*Audio Advice

Mostly unsolicited.

What to Do If a Favorite Record Changes Its Sound

Records We’ve Played that Are Good for Testing

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written around 2010. Note that we rarely have this title in stock, for the simple reason that these days it’s just too hard to find with the right stampers and good vinyl.

Our last big shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ debut was back in early 2008. Since we never tire of discussing the revolutionary changes in audio that have occurred over the last quite eventful year (really more like five quite eventful years) , we here provide you with yet another link to that commentary.

Suffice to say, this record, like most good records, got a whole lot better.

(Some records do not, but that’s another story for another day. If your audiophile pressings — especially these — start to sound funny, you are probably on solid ground. They sure sound funny to us.) 

This time around all the best qualities of the best copies stayed the same; this is to be expected.

If records you have known well, over a very long period of time, suddenly start to sound different*, you can be pretty sure that you’ve made an error of some kind in your system, room, electricity, setup or something else.

You need to find it and figure out how to fix it as quickly as possible, although as a rule this process can turn out to be very time consuming and difficult.

The first place I would look is to any changes you might have made in your wiring, whether speaker, interconnect or power cord. (Robert Brook has done some work in this area that you may find helpful.)

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Sound Like This Makes Audiophiles the Laughing Stocks of the Music World

Advice We Think Can Help You Make More Audio Progress

Click on the link below and give this system a listen for a minute or two.

Have you ever heard live music that sounded like this?

Who in his right mind wants a stereo with this kind of ridiculously artificial sound?

If you’re reading this blog, I hope it’s not you, because you will never find a record on our site with sound this unnatural.

If you like the sound of an album such as Aerial Boundaries, then buy this speaker. It will make all your records sound just like it! It’s the perfect example of a pass/fail record, the way this speaker is an example of a pass/fail speaker.

Here is how we described the sound of Aerial Boundaries years ago:

It sounds as if someone went into the biggest room in the studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool out in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls. Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using.)

And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!

If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.

Some commentary I found on the web

Aerial Boundaries is the second album by guitarist Michael Hedges released on the Windham Hill label in 1984. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Engineered Recording.

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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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