Records that Are Good for Testing the Lower Midrange and Mid-Bass

The Who By Numbers – More Bass or More Detail, Which Is Right?

With Doug Sax mastering from the real tape, you get a Rock Solid Bottom End like you will not believe. Talk about punchy, well-defined and deep, man, this record has BASS that you sure don’t hear too often on rock records. 

And it’s not just bass that separates the Men from the Boys, or the Real Thing from the Classic Reissue for that matter. It’s WEIGHT, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, that area that spans roughly 150 to 600 cycles.

It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern.

It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Johns intended.

The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.

But not the Classic. Oh no, so much of what gives Who By Numbers its Classic Rock sound has been equalized right out of the Heavy Vinyl reissue by Chris Bellman at BG’s mastering house.

Some have said the originals are warmer but not as detailed. I would have to agree, but that misses the point entirely: take out the warmth — the fullness that makes the original pressings sound so right — and you of course hear more detail, as the detail region is no longer masked by all the stuff going on below it.

Want to hear detail? Disconnect your woofers — you’ll hear plenty of detail all right!

Keep that in mind when they tell you at the store that the record you brought in to audition is at fault, not their expensive and therefore “correct” equipment. I’ve been in enough of these places to know better. To mangle another old saying, if you know your records, their excuses should fall on deaf ears. (more…)

Linda Ronstadt – Can You Hear the Bloated Bass of the DCC Pressing?

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

More Heavy Vinyl Mediocrities

[This review was written many years ago, around 2004 I think. This was one of the first DCC records I did a shootout with up against run-of-the-mill Mastering Lab domestic pressings, only to find, somewhat surprisingly, at least at that time, that the DCC came up short, as you will see in the review below.]

Sonic Grade: C

As much as I admire Steve Hoffman’s work for DCC, on this title the DCC is not as good as the best domestic copies. The best domestic pressings are just plain more fun.

The DCC sounds thick in the midrange and fat in the bass, although some of that boost in the bass could have been used to the advantage of some of the domestic pressings we played. 1 DB or so at 50-60 cycles would help, but the DCC has a boost in the middle and upper bass that causes the bass to sound bloated next to a properly mastered, properly pressed LP. 

I like rich sounding records just like Steve does, but his version of this title is too rich for my blood. If your system is lean sounding you may prefer the DCC, but we found it less than agreeable over here.

Not sure why so few reviewers and audiophiles notice these rather obvious shortcomings, but we sure do, and we don’t like it when records sound that way. These are records for those who are not sufficiently advanced in the hobby to know just how compromised and wrong they are.

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I Once Fell Into a Common Audiophile Trap – This Album Helped Me Find My Way Out

More Vintage Hot Stamper Pressings on Columbia Available Now

Playback Accuracy Is Key to Audio and Record Collecting

This 2005 commentary discusses how easy it is to be fooled by tweaks that seem to offer more transparency and detail at the expense of weight and heft. Detail is everything to some audiophiles, but detail can be a trap that’s easy to fall into if we do not guard against it.

The brass on this wonderful Six Eye Mono pressing of the album set me straight. [Since that time I have not been able to find mono pressings that sounded as good as I remember this one sounding. That sh*t happens.]

I was playing this record today (5/24/05) after having made some changes in my stereo over the weekend, and I noticed some things didn’t sound quite right. Knowing that this is an exceptionally good sounding record, albeit a very challenging one, I started playing around with the stereo, trying to recapture the sound as I remembered it from the last copy that had come in a few months back.

As I tweaked and untweaked the system around this record, I could hear immediately what was better and what was worse, what was more musical and what was more Hi-Fi. The track I was playing was Night In Tunisia, which has practically every brass instrument known to man, in every combination one can imagine.

Since this is a Mono pressing, I didn’t have to worry about issues like soundstaging, which can be misleading, or perhaps distracting is a better way to describe the problem.

I was concerned with tonality and the overall presentation of the various elements in the recording.

To make a long story short, I ended up undoing all the things that I had done to the system over the weekend! In other words, what improvements I thought I had made turned out not to be improvements at all. And this is the album that showed me the error of my ways.

Brass instruments are some of the most difficult to reproduce, especially brass choirs. You have to get the leading edges so that the instruments have “bite.” You can’t have too much harmonic distortion or smearing, because harmonic distortion and smearing are very obvious on brass instruments.

But the one thing above all that is intolerable when trying to reproduce brass is a lack of weight or heft. There is nothing worse than thin sounding brass. It becomes hard, shrill, sour and altogether unpleasant.

This is another reason why I don’t like small speakers: they have trouble reproducing the weight of brass instruments, in every kind of music, but especially jazz and orchestral music.

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Liszt in Living Stereo – Rich, Rosiny Lower Strings Like These Are to Die For

More of the music of Franz Liszt (1811-1880)

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Arthur Fiedler

The rich, textured, rosin-on-the-bow lower strings on this record are to die for.

Find me a modern record with that sound and I will eat it.

And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. No one alive today can make a record that sound like this. To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have fully grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: compared head to head they are simply not competitive.

After twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples, both the boutique and major labels of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful or as lifelike as this RCA from the old days. (This is actually a later pressing; in some ways it sounded more tubey and rich than many of the Shaded Dogs we played against it.)

Fortunately for us record lovers and collectors, we at Better Records are not trying to make a record sound the way these sides do, we’re just trying to find ones that do, and folks, we found some very, very good sides here.

Side One

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
Mazeppa

Side Two

Les Preludes
Rakoczy March

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In the Market for New Speakers? – See How Well They Handle the Fat Snare on Dreams

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Reviews and Commentaries for Fleetwood Mac

Rumours Is a Record that Is Good for Testing Your Speakers’ Lower Midrange and Mid-Bass Reproduction 

What do the best copies of Rumours have that the also-rans don’t? Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you should pay special attention to: the sound of the snare.

When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to the sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the analog stuff we ADORE about the sound of the best copies.

Now if your speaker is not capable of really bringing the snare to life, perhaps because you have screen speakers or a small boxed design, this is still a handy test. Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare. That’s probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to Rumours, and The Beatles, and Zuma, and lots of other favorite records of ours, and we hope favorites of yours too.

This is probably not the right kind of speaker for a record such as Rumours. Three 6.5 inch woofers are just not going to be enough to get that snare to sound big and fat.

In the Market for New Speakers? See How Well They Handle the Energy of Far More Drums

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

More Columbia 30th Street Studio Recordings

The drum solo Joe Morello lets loose on Far More Drums is one of the best on record. I was playing that song recently and it occurred to me that it is practically impossible for a screen or panel speaker of any design to reproduce the sound of those drums properly, regardless of how many subs you have.

Most of the music is not in the deeper bass anyway. It’s the whack of instruments whose energy is in the lower midrange and mid-bass that a screen speaker will struggle with.

A good large-driver dynamic speaker fed by fast electronics can handle the energy in that range with ease.

This is the album you need to take with you next time you head to your local stereo store to audition speakers.

It will help clarify the issues. Screen speakers do many things well, but drums are not one of them, at least in my experience they aren’t. If drums are important to you, do yourself a favor and buy a dynamic speaker, the bigger the better.

brubeck in the studio733

Time Further Out, like most of the classic Brubeck albums, is a Big Speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring the this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

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Van Halen – What to Listen For

More of the Music of Van Halen

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Van Halen

Most copies just do not have the kind of weight to the bottom and lower mids that this music needs to work. Put simply, if your Van Halen LP doesn’t rock, then what exactly is the point of playing it?

The other qualities to look for on the best pressings are, firstly, space — the best pressings are huge and three-dimensional, with large, lively, exceptionally dynamic choruses.

The copies with the most resolving power are easy to spot — they display plenty of lovely analog reverb trailing the guitars and vocals.

And lastly (although we could go on for days with this kind of stuff), listen for spit on the vocals. Even the best copies have some sibilance, but the bad copies have much too much and make the sibilance gritty to boot.

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Listening in Depth to Songs in the Attic

More of the Music of Billy Joel

More Personal Favorites

You know how you can tell when you have a Hot Stamper? It’s the side you play through to the end.

When the sound is right you want to hear more.

Since the opening track of this record is one of the keys to knowing whether it’s mastered and pressed properly, once you get past the sibilance hurdle on track one, the next step is to find out how the challenges presented by the rest of the tracks are handled.

If you are interested in digging deeper, our listening in depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done shootouts for.

Side One

Miami 2017

This is usually the brightest cut on the first side, commonly found with some sibilance problems. On the high-res copies the sibilance is lessened, and the sound of the sibilance itself is much less transistory and spitty, with more of a silky quality, which is simply another way of saying it’s less distorted.

Of course one wouldn’t want the sibilance to be lessened by having a dull top end, but few of these pressings are dull. Most of them suffer from a brightness problem. The best copies keep the sibilance under control and balance the upper mids with extended highs. Without extension on the highs the sound will tend to be aggressive.

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The Allman Brothers – Listen for Thin, Edgy Vocals

More of the Music of The Allman Brothers

Easily the group’s best sounding studio recording and especially impressive on a copy like this

Drop the needle on Midnight Rider or In Memory Of Elizabeth Read to hear what this copy can do. You get lots of extension here both up top and down low that makes the overall sound far more engaging and musical than what you’d hear on a typical copy.

One of the biggest problems we ran into with this shootout was thin, recessed or edgy vocals. This is a band known for their rockin’ guitar jams, so it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the vocals are not where they focused their energy when recording.

I wish the vocals here were a bit fuller but at least they have enough presence to put them front and center. (more…)

Listening in Depth to The Dan’s One True Rock Album

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Countdown to Ecstasy

This is the only Steely Dan album recorded with a working live band.

One of the most important qualities we look for in a Hot Stamper copy is the ability to convey the fun and energy of these seriously hard-rockin’ sessions.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Bodhisattva
Razor Boy

This is the track I use to judge side one. Almost every copy you come across has grainy vocals, if there are any highs at all. This is true for the entire album, but it’s especially noticeable on this track. When the vocals are clear, smooth and sweet, or at least as clear, smooth and sweet as one can hope for, you are playing a good copy. Consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

That’s if there’s bass. This is a rock record, and rock records, like all records, need bass. If the vocals on this track are right and the bass is good, you might actually have a winner.

Also listen to how clear and solid the piano and vibes are underneath the vocals. On the best copies their contributions are easy to follow and really provide support in the lower registers for the vocals above them. If on your copy they’re a murky mess don’t be surprised; that’s pretty much the way they sound on most copies. (They’re a good test for the quality of your reproduction from the mid-bass up through the lower midrange.)

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