended up with much of the same equipment we currently use. He seems very happy with the analog sound he is getting these days, especially from his Triplanar tonearm.

And now Aaron B. has made a great leap forward into better sound. He wrote to tell me all about the differences he is hearing now that he has a system that is designed to reveal what’s actually on his records. His previous system was better at hiding the imperfections and shortcomings of many of the albums he was playing, but he’s decided he doesn’t want to go down that road anymore, and we couldn’t be happier for him. His letter:

I’m feeling another huge dose of gratitude for you, Tom.

I installed the Tri-Planar arm on Friday, and I could tell right away that things are sounding just wonderfully better.

My whole setup is getting really close to your full recommendation. Dynavector 17dx mounted in a Tri-Planar tonearm, mounted on a VPI Aries 1 table, going into an EAR 324, out to a [redacted] amp, driving Legacy speakers.

I managed to buy everything except the cartridge used and in good shape. The total cost for my current system is a hair above $10K, and it is sounding nearly as good as I’ve ever heard vinyl sound, or any recorded music for that matter.

The Triplanar tonearm is a game-changer. This is the most dramatic improvement since I first replaced my B&W bookshelf speakers with the Legacys. I’m frankly stunned by what a difference it makes.

The difference the tonearm makes is evident in nearly every aspect of the sound.

First, the problems I was having previously have cleared up. This includes vocal sibilance, occasional graininess to the sound, and what I mistook for groove wear, even on some hot stampers that otherwise sounded great.

Some that I returned to you, I now wish I could have back.

Beyond fixing the last of my playback problems, the Triplanar is bringing out more of the life and energy in the music than any other change I’ve made since you started advising me.

The attack on instruments is arresting. I’ve come to believe that the aspect of live music that’s hardest for any recording to capture is the attack. That’s where the energy of live music is to be found.

I am hearing more details and overtones to the music that I ordinarily needed to turn up the volume to hear. Also, there’s greater depth to the soundstage, even in my small room.

I’ve said this to you before, but it bears repeating. I love the records you sell. I’ve got 15 hot stampers now, and they are the crown jewels of my collection. But, it’s the education you’ve given me that’s truly transformed my music listening experience.

Today, for that, you have my deep gratitude.

Aaron

Aaron,

Thanks for taking the time to write and say all those nice things about our records and the equipment we have recommended you play them with. As you can clearly see now, it takes the right stereo to really bring our records to life. Glad to hear yours is working so well.

I have long held that the best way to do audio is to find a system in someone’s home that sounds amazing and just buy all the same stuff that person has and set it up the same way he did. If a stereo is sounding good, much of it has to be working right. Start there, then make your own improvements based on a proven model of success.

I did this to the extent it was possible back in the 80s, copying my friend George Louis’s system, comprising four 140 watts per channel transistor amps (four times the power I have now), an electronic crossover, two sets of adjustable electrostatic tweeter arrays (RTR for one and Janzen for the other), a large number of woofers in the main cabinet and a couple of dual 10″ subs thrown in for good measure.

It was certainly impressive on some material, but, truth be told, probably not nearly as impressive as I thought it was at the time.

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Nirvana – Live and Learn

Reviews and Commentaries for Nirvana

More on the Subject of Mistaken Audiophile Record Collector Thinking

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently: 

Hey Tom, 

I have purchased about 85 LPs from you in the past 10 years, many of the various types of hot stampers. I was looking at an 11/18/06 article of yours, which said you would verify if my Nirvana/Nevermind LP “is the good one” if I would send you the runout information of side 2.

Well here it is: A339124425S2 320. Hoping you could help me with this. Thanks!

Kind Regards,

Alex 

Alex,

That is not the pressing we like anymore I’m afraid. That’s the old import pressing we used to like, but now we know that those pressings can be very good but they won’t win a shootout against the right domestic original LP. We have no info about that stamper still around either, sorry!

TP

That’s a drag as this is the exact pressing that I purchased from you on 11/18/06 due to an article where you said the following: “The perfect recording, the best of it’s kind, ever. The bass is perfect, the guitars are perfect. The vocals are perfect. Now how in the world could that be you ask?! This import is the first and only version that sounds the way it should: Perfect”. What is the deal here, have things changed so dramatically since then.. Your comments please.

Regards,

Alex

Alex,

It would be great to always be right about which are the best sounding records, but that is simply not possible. We discover new and better pressings for famous albums all the time, once every month or two on average I would say, which means that since 2006 we have found newer, better pressings than our former reference pressings at least a hundred times.

We write about it here under the heading live and learn.

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Small Speakers and Some Audio Lessons I’ve Learned Over the Last 40+ Years

More Speaker Advice

Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Do not believe a word you hear in this video. You probably shouldn’t even watch it.

Let me state clearly one of our core beliefs here at Better Records.

Small speakers are incapable of lifelike musical reproduction in the home.

You will never feel as though you are in the presence of live musicians with a system like the one below. Real acoustic instruments move lots of air; that’s why we can hear them all the way at the back of the concert hall.

Little speakers, unlike speakers with large dynamic drivers, do a poor job of moving air. Screen speakers are not quite as bad as small speakers like those you see pictured, but they suffer from the same limitation: they don’t move enough air.

I’ve never had speakers this small (or screens), but I’ve heard many systems with little speakers on stands, with and without subs, and all of them left a great deal to be desired. When I find myself in a room with such systems, at most I listen for a few moments, for curiosity’s sake more than anything else, just to hear what they might be doing better or worse, and then I get the hell out of there before I become even more irritated than I normally am.

If you get talked into buying a system like this — novice audiophiles constantly get talked into buying bad stereo systems in every audio salon in the world — you will have a hard time getting very far in audio, and will probably just end up stuck at this unacceptably low level. So don’t do it!

This system may represent a floor, a good entry point for the budding enthusiast, but it is also a ceiling in the sense that it will keep you from making any real progress in the hobby. Which would be a shame. I have dedicated more than 45 years of my life to audio and have no intention of abandoning it. On the contrary, I get better at it all the time.

Can you imagine hooking up a turntable to these little boxes? Why bother?

Everything that’s good about analog would be inaudible on this system, and that right there is all the reason you should not go this route.

And to show you how clueless this setup is, the two towers of record shelving behind and to the outside of the speakers are in the worst possible place you could ever put them. Nothing should go there (unless you have Hallographs).

Keep the rear corners behind the speakers mostly empty unless you know what you are doing. This guy clearly does not.

Some of my old audio history:

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording. To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

This was the mid-’70s, 40+ years ago, and I am proud to say I have never owned a small speaker since. I’ve heard a lot of them — some good, most of them not so good — but that’s a sound I personally could never live with.

Especially if you are enjoy playing orchestral spectaculars like those found on our site.

Small speakers just can’t move enough air to bring orchestral music to life in any way that gives meaning to the term Hi-Fidelity.

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The Beatles on Vinyl – An Audiophile Wake Up Call

More of the Music of The Beatles

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Beatles

No artists’ records have been more important to my evolution as an audiophile than those of The Beatles.

This commentary was written about 15 years ago. Unlike some of the things I used to say about records and audio, practically every word of this commentary still holds true in my opinion.

The sound of the best pressings of The Beatles — when cleaned with the Walker Enzyme System on the Odyssey machine — are truly a revelation.

So much of what holds their records back is not bad mastering or poor pressing quality or problems with the recording itself. It’s getting the damn vinyl clean. (It’s also helpful to have high quality playback equipment that doesn’t add to the inherent limitations of the recordings.)

Know why you never hear Beatles vinyl playing in stereo stores or audio shows?*

Because they’re TOO DAMN HARD to reproduce. You need seriously tweaked, top-quality, correct-sounding equipment — and just the right pressings, natch — to get The Beatles’ music to sound right, and that’s just not the kind of stuff they have at stereo stores and audio shows. (Don’t get me started.)

However, you may have noticed that we sell tons of Beatles Hot Stamper Pressings. We have the stereo that can play them, we have the technology to clean them, and we know just how good the best pressings can sound. The result? Listings for Beatles Hot Stampers on the site all the time.

Five of their titles — the most of any band — are on our Rock and Pop Top 100 List. That ought to tell you something. (Let It Be and Revolver would easily make the list as well, but seven albums from one band seemed like overkill, so we’re holding firm at five for now.)

A True Pass/Fail Test for Equipment

I’ve been saying for years that an audiophile system that can’t play Beatles records is a system that has failed a fundamentally important test of musicality. Everyone knows what The Beatles sound like. We’ve been hearing their music our whole lives.

beatlesdoorWe know what kind of energy their recordings have.

What kind of presence.

What kind of power.

When all or most or even just some of those qualities are missing from the sound, we have to admit that something is very very wrong.

I’ve heard an awful lot of audiophile stereos that can play audiophile records just fine, but when it comes to the recordings of The Beatles, they fall apart, and badly. Really badly.

Super detailed may be fine for echo-drenched Patricia Barber records, but it sure won’t cut it with The Beatles. Naturally the owners of these kinds of systems soon start pointing fingers at the putative shortcomings of the recordings themselves, but we here at Better Records — and our Hot Stamper customers — know better.

You can blame the messenger as much as you want — it’s a natural human tendency, I do it myself on occasion — but that sure won’t help you get your stereo working right.

The Beatles albums are the ultimate Audiophile Wake Up Call. It’s the reason practically no equipment reviewers in the world have ever used recordings by The Beatles as test records when making their judgments. The typical audiophile system — regardless of price — struggles to get their music to sound right.

Reviewers and the retailers, makers and sundry promoters of audiophile equipment don’t want you to know that, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Bottom line: The Beatles’ recordings are very good for testing.

* (Love doesn’t count; give me a break. I hope we’re over that one by now. Couldn’t stand to be in the room with it.)

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Unsolicited Audio Advice – Soundstaging At All Costs

More Speaker Advice

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

The first thing I noticed about this system is that the Hallographs are in the wrong place, or at least they are in the wrong place if you are only using one pair. The first pair should be to the outside and just behind the speakers.

What this system screams out to those of us who have heard a lot of stereos, in my case after almost fifty years in audio, is “Soundstage Freak.”

The speakers are too far apart to create a proper center image.

The sound will be exceptionally spacious this way, but it is also very likely to be washed out and vague.

If you listen exclusively to orchestral music, and you like to sit toward the back of the hall when you go to live performances, then yes, you can almost justify having the speakers this far apart.

For most other music this is not a good approach.

A good vocal recording is all that would be needed to make clear the serious shortcomings of placing your speakers this wide apart.

If this were your setup, But I Might Die Tonight could show you the error of your ways, the way it showed me some of mine (albeit different ones) when I had initially setup our new studio. I worked on my speaker placement and room treatments for weeks and months after that, but I knew something was wrong well before that two minute song was over.

Stardust would also be a good choice. Most of Julie London‘s records would work. Some of the more intimate Ella records would be ideal of course, but we rarely have much stock. Blue would work, as would any early Joni Mitchell album.

The recordings of Singer-Songwriters rarely place them anywhere but in the center of the stage, the best of them as prominently as possible. Many of our Hot Stamper pressings would make excellent test discs for getting this aspect of speaker placement dialed in better.

Two Other Obvious Faults

One: Notice the wires on the floor, never a good idea. Check out the wires in the picture at the very bottom of this commentary. That guy doesn’t care what his stereo looks like, he only cares what it sounds like. Try it, you might be surprised what a difference it can make to suspend your wiring.

Two: I have never liked the sound of absorptive materials directly behind the speakers. They tend to deaden the ambience and the space of the stage that we audiophiles should be trying to recreate in the recordings we play, especially live recordings or those made using few mics.

Orchestral Spectaculars are especially good for testing size and space in a recording.

Here is a link to some of our favorite Records for Testing Orchestral Depth, Size and Space.

Further Reading

Robert Brook has been experimenting with different aspects of audio for years now. His Broken Record blog has lots to say about these issues. The Analog Set Up section on his blog is probably a good place to start to see what he has learned by ignoring conventional wisdom and testing every aspect of audio with an open mind.

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.

And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the Modern Remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.

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