*Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

What Do You Get When You Buy a Record from Analogue Productions?

Skeptical Thinking Will Help You Identify Records with Better Sound

Chad Kassem, the man who founded Analogue Productions sometime in the 90s,  claims that all his pressings are superior to those of his competitors, as well as all previous reissues, and — gasp! — even the originals, or perhaps it would be better to say especially the originals.

In doing so he makes claims that can be tested. Our commentary today will look at how he came to believe in the superiority of his product. Naturally we disagree with him about the quality of his records, and have been doing so since the early-90s.

But don’t these disagreements just boil down to one opinion differing with another, our opinion versus his?

As a matter of fact, no. It turns out there are ways to run experiments which are guaranteed to identify the record pressings that actually do have better sound. We at Better Records have spent more than twenty years developing and refining a great many of these methods. Given the necessary resources, these methods are sure to produce reliable data.

This is data backed by evidence. Testable data. Data derived from experiments that may not eliminate the value of opinions, but removes them from the position they occupy most often in the world of audio, front and center, and relegates them to the margins where they are more appropriate.

So let’s get back to the question we asked above: What do you get when you buy a record on the Analogue Productions label?

In the simplest terms, you get a record that meets with Chad’s approval.

Since Chad appears — at least to me — to have no critical listening skills to speak of, he must instead rely on the assurances of the engineers who work for him. Yes, they tell him, they succeeded in making him a record of the very highest quality. There are no conflicts of interest they say. We all love music and are just interested in making the best record we can. Unsurprisingly, we made he best version ever.

Their professional opinions are then backed up by those that review and sell these very same records.

Everyone operating in this circular chain gets paid to agree that Chad’s records are indeed of the highest quality, exactly what one would expect to hear frmo those who know how they were made. (Confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — is surely the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of those who make and market audiophile records.)

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Shouldn’t a Digital Recording Sound the Same on CD and Vinyl?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

These comments are taken from a reddit thread that Geoff Edgers and I were on years ago talking about Hot Stampers. I would add that the audience seemed to have very little experience with high-end audio. Based on the comments I read, most of them, like most audiophiles, especially audiophile record collectors, thought I was selling snake oil.

(Doesn’t it strike you as odd that no one ever seems to bring up the fact that we make a point of explaing to you exactly how to find your own snake oil?)

Someone asked a question about vinyl for digital recordings. Discussing the difference I typically hear between CDs and vinyl pressings, I offered the opinions you see below. (We might have been talking about Brothers in Arms; I honestly don’t remember and don’t think it matters anyway.)

For those of you newer to the blog, please keep in mind that, unlike a great many fans of analog, I actually like the sound of the hundreds of CDs I own and make a point to play them regularly for enjoyment. Properly mastered CDs can sound shockingly good.

In my experience, a good CD will wipe the floor with the vast majority of Heavy Vinyl records being made today. If you are buying modern remastered records, I highly recommend you stop and instead make the effort to find a good CD player and buy vintage — and even some of the better gold — CDs.

My comments:

Well, a too short version would be something like:

On the vinyl and on the CD the tonality should be identical.

If it is not you have problems and you need to do some work to find them and fix them.

Assuming correct tonality, the CD should be big, lively and clear, assuming you have a good CD player and a good CD.

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Nobody Like Us Existed in the Record World of the 90s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A newer customer wrote to me years ago about the amazing sounding Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West that we’d sent him. He noted that his AP Heavy Vinyl pressing was “quite decent,” a characterization we found distressing.

Here is his original letter, along with some of what we wrote back. Newer comments and links have also been added.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

Some things have changed since I wrote that screed many years ago. For example, we don’t find the sound of the OJC pressing of the album acceptable these days, a subject I plan to address before too long [and have yet to do].

The bottom line is this:

The Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West you have now in your possession is the one that allows you to hear what that album is supposed to sound like.

Not the way Chad Kassem likes his records to sound: opaque, bloated, dull, smeary and compressed.

No, your White Hot Stamper has the brilliant sound that Roy DuNann recorded all those years ago, sounding, I believe, the way he wanted it to. This is of course only an opinion, but it is an opinion based on playing dozens of early Contemporary pressings and well as many vintage reissues that actually can beat them. Examples of both can be found here.

But Somebody Needed to Figure It Out, Right?

All that was needed was for some group to come along who could properly clean a batch of vintage pressings, original or otherwise, play them, figure out what the best copies do that the average copy doesn’t, identify that best copy, and send it your way.

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A High Quality Stereo System Lets You Enter the Starting Gate

Hot Stampers and Audio Progress Go Hand in Hand

It doesn’t put you at the finish line.

The finish line for an audio system is so far off that it cannot be seen. It can’t even be reached.

You can give up on audio if you want, that’s your call, but don’t kid yourself — you can never cross the audio finish line. There is always more to be done if what your after is better sound.

The goal should be to create a system of such quality that you never want to give up on listening to the albums you love in the privacy your own home. Striving for better audio will keep you engaged in a way that settling for the sound you currently have probably won’t. (And please don’t embarrass yourself by invoking the law of diminishing returns. It has no relevance to the world of audio.)

This insight comes from personal experience, circa the early-80s, when I had a lot of other things going on. It’s also true for plenty of audiophiles I have met who got halfway there and decided to move on and do something else with their time.

And you should want to keep finding new albums to fall in love with. (Maybe start with some of these?)

If exploring the world of music through an advanced, hi-fidelity system becomes a habit that brings you joy, you will most likely never give up on your stereo or your records.

Graham Nash’s song Better Days from Song for Beginners (1971) was one of the records that started me off and kept me going, a subject I write about here. An excerpt:

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“We Have Different Views of Digital”

Basic Concepts Every Audiophile Needs to Understand

A friend writes:

We have different views of digital. I think I’m more with Neil Young. When you have a choice, you go analog and find the best sounding record. But there is a world out there that uses digital. We’re not going to stop that. So the fact that digital is markedly better than it was years ago is significant. Now I think your view is… why would I want to bother with digital when I know the answer: The best sounding record I can find.

You don’t even use your car stereo to listen to music, right?

I used to really rock out in my 2002 3 series BMW outfitted with Harmon Kardon components. That was a killer system, the best car stereo I ever owned. (The Burmester in our new German SUV does some things well, but since it does not offer CD playback, and I’ve never hooked my phone up to it (or anything else for that matter), I’m sure I have never heard it at its best.)

In some ways my BMW system brought to light faults I did not know existed in my old tube home stereo, and that’s when I knew I needed to make a change. Talk about a wake up call! (More on that subject coming down the road I hope.)

I would take issue with modern digital being better. I am not sure if there is much evidence to support that. The best digital sound I have heard, and guys like my friend Robert Pincus swear by, are the CDs created in the 90s, before they learned how to “make them better.”

Back in the day we played them on the CD players we had picked up at reasonable prices (why spend the money?) that seemed to offer a more natural, analog sound. Out of the two dozen or so CD players I’ve tried over the years, I might have found three or four that offered sound that was strikingly similar to analog.

(None of the ones I heard with lots of fancy clocks and separate components ever did anything for me, but of course I would never say that that approach to digital can’t or doesn’t work. I just never heard one that did. If you have one, more power to you.)

I’ve thrilled to “digital that doesn’t sound digital” for thousands upon thousands of hours. Done a lot of work tweaking and tuning the stereo using CDs. Like the records we’ve listed that helped us dramatically improve our playback, there are plenty of CDs that fit that bill too.

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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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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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