*Audio Advice

Mostly unsolicited.

Money Down the Drain

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

Readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of big speakers, but in a room that’s as bad for sound reproduction as this one is, these monsters would qualify as a form of torture at anything above a whisper.

There is an ideal balance between absorption and reflection that must be found for every room. The balance this fellow has chosen is 98% reflection, which will lead to 100% awful sound.

I don’t even like the picture between the speakers. If you must have something there, in my experience rarely will it sound good unless it is five or more feet off the ground. (See picture below.)

Note that sidewall absorption in our listening room is never more than about five feet high. For some reason that seems to work the best. We tried lots of different heights over the course of years and we always came back to nothing over five feet.

The back wall has 4 inch thick 4×8 sheets of styrofoam across most of it, leaving the corners empty (which always seems to work the best, again, who knows why).

A small piece of absoptive material in the middle up high seemed to help, but more than that was too much and less did nothing.

These may be the most wonderful speakers in the world in the right room, but in this room there is no speaker that could possibly reproduce music properly, which means this guy spent a lot of money and got nothing for it. He’s not alone.

He could get some carpet and pull his speakers well out into the room for starters, but then the whole thing just won’t have the elegance it did, so what on earth would ever make him do such a thing? His favorite music? Hah, that’s a good one.

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A Few Quick Thoughts on Correctly Sized Instruments

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

Something I rarely take time to write about on this blog is the sizing of instruments.

Some speakers — typically those with smaller drivers — create images of instruments that are too small, smaller than you would picture them in your mind if you were sitting in the audience with your eyes closed.

Other speakers — typically screens of one kind or another — produce larger-than-life images of instruments and vocalists. In the 70s, I heard a lot of screens and full-range electrostats — these come to mind, and there were plenty of others like them, Magneplanars and the like — but the images never seemed right-sized or real enough to be taken seriously.

I opted for a big dynamic system in the mid-70s and over the course of the next fifty years never heard anything that would give me reason to doubt that choice.

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The Second Best Day of My Life in Audio

Advice on Making Audio Progress

In the late-90s I had tried to power various speakers I owned with Mac 30s. I could never actually get  them to reproduce music faithfully, but they did wonderful things for some recordings.

In 2005, long after I had moved on from the Macs, I found a low-power integrated transistor amp from the 70s that was vastly superior to the custom tube preamp and amp we were using for shootouts at the time. 

It was, simply put, much more musically truthful. It sounded more like live music and less like recorded music.

It is this quality that is hardest to find in all of audio.

It is also the one quality of our system that, more than any other, makes it possible to do the kind of work we do.

Our equipment (along with our room treatments, setup, electricity and such) lets us hear the naked sound of the record being played, uncolored and unadorned.

Back to Mac

They started building them in 1954. Steve Hoffman was a big fan. We spent a fair amount of our time together tube-rolling back in the late-90s. Based on some of the recent interviews I’ve read, he appears to still be enamored with their sound.

Like the fellow who bought his first boat, buying a pair of Mac 30s was the second best day of my life, exceeded only by the day I got rid of them.

Regardless of what they might have said in their ads, they were not 99.60% perfect by any stretch of the imagination. To this day I consider them to be the most colored and inaccurate — albeit perhaps the most Tubey Magical — amp I have ever heard in my life. Having been actively involved in this hobby for more than fifty years, I regret to say that I’ve heard plenty of amps that didn’t do their jobs right.

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

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

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.

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Midrange Suckout? I Have a Theory

These Titles Are Good for Testing Presence in the Midrange

Many audiophile records suffer from a bad case of midrange suckout.

Vocals and other instruments seem to be so far back in the soundfield that they might as well be coming from another room.

Yet somehow there are still audiophiles who defend the records put out by the ridiculous label that single-handedly created and promoted that sound. What is wrong with these people?

(On a side note, yes, I was one of the audiophiles who fell for their phony EQ trickery in the 70s and 80s. In my defense, that was a long time ago.)

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 it.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall the way you should, you instead have your speakers shoved flat up against that wall.

This arrangement has the effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce the three-dimensional space of the recordings you play.

Kind of Blue on MoFi

I hinted back in 2022 I was going to discuss their pressing 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 short version of that future commentary will note that the drums in the right channel of All Blues are about five feet further back in the soundfield than they are on our reference too-noisy-to-sell Six-Eye pressing, or any other pressing of the album we’ve played for that matter.

At the time I could not wrap my head around how Mobile Fidelity could have gotten hold of the multi-tracks in order to remix the album and place the drums further back in the mix.

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When It Comes to Carts and Horses, Which Comes First, and Who Pulls Whom?

Please Consider Taking Some of Our Audio Advice

Robert Brook recently wrote a piece making the case that the cure for audiophile ailments of all kinds — burnout, boredom, etc. — is a high quality stereo system. It is beautifully written and we think well worth your time to read.

Robert walks us through what it has meant to him to have spent so many hours over the years building a high quality stereo system, mostly by describing the musical enjoyment it has brought to him.

What could be better?

We feel the same way. If you build such a system, and play the right records on it, you will experience the music you love in ways more powerful than you could have ever even imagined. Your favorite albums will sound so good that boredom and burnout would be simply inconceivable.

Those of us with top quality systems are confused by the dysfunctional relationship these poor souls have to their stereos and recordings. With a good stereo and good records, it’s hard to see how these psychological states are even possible.

The Heart of the Problem

The problem audiophiles have is one that sits right at the heart of our hobby.

Good stereos are hard to come by.

So the question always comes down to how one should go about building such a beast. There are two schools of thought.

Is the first priority to have properly-pressed, properly-mastered records of well-recorded music in order to get the ball rolling?

Or is it better to make improvements to the stereo first, so that you can then pursue better sounding records and end up with the best of both worlds, a great stereo playing great records?

My Two Cents

Allow me to weigh in. Please consider the following unusual, even goofy, and possibly logically inconsistent, analogy.

Imagine that the place where you can enjoy music is a town not far from where you live.

Because you love music, you must travel there as that is the only place you can enjoy your favorite music to its fullest.

The Horse and the Cart

The horse that draws the cart that you ride into this town is not the right record, it is the right stereo in the right room.

Without the right stereo, you lack the ability to recognize the right record.

Similarly, you lack the ability to appreciate what makes it more right than any other record.

Without the right stereo, you may in fact be trying to optimize the playback of records that are wrong. I did this for decades with my Mobile Fidelity records in the 70s and 80s. I played Heavy Vinyl pressings in the 90s and early 2000s that sounded right to me at the time but no longer do, mainly because our current system evolved over a very long time to be ruthless at revealing their deficiencies and my ears became better at recognizing them.

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Cartridges Part Two: “Why don’t you talk about other cartridges more often on your blog?”

Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress

Part one of this discussion can be found here.

Ab_ba continues:

Tom, this got me thinking.

I think of a mountain range. From one peak, you see others, and wonder, “gee maybe the view is even more magnificent from that peak!” But, for most of the peaks, it’s about the same, certainly no better, and could be a lot worse. Maybe just behind that other hill that looks so enticing from here there’s a parking lot! And also, climbing each peak takes time and energy, and for most of the journey between the peaks, you are down in a valley. And, is the view really actually better over there? Just because it is higher, doesn’t mean it will be more rewarding. Just because it is dazzling at first, maybe you grow sick of it after a while.

You have created a system that sounds demonstrably fantastic. And, it is a system that is not too finicky – other people can copy it and get amazing sound, even without any tweaking and fine-tuning. Are there other great-sounding systems? For sure. But, who, or what, on earth could be my guide to finding those other peaks? Certainly not the magazines. Certainly not other audiophiles. Certainly not the guys at my local hi-fi store. Certainly not the price tag.

As I’ve spent more time with the [redacted] cartridge my friend loaned me, its sonic character is becoming more evident. It is quite lovely on jazz. I threw on a $5 copy of Art Pepper’s Straight Life (Galaxy label, fwiw) and it sounded just fantastic. Sparkly highs, and the lack of bass that cartridge has was not noticably absent. I wondered, “has it settled in a little? Are my ears getting used to it?” I put on a few different records and said, “nope. It’s just got a sound signature that’s favorable to Art Pepper.”

So there’s a perfect example of a mountain peak I would not want to build my house on. Does the Dyna have no character? Probably not, but different records sound different, and different genres all reproduce well on it, and no part of the spectrum calls attention to itself. If there is a signature to it, it’s one I can live with.

Last question – why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right. I think most of them are loners with disposable income, and most people who make some money in life get it by being supremely confident, perhaps overconfident. You look at guys like [redacted] and me, scientists where humility and knowledge of our own ignorance is in the very fiber of practicing our professions well, and even if we don’t have the disposable income of some audiophiles and some of your customers, we value quality, we value expertise, and we are happy to spend our available funds on things of enduring value.

Ab_ba

Dear Ab_ba,

I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted and sounded good to me.

Is the audiophile of today doing anything different?

What would you be doing if you hadn’t stumbled on a guy with some credibility — he sold you some records that sounded amazing, so he must know something — who turned you on to some audio stuff that sounds great and, better yet, didn’t cost that much?

And how did this guy — me — come to find out about all this stuff in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you.

He had a good audio friend who turned him on to Dynavector cartridges twenty years ago (but oddly enough not the really good one they sell. I had to make that leap for myself).

And this audio friend had learned through extensive trial and error that there were certain receivers one could pick up for cheap at thrift stores that offered excellent, audiophile-quality sound. (Trial and error were his forte. This is the same guy that clued me into the concept of Hot Stampers, a life-changing concept if ever there was one.)

As it turned out, even my friend did not know how good the sound of the receiver he sold me could be when fed by a top quality outboard phono stage, something he did not have access to. (The receiver’s phono stage is decent but hopelessly outclassed by the EAR 324p we use.)

I ended up buying four or five different models with mediocre-at-best sound before I realized the one I owned must be a fluke. Then I bought three more of the model I liked and they all sounded different too, although they ranged in sound at most from excellent to crazy good. So I put the best sounding one in my system and kept the other three for backup. Like I said, they were cheap.

When I met my friend George Louis in San Diego back in the 80s, he had a much better system than I did. He was using non-audiophile-approved equipment that drove custom speakers. He showed me that my audiophile electronics and my Fulton so-called state-of-the-art speakers were not nearly as good as I thought they were. What did I know back then? Not as much as I thought I did, that’s for damn sure.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1987, I met a fellow audiophile named Robert Pincus and we quickly became friends. Along with lots of other records, I was selling vintage classical records to audiophiles and he was supplying me with whatever he could dig up that sounded good.

He showed me that no two records sound the same, and even that no two sides of the same record sound the same. Once I had a chance to listen to some of the Hot Stamper pressings he brought me, I was sold.

Operating as the equivalent of a one-man band* in the 90s, I was only able to offer a small number of Hot Stamper pressings on an ad-hoc basis to customers who trusted me enough to believe in the concept. In 2004,  a mere 17 years later, we had worked out the bugs in the process and began selling them officially on our site, starting with Teaser and the Firecat. During those 17 years I was doing audio and records for 60-80 hours a week. Needless to say, I learned a lot in that time.

Anybody else want to put in 60-80 hours a week for 17 years to find out just how much they don’t know?

Isn’t it easier to go to a forum or site and have somebody tell you what you want to hear? It would save you a lot of work, but what would you learn? It’s our hope that every person buying a record from us has a Heavy Vinyl or audiophile-approved pressing to play against the one we sell them. Comparing the two, on their own time, on their own system, allows them to hear the kind of sound they’ve been missing and were told could not possibly exist.

But it does! And we have the records to prove it does.

Easy-to-carry-out comparisons of this kind have taught a select group of audiophiles and music lovers — customers like ab_ba, along with hundreds of others — not to put their trust in those who claim to know what they are talking about when they opine on what are the best sounding pressings. We have opinions, sure, but we also have the records that back up our opinions.

We’ve spent a lifetime discovering these very special vinyl pressings, and we make them available to discriminating audiophiles who prize superior sound as well as “enduring value.” All it takes is one click.

Best, TP

*More on the subject of being a one man band.

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Letter of the Week – “Why don’t you talk about other cartridges on your blog?”

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

Hi Tom:

With my 17dx out of commission, [a friend] loaned me his [redacted], a cartridge that retails for a little more than the Dynavector. It only served to show me how truly special the 17dx is. The [redacted] is giving me some very nice sound, but there’s a sense of exaggerated detail, a lack of bass drive, a flatter soundfield, and for whatever reason, overall the music is simply less engaging. This mimics [my friend’s] experience with the [redacted] vs Dynavector comparison. He’d use different words, but we both agree that the Dyna is the considerably more satisfying cartridge.

Why is this? Why’s it so hard to make a great-sounding cartridge? And, how does price not serve as a reliable guide to sound performance? I’ve now had a chance to hear several high-priced and well-regarded cartridges: Clearaudio, Sound-Smith, Ortofon, etc. Since I’ve made further improvements to my system since I had any of those other cartridges installed, it was easy for me to believe that I had gotten things to where the cartridge would be less important in the overall sound I was getting. Instead, I think all I’ve done is to create a system that lets me hear very directly what the cartridge is saying.

My question for you is this: Why don’t you talk about other cartridges more often on your blog? Yes, you talk about the 17dx a lot, but I see only a passing mention to other carts. Over the years, what other cartridges have you tried? What impressions did you have of them? I mean, if you want to keep readers on the straight and narrow, then warning them against certain popular cartridges seems like it’d be an even more valuable service than warning them away from bad heavy vinyl pressings. Without the right cart, other changes to your system, and other choices of records to play, almost don’t matter. I guess there’s two ways to put this message to your readers: DO buy a 17dx. (You’ve said that plenty of times.) But also: DON’T bother with those other cartridges. (I think you should say that too!)

ab_ba

ab_ba,

The simplest answer to these questions is that I have very little experience with other cartridges.

Until maybe twenty years ago, I was not in a position to borrow expensive carts and try them out. I had a more forgiving Dynavector, then went to the 17d3 and that was that. It had the sound I was looking for.

Most equipment of any kind is nothing special. It’s mediocre by definition, since it is most likely average. Why would it not be average? Because the owners of said equipment spent so many years trying to find the best? As far as I know, that never happens.

As you say, money buys very little in audio, with the exception of big speakers, but then big speakers are mostly not very good because they often require lots of power, and high power amps never sound good to me.

If you want good sound, you will have to do a lot of work and spend a lot of money to find it.

Or you can buy what I own and save yourself all that time and trouble! As long as you are willing to live with some compromises, it’s hard to imagine you could find something better unless you devoted a huge amount of time and money to the search, and had the listening skills to choose wisely.

These are skills that audiophiles rarely have. They are much harder to come by than good equipment. I talk at length about how wrong I was about so many things for so long during my formative years for the simple reason that recognizing errors is how you learn to make fewer of them.

Who can say they know what they are talking about in audio and get anyone to believe them?

It is a hard road and few want to travel it.

Best, TP

Tom, this got me thinking.

I think of a mountain range. From one peak, you see others, and wonder, “gee maybe the view is even more magnificent from that peak!” But, for most of the peaks, it’s about the same, certainly no better, and could be a lot worse. Maybe just behind that other hill that looks so enticing from here there’s a parking lot! And also, climbing each peak takes time and energy, and for most of the journey between the peaks, you are down in a valley. And, is the view really actually better over there? Just because it is higher, doesn’t mean it will be more rewarding. Just because it is dazzling at first, maybe you grow sick of it after a while.

You have created a system that sounds demonstrably fantastic. And, it is a system that is not too finicky – other people can copy it and get amazing sound, even without any tweaking and fine-tuning. Are there other great-sounding systems? For sure. But, who, or what, on earth could be my guide to finding those other peaks? Certainly not the magazines. Certainly not other audiophiles. Certainly not the guys at my local hi-fi store. Certainly not the price tag.

As I’ve spent more time with the [cartridge] my friend loaned me, its sonic character is becoming more evident. It is quite lovely on jazz. I threw on a $5 copy of Art Pepper’s Straight Life (Galaxy label, fwiw) and it sounded just fantastic. Sparkly highs, and the lack of bass that cartridge has was not noticably absent. I wondered, “has it settled in a little? Are my ears getting used to it?” I put on a few different records and said, “nope. It’s just got a sound signature that’s favorable to Art Pepper.” So there’s a perfect example of a mountain peak I would not want to build my house on. Does the Dyna have no character? Probably not, but different records sound different, and different genres all reproduce well on it, and no part of the spectrum calls attention to itself. If there is a signature to it, it’s one I can live with.

Last question – why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right. I think most of them are loners with disposable income, and most people who make some money in life get it by being supremely confident, perhaps overconfident. You look at guys like [redacted] and me, scientists where humility and knowledge of our own ignorance is in the very fiber of practicing our professions well, and even if we don’t have the disposable income of some audiophiles and some of your customers, we value quality, we value expertise, and we are happy to spend our available funds on things of enduring value.

Ab_ba

Ab_ba,

I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted and sounded good to me.

Is the audiophile of today doing something different?

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Bose Salutes the Sound Of Mercury Records (and Some Audio Lessons Learned Long Ago)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

This Bose / Mercury Demonstration LP is autographed by none other than Amar G. Bose. The autograph reads “To EMI, with regards and best wishes, Amar G. Bose.”

Bose may not have ever made very good speakers, but they sure knew good recordings when they heard them. This LP has excerpts from some of the top Mercury titles, including music by Copland (El Salon Mexico), Kodaly (Hary Janos Suite), Mussorgsky/ Ravel (Pictures At An Exhibition), and Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian Easter Overture).

I played one of these Bose records years ago and was surprised at how good it sounded. The transfers of the Mercury tapes were excellent. I guess that makes sense — if you want to show off your speakers you had better use a well-mastered record for the demonstration.

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording.

To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

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Even Shootouts Won’t Teach You What You Can Learn from Variations in Your Table Setup

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

As anyone familiar with album knows, Court and Spark has loud vocal choruses on a number of tracks. More often than not, during the loudest sections they sound like they are either breaking up or threatening to. This quality of “almost breaking up” is most easily heard on Down to You.

I always assumed it was compressor or board overload. But on the best of the best copies there doesn’t seem to be any breakup — the voices get loud and stay clean throughout.

Which means that instead of being on the master tape, it might be compressor distortion that is occurring during the mastering.

Regardless of the source of the distortion, or lack thereof, the loudest choruses are a tough test for any system.

Setup Advice

If you have one of our hottest Hot Stampers, try adjusting your setup — VTA, Tracking Weight, Azimuth, Anti-Skate — Especially! Audiophiles often overlook this one, at their peril — and note how cleanly the loudest passages play using various combinations of settings.

Keep a yellow pad handy and write everything down step by step as you make your changes, along with what differences you hear in the sound.

You will learn more about sound from this exercise than you can from practically any other. Even shootouts won’t teach you what you can learn from variations in your table setup.

And once you have your setup dialed in better, you will find that your shootouts go a lot smoother than they used to.

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