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. In case you were wondering, the disc is cracked but the picture sleeve is still in pretty good shape.

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?

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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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Can Every Audiophile System Do Its Job Well?

More on the Subject of Speaker Advice

That depends on exactly what job you think you’re giving it to do.

If its job is to allow you to enjoy music in the comfort of your home, then the little box speakers you see pictured to the left can do that job just fine, with the caveat that you must be able to enjoy the kind of sound that comes out of little boxes.

If the job you give your stereo to do is to reproduce the full range of music with high fidelity, then the little boxes you see pictured are going to fail miserably. Until the laws of physics are repealed, however that might happen, they will never be able to reproduce music in a lifelike way.

I like big dynamic speakers because they do a better job of reproducing music in a lifelike way compared to every other speaker I have ever heard, horns included, which can be very lifelike indeed, but have other shortcomings that I cannot abide.

This is not just another post bashing small speakers. I say these things to introduce the comment sent to me that you see below.

I received this anonymous letter recently in reply to a commentary I had written entitled Tone Poets and one-legged Tarzans.

In that post, I took a certain person (rl1856) to task for making judgments about pressings using speakers that are not capable of doing the job he wants them to do, which is to make it possible for him to “easily hear differences in LP quality.”

An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.

Another poster defended rl1856’s claims for the abilities of his system to judge different pressings, noting that his criticisms of these remastered records — both on Tone Poets and Classic Records — generally align with mine.

I find this ending hilarious: “Never Played One – To be clear, we have never played a Tone Poets record. We’ve played many titles mastered by Kevin Gray, and we know that he is credited with mastering some records for the label. Without exception we find that his remastered records leave a lot to be desired. You can find many of them in our Hall of Shame. Anyone defending his work to me has some heavy lifting to do.”

You condemn rl1856 for expressing an opinion regarding something YOU ADMIT YOU NEVER HEARD because you believe his equipment is not resolving enough ? The irony is that his opinion largely mirrors yours regarding the sonic virtues of original RVG recordings ! How is it that he, listening through his “inferior” system can hear the virtues you ascribe to RVG pressings, and also hear when those virtues are not present?

My reply, after a week of thinking about the points this gentleman makes, can be found below.

Hi,
Thanks for writing.

Little box speakers do produce sound of some quality. It would be foolish for me to say that one can’t actually hear something through them. The question is how much?

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Advances in Playback Technology Are More Than Blind Faith

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

In a 2007 commentary for a Hot Stamper pressing of Blind Faith we noted that:

When it finally all comes together for such a famously compromised recording, it’s nothing less than a THRILL. More than anything else, the sound is RIGHT. Like Layla or Surrealistic Pillow, this is no Demo Disc by any stretch of the imagination, but that should hardly keep us from enjoying the music. And now we have the record that lets us do it.

The Playback Technology Umbrella

Why did it take so long? Why does it sound good now, after decades of problems? For the same reason that so many great records are only now revealing their true potential: advances in playback technology.

Audio has finally reached the point where the magic in Blind Faith’s grooves is ready to be set free.

What exactly are we referring to? Why, all the stuff we talk about endlessly around here. These are the things that really do make a difference. They change the fundamentals. They break down the barriers.

You know the drill. Things like better cleaning techniques, top quality front end equipment, Aurios, better electricity, Hallographs and other room treatments, amazing phono stages like the EAR 324p, power cables; the list goes on and on.

If you want records like Blind Faith to sound good, we don’t think it can be done without bringing to bear all of these advanced technologies to the problem at hand, the problem at hand being a recording with its full share of problems and then some.

Without these improvements, why wouldn’t Blind Faith sound as dull and distorted as it always has? The best pressings were made more than thirty years ago [thirty? make that fifty] — they’re no different.

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Are Our Heavy Vinyl Reviews Based on Faulty Reasoning?

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

The short answer is that our reviews aren’t based on reasoning at all.

The full story follows. The comments you see below were left on our listing for the Rhino pressing of The Cars’ first album.

The grievances the writer lists are long and mostly unserious, but I think they have some value, just not the value the writer intended, so of course I am happy to reproduce them here and take a crack at explaining the mistaken audiophile thinking they represent.

If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies, you will have no trouble recognizing all the shortcomings this writer has called us out for in our review of The Cars on Rhino, as well as, we assume, the hundreds of other Heavy Vinyl disasters we take to task on this blog.

Rather that attempt to rebut the individual charges, which seem to be grounded in issues of logic, semantic hair-splitting, a deep misunderstanding of the unwritten rules of criticism, what does and does not constitute an ad hominem attack, my use of injudicious language, and who knows what else, I have an answer that I believe gets to the heart of why none of this matters, which you will find below in my reply to his comments. [Bolding added by me,]

Ad Hominem Attack: The author attacks Kevin Gray personally, suggesting that his work is consistently poor without addressing the specific issues with the remastering process.

Appeal to Authority: The author mentions Steve Hoffman and his successful remastering of The Cars’ first album on Gold CD, implying that because Hoffman did it well, Kevin Gray should have done the same. This disregards the possibility of differences in approach and technique between the two engineers.

Appeal to Popularity: Popularity does not equate to quality.

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Hot Stampers Versus Collector Pressings

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals

I defy anyone who has not made a lifelong study of pressing variations to tell me which of the hundreds of records pictured below is likely to have audiophile quality sound.

There is not a chance in the world the owner knows either, and I suspect he does not care one way of the other. If this fellow describes himself as an audiophile, he is either mistaken or setting a very low bar for hinself.

An audiophile is defined as someone who “loves sound.” The owner of this collection may love sound on some level — he plays records, and they have sound, and if he loves the sound he hears on his records, that would make him an audiophile according to the dictionary.

For those of you who spend much time on this blog, to us an audiophile is a “lover of good sound,” not just any sound.

This fellow is not really an audiophile as we would define the term, certainly not much of one.

He is a record collector, plain and simple.

And that’s not a hard thing to be. Most anyone can amass a collection of records — one this big, ten times its size or one-tenth its size, the process of going about it is the same. You just buy whatever kinds of records you happen to like and organize them in whatever way you find most pleasing.

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What’s the Average Record Worth?

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

What follows is an excerpt from a very old letter (circa 2005) in which the writer attempted to make the case that spending lots of money on records is foolish when a dollar buys a perfectly good record at a thrift store and provides the listener with exactly the same music and decent enough sound.

We think this is silly and, with a few rough calculations, along with a heavy dose of self-promotion and not a little bullying, we set out to prove that the average record is practically worthless. Prepare to confront our exercise in sophistry.

(Yes, we are well aware that our reasoning is specious, but it’s no more specious than anybody else’s reasoning about records if I may say so.)

Jason, our letter writer, points out this fact:

Your records are a poor value in terms of investment. Until you convince the whole LP community that your HOT-STAMPER choices are the pinnacle of sound a buyer will never be able to re-sell B S & T for $300. Even if they swear it is the best sounding copy in the world.

We replied as follows:

If records are about money, then buying them at a thrift store for a buck apiece and getting something halfway decent makes perfect sense. As the Brits say, “that’s value for money.” If we sell you a Hot Stamper for, say, $500, can it really be five hundred times better?

The Math

I would argue that here the math is actually on our side. The average pressing is so close to worthless sonically that I would say that it isn’t even worth the one dollar Jason might pay for it in a thrift store. I might value it somewhere in the vicinity of a penny or two. Really? Yes indeed.

Assuming it’s a record I know well, I probably know just how wonderful the record can really sound, and what that wonderful sound does to communicate the most important thing of all: the musical value.

A copy that doesn’t do that — allow the music to come alive — has almost no value. It’s not zero, but it’s close to zero. Let’s assign it a nominal value. We’ll call it a penny.

What Have You Got to Lose?

You see, when I play a mediocre copy, I know what I’ve lost.

Jason can’t know that. All he knows is what he hears coming from his mediocre equipment as his mediocre LP is playing. To him it sounds fine. To me it sounds like hell. (Hell is in fact the place where they make you listen to bad sounding records all day.)

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Can Chris Bellman Cut Records As Well As Artisan Used to?

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert’s story begins:

Recently a friend and a frequent reader of my website suggested I review the 50th Anniversary Edition of David Crosby’s debut. He’d read my article from a while back in which I made comparisons between two different Hot Stamper copies of the record, and he knew I was a fan the album.

I’m sure he also knew, as any of my regular readers would, that I’m extremely skeptical of modern reissues. You can find many examples on this site of reissues I’ve written about that have failed miserably to impress me. But this friend was pretty insistent that this one, remastered by long time engineer Chris Bellman, was different. He also told me it was on par with original Monarch pressing of If Only I Could Remember My Name he also owned.

Bellman was responsible for cutting one of the few heavy vinyl reissues that my friend Tom Port has liked and recommended – a European pressing from 2020 of the Dire Straits record Brothers In Arms. Tom likes precious few “audiophile” reissues. He’s mentioned maybe 4 or 5 over the years as being worthy of any consideration. Given that, and the fact that my friend was so insistent, I figured why not give Bellman’s recut of If Only I Could Remember My Name a shot?

Click on the link below to read the whole thing. I left some comments at the end you may enjoy reading.

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER MY NAME: 50th Anniversary Edition

If you are interested in picking up an amazing Hot Stamper pressing of the album, we currently (as of 2/24) have some in stock. Click on this link to see what is available.

On the website, we talk about just how much we love this album:

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