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.

If you play huge numbers of records, and listen 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.

Letter of the Week – “My stereo upgrades have widened the sonic chasm between good, old-fashioned records and their nouveau imposters.”

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – These Are the Fundamentals

One of our good customers, Dan, found much to agree with in our recent Better Record’s record collecting commentary and offered up his own two cents worth in the letter below. (Emphasis added.)

Tom,

Just wanted to affirm the new Better Records axiom of “the better your stereo gets, the fewer modern reissues you will own.” My collection has dozens of these Heavy Vinyl reissues, and none of them are holding up after a year and half’s worth of significant improvements to my stereo.

It was only at the beginning of last year that I found myself pleased with roughly 50% of my heavy vinyl purchases. Now, that number has plummeted to less than 10%. Almost everything that’s being put out today is an utter disappointment.

Of course, part of the explanation may be that my listening skills have improved. But it’s hard to imagine that I would have liked dull, dreary, lifeless vinyl a year or two ago. I like to think not.

More probable is that my stereo upgrades have widened the sonic chasm between good, old-fashioned records and their nouveau imposters.

I’d also like to second the avoidance of new vinyl purchases until major stereo improvements are made. I’m trudging through the laborious task of replacing these records with older, better sounding copies. It’s excellent advice to those new to the game or young (or both).

Amazingly, hearing the difference doesn’t even require a Hot Stamper, almost any original or early reissue will beat the Sundazed, Classic, etc. That’s how inferior they are. To borrow from The Who, the sound must change.

Dan,

I agree with this bit at the end of your letter, with one caveat:

Amazingly, hearing the difference doesn’t even require a Hot Stamper, almost any original or early reissue will beat the Sundazed, Classic, etc. That’s how inferior they are.

The caveat would be if you know how to clean your records right, right in this case being the way we recommend you clean them, using Prelude fluids and a machine.

Old uncleaned records can sound pretty bad. An audiophile pressing may beat your old original — until you clean it.

It’s one of the revolutionary changes in audio we spend so much time talking about, and it can make all the difference in the world on some records, especially old ones.

Thanks for your letter. You are not alone in swearing off these modern mediocrities. Many of our customers went through the same process you have, and it seems they are as pleased with the results as you.

Best, TP

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Our Advice Has Been Followed and the Results Are In

Proper Record Cleaning Can Help You Find Your Own Hot Stamper Pressings

One of our customers wrote to us about cleaning his collection not long ago, and we advised him how he should go about it. He seems to have taken much our advice to heart and has quieter, better sounding records as a result. He did not spring for the pricey Keith Monks style machine we use, but felt that his efforts produced excellent results regardless. Best to hear it from him:

Hey Tom,

Just did three records, in all different conditions, and this one Eddie Palmieri, the Latin Salsa pioneer. And I had been meaning to get some famous albums in that genre, and I looked through Discogs.com and this guy wanted $40 for an album called Mozambique. Even though it looked great, it had so much noise from years of build up.

It played beautifully after all the steps. There was a huge jump in fidelity, just the tiniest, tiniest surface noise between songs. You wouldn’t notice if you weren’t listening for it.

From the other two records which had different issues, I don’t think it’s very hard to understand what else a Keith Monk type machine might add to other more difficult records, in combination with the Prelude stuff and a VPI. But for this one, and I think a lot of other records I own, the Prelude and VPI are all I needed.

I know there’s going to be a huge learning curve and I don’t expect things to be so simple. But it was just cool and kind of a treat, my first time out, to know that it’s possible.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that for what it’s worth. Thanks,

Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Glad to hear you were able to get your records cleaner and make them better sounding to boot. What could be better?

Well, there actually is an answer to that rhetorical question, and we supplied it right here on the blog in a listing with step by step instructions using the Prelude Record Cleaning System and two record cleaning machines. You asked me to write it all out so that’s what I did.

It does not surprise me in the least that you got great results with your VPI. That is the very machine we had been using since the early-90s to clean all our records. Sometime later in the decade we discovered the Disc Doctor fluids and switched to them. I wrote a long piece in my paper catalog (this was in our pre-internet days) discussing how much quieter and better sounding all of our vintage classical records sounded when cleaned with DD fluids, and that I was therefore going to reclean them all and reevaluate every last one for sound and surfaces. It was that big a difference.

In 2007, when I first heard a record cleaned with the Prelude System, everything changed radically, a story I tell using the record I was testing at the time, Meddle. It was one of the biggest breakthroughs we had experienced up to that time.

This is the kind of difference you have now heard with Prelude and your 16.5. You are operating at a different level now.

But there was more to come for us when an audio friend invited me to bring a record over that he would clean with Prelude on his Keith Monks machine. I brought over a killer copy of Meddle as I recall. Imagine my shock when it sounded even better than it had when first cleaned with Prelude. I immediately ordered up a industrial-strength threaded-pickup machine, the Odyssey, made in Germany, and started offering Hot Stamper pressings that were quieter and had better sound than I had ever heard before. (We are currently on our third unit. We clean a lot of records.)

This is leap you have yet to take. It might not make as much difference as your cleaning has to date, but, once you do it, you will find that there is a clearly audible “before and after” quality to the sound of your records. No doubt you will want to reclean all your personal favorites using Prelude and whatever Keith Monks type machine you end up with.

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Good Advice on Reducing System Distortion

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Compounding DISTORTION in ANALOG AUDIO

Some excerpts:

Your Hot Stampers will sound WAY better when you get your turntable set up right, isolate it properly and get the equipment you need to make the speed of your platter accurate and stable. And that’s because all of these system improvements are highly effective ways of reducing distortion and its effects on your system.

Aside from our records, our analog front end, our amp and our speakers, our electricity and its effects on our equipment represents yet one more source of distortion in our system. I’ve posted more than one article touching on this issue, and I have shared the ways in which I’ve learned to manage the electricity powering my gear.

When I posted my last article on electricity, I was convinced that improving the electricity going to my system by limiting the effects of other electrical devices in my home was absolutely essential for getting my system to sound its best. The reason being that improving my electricity seemed to greatly reduce the level of distortion in my system.

I still feel this way, but my views on why improving electricity helps have evolved. What I’ve come to understand, or at least understand better, is that back when I wrote that article and for a long time after, I had a lot more front-end distortion than I realized. That distortion was compounded in different ways, one of which was by way of the electricity.

Throwing breakers and unplugging appliances was and is an effective way of reducing compound distortion in my system and improving the way my records sound. But since revamping my turntable setup and learning to better control the platter speed, the improvements I hear by ameliorating the negative effects of my electricity are significantly less than they once were. In other words, with less front-end distortion there’s a lot less distortion to be compounded by bad electricity.

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These Records Helped Us Dramatically Improve Our Playback

Some of the Most Important Albums We Employed to Tune, Tweak and Improve Our Stereo, Room, Table Setup, Electrical Quality and More

The records on this list (limited to rock and pop for the most part but we’re working on adding in the classical and jazz) all have one thing in common: I made practical use of them to improve my equipment, room treatments, table setup, electrical quality and whatever else that I could think of that might result in higher quality playback.

Were it not for my desire — obsession may be the better word, and it’s certainly a better operating principle — to get the wonderful music on these albums to improve with each passing year, Hot Stamper pressings would be at most a niche part of my collection. Worse, and a thought some may find too unpleasant to contemplate, Hot Stampers might have then accounted for only a small part of Better Records’ business.

By the mid-2000s when we started down this road for real, the stereo needed to evolve dramatically. It needed to become much more revealing and truthful than any system I had ever heard if we were going to carry out Hot Stamper shootouts all day.

The best of the best Hot Stamper pressings are often like needles in haystacks. No one in his right mind would go to all that trouble for music that was not emotionally powerful enough to be, for all intents and purposes, practically irresistible.

If you have records you can’t wait to play every time you make a change to your equipment, room, setup, etc., you know what I am talking about.

I favor large scale dynamic speakers because they are the only ones that seem capable of reproducing the demanding recordings you see listed below.

There is no question that the artists that made these albums, in concert with remarkably talented producers and engineers, sweated every detail of these exceptional recordings. For the last five decades I (now we) have been doing all we could to get these wonderful records to sound their best.

We know how good they can sound on systems that have what it takes to play them, because these are the records we used to test, tune and tweak the new studio we built.

The more of that kind of work you do — on your system, room and electricity — the more progress you will make in this hobby. With each improvement, these are the very recordings that will sound bigger and bolder than you ever imagined.

They are the most difficult-to-reproduce albums we know of. Difficult records are the ones that will help you make more real, demonstrable progress in this hobby than any others.

Again and again it was meeting the challenge of reproducing recordings such as these that allowed us to get to the next level, and the next one, and the one after that, and they can do the same for you.

The Top Two

By far the two most helpful records for testing over the last two decades were Tea for the Tillerman (going all the way back to 1984) and Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular. We wrote about their uniquely valuable contributions to our audio progress in this commentary.

Led Zeppelin II is probably the main record our current listening panel uses to dial-in the Dynavector 17Dx Karat cartridges we mount three or four times a year so that every record is always  being played with a relatively fresh cartridge. (We are dealers for Dynavector and would love to get you one to try.)

The records below in bold have been especially important for our work. There should be quite a number of commentaries on the blog for each of them.

Also, at the bottom you will notice that more and more jazz and classical records are being added to the list as time permits.

Rock, Pop, etc.

  • 10cc / The Original Soundtrack
  • 10cc / Deceptive Bends
  • 801 / Live
  • Ambrosia / Self-titled
  • America / Self-titled
  • The Beatles / Please Please Me
  • The Beatles / Rubber Soul
  • The Beatles / Revolver
  • The Beatles / Sgt. Pepper’s
  • The Beatles / Magical Mystery Tour
  • The Beatles / Abbey Road

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The Insufficiently Dedicated Will Have a Fight on Their Hands with This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bernard Herrmann Available Now

A spectacular orchestral dreadnought such as this requires mastering and pressing of the highest quality.

Herrmann’s music taxes the limits of LP playback itself, with deep organ notes (listen for the famous Decca rumble accompanying the organ if you have the deep bass reproduction to hear it); incredible dynamics from every area of the stage; masses of strings playing at the top of their registers with abandon; huge drums; powerful brass effects everywhere — every sound an orchestra can produce is found on this record, and then some.

You will hear plenty of sounds that defy description, that’s for sure. Some of the time I can’t even imagine what instrument could possibly make such a sound!

Your Hard Work Pays Off

A recording of this size and scope will bring virtually any stereo system to its knees. This is the real Power Of The Orchestra! You had better have a top quality front end if you want to play this record properly, not to mention plenty of power and big speakers.

This is not the record for the weekend budget audiophile. If you haven’t put in the years of effort and invested the tens of thousands of dollars in equipment and room treatments it takes to play records of great difficulty such as this one, your system is probably not up to the challenge this album represents.

If, on the other hand, you’ve done the work and spent the money, this is the album that will show you what you have achieved.

Side One

Journey to the Center of the Earth

All those lovely harps! You can practically feel the cool air of the cave as you descend into the blackness.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

Side one boasts some wonderful material from Jason and the Argonauts, including the fight with the skeletons that we all remember from our Saturday matinee movie days. Who else could have orchestrated such a film?

Side Two

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Astonishingly powerful deep bass and drum sounds!

Fahrenheit 451

One of our key tests for side two is the string tone on the Fire Engine sequence.

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If You’re Just Getting Started, Beware of LPs that Will Inhibit Your Progress

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

Robert Brook wrote a scathing review of the Tone Poets pressing of One Flight Up in 2023, much to the dissatisfaction of some of his readers. I was the first to leave a comment as I thought he hit the nail on the head when he said:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

The snare sounds muted. the piano weak, the horns, especially Gordon’s saxophone, resolves poorly and becomes increasingly tiresome to listen to. On my first listen I lasted about 3 minutes into side 1, mostly because I couldn’t stand the way the sax was sounding.

I posted the comments below on Robert’s review. (I have taken the liberty to rewrite some of my comments for the purposes of clarity, along with some additional thoughts.)

Robert,

Another great post. I have many comments to make, so here goes.

When audiophiles prefer records which are clearly second-rate, more often than not I chalk it up to their lack of a better record to play. In order to hear what they are missing, they have to have a record that somehow makes clear to them precisely which aspects of the sound are failing, or at the very least, not up to par.

You could give out the stamper numbers for your Blue Note reissue — I would be surprised if it does not have VAN GELDER STEREO in the dead wax — and those who like the Tone Poets release of One Flight Up could easily find one on Discogs or Ebay and do the comparison for themselves.

But you know what? I would bet you dollars to donuts they will never do that. They simply won’t bother.

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Limitations? Colorations? Moi?

More on the Subject of Making Audio Progress

Yes, me. And, oh, by the way, you.

Dramatic limitations and massive amounts of colorations are endemic to home audio systems.

The only way to get rid of them is by doing the unimaginably difficult work it takes to learn how to identify them through the process of discovering, refining and implementing practical solutions to rooting them out.

This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished with great success, even by the truly dedicated. At best it can only unfold slowly, over the course of years, decades even, and only for a very small percentage of the audiophiles who attempt it.

Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. The limitations will prove too difficult to overcome. More effort feels like banging one’s head against the wall rather than making progress.

Regrettably, to push on in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves is for the few, not the many.

Rightly or wrongly, we self-identify as a member of the few. We think this blog provides all the evidence any skeptic of our success could possibly need.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that we got paid to do it. In addition, an undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder may very well have been at the heart of it. And some very special recordings that I fell in love with a long time ago surely played their part.

Pass/Not-Yet

It is our belief that many, perhaps most of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely.

They thought they’d come a long way, and perhaps they had, but there were still plenty of potentially life-changing improvement possible.

Can you blame them? Devoting the seemingly endless amounts of time and money necessary to climb the greasy pole leading to better sound is not a choice most audiophiles are in a position to make easily.

Wives, children, jobs, mortgages, and a great deal more — especially the lack of a dedicated listening room — all conspire to limit the efforts of even the most committed audiophile.

Not to pile on, but there is an easy way to spot these folks, the ones who never managed to take it far enough to reach the higher level (or levels) we know are possible:

  1. By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
  2. By the records they want to buy (again, typically on Heavy Vinyl),
  3. Or have nice things to say about (again, and for proof just read the posts found on every audiophile forum).

We’ve made a partial list of the records that best identify this group, and it can be found here. It should be noted that bad records, the kind being made by audiophile labels of every stripe these days, are no good for any of this work. The goal is to figure out how to make top quality vintage pressings sound right. More on that subject here.

Most new pressings will only sound enjoyable if the system playing them is good at hiding their flaws.

We hope it goes without saying that no right-thinking audiophile should want anything to do with such a system, and once the necessary improvements have been made, the records that formerly sounded good on it will be of no further use, their many shortcomings now too easily exposed.

Pulling this cart will not be easy — it will surely be a very long, very hard slog — but those who stick with it will come a lot closer to the promised land than those who choose any other path.

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There Aren’t Many Shortcuts in Audio, But We Might Actually Know of a Couple

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Our last shootout for Pretzel Logic occurred in 2021, more than four years ago. We wrote about our fondness for the album here, along with some advice regarding what the best pressings do better than most.

Any grit or grain will show itself on the title track big time, especially if you like to play this album as loud as I do, which is LOUD. The power of all those voices singing at the top of their lungs should give you chills.

At moderate levels chills are a lot harder to come by.

Most audiophiles play their music much too quietly. Sometimes this is due to obvious system limitations, but often it seems to be merely a preference. (Without a spacious, heavily-treated room, no system, regardless of quality, can hope to be able to get the huge choruses of Pretzel Logic to soar the way they do on the best copies we shootout.)

I want to have a powerful emotional experience when playing an album like this. I want to be thrilled. That just isn’t possible at the kind of comfortable listening levels most audiophiles prefer. This music performed live would be very loud, because rock concerts are very loud.

Why wouldn’t we want to reproduce the sound of the live event?

We followed that up with some advice for the advanced audiophile — our code for one who knows not to waste his money on modern reissues — to allow him to enjoy the hell out of the album in ways that would have been all but impossible before we came along:

We’ve been known to remark that there are no shortcuts in audio.

You have to put in years — decades even — of mostly tedious work to get your stereo and room to be able to reproduce music properly.

But there exists one very obvious shortcut in audio, and another sort-of shortcut, that will allow you to get much better sound than you could on your own without putting in the huge amounts of time that are usually required.

The first one is a Hot Stamper pressing.

We’ve already found the record of your dreams for you. This saves you an awful lot of time — time we think you’ll agree is better spent listening to records rather than digging through dusty record bins in dingy record stores trying to find them. (Or wasting money on some Heavy Vinyl wannabe that will never come close to the experience of playing the real thing.) 

The other is record cleaning.

After years of experimentation, we’ve got the science of record cleaning down to a T. It’s partly why our records sound so good; they’ve been cleaned right. We have available the most important element to proper recording cleaning — the right fluids.

All you need then is a good machine and the time and patience to put it to work.

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Down in L.A. Sits Fairly High Up on Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brewer and Shipley Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The commentary you see below was originally written about 15 years ago. Minor changes have since been made. At the time of this posting there is a copy of Down in L.A. on the site, one of the first copies we have had to sell since 2019, and before that I think our last shootout was in 2008.

There are a great many wonderful albums we can no longer offer our customers, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but I am glad to say that Down in L.A. is not one of them.

We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce: how the revolutions in audio of the last decade or two have profoundly changed the ability of the seriously dedicated audiophile to get records that never sounded good before to come to life musically in a way previously understood to be impossible.

This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as the commentary below explains.

60s Sound

The problem here is the sound. It’s got a bit of that tinny 60s pop production sound — too much upper midrange, not enough lower midrange and a slightly aggressive quality when things get loud. Still, it’s quite a bit better than recordings by, say, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane from the era, and I have no trouble playing and enjoying their records.

I can also tell you that if you have a modest system this record is just going to sound like crap.

How do I know that?

It sounded like crap for years in my system, even when I thought I had a good one.

Vinyl playback has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you’ve participated in some of the revolutionary changes that we talk about endlessly on this blog, you should hear some pretty respectable sound. Otherwise, I would pass.

On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, the kind of sound I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. The kind of systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.

If you’re a Weekend Warrior when it comes to your stereo, this is not the record for you.

If however you would like to advance in audio in order to hear better sound and enjoy more recordings than you do now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.

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Discovering Even Better Pressings Is the Most Rewarding Part of Our Job

Welcome to the World of Better Records

The best part of our job is when we manage to discover even better pressings of favorite albums than the ones we had previously thought were the best.

Doing new shootouts for the same titles year after year — sometimes twice a year, as is the case with most of albums by The Beatles, sometimes once every ten years as happens with many of the rarer titles we do — we often find ourselves learning something new by continuing to audition new batches of familiar records.

Yes, we actually love proving ourselves wrong and we go out of our way every day to do it in our Hot Stamper shootouts.

It might be a good idea here to point out that blinded, carefully-controlled shootouts are the only way to prove anything when it comes to records, as they are the only source of real evidence to judge the strengths and weaknesses of records. Opinions are not evidence of anything and are almost always worth exactly what you pay for them.

As Jonathan Swift famously remarked:

“You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.”

The other best part of the job is discovering great recordings of wonderful music that most people have never heard of, some of which can be found here.

For those of you interested in classical and orchestral discoveries — we call them “sleeper” pressings — go here.

Yes, That’s Me

The guy you see pictured above with an old London Rachmaninoff album under his arm has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem).

Before that he wandered around stores that were selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

He would spend a great deal of time with his newly-purchased records, playing them over and over again on the best stereo equipment he could afford.

He thinks everyone would be better off spending more of their time playing records, especially old ones.

For every twenty records he bought, he would consider himself lucky to end up falling in love with one. The vast majority of those “best of twenty” titles have somehow stood the test of time and continue to be played regularly to this day.

Roughly 275 of those Desert Island Discs have been identified to date.

About 50 of them are currently available in Hot Stamper form on the site as of the date of this post.

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