*Critical Listening

If your equipment (regardless of cost) or your critical listening skills do not allow you to hear the kinds of sonic differences among pressings we describe, then whether you are just getting started in audio or are a self-identified Audio Expert writing for the most prestigious magazines and websites, there is much work to be done to achieve higher quality sound.

Those who follow older audiophile approaches will benefit from a greater reliance on empirical testing and less on conventional thinking and received wisdom.

Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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Imagine on Mobile Fidelity from 1984

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

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 depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea 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 album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

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Baskets of Recordings and Facets of Reproduction

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now

Ideally you need a basket of roughly five to ten well known recordings with which to test your equipment, tweaks, room, cleaning regimen and the like.

Don’t rely on any single recording to be The Truth. None of them are. (I found this out the hard way when tweaking the setup in our new studio in 2022.)

To illustrate this idea, imagine your stereo as a huge diamond. Every recording you play is showing you a different facet of that diamond, corresponding to a different strength or weakness of your system’s reproduction.

Audiophile X will play a record and say it has bad bass. His bass reproduction is excellent when playing other recordings, so record X, which he thinks has bad bass, is clearly at fault.

If you have been in audio for very long, you should easily recognize the conclusion this person has drawn as a case of mistaken audiophile thinking. 

Audiophile Y plays the same record and says it has good bass. Assuming the record has good bass for a moment, what is in fact happening in Audiophile X’s system is that most facets of his bass are good, but some facet of his bass is bad, and this record is showing him some shortcoming in his bass reproduction that his other records are not capable of showing him. 

If Audiophile X makes some changes to his stereo, and the record in question now has better bass, and, importantly, other records still sound as good or better than they used to, then some measure of success has most likely been achieved, and another step forward has been taken on that very long and often frustrating journey that we are on.

Flaws in the Diamond

The diamond has many flaws. We find them and fix them by regular tweaking and tuning, both of which have the added benefit of improving one’s critical listening skills.

To help you improve your stereo, room, electricity and the like, we have scores of records that are good for testing a great many aspects of audio reproduction.

Rickie Lee Jones’ first album is what we would call a bad test disc, for one very simple reason:

It can sound good on a system with a great many problems. It doesn’t expose sonic flaws as much as it hides them.

Port’s Rule states: If it isn’t easy for your test discs to sound wrong, they are not very good test discs.

If you are looking for tougher test discs, we have you covered there, with more than two dozen ballbusters guaranteed to bring any stereo to its knees. If you like a challenge, and own some of these records, preferably Hot Stamper pressings you bought from us (because we know those have the right sound; we played them), we invite you to have at ’em.

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I Have to Admit: the Cisco Pressing of Home Again! Had Me Vexed

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Doc Watson

Folks, if you made the mistake of buying the Cisco Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album, and you manage to grab one of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are really in for a treat.

I have to confess that when this record came out in 2003 I had a hard time coming to grips with what was wrong with it. I knew I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure exactly why. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing wrong, if anything. It seemed tonally correct and natural sounding. Why didn’t I like it?

It wasn’t phony up top with sloppy bass like a MoFi.

It wasn’t hard and transistory like so many of the Classic Records pressings back then.

I didn’t know the record at all so I really had nothing to judge it by.

But there was definitely something lacking in the sound that had me confused. Eventually I figured it out. Looking back on it now, the problems with the Cisco I could not identify were these:

  • The Cisco lacks presence. It puts Doc Watson further back than he should be, assuming that he is where he should be on the good vintage pressings, which sound right to me — some better, some worse, of course. Moving him back in the sound field does him no favors.
  • The Cisco lacks intimacy, which is key to the best pressings. The shootout winners remove all the veils and put you in the presence of the living, breathing Doc Watson. The Cisco adds veils and takes the intimacy right out of the record.
  • The Cisco lacks transparency. It frustrates your efforts to hear into the recording.
  • Doc is in a studio, surrounded by the air and ambience that would naturally be found there. The Cisco is airless and ambience-free, with Doc performing in a heavily damped booth of some kind. At least that’s what it sounds like.
  • And the last thing you notice is the lovely guitar harmonics on the originals and early reissues, harmonics that are attenuated and dulled on the Cisco.

As my stereo got better and better, and my critical listening skills improved in tandem, it became more and more obvious to me what was wrong with the Cisco. When we play modern Heavy Vinyl pressings these days, especially albums we know well, it usually doesn’t take us two minutes to hear what they are doing wrong.

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Please Please Me on MoFi – Another Disgracefully Spitty Half-Speed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Sonic Grade: C

If you own the Mobile Fidelity LP, do yourself a favor and buy one of our Hot Stamper pressings. (Actually any good British import pressing will do.)

What’s the first thing you will notice other than correct tonality, better bass and a lot more “life” overall?

No spit!

As we’ve commented elsewhere, because of the wacky cutting system they used, Mobile Fidelity pressings are full of sibilance. 

As I was playing a British pressing of this record many years ago, maybe by about the fifth or sixth song it occurred to me that I hadn’t been hearing the spit that I was used to from my MoFi LP. You don’t notice it when it’s not there.

But your MoFi sure has a bad case of spitty vocals. If you never noticed them before, you will now.

We discuss the sibilance problems of MoFi records all the time. Have you ever read Word One about this problem elsewhere? Of course not.

Audiophiles and audiophile reviewers just seem to put up with these problems, or ignore them, or — even worse — fail to recognize them at all.

Play around with your table setup for a few hours and you will no doubt be able to reduce the severity of the sibilance on your favorite test and demo discs. All your other records will thank you for it too.

Especially your Beatles records. Many Beatles pressings are spitty, and the MoFi Beatles pressings are REALLY spitty. Of course MoFi fans never seem to notice this fact. Critical listening skills and a collection of MoFi pressings are rarely if ever found together. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone spending time on this site, you either have one or the other.

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Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl and the Loss of Transparency

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical and Orchestral Music Available Now

We review yet another mediocre Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl reissue.

We recently gave the Heavy Vinyl pressing from Speakers Corner, the same one that we had previously recommended back in the 90s, a sonic grade of C+. 

UPDATE 2024

Recently in this case means about twenty years ago.

To our ears now it has many more shortcomings than it did back then, which we discuss below.

So often when we revisit the remastered pressings we used to like on Heavy Vinyl we come away dumbfounded — what on earth were we thinking? These are not the droids sounds we are looking for. Perhaps our minds were clouded at the time.

Below are some thoughts from a recent classical listing that we hope will shed some light on our longstanding aversion to the sound of modern remasterings.

What is lost in these newly remastered recordings? Lots of things, but the most obvious and bothersome is TRANSPARENCY.

Modern records are just so damn opaque.

We can’s stand that sound. It drives us crazy.

Important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found. That audiophiles as a whole — including those that pass themselves off as the champions of analog in the audio press — do not notice these failings does not speak well for either their equipment or their critical listening skills.

It is our contention that no one alive today makes records that sound as good as the ones we sell. Once you hear this Hot Stamper pressing, those 180 gram records you own may never sound right to you again. They sure don’t sound right to us, but we are in the enviable position of being able to play the best properly cleaned older pressings (reissues included) side by side with the new ones, where the faults of the current reissues become much more recognizable, even obvious. When you can hear them that way, head to head, there really is no comparison.

A Lost Cause

The wonderful vintage disc we are offering here will surely shame 100% of the Heavy Vinyl pressings ever made, as no Heavy Vinyl pressing — not one — has ever sounded especially transparent or spacious to us when played against the best Golden Age recordings, whether pressed back in the day or twenty years later.

UPDATE 2024

We live and learn. To prove it can be done, here’s one, And we now know of one other. So that makes two.

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There’s a Better Way to Do Analog – Part One

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

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 hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

There’s a BETTER WAY to do ANALOG – Part One

Robert’s Approach

Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:

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System Neutrality — “Allowing the Music to Speak”

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining what the aim of his blog is:

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 hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

System NEUTRALITY: “ALLOWING the MUSIC to SPEAK”

An excerpt:

I am here to tell you, however, that in the few short hours that I spent with Robert and his system, I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge, both in technical tweaks and in the philosophy of how to listen. Despite owning either identical hardware or that of similar ilk (same speakers, cartridge, similar turntable, treatments, and so on). Robert’s system sounded fundamentally different from mine.”

This is surely the result of the large numbers of small changes — with potentially big effects — Robert made to his system, proof that the 80/20 rule is real.

If you click on the 80/20 link above you will find links to hundreds of test records at the bottom of the commentary, along with this paragraph:

These are the records that challenged me and helped me to achieve more progress in audio. If you want to improve your stereo, these are some of the best records we know of to help you take your system to the next level.

To that end, I recently compiled a list of seventy or so records that had been helpful in getting my system to sound better, mostly by working on the many problems I heard when attempting to hear them at their best over the course of the last forty-plus years.

These two were by far the most helpful, but, as I say, there were scores of them, records that I played hundreds and hundreds of times while I went about tweaking and testing. (That’s how I ended up with the lovely lattice all over my soundroom that you can see in the pictures below.)

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I Couldn’t Learn Much Until I Figured Out How to Train My Ears

Developing Your Critical Listening Skills Is Key to Finding Better Records

It’s amazing how far you can get in this hobby if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough.

To achieve real success you must be willing to devote huge amounts of time, money and effort to the pursuit of better home audio.

You will really go far if you’re willing to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding and appreciation of the sound of the various pressings you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles — that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best — we would currently be very unlikely to have a business selling a million dollars or more worth of Hot Stampers every year.

Conventional thinking and wrong-headed thinking would have prevented us from achieving the progress we’ve made over the last twenty years, and they will surely impede your progress too.

(Be sure to avoid these kinds of records while you are at it. They’re nothing but a dead end.)

However, if you choose to follow our approach, you are very likely to be amazed at the positive changes that will come your way.

Training Your Ears

Of course, we should note that it helps to have a dedicated full-time staff doing shootouts, including a full-time record cleaning person. All of the members of the listening panel were musicians with already well-trained ears when we hired them. From the start they had no trouble appreciating the differences between pressings.

I, on the other hand, am not a musician. Over the years I simply tried to get my stereo to sound more like live music. As it improved over the years, it allowed me to hear more and more of what was really on my records. I slowly gained the skills I needed to do the kind of critical listening comparisons that are currently the heart of our business. Let me be the first to admit it was slow going for about the first twenty years.

It has been my experience that most audiophiles are in that same non-musician boat. The problem seems to be that stereos are not nearly as good at teaching these skills as musical instruments are.

Unless you are of an experimental mind and are willing to devote a great deal of your time and money to the audio game, you are unlikely to develop the skills necessary to critically evaluate recordings at the highest level.

Unfortunately, playing into this vicious cycle, those same critical listening skills are the very ones you need to make your stereo revealing enough so that even subtle differences between pressings become not just clear, but obvious.

Better ears lead to better stereos, but bad stereos make it hard to develop better ears.

That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile.

Although we make plenty of mistakes, we think of ourselves as experts when it comes to evaluating the sound of records and stereo equipment. (Experts make mistakes, they just make fewer of them.)

But the practical consequences of these findings are that few audiophiles can ever hope to acquire expert critical listening skills. It takes too much time and it takes too much work. Most people are in this hobby for fun. They already have a job. They don’t need another one.

Perhaps there’s another, better way to look at it. Most people are not going to become scratch golfers, but they can still get better at the game. There is a balance to be achieved between working hard to improve your skills and having fun at the same time.

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Letter of the Week – “Tom likes forward-sounding records, mastered for FM broadcasts. Steve masters for home stereos.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

One of our good customers played some Hot Stamper pressings for a friend of his and wrote to tell us about  the experience.

Dear Tom,

There’s some fascinating sociology here with how contentious your business model is. It really tweaks people.

I recently made a friend who’s always been a vinyl enthusiast. He’s got a fantastic collection. My friend has worked with Steve Hoffman on a few projects in the past, and holds him in very high regard, both professionally and personally.

We got together over Thanksgiving and I brought along my hot stampers. We listened to them on his gorgeous Linn stereo. One by one, he could appreciate the differences in them, and confirm what I was hearing.

I put my Rumours hot stamper and then his Steve Hoffman remaster. I put my Mahavishnu alongside his first UK pressing. I played my Abraxas Hot Stamper against the MoFi OneStep, which he had heard of, but never actually heard.

We debated the sonic merits of each, noting the different decisions that different mastering engineers had made. In all cases, he heard what there was to like about the hot stampers. Despite the evident sonic differences, which we could both hear and agree to, we disagreed over whether that meant Better Records was really on to something.

My friend’s reasons to resist becoming a customer really had nothing to do with the listening experience we had just shared. “Tom likes forward-sounding records, mastered for FM broadcasts. Steve masters for home stereos.”

Or, “a 1A-1A pressing that’s been well cared for will sound the best by definition because that’s closest to what the artists intended.”

Or, “Tom says there’s variance from one biscuit to the next. That’s clearly absurd.”

All this, despite having heard the records! Now, to my friend’s credit, he did allow that he might have a look at the site and try one out, if a record he really loves pops up at a reasonable price. (As far as I know, he hasn’t done it yet…)

Anyway, I had to agree with him – your business model makes no sense in light of all our preconceptions about how to find great sounding records.

And, even when you hear hot stampers for yourself, the defensive walls still stay up. It’s possible to deny what you’re hearing.

Aaron

Aaron,

A quick note about 1A/1A. There was a time when we might have had 6-8 original pressings of a title, some 1A’s, some 1B’s etc. I would have loved to have let you borrow them and have your friend spot the 1A pressing, since it’s “the best.”

It is of course impossible to do that, but then you just lose friends when you embarrass them that way, and who cares what somebody else likes or doesn’t like, thinks or doesn’t think about records? I sure never did. The records sound the way they sound. Opinions, as you found out for yourself, have been known to vary.

Hoffman’s fans are true believers. Try blindfolding the guys on his forum and playing them a variety of pressings, of his stuff and others. They would not do a good job of knowing which is which by ear, which are the ones you’re supposed to like and which are the ones that shouldn’t sound good, your friend included.

But most audiophiles will never submit to this test because the rug might be pulled out from under them. That is a risk they cannot take. The only tests they are willing to submit to are the ones where they know what the answers are in advance, and, to make matters worse, the only answers they will accept are the ones guaranteed to corroborate their biases and prejudgments.

When Geoff Edgers of The Washington Post wanted to test me with a batch of mystery pressings, I said “Bring it on. I do this for a living, and I’ve been at it for twenty years. I know good sound when I hear it.” He went on to play me two of the best sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings I have ever heard (here’s one of them), as well as some of the worst. (Reviews for those are  coming, but there are only so many hours in a day and finding the motivation to critique mediocre Heavy Vinyl pressings is not easy when there are so many great records to write about.)

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