*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.

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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Neil Young and the Limits of Expert Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Richard Feynman gave a series of lectures concerning the workings of the scientific method. Here is an excerpt from one of them that I would like you to keep in mind as you read the discussion that follows. [Bolding added by me.]

Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

Back in 2015, a mastering engineer by the name of Phil Brown contacted me in reference to a Hot Stamper pressing of Neil Young’s  Zuma he had seen in our mailer. (Apologies in advance for not giving out the stamper numbers; we tend to frown on that sort of thing around here.) He wrote:

  Hey Tom,   

I see it’s a featured disc in the newsletter. I’m curious what the matrix numbers are since I mastered it.

I replied as follows.

Phil, you did a great job, we love the sound of Zuma!

The top copy has sold so we don’t know the numbers, but the next best copy is 1[redacted], 1[redacted]. For side one we have also liked 1[redacted] in the past, and we had a 1[redacted] side.

Of course, all these numbers are just as likely to sound bad, or mediocre, as to sound good. We buy any clean Zuma original we can find and let the sonic chips fall where they may. Anyway, once again, good job!

He then offered this:

I can explain the numbering system for you if you like.

[Three numbers and letters, redacted] are from the original run of lacquers and [redacted] would have been from the first recuts so I did those as well.

I replied:

Sure, would love to learn more.

He continued:

Well, what would you like to know? For instance, Zuma was pressed by Columbia. Dash numbers 1A and 1B were pressed at Pitman, F was pressed at Santa Maria, the best plant CBS had at the time. C and D would have been pressed at Terre Haute. H would be a recut and could go anywhere. I worked for CBS and Warners and know all about those companies.

My point is that the only masters that you can be sure were cut from the original master is the first run of lacquers. And in my opinion, and I started cutting in 1971, only masters cut from the original tape, not a copy as is common with recuts, are worth listening to.

This is where I take issue with him on how helpful the information he provided may or may not be.

Phil, interesting stuff but probably not of much use to us in our work. Any of those stampers can sound good or bad and we have to play them all to know which are which so the pressing plants are not really much of a concern, unless of course one plant were to be exceptionally good or bad, and we have not found that to be the case.

Thanks for writing.

He replied:

How can you tell if you don’t know the matrix numbering systems and how they worked? At any rate, I’m not a customer so it doesn’t really matter and your model of selling records that you’ve verified sound good works.

I countered:

Phil, point well taken, but we don’t sell copies made from dubs, there are plenty of good originals around.

Then added:

Phil, there is no way to know whether a record is any good without playing it, early stamper, late stamper or any other stamper. First pressings (A, 1A, A1) don’t always win shootouts. If they did we would simply buy only those stampers.

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Hot Stampers and Good Sounding Records Are Not the Same Thing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan Available Now

They are barely even related. Here’s why.

A good customer wrote to us recently to say that he was not happy with the Stevie Ray Vaughan White Hot Stamper pressings we had sent him.

Tom,

I also have a couple more returns for you: SRV Couldn’t Stand the Weather and SRV Soul to Soul. While these are good, they’re just not quite up to White Hot Stamper quality like some of the other records clearly are.

I took the opportunity to reply at length.

Dear Sir,

You appear to be conflating two concepts, Hot Stampers and good recordings. They are not the same thing. They are barely even related.

Hot Stampers are especially good sounding pressings of specific albums that we found through shootouts.

The recordings of these albums may be better or worse than others you are familiar with. That has nothing to do with how hot the stampers are of the pressings we sell.

It works this way: if you had a hundred copies of The Dark Side of the Moon, the median pressing– the one that would have ranked number 50 out of 100 — would sound substantially better than either of those two SRV albums.

Pink Floyd: amazing recording. 

SRV: good, not great recording.

We would never sell an average pressing of DSOTM. We only sell the best sounding versions of it.

We would never sell the average version of any SRV album. We only sell the best sounding versions of them.

But no SRV album is ever going to sound like a good Dark Side of the Moon! (more…)

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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Cognitive Dissonance Defined

More Basic Concepts and Realities Explained 

Wikipedia’s entry for cognitive dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts (cognition) at the same time or engaging in behavior that conflicts with one’s beliefs. In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one’s beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where “cognition” is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior.

The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.

In popular usage, it can be associated with the tendency for people to resist information that they don’t want to think about, because if they did it would create cognitive dissonance, and perhaps require them to act in ways that depart from their comfortable habits. They usually have at least partial awareness of the information, without having moved to full acceptance of it, and are thus in a state of denial about it.

This guy was comfortable with his penchant for Mobile Fidelity pressings, a sad story if ever I’ve heard one, but one we can all learn from. (And I have to admit I was every bit as clueless myself back in the my nascent audiophile days.)

Empiricism

Some approaches to this audio hobby tend to produce better results than others. When your thinking about audio and records does not comport with reality, you are much less likely to achieve the improvements you seek.

Without a good stereo, it is hard to find better records. Without better records, it is hard to improve your stereo.

You need both, and thinking about them the right way, using the results of carefully run experiments — not feelings, opinions, theories, received wisdom or dogma — is surely the best way to acquire better sound.

An empirically-based approach to audio will surely result in notable improvements to the quality of your playback.

This will in turn make the job of recognizing high quality pressings — the ones you find for yourself, or the ones we find for you — much, much easier.

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When You’re Just Getting Started in Audio, It All Looks So Easy

Presenting another entry in a series of big picture observations about records and audio.

John Salvatier has written a very interesting essay. It’s not short but I think it is well worth the time it will take you to read it.

The parallels to records will be clear to anyone who has spent much time in this hobby, or on this blog for that matter.

Those of us who have run record experiments by the thousands have learned to accept results which regularly defy logic.

All the way back in 2007 we learned an important lesson regarding the vagaries of record pressings: that identical looking LPs can have dramatically different sound quality.

Even two sides of the same record can have quite different sound quality. We know, we’ve played them by the hundreds.

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Better Sounding Records? Lucks Explains a Lot

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written many years ago. It concerns a subject which does not get nearly enough discussion in the audiophile community: the subject of luck in audio and records.

Back in the 70s I was very lucky to have bought some exceptionally good pressings of albums that quickly became personal favorites and have remained so ever since.

This album and others like it were the reason I chose to keep going deeper into audio, which, to be honest, pretty much sums up my life story.

No skill was involved in finding these records. No real knowledge either. It was all just dumb luck. Perhaps you will agree with me that much of life seems to work that way.

Silk Degrees

Most copies severely lack presence and top end. Dull, thick, opaque sound is far too common on Silk Degrees, which may account for some audiophiles finding the Half-Speed an improvement.

Despite all the bad sound I found for this album, I kept buying copies of this record in the hopes that someday I would find one that sounded good. I remember playing this record when it came out in 1976 and thinking that it sounded very good. So how is it that all the copies I’m playing sound so bad, or at the very least, wrong?

Well, the answer to that question is not too complicated. When you get the right pressing, the sound is excellent.

I must have had a good one 40+ years ago, and that’s why I liked the sound. Something similar happened to me with Ambrosia’s first album.

The copy I had picked up at random when I bought the album new in 1976 just happened to have very good stampers. (Keep in mind that we don’t like to call a record Hot until it has gone through the shootout process, a subject we discuss in some depth here.)

When you consider that Hot Stampers for both of those records are pretty unusual, I would say I was very lucky to get good sounding copies of those two masterpieces while everyone around me was buying crap.

To be clear, when I was buying these records, and even as late as when I wrote this commentary twenty years ago, I had much less revealing components and the much lower standards that typically accompany them.

(The longer I have spent in this hobby, the more obvious it is to me that the two go together. This tendency helps to explain, better than any other single reason — although lots of other things are involved — the audiophile preference for remastered pressings of questionable quality.)

So what do you hear on the best copies?

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Stop Doing These Things and You Too Will Start Finding Better Sounding LPs

Our Guide to Collecting Better Sounding Records

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 individual pressings is one which we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I had never had any difficulty wrapping my head around.

At some point in my audio career, probably in the early-90s, about twenty years into my audio journey, I realized it was in fact beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there apparently is a sizable number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it was simply a fact.

What to Stop

Given the unpredictable nature of records, the five most important aspects of the solution we put into practice were these:

  1. We stopped pretending we could know something that can’t be known. [1]
  2. We stopped relying on theories proven to have virtually no predictive effect. [2]
  3. We stopped paying attention to the experts and so-called authorities. [3]
  4. We stopped assuming and speculating. [4]
  5. We stopped worrying about getting it wrong. [5]

It took many years, decades even, to learn what worked and what didn’t work in our pursuit of better records. We came to realize over that span of time that the five things listed above were hindering us in doing our job, so we stopped doing them.

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

  1. Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
  2. Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
  3. Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
  4. Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds better than all the others.
  5. Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
  6. Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
  7. Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.

That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve higher rates of success.

Failing Forward

Edison is said to have failed 10,000 times before inventing a light bulb filament that had a practical use.

Most audiophiles do not have the time and money, not to say patience, needed to fail again and again this way.

For us, having a full-time staff of ten and a rather large record buying budget, we see failures as just another part of the job. Our successes pay for them, since obviously somebody has to, Milton Friedman’s famous remark about free lunches being as true as ever. This partly accounts for our prices being as high as they are.

We don’t make a dime from writing about records that don’t sound good to us. We review them as a service to the audiophile community. We play them so that you don’t have to.

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Getting It Right When There’s Money on the Line

More Entries in Our Thinking About Records Series

John Stossel wrote a piece about prediction markets shortly after the 2022 midterms, explaining why prediction markets are still a good thing even though many of the predictions for the election that were made there did not come true. His take:

Bettors [may be wrong, but] at least adjust their predictions quickly.

Last night, while clods on TV still said “Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the House (CBS),” those of us who follow the betting already knew that Republicans would win the House.

Historically, bettors have a great track record. Across 730 candidate chances we’ve tracked, when something is expected to happen 70% of the time, it actually happens about 70% of the time.

That’s because people with money on the line try harder than pundits to be right.

As you can imagine, this last line was music to my ears.

We’ve built our record business on the fact that we have the experience, the expertise and the staff needed to find the best sounding pressings of many of the most important recordings of all time, from Dark Side of the Moon to Kind of Blue and everything in between.

And, as everyone knows, we charge a premium price for our Hot Stamper pressings, often ten and twenty times their “market value.”  This has been known to confuse and upset some people.

But can we charge more than our customers are willing to pay and still be in business after 37 38 years?

Some people must think they are getting their money’s worth, at least, that’s what some of them tell us.

We have to back up our opinions and our descriptions with actual records that deliver the sound we say they will, or we would have gone out of business a long time ago. You can fool some of the people all of the time, etc., etc.

Guaranteed?

This is in sharp contrast to the audiophile reviewers who tout one new record after another with no guarantee whatsoever that you will find anything like the superior sound they spent an endless number of words describing when the record finally ends up on your turntable.

Where do you go to get your money back when the record doesn’t have the sound they told you it would have?

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The Really Big Questions Rarely Have Good Answers

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

On this blog we have a section devoted to a great many questions that often come up when audiophiles are thinking about records.

By clicking on the link above, you will find, among other subjects, discussions of the “working knowledge” some collectors use to identify what they believe to be pressings with superior sound.

To be sure, these are some very important questions, which, judging by what I read on the web, many audiophiles think they have the answers to.

Before we go any farther, we should make our position on these questions clear to our readers.

We’re really not that interested in big questions, mostly because there aren’t any big answers for them.

When it comes to records, being able to reveal deep underlying truths about a wide range of vinyl pressings is simply not possible. To be honest, we don’t think it can be done.

Knowledge

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of working knowledge. It’s that we have so much of it that we needed a blog to hold it all so that we could share it with others.

No, our working knowledge is made up of lots of little bits of data that guide us in discovering the best sounding pressings for the individual titles we choose to play.

It would be nice to have general rules to help us in our search for better sound on vinyl, but our experience tells us that general rules are so unreliable that they fail to function as rules at all.

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