*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.

Hot Stampers Helped Some Audiophiles Hear What They’d Been Missing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he played at a stereo show recently. You can read all about it here.

We carried on the conversation:

Tom,

Thank you and for sure I’d be more than happy to spread the word more and help out! Send me cards for sure. I’m def a Better Records disciple.

You should consider teaming up with a room at the show next time. I think worth your while. Time to break the grip of the MoFi Mafia at these shows.

All the best, Mike

Mike,

We went to some shows years ago and nothing came of it.

It may turn out that none of these people will ever want to pay good money — let’s be honest, a lot of good money — for Hot Stampers. I wrote about it here.

Experience over many years has borne out this view, disappointing as it may be.

The audiophiles who go to shows for some reason don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around the concept of Hot Stampers.

Hard to imagine that none of them can afford our records. The money someone might pay for three wacky MoFis or three Analogue Productions disasters would probably get you one very good sounding Hot Stamper pressing. In my book, one good record that you might actually listen to and enjoy often is a whole lot better than any number of modern records that you will seldom play and more than likely simply file away on the shelf where their sole purpose will be to collect dust.

I’m guessing. I don’t really know what people do with all these mediocre sounding reissues. I wrote about what I suspect happens to them here.

I Beg the Question

But this is purely an exercise in “begging the question.”

I’m assuming things I do not know to be true, in order to make the very point I have the burden of proving.

To make my case, I would need to provide evidence to back up the claim that these records don’t get played and enjoyed. To be honest, I have no evidence whatsoever that the owners of these records don’t enjoy the hell out of them.

It’s a naked expression of prejudice on my part. I’m assuming that what’s obviously true for me must be true for others. I don’t enjoy playing these Heavy Vinyl records, and I think that other audiophiles must be as disappointed by them as I am.

But Heavy Vinyl records are selling very well these days. Somebody is buying them.

And they buy them even though, as our writer points out, they cannot begin to compete with good vintage pressings.

More question begging? Not really. This happens to be something I can provide plenty of evidence for and can prove with ease.

Practically every record on our site is a rebuttal to audiophile pressings from every era, made by every company in the remastering business.

To find out how wrong these modern records are, all you need do is buy one of our Hot Stampers and play them head to head.

Oh well. All we can do is keep trying to get the word out. And we thank you for your help showing audiophiles what they are missing.

Because explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

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Six-Eye, Black Print, White Print, Red Label – Which Is the Best Sounding Kind of Blue?

Hot Stampers Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

Is the 50s original always better, is the 70s reissue always better, is the 60s 360 pressing always better?

The answer is “no” to all three.

Why? Because no pressing is always better. All pressings are unique and should only be judged on their merits, and you do that by playing them, not by looking at their labels. For us this truth is practically axiomatic. It is in fact the premise of our entire business. Over the course of the 28 years we have been selling records we have never found any compelling evidence to invalidate it.

The day that someone can accurately predict the sound quality of a specific record by looking at the label or cover is a day I do not expect to come, ever.

UPDATE 2024

Our Latest Thinking on KOB

The 6 Eye label domestic stereo pressings win our shootouts, in the case of Kind of Blue without exception.

The 360 label pressings, black print (1962-63) or white print (1963-70), as well as the rare 70s red label (1970-?), can sound very good, but they never win shootouts.

We’ve identified a select group of reissues with the potential to do well in shootouts, typically earning a grade of Super Hot (A++) when up against the best originals which earn our top grade, White Hot (A+++). Kind of Blue is one of those recordings.

A Larger Point

But there is a larger point to be made. Let’s assume that the best original Six Eye Columbia pressings can be the best — the most Tubey Magical, the most involving, the most real. You just happen to have a clean pressing, and you absolutely love it.

But is it the best? How could you possibly know that?

Unless you have done a comparison with many copies under controlled conditions, you simply cannot know where on the sonic curve your copy should be placed.

Perhaps you have a mediocre original. Or a mediocre 360 Label copy. Since you haven’t done a massive shootout you simply have no way of knowing just how good sounding the album can be.

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Are All the Masterdisk Pressings of 2112 Good Sounding?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rush Available Now

Even though many of the original pressings are mastered at Masterdisk (by HW, BK and GK), some of the reissues from 1979 on the “skyscraper” label are too.

But none of the later pressings we played sounded very good. Audiophiles looking for top quality sound should stick to the domestic originals.

What We’re Listening For On 2112

  • Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
  • Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
  • The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
  • Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
  • Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
  • Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
  • Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

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Are White Label Promos the Way to Go on this Mystery Columbia Jazz Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

Recently we conducted a shootout for a Columbia recording, one that we had auditioned a couple of times before and one for which we knew the music and the general quality of the sound well.

It’s not the record you see pictured. For now we’re keeping the title a mystery, consistent with the idea that we give out lots of bad stampers on this blog, but almost never do we give out the good ones. (When we do give out the best stampers, we keep the title a mystery. We are not the least bit interested in putting ourselves out of business.)

The discussion for today revolves around the idea held by a great many audiophiles that the White Label Promo copies are going to be the best sounding pressings of almost any album they might happen to run across.

And, to be fair, in the case of this mysterious double album, they’re right.

Our two best sounding copies were White Label Promos.

What interests me in these findings is that the stampers for a White Label Promo copy, the second one, the one with mostly Super Hot grades, are almost identical to the one that came in last in the shootout, with barely passable grades.

If an audiophile collector were to go to Discogs, find the WLP pressings, write down their stampers, and then check them against the copies he owned or might want to buy, he could either find himself with a top quality copy, or a not-nearly-as-good copy, depending on his luck. (And side four of the worst pressing earned a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+.)

Why one set of stampers sounds so much better than another set, or the same or similar set on a different pressing, is a mystery.

Does anyone have a practical way to get around the unfortunate reality that allows one set of stampers to sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers to sound not much better than decent?

Well, we can’t say there is a practical way, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining that one for more than twenty years.

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Mapleshade Thinks Female Vocals Are Good for Turntable Setup

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Years ago, in a section on their site, Mapleshade recommended a female vocal for turntable setup and mentioned Blue by name.

How much deep punchy bass is there on Blue? Barely a trace in the piano, that’s it. Blue is a good record for testing some sonic qualities, not at all good for testing others.

Our advice: do not limit yourself to a female vocal recording when setting up your turntable.

We use Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular because it is BIG.

How big is Blue? How big can it get? How big is it supposed to be?

We asked that very question about a Heart album we liked to test with years ago. As you can imagine, it is an impossible question to answer when one has only a single copy of the album.

Blue is simply not a good test for size, power, weight or energy.

These things are very important to us — we talk about them in almost every Hot Stamper listing we write — and if you are not the kind of audiophile BS record lover whose collection is full of Sarah McLachlan and Patricia Barber “vinyls,” they should be every bit as important to you as they are to us.

They are what make music fun and exciting.

Don’t you want your music to be fun and exciting?

We sure do. It’s practically a three word definition for the kinds of records we sell.

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Guilty as Charged: We Used to Blame CCR’s Records for the Bad Sound We Heard Too

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now

Another entry that falls under the heading of

What’s the big idea?

Before 2008 or so we had regularly been frustrated with this band’s recordings. There were plenty of  customers for their albums, but even our best Hot Stampers fell well short of the standards we set for top quality sound.

We assumed the recordings themselves were at fault.

Things started to turn around after that, judging from this bit of boilerplate at the bottom of a listing for Green River from around 2010 or so:

Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these.

The best copies no longer to seem to have the problems we used to hear all the time.

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard the congestion and grittiness in the recording is that two things changed. (1) We found better copies of the record to play — probably, can’t say for sure, but let’s assume we did — and (2) we’ve made lots of improvements to the stereo since the last time we did the shootout.

You have to get around to doing regular shootouts for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they might comprise or when they might have occurred, were incontrovertible. The album was now playing at a much, much higher level.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of taking full advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last ten or twenty years. [Make that thirty by now.]

Live and Learn

When Creedence’s records started to sound good, we stopped blaming those albums for being badly recorded.

It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad — or least problematical — now sound pretty darn good. 

Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability — and yours — to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what Hot Stampers are all about.

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The Million Dollar Stereo (Updated)

He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.

Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — “the world’s greatest hi-fi”.

What would it mean in the end?

Geoff Edgers has written a highly entertaining story about an extremely misguided audiophile who went “searching for perfect sound” in ways that practically guaranteed he would never find it.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this fellow’s mistakes.

Just to take one obvious example, this picture of some of the records in his collection speaks volumes, at least it does to me.

He built a million dollar stereo to play records like these?

No amount of money spent on equipment can make most of these titles sound good, and failure to appreciate that fact is just one of the many fatal errors the late Mr. Fritz made in his approach to both records and audio.

He mistakenly thought he was at the “I know everything” stage, but that is just the prelude to the stages of knowledge where real understanding and progress begin, not end.

My own stereo history may be of some value in helping to shed light on these issues. Like everyone else, I started at the bottom. Thank god I didn’t have a million dollars to waste back then because I clearly didn’t understand audio any better than the late Mr. Fritz did.

Like him and practically every audiophile I’ve ever come in contact with, I sure thought I did. Having suffered myself from a serious case of pretentious-knowledge syndrome, it’s easy for me to spot the signs in others. (My understanding is that you can’t sign up on the Hoffman Forum without first proving your know-it-all bona fides.)

Why So Uncomfortable?

In a recent letter I received about the Dynavector 17dx cartridge we use, this question was posed:

Why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right.

I answered as follows:

I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it sounded good to me and was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted.

Is the audiophile of today doing anything different?

What would you be doing if you hadn’t stumbled on a guy with some credibility — he sold you some records that sounded amazing, so he must know something — who turned you on to some audio stuff that sounds great and, better yet, didn’t cost that much?

And how did this guy — me — come to find out about all this stuff in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you.

He had a good audio friend who turned him on to Dynavector cartridges twenty years ago (but oddly enough not the really good one they sell. I had to make that leap for myself).

And this audio friend had learned through extensive trial and error that there were certain receivers one could pick up for cheap at thrift stores that offered excellent, audiophile-quality sound. (Trial and error were his forte. This is the same guy that clued me into the concept of Hot Stampers, a life-changing concept if ever there was one.)

As it turned out, even my friend did not know how good the sound of the receiver he sold me could be when fed by a top quality outboard phono stage, something he did not have access to. (The receiver’s phono stage is decent but hopelessly outclassed by the EAR 324p we use.)

I ended up buying four or five different models with mediocre-at-best sound before I realized the one I owned must be a fluke. Then I bought three more of the model I liked and they all sounded different too, although they ranged in sound at most from excellent to crazy good. So I put the best sounding one in my system and kept the other three for backup. Like I said, they were cheap.

When I met my friend George Louis in San Diego back in the 80s, he had a much better system than I did. He was using non-audiophile-approved equipment that drove custom speakers. He showed me that my audiophile electronics and my Fulton so-called state-of-the-art speakers were not nearly as good as I thought they were. What did I know back then? Not as much as I thought I did, that’s for damn sure.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1987, I met a fellow audiophile named Robert Pincus and we quickly became friends. I was selling vintage classical records to audiophiles (along with lots of other records) and he was supplying me with whatever Shaded Dogs, Mercs, Londons, EMIs and such that he could dig up with top quality sound and surfaces.

He showed me that no two records sound the same, and even that often two sides of the same record don’t sound the same. Once I had a chance to listen to some of the “Hot Stamper” pressings he brought me, I was sold.

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We Learned a Valuable Lesson About Goats Head Soup in 2016

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

Presenting a classic case of live and learn.

We would agree with very little of what we had to say about Goat’s Head Soup as a recording when we wrote about it back in 2011 — and for the previous 35+ years since I had first played a domestic original. (Turns out the imports are no good either.)

Having done a big shootout for the album in 2016, we now know that there most certainly are great sounding pressings to be found, because we found some. We broke through.

The data are in, and now we know just how wrong we were.

In our defense, let me just ask one question: Did anybody else know this record was well recorded? I can find no evidence to support anyone having ever taken such a contrarian position.

But we’re taking that position now.

All it takes is one great sounding copy to show you the error of your ways, and we had more than one.

Here’s what we had to say back in 2011. After having played dozens of copies and never hearing the record sound more than passable, can you blame us?

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Challenging Our Assumptions for Better Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining what the aim of his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

CHALLENGING Our ASSUMPTIONS For BETTER SOUND

We’ve written about the lessons to be learned from the misguided exploits of the late Mr. Fritz ourselves, and you can read all about them here.

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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

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

I’ve just gone to this reviewer’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?

Some background. Years ago our first Hot Stamper shootout for Songs in the Key of Life had us enthusiastically singing its praises:

Hot Stampers discovered for one of the funkiest and most consistent double albums of all time! It’s beyond difficult to find great sounding Stevie Wonder vinyl, but here’s a copy that proves it’s possible if you try hard enough. So many copies are terrible in so many different ways — we should know, we played them. And just to be clear, this copy is far from perfect as well, but it did more things right in more places than we ever expected it would or could. And that means it showed us a great sounding Stevie Wonder record we never knew existed.

But a well known reviewer says it’s a bad recording. Does he know something we don’t?

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