Audio Advice

Mostly unsolicited.

The VPI Super Platter and Testing Advice

Revolutions in Audio, Anyone?

This review was written in 2005, perhaps before. To see what comprises our current system, click here.

We love the new VPI Super Platter. It’s a big step up over the acrylic platter, which makes records sound more like CDs, kind of thin, vague, edgy. The original TNT type Aries platter is a very similar design to the Super Platter, and so when I got my super platter it was obviously better after the first five seconds of play but not dramatically better. On a customer’s TNT with the acrylic platter it was huge.

The bigger and more powerful the stereo, the bigger will be the difference, because it has to do with weight and heft and solidness and those sorts of sonic qualities, the kind that too many modern audiophiles ignore. (The CD guys don’t even know what those things are because CDs so rarely have those qualities, certainly never in abundance the way good records do.)

It has been our experience that VPI upgrades tend to be actual sonic improvements over the earlier versions of their equipment, unlike so much of what passes for “better” audio in the land of Hi-Fi, which is often just different and in many cases actually worse. [I cannot back up that claim now, as we have been out of the turntable-auditioning business for more than a decade. I simply have no idea whether VPI’s products are any good these days. Caveat emptor, as always.]

These are the kind of upgrades we love to do, and the reason is no doubt obvious to all you audiophiles out there. Pop the new platter on and thirty seconds later you can hear the difference. Not sure about the change? Don’t like it? Thirty seconds later you can have your old platter spinning to see exactly what happened to the sound.

It’s the kind of testing we do here all day long with Hot Stamper and other pressings. [1] Take ten copies of any title and play them, making notes as to their strengths and weaknesses. Assign each one an overall sonic grade. Think numbers 2 and 7 are the best of the bunch on side one, but not quite sure which of the two is better? No problem. Take one of them, throw it back on the table, listen for a minute, then pop on the other. That kind of head-to-head shootout is the easiest, most reliable way to find out which record really has the Hot Stamper Magic and which one only appears to.

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Big Speakers and Loud Levels Bring Out the Power of the Orchestra

Hot Stamper LPs that Sound Their Best on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

The darker brass instruments like tubas, trombones and french horns are superb here. Other Golden Age recordings of the work, as enjoyable as they may be in other respects, do not fully reproduce the weighty quality of the brass, probably due to limiting, poor eq, poor miking, or some combination of the three.

The brass on this record has the powerful weight and energy of live music like practically no other orchestral pressing we have ever played.

It’s also tonally correct. It’s not aggressive. It’s not irritating. It’s just immediate and powerful the way the real thing is when you hear it live. That’s what really caught my ear when I first played the recording.

There is a blast of brass at the end of Catacombs that is so big and real, it makes you forget you’re listening to a recording. You hear every brass instrument, full size, full weight. I still remember the night I was playing the album, good and loud of course, when that part of the work played through. The power of it was truly startling.

Back then I had the Legacy Whisper speaker system, the one with eight 15″ woofers. They moved air like nobody’s business. If you want to reproduce the power of the trombone, the loudest instrument in the orchestra, they’re the speaker that can do it.

Some of Ansermet’s recordings with the Suisse Romande are absolutely the best I’ve ever heard. It was a magical combination of the right hall, the right engineers, the right orchestra and the right technology — the pure tube ANALOG technology of the 50s and 60s!

Dynamics

Another thing this recording has going for it is dynamic power. This is a dynamic piece of music. Few recordings I have ever heard have the dynamic contrasts that this one does. It really gets loud when it needs to. The best pressings sound completely uncompressed. Although I’m sure there has to be compression of one kind or another, the listener is rarely made aware of it.

Dynamics such as these are thrilling. They let the music come alive.

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Tuning and Tweaking Are Key to Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

More on Developing Your Tuning and Tweaking Skills

Improving your critical listening skills is what allows you to make audio progress.

More to the point for readers of this blog, better quality audio allows you to collect better sounding records.

Since we play all kinds of records all day as part of our regular shootout regimen, tweaking and tuning are much easier for us to do than they would be for most audiophiles. As I have told many in this hobby over the years, if you don’t do the work, the only person who doesn’t get to hear better sound is you.

I can come home to my good sounding stereo — I’ve put in the work — but you’re stuck listening to all the problems you haven’t solved, right?

There’s no problem with an untweaked stereo or an untreated room as long as you don’t mind sound that falls far short of its potential to immerse you completely in the music you are playing.

If you actually want good sound, you have to learn how to tweak your stereo and you have to learn how to treat your room.

Neither one can be ignored. You have to learn how to do both.

And doing both is what teaches you how to listen, which is a skill that’s very hard to acquire any other way. This explains why so many audiophiles have such poor listening skills. They simply never developed them because they never needed them. Think about it: Listening to music for enjoyment requires the exercise of no skills whatsoever.

Such is obviously not the case with tweaking. Tweaking your system requires that you listen carefully and critically in order to make the fine judgments that are essential to making progress. Progress in audio from tweaking often occurs in small, almost imperceptible increments.

Being so subtle, these changes force you as a listener to concentrate, to focus your attention, to bring to bear all your critical listening skills.

Naturally, these skills, like any skills, having been exercised, start to improve, and continue to improve as you continue to exercise them.

Going About It

Everybody knows that practicing and challenging yourself will make you better at whatever you are trying to do.

But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to bettering your own audio skills (other than on this blog)? Just how would you go about challenging yourself as an audiophile?

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Tone Poets and One-Legged Tarzans

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

A fundamental tenet of conservatism is that we must accommodate ourselves to the world that exists, not the world we might want to pretend exists, or the world we would like to exist.

The laws of physics are laws — not theories, not recommendations — and they operate independently of how convenient we may find them.

It follows from this — if you will allow me to make the case — that not everybody with a stereo can play Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings properly, and some people cannot play Tarzan at all. (More on that below.)

There is a fellow, rl1856, who made some comments on Robert Brook’s blog, addressing the Tone Poets pressings of RVG’s recordings vis-a-vis vintage pressings that RVG mastered. (Emphasis added.)

rl1856 writes:

An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.

When an audiophile reveals that his equipment is simply not capable of reproducing the sound of live music, I think that we can safely ignore whatever opinions he may have offered about the sound of the records he is discussing.

It’s obvious that the records were played with unacceptably low fidelity, which means he has all the credibility of a blind man judging paintings.

If this person wants to make the case that he is in fact able to reproduce music with acceptable fidelity, we would need to know more about his system and room in order to take his claim more seriously.

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Robert Brook Undoubtedly Has an Impressive System

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

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 records and are looking to understand them better.

Below is a link to a review he has posted from a guest contributor, ab_ba, a person who has written us a number of letters as well.

Please read his posting on Robert’s blog and then check out my notes below.

I FINALLY Heard A TRULY GREAT STEREO, and Oh!

Wires dangling from the ceiling?

Check!

ab_ba writes:

So, if we can’t hear distortion until it’s been removed, reason leads us to conclude that we can never declare a stereo free of distortion, even one that sure sounds like it is. And indeed, Robert could readily demonstrate for me that his system still has some distortion. While I sat there marveling at the sound of John Bonham’s drumming on his pristine Ludwig pressing of Led Zeppelin II, Robert hopped up to shut off the breaker to the fridge.

We have been writing about this subject ourselves for a very long time. Here are a couple of links.

And here is a good overview of our approach: How To Get The Most Out Of Your Records – A Step By Step Guide

As for getting one’s stereo act together, we are all for it. The better the stereo, the more obvious the superiority of a top quality pressing will be. ab_ba notes in his posting:

Listening to good records on a good system is a delight, but hearing a great system is an absolute revelation. If you want to find really great copies of your favorite records, they’re out there, but you need a stereo that will enable you to identify them.

We wrote a commentary addressing that subject, entitled: First Get Good Sound – Then You Can Recognize and Acquire Good Records

One of the (many) reasons Robert Brook’s stereo has such low distortion is that he uses the same Townshend Seismic Platforms that we do. If you are interested in getting distortion out of your system, we can supply you with one to try. We have never had one returned. They are by far the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to improve the sound of any stereo. (Of course unplugging your fridge is even cheaper, but it may not be as easy.)

Robert uses the same Hallographs that we employ to help improve the acoustics of his room. We have three pair. Three of the units can be seen in the photograph above.

Tweaking and tuning are the foundation of good sound. The 80/20 rule is very real, and, if I may offer up my own experience to serve as a guide, the numbers are probably closer to 90/10.

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play an Album Like This?

More Albums that Come Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound?

Not that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

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Revolutionary Changes in Audio – What Works for Us Can Work for You

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

This listing, like the stereo itself (mine and yours), is a work in progress. It used to be on our website. Now it resides here on the blog.

When I first got started in audio in the early- to mid-70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:

  • Stand-alone phono stages.
  • Modern cabling and power cords.
  • Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
  • Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
  • Carbon fiber mats for turntable platters.
  • Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
  • Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.
  • And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.

Our reason for having this kind of commentary on a site ostensibly devoted to the selling of records is simple: the better your stereo sounds, the better our records sound, and, more importantly, the bigger the difference between our records and the copies you already own. That includes LPs recommended by “audiophile” record dealers, which tend to be on Heavy Vinyl, at 45 RPM, Half-Speed mastered or pressed in Japan.

We have no interest in any of them. Why?

On our system they rarely sound better than second-rate.

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A Loaded Seismic Sink and the Remarkable Benefits of Testing and Tuning

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he’s written for one of our favorite ways to improve the sound of any stereo, the Townshend Seismic Platter.

LOADING the TOWNSHEND SEISMIC PLATTER Brings Your SYSTEM TO LIFE!

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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Question – “How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?”

Our Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress

The following letter came to us not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

I am trying to make sense of the information on your site and the asking prices for these ‘hot stampers.’

In order to better understand how you assess sound quality, can you let me know what equipment you use for this purpose (what turntable, arm, cartridge, amps, speakers)?

How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?

Bas

Bas,

Thanks for contacting us. We written about this subject a great deal. Here are some links you may want to check out.

As for our sound signature, we’ve labored mightily over the last forty years to build the biggest, most dynamic, most powerful system, limited by only those colorations we don’t know how to rid ourselves of. Here are some thoughts on what we went through in order to achieve our current level of fidelity:

Having done all that work over the course of decades, we feel we are in a good position to offer our readers:

Even the ones that never asked for it!

A lot of the basics about our Hot Stampers can be found at the top of every page under the heading:

Any questions, feel free to write me.  Of course, writing is one thing, but

Best, TP

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Letter of the Week – “…going through all my Hot Stampers and taking it all in …”

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

This week’s letter comes from our good friend Franklin.

Franklin was having some serious sound problems that were driving him crazy after moving his speakers from the long wall (not a good idea) to the short one (much better as a rule).

He already had one pair of Hallographs, which had helped his room problems quite a bit. We rely on three pair, and the second and third pair were a big improvement over the first, so we recommended another to Franklin, which, by the sound of this letter, seems to have worked miracles!

Hello Mr. Port,

Just to let you know what you already know about this LP. When I first received this ($500) LP and listened to it, I thought I had really messed up.

I didn’t hear all the nuances you described. I just put it away and forgot about it. What a BUMMER!!!!! But I decided to try it again after placing the new pair of Hallos. I moved them all over the place. I even have the floor marked all over with painter’s masking tape to remind me where the best spots are for the Hallos. Floor really looks funny.

Sometimes when you make a change, it seems to be better for some LPs but not others. But when a change impacts all the LPs positively, you know you are in the game. I am going through all my Hot Stampers and taking it all in. I will tweak some more but for now I’ll just enjoy.

Regards,
Franklin

Franklin,

Thanks so much for your letter. When your system is cookin’ and you’re hearing all your records sound better than ever, that’s when audio is FUN. You had to do a lot of work to get there and the good sound you are now able to enjoy is your reward.

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