*Making Progress

It’s not easy to make audio progress — nothing is in fact harder. However, if your approach to audio is clear-headed and evidence-based — in other words, scientific — progress is not only possible, it is virtually guaranteed.

If you play huge numbers of records, and listen to them critically, some of them will teach you things about audio that you cannot learn any other way.

Practically all of our audio philosophy derives from the simple act of trying to get our system to play the greatest recordings of all time with the highest fidelity possible. Every record is a challenge, and every defeat an opportunity to learn something — to see where we may have gone wrong — in order to know more than we did before.

Limitations? Colorations? Moi?

More on the Subject of Making Audio Progress

Yes, me. And, oh, by the way, you.

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 through the process of discovering, refining and implementing practical solutions to rooting them out.

This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished with great success, even by the truly dedicated. At best it can only unfold slowly, over the course of years, decades even, and only for a very small percentage of the audiophiles who attempt it.

Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. The limitations will prove too difficult to overcome. More effort feels like banging one’s head against the wall rather than making progress.

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

Rightly or wrongly, we self-identify as a member of the few. We think this blog provides all the evidence any skeptic of our success could possibly need.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that we got paid to do it. In addition, an undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder may very well have been at the heart of it. And some very special recordings that I fell in love with a long time ago surely played their part.

Pass/Not-Yet

It is our belief that many, perhaps most of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely.

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

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 never managed to take it far enough to reach the higher level (or levels) we know are possible:

  1. By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
  2. By the records they want to buy (again, typically on Heavy Vinyl),
  3. Or have nice things to say about (again, and for proof just 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, and once the necessary improvements have been made, the records that formerly sounded good on it will be of no further use, their many shortcomings now too easily exposed.

Pulling this cart will not be easy — it will surely be a very long, very hard slog — but those who stick with it will come a lot closer to the promised land than those who choose any other path.

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There Aren’t Many Shortcuts in Audio, But We Might Actually Know of a Couple

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Our last shootout for Pretzel Logic occurred in 2021, more than four years ago. We wrote about our fondness for the album here, along with some advice regarding what the best pressings do better than most.

Any grit or grain will show itself on the title track big time, especially if you like to play this album as loud as I do, which is LOUD. The power of all those voices singing at the top of their lungs should give you chills.

At moderate levels chills are a lot harder to come by.

Most audiophiles play their music much too quietly. Sometimes this is due to obvious system limitations, but often it seems to be merely a preference. (Without a spacious, heavily-treated room, no system, regardless of quality, can hope to be able to get the huge choruses of Pretzel Logic to soar the way they do on the best copies we shootout.)

I want to have a powerful emotional experience when playing an album like this. I want to be thrilled. That just isn’t possible at the kind of comfortable listening levels most audiophiles prefer. This music performed live would be very loud, because rock concerts are very loud.

Why wouldn’t we want to reproduce the sound of the live event?

We followed that up with some advice for the advanced audiophile — our code for one who knows not to waste his money on modern reissues — to allow him to enjoy the hell out of the album in ways that would have been all but impossible before we came along:

We’ve been known to remark that there are no shortcuts in audio.

You have to put in years — decades even — of mostly tedious work to get your stereo and room to be able to reproduce music properly.

But there exists one very obvious shortcut in audio, and another sort-of shortcut, that will allow you to get much better sound than you could on your own without putting in the huge amounts of time that are usually required.

The first one is a Hot Stamper pressing.

We’ve already found the record of your dreams for you. This saves you an awful lot of time — time we think you’ll agree is better spent listening to records rather than digging through dusty record bins in dingy record stores trying to find them. (Or wasting money on some Heavy Vinyl wannabe that will never come close to the experience of playing the real thing.) 

The other is record cleaning.

After years of experimentation, we’ve got the science of record cleaning down to a T. It’s partly why our records sound so good; they’ve been cleaned right. We have available the most important element to proper recording cleaning — the right fluids.

All you need then is a good machine and the time and patience to put it to work.

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Down in L.A. Sits Fairly High Up on Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brewer and Shipley Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The commentary you see below was originally written about 15 years ago. Minor changes have since been made. At the time of this posting there is a copy of Down in L.A. on the site, one of the first copies we have had to sell since 2019, and before that I think our last shootout was in 2008.

There are a great many wonderful albums we can no longer offer our customers, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but I am glad to say that Down in L.A. is not one of them.

We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce: how the revolutions in audio of the last decade or two have profoundly changed the ability of the seriously dedicated audiophile to get records that never sounded good before to come to life musically in a way previously understood to be impossible.

This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as the commentary below explains.

60s Sound

The problem here is the sound. It’s got a bit of that tinny 60s pop production sound — too much upper midrange, not enough lower midrange and a slightly aggressive quality when things get loud. Still, it’s quite a bit better than recordings by, say, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane from the era, and I have no trouble playing and enjoying their records.

I can also tell you that if you have a modest system this record is just going to sound like crap.

How do I know that?

It sounded like crap for years in my system, even when I thought I had a good one.

Vinyl playback has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you’ve participated in some of the revolutionary changes that we talk about endlessly on this blog, you should hear some pretty respectable sound. Otherwise, I would pass.

On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, the kind of sound I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. The kind of systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.

If you’re a Weekend Warrior when it comes to your stereo, this is not the record for you.

If however you would like to advance in audio in order to hear better sound and enjoy more recordings than you do now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.

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Discovering Even Better Pressings Is the Most Rewarding Part of Our Job

Welcome to the World of Better Records

The best part of our job is when we manage to discover even better pressings of favorite albums than the ones we had previously thought were the best.

Doing new shootouts for the same titles year after year — sometimes twice a year, as is the case with most of albums by The Beatles, sometimes once every ten years as happens with many of the rarer titles we do — we often find ourselves learning something new by continuing to audition new batches of familiar records.

Yes, we actually love proving ourselves wrong and we go out of our way every day to do it in our Hot Stamper shootouts.

It might be a good idea here to point out that blinded, carefully-controlled shootouts are the only way to prove anything when it comes to records, as they are the only source of real evidence to judge the strengths and weaknesses of records. Opinions are not evidence of anything and are almost always worth exactly what you pay for them.

As Jonathan Swift famously remarked:

“You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.”

The other best part of the job is discovering great recordings of wonderful music that most people have never heard of, some of which can be found here.

For those of you interested in classical and orchestral discoveries — we call them “sleeper” pressings — go here.

Yes, That’s Me

The guy you see pictured above with an old London Rachmaninoff album under his arm has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem).

Before that he wandered around stores that were selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

He would spend a great deal of time with his newly-purchased records, playing them over and over again on the best stereo equipment he could afford.

He thinks everyone would be better off spending more of their time playing records, especially old ones.

For every twenty records he bought, he would consider himself lucky to end up falling in love with one. The vast majority of those “best of twenty” titles have somehow stood the test of time and continue to be played regularly to this day.

Roughly 275 of those Desert Island Discs have been identified to date.

About 50 of them are currently available in Hot Stamper form on the site as of the date of this post.

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Half-Speed Masters – Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Mobile Fidelity released a version of Diamonds and Rust on Anadisq in 1995, and if you want to hear a pressing that’s not murky, compressed and opaque, you would be wise to avoid their remastered pressing.

To be fair, MoFi has made some reasonably good sounding records too. For those of you whose budget is on the limited side, if you find an affordable copy of any of these MoFis, you are probably not completely wasting your money.

Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Our advice for the longest time has been that, while you are actively improving your stereo, room and setup, the best way to use your remastered audiophile pressings is as stopgaps and benchmarks.

As you make more and more progress, eventually you will find the vintage pressings that can show you what your audiophile pressings don’t do well, or at the very least, not as well as they should.

The unfortunate reality — considering how much money you had invested in them — is that they were falling short in many ways for all the years you had been playing them, but until you improved your playback, those problems were hidden from you.

Charting Your Success

As your stereo improves, you can actually chart your success by how many of these kinds of records you are able to eliminate from your collection. Once you can count the number of modern reissues you still own on one or two hands, there is a good chance you have reached a much higher level of playback.

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Bob and Ray Were Not Enough – We Needed the Tillerman Too

Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular is my all time favorite test disc, the one test that every change to the system must pass: by making The Song of the Volga Boatmen sound better.

The danger in making the bulk of your sonic judgments using only one record is that you never want to optimize your system for a single record, only to find out later that it now sounds better but others you play now sound worse.

Here is the story of how I made that mistake long ago (and apparently did not learn my lesson): In 2005, I fell into a exactly this kind of audiophile trap.

The Right Way

So the right way to go about testing and tweaking is to get all your hardest test records out and start playing them, making notes as you tweak and tune your system, setup, room and whatever else you can think of.

This may take a long time, but it is time well spent when you consider that, once you are done, all — or nearly all — of your records will sound better than they did before.

In my review of the 45 RPM Tillerman, I noted the following:

Recently I was able to borrow a copy of the new 45 cutting from a customer who had rather liked it. I would have never spent my own money to hear a record put out on the Analogue Productions label, a label that has an unmitigated string of failures to its name. But for free? Count me in!

The offer of the new 45 could not have been more fortuitous. I had just spent a number of weeks playing a White Hot pink label original UK pressing in an attempt to get our new playback studio sounding right.

We had a lot of problems.

We needed to work on electrical issues.

We needed to work on our room treatments.

We needed to work on speaker placement.

We Repeated Our Mistake

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“Robert directly improved my stereo to achieve levels of sonic performance I didn’t think were possible.”

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Bill, who also happens to be a very good customer of ours, recently had Robert Brook over for a visit to help him tweak and tune his setup.

The changes Robert was able to make to Bill’s system took it to the next level, or maybe even the one that comes after that. There are a lot of levels in audio!

As Bill said, even with a $6k phono stage and other comparably expensive equipment, the sound was still just OK.

Tedious, painstaking setup is the only thing that can make all that fancy equipment sound good, and Robert was the man with the patience to help out a friend who needed some guidance.

The magazines and the websites don’t talk much about these things, but we here at Better Records know that high fidelity sound is simply not possible without learning how to do the work and sweating all the details.

“TRANSFORMED MY SYSTEM from OK to GREAT!”

I only know of three people who followed my audio advice: Robert, Bill and Aaron, all of whom can be seen in the picture below.

For years I’ve been banging on about Legacy speakers, low-power transistor integrated amps, EAR 324p phono stages, Triplanar tonearms, 17dx cartridges, VPI turntables, Super Platters and motor controllers, Townshend Seismic Platforms, Hallographs, suspended cables, clean electricity, and the kind of tuning and tweaking that can take your system beyond where you thought it could go.

Even buying all this stuff used, the resulting system would still end up being a few tens of thousands of dollars. That said, I honestly don’t think you can achieve this level of sound with standard audiophile equipment, the kind you might see in a showroom or advertised on websites, at any price*.

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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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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. …

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Carlos Santana Knows: Louder Is Better

santasanta_1401s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

Santana’s debut is yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

The commentary below refers to an experience I had playing the album on my Legacy Whisper speakers in the late-90s.

This album needs to be played loud. I mean really loud. Years ago I used to demonstrate how important it was to have the level up good and high on the song Waiting.

Back in the mid-90s, I had somehow lucked into my first shockingly good Hot Stamper copy.

As a demonstration of what the Legacy Whisper system and its 8 fifteen inch woofer/midrange drivers could do, I would play the first minute or so of the track at a pretty good level. There’s lots of ambience, there’s a couple of guys who shout things out from way back in the studio, there’s a substantial amount of deep bass, and the whole recording has a natural smooth quality to it, which is precisely what allows you to play it at loud volumes.

Then I would turn it up a notch, say about 2-3 DB. I would announce to my friends that this is probably louder than you will ever play this record, but listen to what happens when you do. The soundstage gets wider and deeper, all those guys that shout can be heard more clearly, you start to really feel that deep bass, and when the song gets going, it really gets going. The energy of the music would jump to another level.

Then I would turn it up another 3 DB or so. At this point I would say that “this is how loud it should be played.” All the effects I mentioned earlier would become even more pronounced — wider, deeper, more clear, more powerful. The record was actually starting to sound like live music in my living room.

But of course, I was showing off a system that few could afford and that nobody in his right mind would put out in the middle of his living room. You would need a custom sound room, and a big one at that, to fit such a massive speaker and be able to turn it up.

But I was a bachelor at the time, and my live-in girlfriend at the time knew that she would have to go before the stereo did.

Unboosted

It was pointed out to me one day that the reason this record can be played loud is that, unlike most popular recordings, this album has a natural, unboosted top end, which means that the louder you play it, the more real it sounds. You can’t do that with most records. Many records have a top end that’s boosted to sound good at lower volumes. Not so with the first album by Santana. [For more records with the kind of vintage smooth sound we find so appealing, click here.]

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