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.

This Is Why We Love Records from the 50s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

From time to time a record comes our way that sounds absolutely amazing, “I can’t believe it’s a record” amazing.

If it’s the kind of record that sounds like the best copy of Fiesta in Hi-fi from our most recent shootout, we might even let our enthusiasm for its superb fidelity get the better of us. That’s the effect a record as good as the copy we played can have. You just can’t stop yourself from saying one great thing after another about it.

Our over-the-top notes, like those you see below, attempt to convey what it’s like to experience the absolutely breathtaking sound we were hearing.

But where is the harm in that? These are notes that no one outside of the staff are ever expected to see. They are helpful to us in writing our commentary and pricing the specific copy we auditioned, but they are practically never quoted in the listings.

Fiesta in Hi-Fi is an example of one of those recordings that doubles as a thrill ride. They come along from time to time in order to show us the kind of sound that we’d almost forgotten was possible on a record.

Oh yes, with the rare properly-cleaned, properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage vinyl LP, played back on top quality equipment in a heavily treated, dedicated soundroom, we can assure you it is very possible indeed. Allow us to make the case with the Shootout Winning original pressing you see below.

The notes read: 

So rich and big / Great space and detail / Everything sweet + clear + breathy / 3D too / Great dynamics / A touch hot but so fun / Deep bass.

You know what’s unusual about these notes?

(more…)

Focus Is the Hidden Driver of Excellence

More on Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

Every day Delanceyplace sends me email book excerpts, and the one that came today struck me as particularly relevant to the devilishly difficult audio hobby many of us have been engaged in for most of our adult lives. Some of their excerpts are seen below. (Italics added by me.)

I myself wrote a commentary back in 2006 about the 10,000 hour rule, which I have linked below delanceyplace’s piece, along with other commentaries I think you might enjoy.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman.

“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ — that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field — has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. The problem: it’s only half true.

“If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.

“No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal” .

“Apart from sports like basketball or football that favor physical traits such as height and body size, says Ericsson, almost anyone can achieve the highest levels of performance with smart practice. …

“Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is ‘deliberate practice,’ where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.

“Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient.

How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference.

For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists — the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours — Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.

“Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them — which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks.

“The feedback matters and the concentration does, too — not just the hours. …

(more…)

It Ain’t Easy Being a One-Man Band

How to Go About Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

I should know. I was a one-man band working 60 to 80 hours a week with very little help until about 2000. I had someone cleaning records and packing and shipping, but everything else was on me. It was a lot.

In order to evaluate the qualities of the titles I was selling back then, whether on Heavy Vinyl or thin, imported or domestic, original or reissue, the process was the same.

I would play the record, and I would listen for the qualities that were important to me, qualities you might say were of a “make it or break it” nature.

What I mostly wanted to know about the record was whether it was:

  • Tonally correct.
  • Big enough.
  • Clear enough.
  • Balanced from top to bottom.
  • Energetic.
  • Present in the midrange.
  • Not bass shy.
  • Not rolled off in the high frequencies.
  • Not compressed.
  • And, finally, whether it would appeal to a wide enough audience to make carrying it worthwhile.

If I had other pressings of the same title to audition, which, to be honest, sometimes I did not, I would play those to see how they compared.

For some records this was not easy. To give just one example, for many of the Speakers Corners Decca classical pressings, I rarely had especially good pressings to judge them by.

(more…)

Gilbert and Sullivan Overtures – How Did They Do It?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The hall is HUGE: spacious and open as any you will hear, but not at the expense of richness or fullness. The orchestra is solid and full-bodied, yet the woodwinds and flutes soar above the other sections, so breathy and clear.

How did the Decca (recording) and RCA (mastering) engineers succeed so brilliantly where so many others have failed, failed and failed again, right up to this very day?

Who knows? It’s still a mystery that has yet to be explained, to my satisfaction anyway.

Essential Music – And No Singing

The music of Gilbert and Sullivan belongs in any serious classical collection. This is without a doubt the best way to get the most Gilbert and Sullivan music with the best sound. And no singing.

If for some reason you don’t have a good recording of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Overtures, you are really missing out. This is some of the most wonderful music ever composed. It’s the kind of music that will immediately put you in a good mood. Here the Overtures are played to perfection. For music and sound, this one is hard to fault.

As the liner notes say, “…immense charm, good-natured energy and the ‘rightness’ that announces the influence of a superb musical command”.

(more…)

Some Stereo Systems Make It Difficult to Find Better Sounding Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, resulting in an overall thinning of the sound and lower strings that get washed out.

On some sides of some copies of some titles the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

If you have vintage tube equipment, or modern equipment that is trying to mimic the sound of vintage tubes, you never have to worry that the strings on your London orchestral recordings will sound too dry.

You haven’t solved the problem, obviously.  You’ve just made it much more difficult — impossible even — to hear what is really on your records.

Some audiophiles have gone down this road and may not even realize what road they are on, or where it leads. Assuming you want to make progress in this hobby, it is, from our point of view, a dead end.

If you want to find Better Records, you need equipment that can distinguish good records from bad ones.

Vintage tube equipment is good for many things, but helping you find the best sounding records is not one of them.

A rack full of equipment such as the one shown here — I suspect it is full of transistors but it really doesn’t matter whether it is or not — is very good at eliminating the subtleties and nuances that distinguish the best records from the much more common second- and third-rate pressings that often look identical to them.

If you have this kind of audio firepower, Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered LPs don’t sound nearly as irritating as they do to those of us without the kind of filtering you get from the electronic overkill you see.

In my experience, this much hardware can’t help but create a barrier between you and the music you love.

It may be new and expensive, but the result is the kind of old school stereo sound I have been hearing all my life (and was perfectly happy with myself before the early 2000s.)

(more…)

Paraphrasing Hayek – Our Curious Task

F. A. Hayek summarized his views well when he noted that:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Our curious task has been to demonstrate to audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them how mistaken they are to think that they can understand the sound of a recording by playing a small number of pressings of it.

Similarly, the modern mastering engineer operates with the understanding that he can design and operate a cutting system that produces sound superior to that which was produced by the engineers of the past.

Based on the hundreds of remastered records we have auditioned, this is clearly a case of overpromising and underdelivering.

These assumptions, and the mistaken approach to record collecting that flows from them, are clearly unsupportable.

The scores of commentaries we have written on both subjects provide all the evidence required to falsify them, and — with a fair amount of effort, sorry for the trouble — can be found among the 5000+ postings on this blog.

The Hot Stamper pressings we offer, so much bigger, livelier, and more engaging than anything produced by these so-called audiophile mastering houses, are simply the physical evidence of our deeper and more correct understanding of the true nature of records and their mysterious and confounding properties.

Digging Deep

Everything we think we know about records is based on strictly empirical findings, findings that resulted from critically auditioning thousands and thousands of albums. Many of these albums we have played by the score. For some titles, such as the more popular Beatles’ albums, we have played more than a hundred copies.

No one else has ever dug as deep as we have into the mysteries of pressing variations, for the simple reasons that no individual or group would be motivated to do so and have the resources required to accomplish such a feat.

(more…)

Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound

More Outlier Pressings We’ve Discovered

This commentary was written about ten twenty years ago and has been updated a few times since.

A while back we did a monster-sized shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second release, an album we consider THE Best Sounding Rock Record of All Time.

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds — a copy we gave a Hot Stamper grade of A with Four Pluses, the highest honor we can bestow upon it — various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne, How did it get here?

  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we usually place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

Which brings us to this commentary, which centers around the concept of outliers.

(more…)

The Paradox of ‘Pleasurable Sadness’: Why Do We like Sad Music?

An enjoyable read from Medium.com. from Mason Kissell.

An excerpt:

Despite the recent surge in the number of studies on the beauty of sad music, researchers admit that the “paradox of pleasurable sadness” remains unsolved.

While future investigations may gain a deeper insight into the appeal of gloomy melodies, it could also be argued that the power and value of music lie in its ability to connect the listeners to their inner selves, thus creating a transcendent experience that defies explanation.

An AI Summary

This is a compelling exploration of the “sadness paradox”—how the human brain transforms melancholic experiences into sources of reward, introspection, and empathy.

Here is a quick breakdown of the key neurological mechanisms and clinical insights highlighted in your essay:

  • The Reward Paradox: Melancholic stimuli (like sad music) activate reward centers like the nucleus accumbens, ventral striatum, and medial orbitofrontal cortex through dopamine pathways, treating emotional depth as intrinsically valuable.

  • Emotional Rehearsal: Processing sadness engages the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), serving as low-risk practice for coping with loss and constructing coherent personal narratives.

  • Neural Empathy: Shifted levels of oxytocin and serotonin, combined with the mirror neuron system, allow us to internalize others’ sorrow, deepening emotional literacy and social bonding.

  • Therapeutic Function: For individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), sad media doesn’t necessarily worsen symptoms; instead, engaging reward and emotion networks can help reactivate blunted emotional systems.

Letter of the Week – “Insulting people is petty and makes you sound as though you are jealous of their success.”

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

Click here to see more letters from fans and detractors alike.

A fellow sent me this email a while back. Normally when people find fault with what we do, or how we do it, or the prices we charge, or the things we say, we figure live and let live and just go about our business (you know, the one where we find the best sounding records ever made).

This fellow took me to task for speaking ill of “people in the record industry,” which is a common complaint their number one apologist, Michael Fremer, likes to make, rather foolishly in my opinion, so I thought I would write a few words addressing the topic.

Ray’s letter:

Everytime I am tempted to make a purchase I always read something where Mr. Port is insulting people in the record industry. I get it. Your records may sound better than an audiophile pressing but for the price, they better! I respect the fact that you put a lot of time and effort into what you do, but insulting people is petty and makes you sound as though you are jealous of their success, you can sell records by simple stating that they sound great and with your money back guarantee (which few people actually take advantage of, from what I have read) You should be able to continue doing what you do with great success.

Just my unsolicited opinion.

Ray

I replied as follows:

Ray,

Thanks you for your letter.

Part of the problem with our approach to vinyl is that we not only sell a product that directly competes with those produced by others in the industry, but we also review the products that these other companies make.

We see it as fundamental to our job — something we owe to our customers — that we compare their Heavy Vinyl remastered pressings to our vintage Hot Stampers.

When we do that, insults are hard to avoid.

Their records are mostly a disgrace, but they don’t seem to notice how bad they sound. Nor do the audiophile types who review them.

This used to confound us. It still confounds us, but over the years we have decided it is better to accept reality and just live with it.

We are of the opinion that the people making records today should be held to account for their substandard work. Who better to do that than us?

We can provide the physical records that, when played properly, prove just how second-rate theirs actually are.

Bernie Grundman cut many of the best sounding pop and rock records ever made. I wanted to pay tribute to his fine work, so I wrote this commentary and tagged many of his best records within it: Thriller is proof that Bernie Grundman was cutting great records in 1982

But the bad records he made are very bad indeed. Most of what he mastered for Classic Records is awful, a more recently he has been doing equally spotty work. Here is a link to a select group of his worst remasterings.

Since no one seems to want to write about just how bad these records are, we felt it was our duty, as experts in the world of records, to point out their specific shortcomings. We do this for the benefit of audiophiles who might actually want good sound and not just quiet vinyl.

(more…)

Are Reviews Objective?

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert recently addressed an issue that came up when someone left a comment about the sound of Tone Poets reissues vis-a-vis the the pressings that Rudy Van Gelder mastered, to wit:

“To say anything other than the difference (between the T.P. and the RVG) is subjective is misleading the audience.”

Robert explains in the post linked below that he has worked very hard to make his system as neutral as he possibly can, and why he thinks that is a good idea. He also notes that he isn’t done, that there is plenty of work left to do, and that a more revealing, more truthful system is his one and only goal.

Any piece of equipment, or tweak, or setup adjustment that brings him closer to the sound his critical listening skills tell him are an improvement is to be adopted. They have passed passed the “more truthful” test.

Are My REVIEWS Objective?

There are scores, maybe even hundreds of posts on this very blog to explain what we do and how we do it.

We tell you about our playback system and why it’s good at its job.

In addition, practically every listing on our site has standardized text detailing the three areas that are key to understanding our vintage vinyl offerings. They include:

  1. What sonic attributes our Hot Stampers have.
  2. How we go about finding records with these attributes, and
  3. What we’re listening for in order to distinguish superior pressings from common ones.

(more…)