*Audio Advice

Mostly unsolicited.

Teach Yourself Audio Using the Right Records

Advice on How to Make More Progress in Audio

If you believe what you read on the various internet sites where audiophiles gather to dispense advice about everything they think they know regarding music, recordings and equipment, you are asking for trouble and you are surely going to get it.

You will encounter an endless supply of half-truths, untruths and just plain nonsense, more often than not defended tooth and nail by those with typing skills but not much enthusiasm for the tedium of tweaking and critical listening. 

What kind of equipment are these people using? How deep is their experience in audio?

Truth be told, I was pretty misguided myself during the first twenty (or thirty, gulp) years I spent in audio, reading the magazines (I still have my Stereophiles and Absolute Sounds from the 70s in boxes), traipsing from one stereo showroom to another, trying to figure out what constituted “good sound” so that I could attempt to get my system to produce something closer to the best of what I was hearing.

Most of the time the demonstrations I heard made me want to go in a completely different direction.

Which is often what I ending up doing. The solutions offered by the experts, to these ears, fell far short of the expectations I had for the sound of music in my home.

Unbeknownst to me — I was far too inexperienced in audio to have a real understanding of what it was that I wanted — I was a thrillseeker, and the sound I was hearing rarely gave me anything that could be called a thrill.

So how do you learn about all this stuff?

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Small Speakers and Some Audio Lessons I’ve Learned Over the Last 50+ Years

These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

UPDATE 2026

The video linked to below is now private.

However, as you will see from our commentary, it really doesn’t make much of a difference whether it is or not. What we had to say about it years ago is nonetheless true.

Do not believe a word you hear in this video. [Not a problem!]

You probably shouldn’t even watch it. [Same.]

Let me state clearly one of our core beliefs here at Better Records.

Small speakers are incapable of lifelike musical reproduction in the home.

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The Townshend Seismic Platform: Essential in Analog Playback

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

The Townshend Seismic Platform: ESSENTIAL in ANALOG Playback

Robert mentions that his original commentary for the Seismic Platform has been lost. Here is what’s left of it.

I shared my story of starting out with the ‘bladder” version of the sink (now called a platform) back in the early 2000s, noting what a pain it was and how the amount of air in each of the three bladders changed the sound of the turntable.

Fortunately, those days are gone. It is now set and forget (although, like everything else in audio, you need to tweak it a bit to get the most benefit from it). You can contact Townshend for pricing and the cost of shipping direct to you, no middleman (that used to be us!) involved. We cannot recommend any piece of audio gear more highly.

(Please note that we do not make a dime from this product. We want you to buy them — yes, ideally you’re going to need more than one — so that your stereo can show you just how much better our vintage vinyl pressings are when directly compared to any and all others.)

Some background:

A few years back I discovered something wonderful about the Seismic Sink I was using under my turntable to control vibration. In our experience, vibration control is one of the most important revolutionary advancements in audio of the last twenty years or so. This commentary should help to give your tweaking efforts more context.

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Some Speakers Don’t Let Frampton Come Alive

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Frampton Available Now

When I was first getting serious about audio in the mid-70s, electrostatic and screen-type speakers were quite common in audio showrooms. Classical music aficionados in particular seemed to prefer them to other designs. They were more often than not big, open and clear, and never boxy or sour.

Another quality they had going for them was that they were exceptionally transparent.

Alas, they were inadequate or wrong in almost every way a speaker can be, but transparency was their strong suit and everybody could hear it. All of the qualities noted above — big, open, clear — worked together to fool a great many audiophiles into thinking that theirs was the right approach to reproducing music.

(Circa the Pretzel Logic era, Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan fame were apparently big fans of Magnepan speakers, to the consternation of everyone else in the band — especially the engineers, one imagines — who thought they were overly-smooth, incapable of reproducing the frequency extremes high and low, soft, and lacking in their ability to reproduce many of the most important aspects of music, energy especially. Count me among their harshest critics.)

It was my good fortune at the time that I liked to play my rock music good and loud, so screens, panels and full-range electrostats were never going to cut it for me.

I once heard the giant Magnaplanar 1D system — a series of ten panels that stretched all the way across the long wall of the audio showroom I frequented at the time, standing about 7 feet tall to boot — try to reproduce a favorite Peter Frampton record of mine. (It was Wind of Change, a Desert Island Disc I still play regularly to this day.)

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The Prelude Cleaning System – Always in Stock

Proper Record Cleaning Can Help You Find Your Own Hot Stamper Pressings

Better Records is now the exclusive distributor for The Prelude Record Cleaning System (formerly produced by Walker Audio).

Prelude is the only fluid we recommend for serious sound enhancement and cleaning of your LPs.

It is our strongly held belief that you have never really heard what’s in the grooves of your records until you’ve cleaned them using Prelude’s enzyme-based system. There is nothing in our experience that works as well.

The Prelude Record Cleaning System can be used with any vacuum record cleaning machine.

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Get the Phono Finish!

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Get the PHONO FINISH!

Robert’s Approach

Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:

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Imagine on Mobile Fidelity from 1984

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

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Getting the Electricity Right Made All the Difference in Our New Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

In response to a customer’s letter, I wrote the following a few years back:

The vast majority of audiophiles never get to the higher levels of audio because of the compromises they make at every step in their rooms, speakers, wires and practically everything else.

For example:

  • Speakers too small,
  • Shoved up against a wall,
  • In an untreated room that
  • The family uses to watch TV in?

You can’t get very far that way.

Some of the worst off of these folks end up with a collection of crap Heavy Vinyl because their systems simply will not let them hear how much better their vintage pressings sound.

Better Electricity Made All the Difference

When we moved the business into an industrial park a few years ago, I took the opportunity to build the largest playback studio I could fit on the premises. It was 17 by 22 with a 12 foot high ceiling, with a concrete slab floor and six inch thick double drywall for walls, as well as a complicated system of dedicated electrical circuitry.

It took a surprising amount of work carried out over months to get it to sound right. Day after day we ran experiments. Most of the time it was just me. I actually like working alone. It’s not hard for me to stay focussed.

Oddly enough, what made the biggest difference was getting the electricity right: computers and cleaning machines on isolation transformers, stuff unplugged, stuff left plugged in that made the sound better, lights hooked up to batteries rather than plugged in to the main circuits, etc. 

Over the course of about two months, the sound became night and day better.

More on unplugging here.

Also, Robert Brook has done a great deal of work along these same lines, which he explains in detail here.

This kind of work is not hard for me. We’ve been doing it for decades, but we have a very big advantage over everyone else: we have good sounding records to test with.

We have Hot Stampers! The records are correct. If they sound wrong, it’s not their fault. They are almost never the problem.

I used But I Might Die Tonight from Tea for the Tillerman for weeks and weeks. It was very difficult to get all the parts right, but in the end it was more glorious than I had ever heard it. I wrote an extensive commentary on the experience I went through which you can read all about here.

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One Man’s Experimental Approach to Audio Reveals Some Inconvenient Truths

Here Are Some of Our Favorite Orchestral Test Discs

UPDATE 2025

The following was originally posted by Robert in 2020. We have added a link at the top to test discs that we’ve found to be good for tweaking and tuning your system, room, electricity and such like.

Robert has also reviewed a fair number of difficult to reproduce orchestral recordings, titles that are sure to challenge the playback quality of any system. They should make it easy to hear whether the changes you make are actually getting closer to sound that is more like live, unamplified music, which, from our point of view, should be the goal of any audiophile.

This is the one true test for any system.

Here’s an especially good test disc to get you started.

POWER CORDS: Is THIS the Difference You Want?

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out with a group of power cords he had on hand. I did the same thing about fifteen twenty years ago and it taught me a lot (although strangely in my case I’ve never taken the time to write about it, mostly because my notes are long gone).

The experience he went through is instructive and easily replicated by anyone for any system. The benefits are likely to be substantial, maybe even life-changing. (Robert has had many life-changing experiences with audio and music since this was written, and we couldn’t be happier that we played some small part in the evolution he underwent.)

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Speaker Placement — The Room Coupling Method

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble efforts to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love the sound of music reproduced with the highest fidelity and, more importantly, are serious enough to be willing to spend a great deal of their money and their time in order to make that happen.

If you aspire to great things in audio, Robert’s blog is for you, as is the one you are now on.

SPEAKER PLACEMENT: The ROOM COUPLING METHOD

An excerpt:

[A] few months ago I came across an article on a Room Coupling Method for speaker placement. Encouraged by finding some common ground with author Richard Mak’s thinking, I started trying it out, and it has helped me make some meaningful progress.

One thing I particularly appreciated in Mak’s article was his assertion that “measurements” and “analysis” are not a substitute for “listening.”

“Charts, graphs, room nodes, reflection coefficients, or even a Ph.D. in room acoustics won’t get you there. Many who are armed with an arsenal of scientific knowledge do not even know how or what to listen for on a reference test track.”

To Mak’s point, as I attempted to apply his approach to my speaker and listening chair positions, I realized in the process that even though the placement of my speakers and listening chair have been suboptimal for some time, that time was far from wasted.

Because in that time I’ve done A LOT of listening, and that listening has led to a special kind of knowledge, which for a long time was without a clear application. Mak’s methodology has since given me an outlet for this knowledge, and all that listening is now paying off.

In his article, Mak walks us through a process that begins with how to determine the distance of the speakers from the back wall. From there he describes how to determine their width, then their toe-in angle, and finally how to dial in the position of the listening chair.

For those of you who would like to tune and tweak the location of their speakers, the article seems to have some good advice for doing that, with plenty of tests to challenge both your setup and your critical listening skills. (We have some great test records you might find useful as well. The more difficult ones to get to sound right can be found here.)

This subject is so complicated that to say much more might send me down a rabbit hole I’d have a hard time climbing out of, but here’s a thought or two.

I’ve had many different big speaker systems set up in a number of good-sized rooms over the years, starting in 1975. When I moved into the house I bought in Thousand Oaks in the early 2000s there was a “great room” with a piano on the far end (where the speakers are now) and a dining table at the opposite end. It measured 15×30 with about a nine foot ceiling.

I was hoping to use my Legacy Whisper speakers in this room so that I could audition records all day (my desk can be seen there on the right). I spent about two years trying to make the speakers sound good where you see them in the picture below.

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