*Mistaken Ideas

We used to refer to them as myths but we’ve come to the conclusion that mistaken ideas is more correct.

It’s also a less pejorative way of saying that some things audiophiles believe are lacking in the kind of hard evidence that one would think should be required to defend them.

The fact that good evidence is not required for audiophiles to believe practically anything they think they know about records and audio is one reason we write so much about these subjects on this blog.

Siren on Import Vinyl? Not So Fast

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Roxy Music Available Now

Siren is one of our favorite Roxy albums, right up there with the first album and well ahead of the commercially appealing Avalon.

After reading a rave review in Rolling Stone of the album back in 1975, I took the plunge, bought a copy at my local Tower Records and instantly fell in love with it.

As is my wont, I then proceeded to work my way through their earlier catalog, which was quite an adventure. It takes scores of plays to understand where the band is coming from on the early albums and what it is they’re trying to do. Now I listen to each of the first five releases on a regular basis.

Somehow they never seem to get old, even after more than forty years.

Of all the Roxy albums (with the exception of Avalon) this is probably the best way “in” to the band’s music. The earlier albums are more raucous, the later ones more rhythmically driven — Siren catches them at their peak, with, as other reviewers have noted, all good songs and no bad ones.

Imports? Not So Fast

The British and German copies of Siren are clearly made from dub tapes and sound smeary, small and lifeless.

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A Random Copy of 52nd Street Tells You What, Exactly?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Sonic Grade:

Side One: F / Side Two: C+

The Impex (Cisco) 180 gram remastering of 52nd Street was cut by Kevin Gray, under the direction of Robert Pincus (aka Mr Record), at the now defunct AcousTech Mastering in Camarillo. We noted the following in a recent review for a much superior (how could it not be?) Hot Stamper pressing:

Side one is a joke (not much ambience, resolution, energy, etc.) but side two is actually quite good. Side two fixes the biggest problem with the album: hard, honky vocals.

In his review appearing in The Absolute Sound, Neil Gader plucks two songs out of the album’s nine as especially worthy of praise. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. If I didn’t know the album as well as I do, I might wonder why. 

In our review we went on to say:

But at a cost. It still sounds like a modern record, with not much in the way of space, transparency, richness, resolution and the like. You know, all that ANALOG stuff that old dinosaurs like us like our records to have.

For those of you who have thirty three dollars to spend, you could do a lot worse on side two. Side one is pretty bad and you would have a hard time doing worse.

Allow me to now quote Mr. Gader from The Absolute Sound, October 2011, Issue 216, Pg. 129

The Impex 180-gram remastering by Kevin Gray is superb. It replaces the spongy timing and dull top of the original Columbia LP with expansive space and sharp details. Its vivid and brightened treble is welcome compared to the warm but smothered original. Listen for Joel’s doubled harmonies, the pennywhistle in “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” and the burning horn section in “Half a Mile Away,” and you’ll hear what a difference a great remastering makes.

Mr. Gader has a bad original pressing, and like most reviewers he makes the mistake of assuming that other originals, and probably all the originals, perforce sound like his. Speaking from experience, they most assuredly do not. We will not be addressing his specific complaints in this commentary for one simple reason.

Nothing in his review describes the sound of the best copies. 

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Songs in the Key of Life – Is This a Well-Engineered Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Wonder Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written more than ten years ago and probably updated a bit here and there since then.

Fremer is here as reliably mistaken as ever about the sound of the records he reviews, in this case Songs in the Key of Life, but even worse, he thinks he knows things about master tapes and the qualities of specific recordings that he can’t possibly know. We simply wanted to call him out for the pernicious ideas he’s made a career out of spreading.

These ideas may comfort the mid-fi crowd who accept the mediocrities produced by this guy and all those who compete with him, but they will positively impede the progress of any audiophile who wants to reach the highest levels of playback in the home.

I’ve just gone to Fremer’s website to make sure the quote below is accurate, and everything you need to see is still up and as misguided as ever.

Some audiophiles never learn, and a great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles avoid the errors this reviewer and others like him have been making for decades. In the mid-90s I wrote my first commentary about the awful audiophile records this person had raved about in his review in one of the audiophile rags.

In the years since it seems that nothing has changed. Bad sounding audiophile pressings make up the bulk of this person’s favorable reviews to this day. Here are 157 of them.

How it is possible to spend so much time doing something, yet learn so little in the process? It is frankly beyond me.

I put the question to you again:

Is this a well-engineered album?

The first question that comes to mind is:

How on Earth could anyone possibly know such a thing?

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Dopey Record Theories – Putting Bad Ideas to the Test

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

The discussion below was prompted by a stunning White Hot Stamper 2-pack that had just gone up on the site in 2018.

I implored the eventual purchaser to note that side two of record one has Joni sounding thin, hard and veiled. If you look at the stampers you can see it’s obviously cut by the same guy (no names please!), and we’re pretty sure both sides were stamped out at the same time of the day since it’s impossible to do it any other way.

What accounts for the amazing sound of one side and the mediocre sound of its reverse?

If your theory cannot account for these huge differences in sound, your theory is fatally flawed. 

Can anything be more ridiculous than the ad hoc, evidence-free theories of some audiophile record collectors desperately searching for a reason to explain why records — even the two sides of the same record — sound so different from one another?

The old adage “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” couldn’t be more apt. If you want to know if a pudding tastes good, a list of its ingredients, the temperature it was cooked at, and the name of the person stirring it on the stove is surely of limited value. To know the taste one need only take a bite.

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How Do the Early Pressings of this Mozart Piano Concerto Album Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now

About fifteen years ago (2010) we played an original pressing of this title that we really liked. It’s the one with the rare cover you see pictured, and might have actually been the first one we had ever found in audiophile playing condition. We had a devil of a time finding more copies, but we were convinced that the early pressings were clearly the best.

More recently we were able to acquire quite a variety of different pressings for an upcoming shootout and were fortunate to be able to include one of the stereo originals for the first time in many years.

We started out with high hopes, but once the early pressing began to play, our hopes were dashed fairly quickly.

Our notes for the original pressing read:

  • Overly rich and weighty
  • Dynamics/life are gone.
  • Side two has one of the most boomy sounding pianos I’ve ever heard.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

Were we wrong years ago? Hard to say. That copy from many years ago is gone.

Three things we always keep in mind when a pressing doesn’t sound the way we remember it did, or think it should:

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We Were Wrong about the Reissues of Christmas with Chet Atkins

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Atkins Available Now

In 2006 we wrote our review for an orange label RCA reissue of the album.

Recently we did a shootout for the album and only one side of one of the later orange label pressings earned a Super Hot (2+) grade.

Our system was noticeably darker and clearly far less revealing than the one we have now, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to compensate for the shortcomings of the reissue reviewed below.

What I couldn’t hear on my system back in those days (and even as late as 2006) no doubt explains most of these kinds of errors. That’s why we are constantly harping on the idea that audiophiles would do well to get good sound before they spend a fortune on vinyl.

Higher quality playback is what makes it possible to recognize and acquire better sounding records.

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Always wanted to have a Plum and Orange pressing? Here’s your chance!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We should have titled this one “here was your chance,” since this pressing sold very quickly.

Over the years most Plum and Orange pressings were disposed by us of on ebay for the benefit of collectors and those audiophiles who might be ill-informed enough to think that early British pressings would have the best sound for Led Zeppelin III.

They do not. They can, however, sound reasonably good in some cases with the proper cleaning.

However, they are not even Double Plus (A++) good, which sounds like something from the novel 1984 but is in fact a Very Good grade and guaranteed to trounce any and all copies of the album you have ever heard.

No, the best Zeppelin album we have played to date with the early label in this case earned a grade of Single Plus to Double Plus, which we describe as “[a] wonderful sounding side with many impressive qualities, notably better than a Single Plus copy. A big step up from the typical pressing.”

UPDATE:

We do not even offer Single Plus copies on the site anymore. Although their faults would be less obvious to anyone who went through the shootout process with the album, such faults are much too bothersome to us precisely because we did go through that process.

Once you know what is right, it’s very easy to spot what is wrong.

This is the foundational principle of Hot Stampers.

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Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2025.

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another mistaken idea.

We evaluated an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last.

The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played.

We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Not sure what those two commas are doing there. Pausing for emphasis? Sure, why not? This is a big deal.

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is truly one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He might be, or at least he might choose to describe himself as one.

Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.

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Baskets of Recordings and Facets of Reproduction

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now

Ideally you need a basket of roughly five to ten well known recordings with which to test your equipment, tweaks, room, cleaning regimen and the like.

Don’t rely on any single recording to be The Truth. None of them are. (I found this out the hard way when tweaking the setup in our new studio in 2022.)

To illustrate this idea, imagine your stereo as a huge diamond. Every recording you play is showing you a different facet of that diamond, corresponding to a different strength or weakness of your system’s reproduction.

Audiophile X will play a record and say it has bad bass. His bass reproduction is excellent when playing other recordings, so record X, which he thinks has bad bass, is clearly at fault.

If you have been in audio for very long, you should easily recognize the conclusion this person has drawn as a case of mistaken audiophile thinking. 

Audiophile Y plays the same record and says it has good bass. Assuming the record has good bass for a moment, what is in fact happening in Audiophile X’s system is that most facets of his bass are good, but some facet of his bass is bad, and this record is showing him some shortcoming in his bass reproduction that his other records are not capable of showing him. 

If Audiophile X makes some changes to his stereo, and the record in question now has better bass, and, importantly, other records still sound as good or better than they used to, then some measure of success has most likely been achieved, and another step forward has been taken on that very long and often frustrating journey that we are on.

Flaws in the Diamond

The diamond has many flaws. We find them and fix them by regular tweaking and tuning, both of which have the added benefit of improving one’s critical listening skills.

To help you improve your stereo, room, electricity and the like, we have scores of records that are good for testing a great many aspects of audio reproduction.

Rickie Lee Jones’ first album is what we would call a bad test disc, for one very simple reason:

It can sound good on a system with a great many problems. It doesn’t expose sonic flaws as much as it hides them.

Port’s Rule states: If it isn’t easy for your test discs to sound wrong, they are not very good test discs.

If you are looking for tougher test discs, we have you covered there, with more than two dozen ballbusters guaranteed to bring any stereo to its knees. If you like a challenge, and own some of these records, preferably Hot Stamper pressings you bought from us (because we know those have the right sound; we played them), we invite you to have at ’em.

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Take Our Advice and Skip the Original of The Stone Poneys

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

The originals from 1967 have never impressed us much.

Click on the links below for more records that sound best to us on the right reissue pressing 

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound their best on the right reissue (the ones we sell, obviously; there are plenty of reissues that don’t have good sound, but the ones we offer handily beat the originals we’ve — and no doubt you’ve — heard).

Here are all the titles we’ve reviewed to date that have the potential to sound their best on the right reissue

On this album the sound varies quite a bit from track to track.

The best tracks are rich, tubey and clear; the worst thin, bright and hard. 

The first track on side one rarely stayed clean when loud, but here for the most part it does. It’s a good test for whether or not you have a copy with high quality, low distortion mastering.

Listen for the least amount of smear and congestion and the most resolution.

The second track is richer and tubier – it proves that side one is mastered correctly.

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