*Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

Better Sounding Records? Lucks Explains a Lot

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written many years ago. It concerns a subject which does not get nearly enough discussion in the audiophile community: the subject of luck in audio and records.

Back in the 70s I was very lucky to have bought some exceptionally good pressings of albums that quickly became personal favorites and have remained so ever since.

This album and others like it were the reason I chose to keep going deeper into audio, which, to be honest, pretty much sums up my life story.

No skill was involved in finding these records. No real knowledge either. It was all just dumb luck. Perhaps you will agree with me that much of life seems to work that way.

Silk Degrees

Most copies severely lack presence and top end. Dull, thick, opaque sound is far too common on Silk Degrees, which may account for some audiophiles finding the Half-Speed an improvement.

Despite all the bad sound I found for this album, I kept buying copies of this record in the hopes that someday I would find one that sounded good. I remember playing this record when it came out in 1976 and thinking that it sounded very good. So how is it that all the copies I’m playing sound so bad, or at the very least, wrong?

Well, the answer to that question is not too complicated. When you get the right pressing, the sound is excellent.

I must have had a good one 40+ years ago, and that’s why I liked the sound. Something similar happened to me with Ambrosia’s first album.

The copy I had picked up at random when I bought the album new in 1976 just happened to have very good stampers. (Keep in mind that we don’t like to call a record Hot until it has gone through the shootout process, a subject we discuss in some depth here.)

When you consider that Hot Stampers for both of those records are pretty unusual, I would say I was very lucky to get good sounding copies of those two masterpieces while everyone around me was buying crap.

To be clear, when I was buying these records, and even as late as when I wrote this commentary twenty years ago, I had much less revealing components and the much lower standards that go with them.

(The longer I have spent in this hobby, the more obvious it is to me that the two go together. This tendency helps to explain, better than any other single reason — although lots of other things are involved — the audiophile preference for remastered pressings of questionable quality.)

So what do you hear on the best copies?

(more…)

The Really Big Questions Rarely Have Good Answers

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

On this blog we have a section devoted to a great many questions that often come up when audiophiles are thinking about records.

By clicking on the link above, you will find, among other subjects, discussions of the “working knowledge” some collectors use to identify what they believe to be pressings with superior sound.

To be sure, these are some very important questions, which, judging by what I read on the web, many audiophiles think they have the answers to.

Before we go any farther, we should make our position on these questions clear to our readers.

We’re really not that interested in big questions, mostly because there aren’t any big answers for them.

When it comes to records, being able to reveal deep underlying truths about a wide range of vinyl pressings is simply not possible. To be honest, we don’t think it can be done.

Knowledge

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of working knowledge. It’s that we have so much of it that we needed a blog to hold it all so that we could share it with others.

No, our working knowledge is made up of lots of little bits of data that guide us in discovering the best sounding pressings for the individual titles we choose to play.

It would be nice to have general rules to help us in our search for better sound on vinyl, but our experience tells us that general rules are so unreliable that they fail to function as rules at all.

(more…)

Are Our Heavy Vinyl Reviews Based on Faulty Reasoning?

Welcome to the Skeptical Audiophile

The short answer is that our reviews aren’t based on reasoning at all.

The full story follows. The comments you see below were left on our listing for the Rhino pressing of The Cars’ first album.

The grievances the writer lists are long and mostly unserious, but I think they have some value, just not the value the writer intended, so of course I am happy to reproduce them here and take a crack at explaining the mistaken audiophile thinking they represent.

If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies, you will have no trouble recognizing all the shortcomings this writer has called us out for in our review of The Cars on Rhino, as well as, we assume, the hundreds of other Heavy Vinyl disasters we take to task on this blog.

Rather that attempt to rebut the individual charges, which seem to be grounded in issues of logic, semantic hair-splitting, a deep misunderstanding of the unwritten rules of criticism, what does and does not constitute an ad hominem attack, my use of injudicious language, and who knows what else, I have an answer that I believe gets to the heart of why none of this matters, which you will find below in my reply to his comments. [Bolding added by me,]

Ad Hominem Attack: The author attacks Kevin Gray personally, suggesting that his work is consistently poor without addressing the specific issues with the remastering process.

Appeal to Authority: The author mentions Steve Hoffman and his successful remastering of The Cars’ first album on Gold CD, implying that because Hoffman did it well, Kevin Gray should have done the same. This disregards the possibility of differences in approach and technique between the two engineers.

Appeal to Popularity: Popularity does not equate to quality.

False Dichotomy: The author presents a binary choice between their preferred pressing and the Rhino pressing, suggesting that the Rhino pressing is objectively bad without considering the possibility of subjective preferences or different listening experiences.

Appeal to Emotion: The author uses emotive language (“just awful,” “godawful”) to elicit a strong negative reaction from the reader, rather than providing objective evidence to support their claims. This would be very difficult considering that taste and preference is subjective.

Hasty Generalization: The author assumes that anyone who disagrees with their assessment of the Rhino pressing must have inferior audio equipment or lack understanding of audio quality. This overlooks the possibility of legitimate differences in opinion or subjective preferences.

Appeal to Ignorance: The author suggests that because they personally find the Rhino pressing to be of poor quality, it must be objectively bad. However, personal experience or opinion does not necessarily reflect objective truth.

I would hope that no one reading this blog could possibly find these sophistic arguments persuasive, for the simple reason that none of them have very much to do with the sound of the records, by The Cars or anybody else, that we discuss in our 5000+ listings and commentaries.

Everything we say about records is backed up by the evidence we have discovered by actually playing them.

Failures of logic and generally fallacious thinking have nothing to do with whatever “truths” we believe we have discovered about records, because we didn’t use either one — logic nor reasoning — to learn what we know about them.

I also don’t think we would be comfortable characterizing our claims about the sound of records to be objectively true. Our claims may be objectively true for us; the same stampers of scores of records win our shootouts over and over again, even though no one playing or reviewing the pressings in question knows which stampers are which until the grades are in.

But that objectivity extends only to the records we play on our stereo, and the kind of sound we like our records to have. (May I point out here that the other two guys who took over the job of doing our shootouts more than five years ago heard things the same way I did, and we never quarreled even once about which pressings were the best. They didn’t need teaching, they just needed good records to play on a good system. If your stereo is good enough, the right answers come naturally and effortlessly.)

Fortunately for us, thousands of customers have found that their stereos play our records just fine, and these same customers seem to like the kind of sound we like. That didn’t have to be the case, but we’re glad it is. Otherwise I would have had to find some other way to make a living. I sure wasn’t going to keep selling Heavy Vinyl once it was clear to me how consistently inferior the sound was more than likely going to continue to be.

Logic and Evidence

To understand the records we offer, and the reviews we write, logic is of no use whatsoever.

The only thing that has any real value is experimental evidence.

Without experimental evidence, you simply have no evidence, because logic is not evidence.

(more…)

Compromised Recordings and the Rapture of the Purely Musical Experience

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The best classical recordings of the ’50s and ’60s, like the wonderful Mercury you see pictured, were compromised in every imaginable way.

Yet somehow they manage to stand head and shoulders above virtually anything that has come after them. How is that possible?

Well, having taken advantage of scores of revolutionary changes in audio that have come to pass since those days, finally we can hear them in all their glory on the kind of high quality playback equipment that exists today.

The music lives and breathes on those old LPs. Playing them you find yourself in the Living Presence of the musicians. You become lost in the performances captured in the grooves of these old records.

Whatever the limitations of the medium, they seem to fade quickly from consciousness. What remains is the rapture of the musical experience.

That’s what happens when a good record meets a good turntable.

We live for records like these. It’s the reason we all get up in the morning and come to work, to find and play good records. It’s what this site is all about — offering the audiophile music lover recordings that provide real musical satisfaction. It’s hard work — so hard that nobody else seems to want to do it — but the payoff makes it all worthwhile. To us anyway. Hope you feel the same.

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works.

Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start; it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

(more…)

Answers to Some of Your Hot Stamper Questions

The Beatles in Mono, Our Grading System, Our Cleaning System and More

We discuss a number of issues with our letter writer, the kinds of questions we often get, so here are some of the answers we often give out.

  • While Prices for Many Records Have Trended Down, Others Have Gone Up
  • The Beatles in Mono
  • Our White Hot Triple Plus Grade
  • Why Our Stereo Is Good at Its Job, and
  • Record Cleaning

  Hey Tom, 

First off, I got to say, congratulations on a great concept. Also, congrats on having the balls to charge what these albums are worth.

Thanks. Like any business, we charge what the market will bear, and it seems people are willing to pay a lot for these records, although less for some than they used to — some of our records now sell for half or even less than what we were getting two or three or five years ago.

That said, the top copies have held their prices pretty well over the years and often gone up substantially. It’s the second tier and third tier titles and the Super Hots that have really fallen in price. That’s where the real “bargains” are these days.

Ok – I spent a fortune on my system. Including acoustic design, the best of everything – speakers, turntable, preamp, amps – you get it. The whole set up probably cost me over $600k.

Wow. I don’t have $600k in my system, but I do have about $600k worth of labor in it (!) You can read all about Our Stereo here.

I am a crazy fanatic – audio perfection is something that really moves me.

Me too. I wrote about it here, when I fell in love with a record that gave me a good reason to get seriously into audio.

So, you can imagine I am intrigued with what you are doing. I will try you guys out (already bought my first album – CSNY) very hopeful that I will notice a difference between your albums and others.

Hard to imagine that you won’t hear a huge difference. Most versions of Deja Vu, including audiophile ones, are terrible.

I’d love to set up a call to discuss some questions I have regarding some of your best vs. say, they latest Neil Young releases with his archive release bundles. I have first pressings of the newly analog remasters and they are amazing.

I hope we’re not talking about this pressing: After the Gold Rush

I also purchased the Beatles mono set and have a separate mono cartridge and tone arm just for this set. They are real nice – not as great sonically as the Neil releases, but better than the Beatles Stereo box set.

We had a mono set in and spent about a half hour trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I realized in the end that the sound was dead as a doornail. If you want to hear The Beatles sound better than you ever imagined, we can make that happen.

But not in mono. Here are our in-stock Hot Stampers pressings of The Beatles, guaranteed to blow your mind.

I am also curious as to the system you use to evaluate your albums – and what you see as the holy grail of the A+++ standard.

Triple Plus means this: (more…)

A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Record Reviewing

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Allow me to respond to a comment left by a fellow named Ian Malone.

It was left in the comments section for the interview Steve Westman did with me.

He wrote:

Quite happy for you to promote your business Tom, but surely you are a better person than doing it in this way. I know that other people in the industry have said unkind things about you but you can rise above these insults.

My response:

I never say that the people making these modern records, as well as those reviewing them, are malicious or evil. I say they make or review bad sounding records and are simply misguided and, more than anything else, incompetent.

Am I being unkind? If Michael Bay makes one bad movie after another, are we unkind to point that out? I don’t know whether or not he is a bad person, but I do know that he is a bad filmmaker, and gets called out regularly for putting out a bad product.

Everyone understands that this is a matter of taste. If you always wished The Beatles albums had more bass, more compression and a smoother tonal balance overall, you can buy the new Heavy Vinyl pressings and get the sound you prefer on every title The Beatles ever released.

However, I hope you know that the sound I have just described does not exist on the master tapes.

I have no way of actually knowing that for a fact, but since no mastering engineer before 2014 had ever put that sound on an actual record, I think we can safely say that the evidence supports the idea that a completely “new sound” was specifically created for The Beatles when their catalog was remastered early in this century. [1]

A New Sound

Call it The New Beatles Sound. I am on record as not liking engineers who create a new sound for records that had perfectly good sound already. Those of us who do not like our Beatles album to have those qualities should not be buying these newly remastered versions.

We offer the consumer an alternative sound, and, since our Beatles Hot Stampers are far and away our best sellers, it seems our customers agree with us that they actually do sound better. Some come back, sure, but not many, and I don’t think anyone has ever said they liked the new pressings better, although I cannot rule out that possibility in the future, audiophiles being who they are.

In some ways we operate like Consumer Reports. Blender X is terrible at making margaritas and blender Y is good at making those delicious drinks. The company that makes bad blenders should be called to account. If there is a name attached to that company, then I guess we can say that the person who runs that company should learn how to make better blenders or find something else to do with his time.

(more…)

Facing Some Hard Truths in Phoenix

Advice on Making Audio Progress

Or kicking them while they’re down. Pick whichever one you like best, they both work for me.

For those of you who have not been following this story, here is the best place to start.

Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough. (In September there will be a long-form video of me going about a Hot Stamper shootout and discussing the world of audiophile records, which you do not want to miss!)

Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.

Before we start talking about where the blame lies in this mess — with Esposito, Fremer, Jim Davis, or the so-called “engineers” who work for Mobile Fidelity — I would like bring up a couple of ideas that you have no doubt seen before, mostly because they are discussed endlessly on this blog.

We Make Mistakes

The first is that anyone who has been on an audio journey for very long has made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when we were wrong. You might say we are even proud of the fact that we used to get so many things wrong about records and audio.

Our experimental, evidence-based approach, requiring that we not only make mistakes but that we embrace them, is surely key to the progress we have made in understanding recordings and home audio. One of our favorite quotes on the subject is attributed to Alexander Pope.

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

To say that few audiophiles have followed our approach is not to admit defeat. Rather it is simply to say that the approach we use to find better sounding pressings involves a great deal of tedious, sometimes expensive, always time-consuming work, work that few audiophiles seem interested in doing.

Instead, the approach that most audiophiles these days take is to buy ready-made audiophile pressings. They convince themselves — how, I cannot begin to imagine — that these pressings are superior to all others because of the exceptional skills and superior methods of those tasked with mastering and pressing them. Also I think I remember reading that their hearts were in the right place or something to that effect.

(more…)

To Better Understand the Mysteries of Records, Consider These Three Ideas

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

We think that sitting down to play a Hot Stamper pressing — one you find yourself through the shootout process, or one we find for you — is the only way to appreciate its superior sound quality.

A great sounding LP, played on a top quality system, is an immersive experience hard to recreate with anything other than vintage vinyl.

For those who want to dig deeper into the mysteries of vinyl, consider the three commentaries we’ve linked below:

Compromised Recordings Versus Purist Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different then. A few dozen had been done since 2004, and probably not nearly as well as we thought at the time, truth be told.

A while back one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few really amazing sounding direct discs that contains music actually worth listening to. Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. 

Hot Stamper pressings are almost always going to be studio multi-track recordings, not direct to discs of live performances.

They will invariably suffer many compromises compared to the purist approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate sources of distortion in the pursuit of the highest fidelity.

But when they do that, they almost always fail. How many Direct Discs sound like that Glenn Miller? A dozen at most. The vast majority are just plain awful. I know, I’ve played practically every one ever made. For more than a decade I made a living selling them.

Thankfully that is no longer the case, although we do have a handful of direct discs that we still do shootouts for, such as The Three, Glenn Miller, Straight from the Heart and the odd Sheffield.

Compromised Recordings

What we do play is those very special, albeit compromised, mass-produced pressings. The right Londons and Shaded Dogs. Columbia and Contemporary jazz. Brewer and Shipley. Sergio Mendes. The Beatles. The Doobie Brothers for Pete’s sake!

Why? Because those pressings actually communicate the music. They allow you to forget about the recording and just listen. You can’t do that very often with the CD of the album. You can’t even do it with most of the vinyl pressings you run into. You certainly can’t do it with the vast majority of 180 gram LPs being made today, not in our experience anyway.

You have to have the right pressing. That’s what a Hot Stamper is: more than anything else, it’s the right pressing.

It’s the one that really lets the music come through, regardless of whatever compromises were made along the way.

(more…)

Getting Older and Losing Patience

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores that sold  new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten, sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

I’ve noticed an interesting development in the world of record collecting, one that seems to be true for me as well as many of my customers.

As I’ve gotten older I find I have more money, which allows me to buy higher quality goods of all kinds, including — and especially — records.

I also seem to have much less tolerance for practically anything of mediocre quality.

And I have much less patience with the hassle of having to work to find a record exceptional sound, one that actually will reward me for the time and effort it will take to throw it on the turntable, sit down and listen to it all the way through.

As a consequence, if I’m going to play a record, I’m going to make sure it’s a good one, and I don’t want to have to play five or ten copies to find the one with the magic that will keep me involved from start to finish.

Because it’s our business, we actually do play five or ten copies of every record we judge, but I sure don’t have the patience to go through all that rigamarole for my own personal listening the way I did before I retired.

(more…)