*Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

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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Thought for the Day – Progress Depends on the Unreasonable Man

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Achieving Better Sound

Playwright George Bernard Shaw had a thought on why we need unreasonable people:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — in other words, when it comports with reality, we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn whatever lessons the records are trying to teach us.

Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.

And that’s how we make money, by selling the pressings that really do sound the best, regardless of what the audiophile hive-mind has to say about them.

When rules of thumb work, they’re very handy for the amateur record collector looking for better than average sound. It’s all the times that they don’t work that are the problem — the exceptions to the rule, especially if one of those exceptions just happens to be a favorite album of yours.

Then you’re really up a creek. You followed a general rule that usually works, but has in this case failed, and now you really don’t have any other way to find a solution to your problem.

Fortunately for readers of this blog, we do, and we share that knowledge with you.

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How We Rationalized Selling Heavy Vinyl Even as Late as 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We were still recommending the Classic Records pressing of Who’s Next as late as 2007 (2007 being the year that everything changed) by considering its sound quality, quiet vinyl and price relative to the expensive, vintage Hot Stamper pressings we had started to offer at the time.

Hot Stamper copies are not particularly quiet, and they are never cheap, which is in marked contrast to Classic Records’ heavy vinyl pressings, which are fairly quiet and also fairly cheap. Some of you may think $30 is a lot of money for a record, but we do not. It’s a fair price.

When you buy Crosby Stills and Nash’s first album or Tapestry or Bridge Over Troubled Water on Classic for $30, you are getting your money’s worth.

But don’t kid yourself. You are not getting anything remotely close to the best pressing available, because the best pressings are hard to find. We do find them, and we do charge a lot of money for them, because they sound absolutely AMAZING in a direct head to head comparison to the Classic versions and anything else you may have heard.

We recommend you use the Classic version of Who’s Next as benchmark. When you find something that beats it, you have yourself a very good record. Until then, you still have a good, quiet record to enjoy. You win either way.

But some enough, sometime in 2007 as a matter of fact, we did our first big shootout for the album, and, as so often happens, our appreciation of the recording changed dramatically. We were finally able to hear it in all its glory on the right reissue — yes, the conventional wisdom had been wrong all along once again — and that experience left the Classic Records pressing in the dust so to speak.

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When you read a review of a record that was obviously reproduced with inferior equipment, what’s your first reaction?

When You’re Just Getting Started in Audio…

Mine is typically “what an idiot!“

But then you might step back and, with a moment’s reflection recognize that you yourself have written seriously mistaken reviews back in the days when your equipment was inferior, and have to recognize “that could have been me, and maybe not all that long ago.“ Here’s one from the mid-90s, about twenty years after I had purchased a pair of rather large floor standing speakers and a number of highly-rated, very expensive hi-fidelity components to drive them.

But all that hardware and all that money could not tell me how awful sounding some records were, and there are plenty more like that ridiculous remastered pressing from my past.

In fact, there are so many that we thought they deserved their own special category here on the blog, under the heading dubious sounding records I once liked.

The explanation for all the nonsense one reads on the web could not be simpler or more obvious.

The lo-fi to mid-fi crowd doesn’t know what it’s missing and telling them doesn’t do them (or you) any good because they are not where they need to be yet. They are not where you are — they are where they are. And that just happens to be the same place you were at some point in your journey.

They are in the hole you used to be in. The difference is you managed to climb out of that hole. They’re still in it.

Keep in Mind

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We Didn’t Know How Good We Had It in the Seventies

Hot Stamper Pressings of Well-Recorded Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Stealin’ Home has long been a Folkie-Pop favorite of mine, mostly on the strength of the consistently smart songwriting, polished production and audiophile sound quality.

But really, to be truthful, what I found attractive right from the start was Iain Matthews’s especially clear, sweet tenor. That’s the hook that drew me to the album.

Only later would I be pleasantly surprised to find that the recorded sound was wonderful; that the production was equal to the best major label Rock and Pop around (a comparison to The Doobie Brothers would not be a stretch); and, with repeated listening, it was clear that the level of songwriting was high indeed (an a capella rendition of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught, which opens side two, can’t help but raise your averages).

ian_matthews_-_stealin_homeWe Didn’t Know How Good We Had It

Produced in 1978, the best copies are rich, smooth and sweet in the best tradition of ANALOG recording.

Only a few years later this sound was out of style, replaced by the edgy, hard, digital qualities preferred by synthpop bands like Tears for Fears and Simple Minds.

This would turn out to be a bad time for audiophiles (like me) who liked the pop music of the day but not the pop sound of the day. Heavy-handed processing as well as the overuse of synthesizers and drum effects, with the whole of the production slathered in digital reverb, have resulted in most of the albums from the early- to mid-80s being all but impossible to enjoy on a modern high-end system. Believe me, we’ve tried.

UPDATE 2026

Getting distortion out of the system, electricity, room and all the rest helps make the records from the 80s much more enjoyable. Brothers in Arms comes instantly to mind, but there are scores of others. Obviously some heavily processed recordings are going to sound much better than others, especially if you have the right pressings, but few of them can compete with the better recordings from the 70s.

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“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time…”

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

“Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.” — Shane Parrish

Everybody knows that practice of any skill with the idea of challenging yourself will more than likely make you better at practically anything you choose to do. But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to bettering your own audio skills other than right here on this blog? (And Robert Brook‘s of course.)

Just how would you go about challenging yourself as an audiophile?

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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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Music Is Always More Important than Sound

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

You can find Demo Disc quality records all over the site, but what if you are not interested in demonstrating your equipment and just want to play the music you love?

And what if the music you love wasn’t recorded all that well?

What if the music you love is on the third Band album, Stage Fright, a notoriously problematical recording?

You buy the best sounding version you can find and put up with the sonic limitations because the music is always more important than the sound.

(My wife toured with the band Asia in Europe one year, a tour to celebrate their Number One debut album. It happens to be one of the worst sounding records I have ever played, but that didn’t stop people from loving the music. Why would it?)

A better example than Stage Fright are the albums released by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Good recordings, not great ones, nothing like Demo Discs, just some of the greatest roots rock music ever made. Their first six albums probably belong in any collection of pop and rock. (Number seven, not so much.)

It’s how Washington Post writer Geoff Edgers first learned for himself that our records are the real deal.

We sent him one of their albums, a second rate copy with one good side, and according to him it’s still the best sounding CCR record he’s ever heard. I told him he should play the AP pressing and he said “Why bother?” He’s heard enough of their records to know what to expect, and it sure isn’t better sound.

And, because I can’t resist, allow me to point out that the Heavy Vinyl pressings those AP guys made were really something, and by really something, I mean really bad. After playing the Heavy Vinyl (and the MoFi), I had only one question: why would anyone want to take all the fun out of CCR’s music?

Still waiting for an answer to that one.

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The One True Test for Records

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

There is only one true test for records: Which ones do you want to play?

Collect those and sell off all the others.

Acquiring better sounding pressings and getting rid of those that are no longer satisfying will result in a collection that is a joy to own, a collection that will provide a great deal more satisfaction than one made up primarily of collectible records.

To me there is nothing more thrilling in audio than hearing a favorite, familiar recording sound better than I ever thought it could. If that’s the kind of thrill you are looking for, I recommend you visit the site as often as you can. Something of interest is sure to pop up.

It can’t be downloaded. It can only be found — as far as I know — on an old vinyl record.

Like many of our customers who’ve had their standards raised by our Hot Stamper pressings, you may be so exhausted and disappointed by the mediocrities being churned out these days by one Heavy Vinyl grifter after another that you finally make the pledge to swear off bad records for good. Only you can free yourself of the chains that are holding you back.

Once those chains are broken, a world of possibilities will open up, populated by vintage vinyl pressings that exist by the millions all over the world, waiting to show you just how sublime and immersive and enjoyable music can sound in your very own home.

Here is a good way to get started.

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Analog Shmanalog – Why Avoid the Only Question Worth Asking?

Saving the world from bad sound you say? Hey, that’s what I’m about too!

The following is my reply to the friend who sent me the NYT article linked above.

He had been to my studio and heard for himself the sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that “The Wizard of Vinyl” produces. Up against properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LPs, they are rarely better than mediocre, and more often than not just plain terrible. (We actually play one of his remastered records in this video.)

Mr. Kassem can’t seem to stop stepping on rakes, no doubt because he never made any effort to develop his critical listening skills, which for some reason he thought he already possessed. As a consequence of this mistaken judgment, he literally has nothing to guide him, a fact that should be obvious to anyone who has played any of his company’s records.

My letter:

This “pure analog versus analog tainted with digital” debate needs to stop.

It completely avoids the only question worth asking: are these new records any good?

Who cares how they make them?

Only the deaf! Those who can actually hear know how badly they suck and could not care less.

You sat me down and we played a batch of modern remastered records. They all failed. (More or less.)

That is the only true test.

Put all of these new records to the same test! Please, somebody!

Somebody with a top quality system can volunteer to do shootouts for any and all of them and let the chips fall where they may.

Finding such a system may be impossible, but we can at least try. This talk of master tapes and pure analog sound is getting us nowhere.

There is no testing going on, just claims being made with almost nothing to back them up.

None of this matters. Literally, none of it.

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