*Hey, What’s the Big Idea?

Thoughts on The Big Picture from someone who has been playing records for almost 60 years. I bought a copy of She Loves You on Swan in 1964 and still own it. The disc may be cracked but the picture sleeve is in pretty good shape, just in case you were wondering.

The Thrill of Discovering Great Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Percussion Recordings Available Now

Robert Fine was one of the greatest audio engineers who ever lived. He is the man responsible for recording this audiophile gem for Command, as well as much of the Mercury catalog.

Unfortunately, we rarely have any Command records in stock, but we do make an effort to have a good selection of the most amazing sounding Mercury titles available in the form of Hot Stamper pressings.

If you have the system for it, it’s very possible you have never heard most of these instruments sound this real on any other recording. It’s as if you were standing right in the studio with them. Yes, it’s that crazy good.

Let Me Ask You This

Here’s a question no one seems to be asking:

Who is finding incredible Demo Discs like this Command from 1961 nowadays?

Harry Pearson used to.

Sid Marks reviewed plenty back in the day (reviews which I mostly disagreed with, but still, at least he wrote them).

Jim Mitchell (now long-forgotten) wrote about them back in the 80s.

Moon and Gray published a book full of the best sounding Deccas and Londons.

Anybody else?

Are the audiophile reviewers of today picking up the baton that the giants of the past have dropped at their feet?

I see little evidence of it. [1]

Not to worry. Better Records has taken on the job that no one else seems to want to do. For example, here are 200+ records we’ve discovered with (potentially) excellent sound.

And that’s not all. Not only have we set a higher standard for audiophile-quality records with our vintage vinyl Hot Stamper pressings, but we’ve endeavored to provide a great many other benefits to the audiophile community as well.

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Warning: Hot Stampers May Cause Cognitive Dissonance

Thinking Critically About Records Is Key to Understanding Them

Check out the article that Wired wrote about Better Records and our pursuit of Hot Stampers.

If you have time, go to the comments section and read any of the 300 or more postings claiming that the very idea of Hot Stampers is absurd, not to mention the atavistic, borderline fetishistic attachment to vinyl that these self-described “lovers of sound” engage in, and don’t forget how ridiculously expensive the equipment many of them own must be, making a real trifecta of audiophile inanity.

As if you didn’t know already!

But all of this is true only under one condition:

That you have never played one of our Hot Stamper pressings on top quality equipment.

Once you have played one, even the most skeptical audiophile often finds himself becoming as fetishistic about the pursuit of old records as we are (and have been for fifty years).

We sure get a lot of letters from folks who seem to like our records. Can there really be that much Kool-Aid to go around? is it possible for one sip to change your life?

Good News

There is a way to find out.

If you live in America and you try one of our Hot Stamper pressings and you decide you don’t like it, we will cover the shipping cost both ways and refund 100% of the money you paid.

With a guarantee like that, wouldn’t it be more absurd to conclude, as so many have done, that what we say about records cannot possibly be true? All without even a hint of empirical evidence to support the idea?

The Real Risk

Of course, the real risk in taking a chance on a Hot Stamper is not financial, since we are covering all the costs.

The real risk is that you might end up proving to yourself that some of the things you have been told about records are mistaken.

Carefully cleaned and evaluated vintage pressings can indeed sound dramatically better than the ones they are making these days. We can actually prove it. You just need to let us send you the proof.

Now wait just a gosh darn minute, Mister Hot Stampers, I hear you saying to yourself.

I own so many of these new records! I’m a smart guy. I’m no dummy. How could I have been so easily taken in? Why did I believe them when they told me these new records were the best? You know, the labels that make them and the reviewers who review them and the forum posters who rave about them. Everybody. I thought we all agreed about this!

It’s not right that your Hot Stamper pressings turn all of what I thought I knew to be true on its head. Yes, your records are clearly better, but now I feel I was duped when I bought all these other pressings. I feel like a fool and I don’t like that feeling.

You can see how easy it would be for this turn of events to result in some serious cognitive dissonance, the kind that everyone — even me — will do everything in their power to avoid. (Most of it is subconscious and automatic anyway, so you don’t really have to do anything, truth be told.)

The Right Choice Is Clear

Therefore the easiest choice, the smartest choice, the choice practically every audiophile makes (never mind the general public, they couldn’t care less), is to come up with some reasons why our records cannot possibly be as good sounding as we say.

That’s the ticket. This whole Hot Stamper thing makes no sense. It’s not possible. Your customers are wrong. They are deluding themselves. You guys are the ones who are suffering from cognitive bias, not me. You hear what you want to hear on these old records and you ignore what’s good about the new ones.

I’m pretty sure that must be what’s going on. How can everybody else be wrong and somehow you get to be right? That’s really absurd. You should be ashamed of yourself for ripping off gullible audiophiles who are too stupid to realize that what you are selling is the worst kind of snake oil. Either that or false hope. You’re cynically preying on those who have more money than sense and laughing all the way to the bank. That’s on you. There’s a sucker born every minute, and that’s why you will never run out of customers. Hah!

Fair enough. Well said. You figured out this whole thing must be a scam. Awesome. Good job.

As a bonus, you’ve just saved yourself a huge amount of work and avoided a lot of mental anguish. You proved yourself right without lifting a finger. (Well, you did some typing, so I guess that counts as lifting a finger. But it sure was easier than playing a record and critically listening to it. That stuff is hard.)

Now that all that Hot Stamper stuff is out of the way, please allow me to point you toward the one book that explains all the bad thinking we humans constantly engage in, this one.

In my experience, no other book explains more about audio and the audiophiles who pursue it, myself included. I guarantee that if you read this book you will never be the same. It is that eye-opening.

Kind of like playing your first Hot Stamper. Nothing is ever the same again. Even if it is a scam.

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The Scientific Method in a Nutshell, Courtesy of Richard Feynman

An Experimental Approach to Finding Better Records Is the Only One that Can Work

Experimenting with records is the best way to learn about them. Hot Stamper shootouts are simply the name we came up with for the rigorous blinded experiments we do in order to find the best sounding pressings of the albums we play.

If you haven’t run an actual experiment under controlled conditions, you may have an opinion about the sound of a given record, you may even have experts who agree with you about that record, but what you don’t have is evidence to back up anything you or anybody else says.

It’s possible that when carrying out your experiments you may have allowed yourself to be fooled, or maybe you failed in some other way to run a proper shootout,

The audio world is drowning in pretentious knowledge, the kind that has no hard-won experimental evidence to support it.

We here at Better Records do things differently. We run experiments that tell us not which pressings should sound the best, but which ones do sound the best.

Our experimental results often disagree with whatever it is that the conventional wisdom of the audiophile community might have predicted.

As Richard Feynman points out below, that makes us right and them wrong, at least provisionally.

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“Why would you want to go into a room and just play a record by yourself?”

In Geoff Edgers’ Washington Post article about audiophiles, somebody asks “why would you want to go into a room and just play a record by yourself?”

I would answer the question with a question of my own:

Why would you go to a museum and just look at a painting by yourself?

You don’t need anybody around you to help you understand a painting. You just look at the painting and you experience looking at a painting.

When I listen to a record, I want the experience of listening to the record. I don’t need anybody else around. I don’t need anybody talking to me. I want it to take me from the beginning to the end. And at the end I should feel like I still want more.

For me, that’s what a good record and a good stereo is all about. That’s the reason some of us describe ourselves as audiophiles.

The shortest definition of an audiophile is a “lover of sound.” I love good sound and I’ve spent more than forty years building a stereo system that has what I think is very good sound. (What others think of it has never been of much concern, and I don’t know why it would be.)

It’s in a darkened room with no windows [1] because music sounds better in a darkened room with no windows and the door closed. (In our old studio, the stereo sounded better with the door at the end of the hallway open. This one sounds better with the door behind the left speaker closed. There is no rule to follow here. Whatever sounds the best, sounds the best.)

There is one chair and it is located in the only sweet spot in the room. (Yes, there can only be one sweet spot.)

I go in there to put myself in the living presence of the musicians who performed on whatever record I choose to play.

Music is loud and so I play the stereo at levels as close to those of live music as I can manage.

The system creates a soundfield that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. With the speakers pulled so far out into the room, they have often been known to disappear, leaving only three-dimensional imaging of great depth and precision (especially in the case of orchestral music).

By listening this way, I am able to completely immerse myself in the music I play, with no distractions of any kind.

This way of listening is more intense and powerful and transportive than any other I have known (outside of the live event of course).

That’s what I am trying to achieve with my system and the best records I can find to play on it: an experience that is so intense and powerful that I find myself completely transported out of the real world I exist in, and into the imaginary world created by the producers, engineers and musicians responsible for making the record.

If you want this kind of experience, you need more than good music. You need a good recording of that music, and, if you’re an analog sort of person with high standards, you need an exceptionally good pressing of that recording.

At the highest levels of sound quality, for us audiophiles it can’t just be about the music. You really do need all three: good music, well recorded, then mastered, pressed and cleaned properly.

Depending on your tastes and standards, good music can easily be found most everywhere. Good music with good sound, at least on vinyl, is much more rare, and good sounding music reproduced well is, in my experience, very rare indeed.

Some people are upset and put off by what they consider to be our “extreme” approach to records and audio. It bothers them that we constantly say that doing records and audio is harder than it looks. To them it seems so easy.

Naturally, we believe there is ample evidence to support our views on the subject. I refer those who disagree with us to the many hundreds of commentaries on this blog.

And, if I may paraphrase Jesus, upset folks will always be with us.

[1] In the picture below you can see how bright the back of the soundroom is. Until I watched the video again recently, I had completely forgotten that we had installed a solatube skylight in the ceiling at the far end of the room.

Why did we do that? Because there is no electricity being used in this room that is not going to the stereo. There is a light by the turntable that runs off batteries. When we tried plugging that light into the electrical circuits, even the ones separated from the ones the system uses, the sound became degraded — flatter, harsher, less transparent, less open, etc.

We needed more light in the room to do our work, so we put a solatube well behind the listener, which allowed us to leave the area around the speakers mostly dark. This worked like a charm.

We spents months testing the electricity going to everything in the space we rent, including the testing of the isolation transformers we use (about six as I recall) for our computers and record cleaning machines.

All of the experiments we carried out were done without the listener knowing what had been changed. Notes were taken and combinations of changed evaluated.

I did this kind of thing over the course of years in the house I owned in Thousand Oaks, where we had the studio set up in the master bedroom, so I knew exactly how to go about it. If you ever manage to do this kind of work for your own stereo — assuming you take it to the level we took it to — the one thing you are guaranteed to take away from the experience is how shocking the before and after difference can be.

We don’t talk about it much because it’s just too complicated and so few audiophiles will choose to make use of our experience. I doubt if even one out of a hundred of our customers would. Robert Brook and a handful of others at most would be my guess.

But good electricity is key to good sound, and, if I may be so bold, it’s the most obvious source of problems in home audio systems.

Further Reading

We Don’t Know — And We’ve Learned Over the Years Not to Pretend To

More on the Subject of Pretentious Knowledge

In our twenty-year-old review for the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan we made the following claim, a claim which we obviously had no evidence to back up.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

It was foolish of us to declare any such thing, especially with such certainty. How on earth could we possibly know what tapes were used to master the record, in Germany of all places? The very idea is absurd. We call people out for saying things they have no evidence to support all the time. Running into this review today, I have to call myself out for such nonsense. What I should have said was the following:

This reissue sounds to us as though it has been made from copy tapes.

Just to be clear, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that it sounds like a copy tape was used to master the record, but I am not at all justified in saying that a copy tape was actually used to master the record.

Nor do I have any business talking about about the sound of a master tape I’ve never heard.

I can certainly talk about the sound of the best London pressings. Those I have played. I’ve critically listened to batches of them over the course of many years. They may be expensve but they are not hard to find. We’ve sold dozens of them as Hot Stamper pressings and played plenty of others with sound not good enough or surfaces not quiet enough to offer to our customers.

Whatever approach Decca may have used in the mastering, with whatever tape they may have used to make the records that we’ve auditioned, is information that would be nice to have. But it’s really none of my business, since it doesn’t alter the sound of the pressings we auditioned.

More importantly, it’s none of Better Records’ business.

Our business is about one thing and one thing only: records that sound better than other pressings.

Discussions of master tapes and what they should sound like or what they do sound like is not part of our remit. Nor should it be. At bottom it is nothing but speculation, and it is rarely if ever supported by anything resembling evidence.

We are firmly on record as opposing that sort of thing.

We’ve Been Saying This for Twenty Years

After our dubious claim to knowing that the record was mastered from a copy tape, we went on to say:

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How Did Columbia Make So Many Great Sounding Records Without Today’s Obviously Superior Mastering Equipment?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

When I play Columbia recordings from the 50s and 60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles Davis and other jazz giants, what I find most striking about them is how natural, warm and sweet they sound.

I was playing an old mono Ellington record a while back, and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing.

Those guys — the engineers and the musicians — knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how many of the best sounding records in the world managed to be recorded without the benefit of any of that stuff.

RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos.  Decca didn’t need it.

Contemporary Records managed to record many of the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great records get made with such bad equipment?

I guess we’ll never know.

Columbia may not have always recorded the best “serious” jazz, but they were very serious about the sound of their jazz. Outside of Contemporary, Columbia has better sounding jazz records than any other label of which I am aware.

Recordings made at their 30th Street Studio are pretty hard to beat. There is no Heavy Vinyl reissue on the planet that can compete with the sound of one of our Hot Stamper pressings of any of the albums recorded there you see available on our site, and they are guaranteed to knock your socks off or your money back.

And the Brubeck albums recorded by Fred Plaut are some of the most amazing sounding of all the Columbias, something few audiophiles would dispute. (Try to get the early pressings in stereo. Nothing can touch them. If you can’t afford our prices, we are more than happy to help you find your own. )

UPDATE 2025

We have two new lists for those who would like to know which Columbia label pressings win shootouts — one for 6-Eye Label winners and one for 360 Label winners.

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What Does Neutral in Audio Really Mean?

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

What Does NEUTRAL in Audio REALLY MEAN?

I wrote about this very subject in one of Robert’s postings from 2024, this one. Here is most of what I had to say at the time:

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 and then figure out practical ways to root them out.

This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished, even by the truly dedicated. It unfolds slowly, over the course of decades, and only for a very small percentage of audiophiles. Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. To attempt to go further feels like banging your head against a wall.

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

(Of course it didn’t hurt that we got paid to do it. An undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder also played a part, as did certain records that I fell in love with a long time ago.)

Pass/Not-Yet

In our opinion, some of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely.

They thought they’d come a long way, and perhaps they had, but there was 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 greased ladder leading to better sound is not a choice most audiophiles are in a position to make.

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 could only take it so far:

    1. By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
    2. Or want to buy (ditto),
    3. Or have nice things to say about (ditto again, 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, or such records.

And with his latest post, Robert Brook proves once again that he is an audiophile who knows what the goal of playing music in the home should be — to make it sound as natural and lifelike as possible — and, even more importantly, he recognized that it would take years of work to make that sound a reality, and knowing all that, committed himself to the task.

And why has he done all this work?

Because he is the one who gets all the benefits.

He gets to hear the greatest music ever recorded in a more powerfully immersive way than 99% of the audiophiles who share neither his approach nor his ambition. (You can add work ethic for the trifecta.)

If you want easy answers and quick fixes, Robert (and I) will tell you there are no such things in the world of audio. Until you’ve done the work, this way of thinking may seem counterintuitive and confusing, especially if you’ve spent much time on audiophile forums.

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Neil Young’s Guitar Masterpiece – Danger Bird

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Listen to the way Danger Bird (the second track on side one of  Zuma opens. Each instrument, one by one, slowly, deliberately, one could almost say haltingly, feeds into the mix, until the churning guitars give way to Neil’s spare vocal — fatalistic, doomed, already resigned to some fate he barely understands. 

Even though the song has just begun, you sense that Neil feels a weight and a darkness bearing down on him, that it’s ongoing, that it’s already started, that somehow you’re coming into it in the middle, well after the weight of it has begun to crush and perhaps even kill him. He knows the story of Danger Bird all too well.

It’s as powerful and intense a piece of music as any I have ever experienced; sublime in its simplicity, transcendental in effect. You feel yourself swept along, an out of body experience that you can’t control. When Neil launches into the first of many guitar solos the sense of journeying or exploring with him the imaginary musical world he is creating is palpable. He doesn’t seem to know where it will lead and neither do you. There is no structure to reassure you, no end in sight, only the succession of notes that play from moment to moment, first tensing, then relaxing; cresting, then falling away.

Music has the power to take you out of the world you know and place you in a world of its own making. How it can do that nobody knows. Whatever Neil tapped into to make that happen on Danger Bird, he succeeded completely.

If you’re in the right frame of mind, in the right environment, with everything working audio-wise, a minute into this song you will no longer be sitting in your comfy audio chair. You won’t know where you are, which is exactly where you should be.

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It May Be Hard to Believe, But We Actually Enjoy Testing Records

Advice to Help You Make More Progress in Audio

Some audiophile reviewers opining at great length about the sound quality of various kinds of discs — both compact and vinyl — prefer to review only those that sound good to them and simply ignore the rest. (A small sample of the writings of one such reviewer can be found here on the blog, but there are doubtless others who follow the same approach.)

We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.

Needless to say, we see our role differently. Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things.

They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.

They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.

We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.

It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.

No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a fraction of the records that we have. We’ve been looking for the best sounding pressings of records for a very long time, more than forty years.

Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.

That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.

Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of records is one which we learned to accept as axiomatic. As a born skeptic, this was never difficult for me. Early on in my audio career, sometime in the ’80s, I realized it was self-evident.

The solution we put into practice given the nature of records comprises the four principles we adopted:

  1. We stopped pretending to know something that can’t be known.
  2. We stopped relying on theories proven to have very little if any predictive effect.
  3. We stopped relying on the experts and so-called authorities.
  4. We stopped assuming and speculating and, importantly, we stopped worrying about getting it wrong.

What remained was the simplest possible approach to the problem that would actually work. One that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by skeptical record collectors.

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Even In The Quietest Moments and Your 1977 Ears – There’s No Going Back

supereveni_1506_1x

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

By 1977 I was a huge fan of the band, having first discovered their music on Crisis (1975) and Crime (1974), in which order I honestly can’t remember.

I played their albums all the time, especially Crisis.

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have been Crime of the Century by Mobile Fidelity, which came out in 1978.

Every right-thinking audiophile had that one — MoFi sold over a hundred thousand of them (along with a hundred thousand of Aja, Touch and one or two others).

And why not? The sound was killer on the systems of the day. Lots of slam down low (but not really that low, although it seemed plenty low at the time), lots of extra top up high, lots of phony detail, just what the old school stereos of the day, like mine, needed.

Crisis? What Crisis? followed in 1975. It was the Supertramp album that sent me over the top. I played that album relentlessly. Before long Art Rock was at the top of my list anytime I wanted to have an immersive musical experience, and that, for an obsessive audiophile like myself, meant almost every day.

Supertramp, Yes, Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, Crack the Sky, ELO, Bowie – it’s all I wanted to listen to back then, and it encouraged me to keep upgrading my equipment whenever I had the money, although I admit to being completely clueless about all of that at the time. More on that subject here.

A year and a half later EITQM followed. It too became a staple of my musical diet. Man, I played that record till the grooves were worn smooth.

I thought the sound of my domestic pressing was killer at the time, too. Crisis was a demo disc at my house and this was right up there with it. Now the obvious question is, did I have a good sounding copy, or did my stereo not reveal to me the shortcomings of my LP? Or maybe my ears were not well enough trained to hear what was wrong.

Those of you who have been doing this for a long time know the answer: any or all of the above, probably all, and nobody can know just how much of each.

And there is no way to find out because you are not that person anymore.

Your 1977 Ears… and Mine

Even if you could recreate your old stereo and room, and find your original copy, there’s one thing you can’t do, and that’s listen to it with your 1977 ears.

Every time you play a record and listen to it critically, your ears get better at their job.

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