*Thinking About Records

Robert Brook Has a Question for the Audiophile Community

Are Hot Stampers for real, or are they for the birds?

(That’s a question I see asked a lot, not one from Robert Brook.)

Below you will find some of the text from an email exchange I had with Robert a while back, one of hundreds we’ve sent to each other as we wound our way through the thicket of records and audiophile equipment that we both struggle to understand.

In this email he recounts a personal story about yoga friend, exploring his reaction to an incident that occurred with a fellow yoga practioner and some of the psychological lessons he learned from it. What he learned, he has now come to realize, helped him see more clearly some of the things that are going on in analog audio, especially when it comes to the credibility of yours truly.

He also points out that I am not always as tactful as I should be, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he is right about that. Not my strong suit. I’m more in favor of the “tough love” approach, but after rereading some of my old emails, it’s often shocking even to me how blunt I can be. I’ll try to do better.

Enough about me. Please to enjoy Robert’s story.

TOM PORT and Why More Audiophiles Don’t Take His Advice

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered methodically and carefully along these three fronts:

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Guilty as Charged: We Used to Blame CCR’s Records for the Bad Sound We Heard Too

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

Another entry that falls under the heading of

What’s the big idea?

Before 2008 or so we had regularly been frustrated with this band’s recordings. There were plenty of  customers for their albums, but even our best Hot Stampers fell well short of the standards we set for top quality sound.

We assumed the recordings themselves were at fault.

Things started to turn around after that, judging from this bit of boilerplate at the bottom of a listing for Green River from around 2010 or so:

Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these.

The best copies no longer to seem to have the problems we used to hear all the time.

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard the congestion and grittiness in the recording is that two things changed. (1) We found better copies of the record to play — probably, can’t say for sure, but let’s assume we did — and (2) we’ve made lots of improvements to the stereo since the last time we did the shootout.

You have to get around to doing regular shootouts for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they might comprise or when they might have occurred, were incontrovertible. The album was now playing at a much, much higher level.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of taking full advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last ten or twenty years. [Make that thirty by now.]

Live and Learn

When Creedence’s records started to sound good, we stopped blaming those albums for being badly recorded.

It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad — or least problematical — now sound pretty darn good. 

Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability — and yours — to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what Hot Stampers are all about.

You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing, check off the box for that title, file it alphabetically on the shelf where it goes and sleep soundly knowing that all is right with the world.

You did the right thing, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the real analog tape, mastered by one of the greats, the one pressed on the best vinyl, in a limited run, and on and on down the list.

When — sometimes if but usually when — the sound of the record doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it, you merely accept the fact that the recording itself must be at fault.

We did it too, more times than I care to admit.

Try It Our Way

Instead of heading toward that dead end, perhaps you should consider adopting our approach, and approach that allows you to hear those very same albums sound dramatically better than you ever thought possible. In fact, many of our customers have written to tell us what a revelation our Hot Stamper pressings of familiar albums can be.

Our approach has the added benefit of freeing up time that might otherwise be spent bitching about the unfortunate sound of so many great recordings. (Fragile is apparently not a good recording. Songs in the Key of Life is also apparently not a good recording. Who knew we could find such amazing sounding pressings made from such bad recordings?)

This in turn makes more time available for pleasurable listening to the Hot Stamper pressing you discovered on your own or the one we found for you. It’s the same process whether you do it yourself or we do it for you.

You will already own the pressing that settles the argument.  Keep in mind that your pressing only settles the argument for you.

And why should they? They have never heard your copy. It would take quite a leap of faith on their part to believe that your copy sounds so much better than the one they own, when the one they own looks just like the one you own. It might even have the same catalog number, the same label, maybe even the same stampers.

But this is precisely what Hot Stampers are all about. Pressings often look the same but they most assuredly do not often sound the same.

We Can Only Do So Much

Unfortunately most of what is important in audio you have to learn to do for yourself.

We can find you the best sounding pressings; that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to play them, and learning how to listen to them, well, that’s a fair bit harder. That part takes a lifetime, at least.

This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it, especially if you use our approach.

It has worked for us and it can work for you.

This is what the revolutionary changes in audio link explains. If you haven’t taken advantage of all the newest technologies that make LP playback dramatically better than it was ten or twenty years ago, CCR’s records most likely won’t sound the way you want them to.

Trust me, there’s a world of sound lurking in the grooves of the best Creedence records that simply cannot be revealed without Walker cleaning fluids, the Talisman, Hallographs, vibration-reducing platforms, top quality front ends, big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a treated room, and all the rest.

Our playback system is designed to play CCR’s records with all the size, weight, energy and power of live music.

We live for this kind of classic rock sound here at Better Records. We’re prepared to do whatever it takes to play records like this with maximum fidelity, secure in the knowledge that a system that can play Creedence’s records right is one that can play practically any record.

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Cognitive Dissonance, or, I Just Paid $600 for This LP – Was That Too Much?

New to the Blog? Start Here

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

This letter came to us when we first started selling Hot Stamper pressings on our website way back in 2004-2005. Since that time we have received many other letters like it. Apparently, charging a lot of money for used records upsets people. Who knew?

Don, who wrote us the following letter, applauds us for being able to convince our customers to pay forty times the going rate for some of the records we sell — and like it!

The subject line of Don’s letter is Music.

What a great example of free market capitalism at it’s [sic] finest. Your web site is truly a unique example of marketing. You’ve taken a medium that [sic] completely relative and you can convince someone to pay upwards of 40X the going rate because….well, you said so. That doesn’t mean that the record will sound the same to them or that their experience of music is the same as yours as a reviewer. I guess if someone decides to spend $600 on a record they damn well better find a reason why it’s worth it even if they’re not completely convinced. (I took the time to read some of the other comments on your site.)

Don’t understand why someone would be upset about that or how they could argue that the records aren’t worth the price. They’re worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them as I see it. Maybe because they didn’t think of it first or they have some misplaced sense of ethics….who knows. I know it’s not worth it to me and thankfully there are plenty of other resources available for buying music. Another great example of capitalism…..

Sincerely,

Don L.

Don, honestly, I’m positively blushing at the thought that my “say so” is what gets people to pay the ridiculously high prices we charge for what appear to be fairly common rock records, the kind that might be worth roughly, oh, I don’t know, 1/40th of what we are asking? (Truth be told, probably even less.)

Ah, but here’s the kicker: there’s actually a scientific explanation for it!

It’s called Cognitive Dissonance, and it works like this. Let’s say someone decides to spend $600 on a record — sound familiar? — yet for some reason they’re not completely convinced it’s worth it — ring any bells? — so they find a way to justify the purchase to themselves by rationalizing one of two things: their actions or their perceptions.

In this case, although the actual record may not sound all that good when they get it home, because it costs so much they must find a way to make it somehow seem better than it really is. Failing to do so, this person, demonstrably $600 poorer, would have to conclude that he, like an idiot, has just let himself get ripped off, in this case by us.

Twisted Logic

The logic at work here is pretty straightforward. The buyer says to himself: I am not an idiot. Only an idiot would pay $600 for a record that doesn’t sound amazingly good, especially one that can easily be had for one-fortieth the amount of money I have paid, therefore the record must sound better than my ears tell me it does.

Which — let’s be honest here — may in fact be happening. I don’t know what these records sound like in my customer’s homes. How could I? They live all over the world. I have certainly taken some of my best sounding pressings with me while visiting customers, and they sure sounded good on their systems. But I can’t vouch for systems I have never heard and people I have never met. That would be silly.

You Are Correct Sir

You are certainly correct in pointing out that musical values are relative. The famous Latin proverb “De gustibus non est disputandum,” roughly translated “There’s no accounting for taste,” is one with which I am very familiar. (When somebody pays $600 for The Hunter on vinyl, you don’t have to tell me there’s no accounting for taste.)

As a skeptic I require evidence for what I believe in order to believe it. Although it’s certainly possible that our customers are willing to pay our admittedly high prices on nothing more than our say so, I see no evidence that this is in fact the case. All things being equal I think they must really like our records. They tell us so all the time, and they keep buying them week after week, so if they really are just fooling themselves, they apparently can’t stop doing it.

Occam’s Razor

The scientist’s and skeptic’s best friend, Occam’s razor, comes into play here. It holds that “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.” It’s often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions…”

Why assume people who buy expensive records are crazy? Why assume that the records they buy aren’t every bit as good as advertised, if not better? Why assume that the “other resources available for buying music” are even remotely as good, absent any evidence?

People assumed that the CD was going to be a cheap and easy resource for their music, and look where that got them.

Assumptions? Us?

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Question – Where Are All Your New Wave and Post Punk Titles?

Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob

Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records

One of our good customers wrote us a letter recently

Hey Tom, 

Just a quick message to let you know that I really enjoyed reading those two recent pieces on the Dangerous Minds blog (“Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob” and “Extreme Record Collecting Part II: There’s Only One Way to Find Better Records”).  As always, it is a total pleasure to read anything in which you are interviewed at length, as you articulate ideas about sound and music so much better and more eloquently than anybody else.

Very kind of you to say, we try! I did an interview with a colleague which you may enjoy: detail versus weight

Loved some of the nuggets I had never heard you speak about before (the lack of any hot stampers for Then Play On, the difficulty with the first CSN album, and your hilarious take on the live Fleetwood Mac album).  Hearing those kinds of insights from you gives me a total buzz for hours afterward! 

Awesome. We do a lot of that stuff on the blog. Do a search for any record and something will usually come up. Also we have a “never again” tag for some of the records that probably won’t go into shootouts now that I have retired.

The only point you offer in the whole interview with which I would quibble at all is your take on new wave and post-punk titles.  Your sense is that there wouldn’t be a market for $200 pressings of records by Nick Cave, Joy Division, et al., but I suspect the exact opposite is true.  I for one would leap at Hot Stampers by both of those artists, as well as many others from their time (Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Blue Nile, The Psychedelic Furs, Public Image Ltd., etc.), and I’m certain that there are many others like me.  What’s more, I suspect we would pay a lot more than $200 for each title.  Your point about the sound quality of some of those albums being less distinguished than records from previous eras could certainly be true.  Nonetheless, as we’ve talked about before, people don’t expect every record they buy from you to sound like Aja or Dark Side of the Moon.  Rather, they want the albums they love to sound the best they possibly can.

While not precisely analogous, I might mention your recent success with Hot Stampers of Beck’s Sea Change as indicative of the untapped market that awaits you.  By my count, at least three copies of that title (two White Hot Stampers and a Super Hot Stamper) recently flew off the shelves of Better Records.  I have no doubt that Sea Change is an exceptionally well recorded album and perhaps—as your write-ups indicated—an especially analog-sounding one.  But all of the records on your website have those qualities.  The copies of Sea Change went so fast because that title and that artist had never been available from your store before.

Having said all of that, I completely get your point about the time, money, and hard work that would be involved in introducing new titles to the Better Records inventory.  Given that you and your team are working full time as it is, and given that you are massively successful with the existing pool of titles, there doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive to change course for an unproven commodity.  Nonetheless, if you ever do decide to test the waters with some of these other artists, I would gladly share my two cents as far as artist/album selection goes, and I would gladly share my thousands of dollars for the shootout winners.

All good points. The reason it was easy for me to get Beck going was that I owned both Sea Change and Mutations and knew the sound was excellent. The R and D had already been done.

I have played albums by The Blue Nile, Psychedelic Furs and Public Image and found them all to be unacceptable, along with a host of others. Ultravox is a good sounding band, but who will buy them if we have trouble selling Roxy Music? We can hardly do Roxy Music these days for cryin’ out loud. One of the greatest bands ever.

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Santana – One of the Best Sounding Rock Records We’ve Ever Played

More of the Music of Santana

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums with Especially Dynamic Guitar Solos

In our most recent shootout (11/2023), the first we’ve done in quite a few years, my main listening guy was blown away by the sound of the Shootout Winning copy. This warmed my heart no end, as I have been raving about the sound of this album for fifteen years or more.

We created a section for phenomenally good sounding records such as Inner Secrets, and the link below will take you to it.

His notes from the session can be seen below.

And he’s not wrong about much of the album being “blah.” There are really only about four top quality songs out of the nine on the album, but three of those four are killer, and, even at our prices, make the album a Must Own for those of you with big speakers that can play good and loud.

Phase One and Phase Two of a Shootout

Like other Hot Stampers you may have read about, sometimes the instruments and voices just jump out of the speakers. When that happens I usually write “It’s Alive!” on the post-it, and I know exactly what to do with it. I put it right in the Contender pile, to be compared with the other top contender copies at some point.

It’s definitely a crazy-good Hot Stamper; just how hot we still need to find out.

Which is what happens in Phase Two of these affairs. We go back through all the best copies to see in what areas they really shine and in what areas they may fall a bit short of the best.

Of course there’s no way to know what accounts for any of the sound we hear. Not for sure anyway. It’s just interesting to ponder what makes one record sound one way and the next record, with stampers as little as one letter off in the alphabet — sometimes with exactly the same stampers! — sound so different from one another.

Doug Sax Is The Man

All the originals (the only ones with the potential for good sound in our experience) are cut by The Mastering Lab, one of the greatest cutting houses to ever master records.

Doug Sax may or may not have had anything to do with the making of this record, but one thing we can be sure of: he knew how to keep his lathes and amplifiers working at state-of-the-art levels. The sound quality is unsurpassed.

And he did it all with tubes.

He was very proud of his custom-made tube-driven cutting amps, designed by none other than his brother, Sherwood. His amps cut many of my favorite records of all time, including this one, an album that I have been using to improve the playback quality of my system for more than thirty years.

To this day we get taken to task by some regrettably misguided individuals for criticizing his work on the awful audiophile records he made in the 90s, many of them for Analogue Productions. We stand firmly behind the criticism we made of those albums decades ago. Their sound has not improved with age.

Those records from the 90s sound nothing like the records Doug and his crew were making in the 70s.

According to the logic of our critics, if you made great records in the 70s, then you must have been making great records in the 90s, whether your name is Doug Sax, Bernie Grundman, George Marino, Robert Ludwig or any other.

This is a very crude way of understanding the work of these exceptionally talented men.

The fact that this kind of sophistry is taken seriously by grownup adults in the audiophile community is embarrassing. To those of us who have been in the hobby for decades, it comes as no surprise.

Audiophiles have always embraced bad ideas (half-speed mastering!) and bad records (like those found here.) Our hobby attracts large numbers of True Believers, and many of them — too many of them — latch onto conventional ideas about records and audio which are attractively convenient and comforting.

Self-evident, convenient and comforting ideas — so beautiful and beguiling — rarely get put to the test. They are a ball some audiophiles have unknowingly chained to themselves.

These superficially attractive ideas do not hold up well to scrutiny. They are mostly assumptions, and we take issue with assumptions when it comes to finding better sounding records.

For those who would like a more thorough explanation of our approach and the heterodox views that result from it, we wrote about it here.

Uniquely among audiophile reviewers, empirical evidence, using large pools of data, all of it acquired scientifically, is at the heart of everything we think we know. And, as we freely admit, we still sometimes get it wrong.

Some quick notes about the best tracks on Inner Secrets follow.

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Kind of Blue – Is This a Good Test Record?

Hot Stamper Pressing of Miles’s Albums Available Now

More of Our Favorite Jazz Test Discs

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Listening to Kind Of Blue. Who needs an equipment upgrade with records like these?

Our reply at the time:

So true!

But on further reflection, it became clear to me that there is more to this idea than one might think upon first hearing it.

When records sound as good as Kind of Blue on vintage vinyl (not this piece of trash), it’s easy to think that everything in the system must be working properly, and, more to the point, reproducing the sound of the album at a high level.

If only more records were as well recorded as KOB, we could save ourselves a lot of time and money, time and money that we’re currently spending on tweaking, tuning and upgrading the various components of our systems. (Assuming you are in fact doing these things. I certainly hope you are. Achieving higher quality sound is one of the greatest joys to be had in all of audio.)

This is undoubtedly true, as far as it goes. But we must live in the world of records as we find it, not the one we want to exist.

Finding good sound for most of the records you wish to enjoy takes a great deal of effort, assuming you are setting your standards for sound at an exceptionally high level. Yours don’t have to be as high as ours — we’re the guys who put their reputations on the line for extravagantly priced Hot Stampers, not you — but the records you are playing have to sound good enough to allow you to forget they are records and just get lost in the music.

With every improvement you make to your system, you eventually will find yourself banging your head up against the psychological effect of Hedonic Adaptation.* Once you have achieved better sound, it doesn’t take long before you get used to it, and now your much-improved “new normal” isn’t as thrilling as it was when you first experienced it.

It’s a common misconception among many audiophiles that if you can make a record like KOB sound great, you must have a good stereo system. Some of them write to us to tell us that the so-called Hot Stamper pressing we just sent them didn’t sound good, which must be the record’s fault since so many of their other records sound just fine.

A certain Bob Dylan record came back to us, twice, something that has never happened before or since. One customer said it just didn’t sound good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper, and another said it was full of distortion.

In both cases, once the record had come back to us, we immediately played it to see where we might have gone wrong. In both cases it still sounded fine. We realized there was something about it that made it difficult to play, but since we were able to reproduce it properly, there was no way for us to even know what that might be. Eventually the next person to buy it found it to his liking and that was the last we heard of it. Since then no copies have been returned.

We’re Devoted

A great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles gain a better understanding of the vagaries of high-quality record pressings and the difficulty of finding and setting up the equipment needed to play them.

To this end, we have created a number tests to help improve your playback. Kind of Blue is a phenomenally good sounding jazz record. You can certainly use it as a test disk, but only if you go about it the right way, by setting very, very high standards for it.

Rather than play a record that tends to sound good in order to improve your stereo, set up, etc., why not play something that’s difficult to get to sound good? Once you have improved the sound of such a record, then it will be much more obvious  that your efforts were actually successful. (Here are some of the toughest test discs we’ve encountered over the years.)

We live the challenges posed by difficult recordings, not the ones that are easy to reproduce.

If you want to test the limits of your system, here are some difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.

And if you want to buy some records that sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.

*Psychology Today explains one aspect of the Hedonic Treadmill this way:

What are examples of hedonic adaptation?

After moving to a new house or apartment, one may revel in the extra room, the higher ceilings, the improved view to the outside, or other features—only to stop appreciating these things as much as the months wear on. The same could be said for the mood boost we might receive from other new possessions or highly anticipated experiences… such that eventually, their level of happiness returns back to where it started, or at least closer to the baseline than immediately after the event.

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Doing Shootouts for Other Genres of Music

More Letters from Fans and Detractors Alike

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Jack contacted us recently about doing shootouts for records we rarely do shootouts for:

Hello Tom,

I am thinking about opening an online record store based on the same hot stamper methodology as Better Records, only I focus on genres that you do not cover, such as rap, metal, punk, hardcore, post-punk, noise and other niche genres.

Thus I am trying to get a sense of what it would take to make this project work. Did you have a reputation in the audiophile community prior to starting Better Records that drove people to your store?

The other question I am wondering is about equipment. Do you think that one has to have extremely high-end equipment (e.g., $5000 tone arms and the like) to properly tell whether a record is a hot stamper?

Finally, do you think that your methodology could work on LPs released post-1990, when there are far fewer variants of an album available? Any insight you could offer would be much appreciated.

Regards, Jack

Jack,

You need to follow our approach to the letter. The basics of it can be found here:

For a deeper dive:

This would be a good budget to start with:

  1. Cleaning system: $10k.
  2. Stereo: $40k.
  3. Dedicated sound room: (not cheap)
  4. Staff to help with the work: 3-5.
  5. Years to figure all this stuff out: 10, at least. (This assumes you are twice as smart as me. It took me more than 20.)

Chances it will work: not very good. Better to find something else to do with your next ten years. I regret to inform you that this idea strikes me as a non-starter.

Best, TP

I sent Jack’s letter to one of my customers who has done some of his own shootouts, and here is what he had to say about it:

Tom,

Thanks for sharing it. You make it look easy, I guess!

Without a 30-day money-back no-questions-asked policy, nobody would buy anything from him. And, with a policy like that in place, he’d go broke in a month. Also, the raw materials he’s talking about just don’t support finding hot stampers. They are all overpriced. I have a couple hip hop albums that sound ok to me but sell for a small fortune on discogs. I’m not sure what people think they are buying, but it’s not sound quality. To find a copy that sounds really great, he’d have to charge more than you do.

That said, I’d gladly pay hot stamper prices for a copy of Maggot Brain or Joy Division’s Closer if they really sound like hot stampers.

I especially like his asking you if you had a reputation before you started Better Records. He probably means, “did everybody like you, like you could have been a youtube influencer?” You should tell him he has to have a reputation for disrupting peoples’ complacency, bringing the evidence, and not backing down.

Or you could simply point out to him there’s really no good vinyl anymore since the sourcing all became digital – which is exactly the time frame in which he thinks he’s going to find hot stampers.

Tom, I hope Fred’s got another 10-20 years still in him for this, because nobody else will ever be able to do what your company can do, and I don’t want to have to go back to finding good sounding records on my own. It’s just too expensive doing it that way.

Aaron

Aaron,

My “reputation” is something that I didn’t take the time to discuss with Jack. Everyone knows, or should be able to find out easily enough, that I am probably the most hated man in all of audio. A writer for a well-known newspaper who interviewed me confirmed as much on a number of occasions, with some of those he spoke with saying things not remotely fit to print in a family-friendly blog.

I accept my place on the “periphery” of the audiophile world.

The bulk of that world is clearly not for those of us who are very serious about audio or records, and there’s no reason it should be.

Two More Strikes

The records this gentleman wants to do shootouts for are indeed pricey and rarely do they sound very good.

Some of the main reasons our business has been successful is that many of the records we do shootouts for were made in the millions, and many of them are exceptionally well recorded, and in analog.

The albums we audition have the potential to sound great on pressings that, twenty years ago, were plentiful and cheap. The better titles are neither plentful nor cheap these days, but it seems our customers will pay the prices we must charge in order to carry on the business.

If our customers ever stop paying our prices, the overhead built into our operation would cause it to collapse pretty quickly. Let us hope that doesn’t happen before we can find Hot Stamper pressings of all your favorite albums!

Best, Tom

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Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound

More Commentaries for the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

More Outlier Pressings We’ve Discovered

This commentary was written about ten years ago and updated more than a few times since.

A while back we did a monster-sized shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second release, an album we consider THE Best Sounding Rock Record of All Time.

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds — a copy we gave a Hot Stamper grade of A with Four Pluses, the highest honor we can bestow upon it — various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne, How did it get here?

  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we usually place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

Which brings us to this commentary, which centers around the concept of outliers.

Wikipedia defines an outlier this way:

In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data.

In other words, it’s something that is very far from normal. In the standard bell curve distribution pictured below, the outliers are at the far left and far right, far from the vast majority of the data which is in the middle.

In the world of records, most copies of any title you care to name would be average sounding. The vertical line in the center of the graph shows probability; the highest probability is that any single copy of a record will be at the top of the curve near the middle, which means it will simply be average. The closer to the vertical line it is, the more average it will be. As you move away from the vertical line, the data point — the record — becomes less and less average. As you move away from the center, to the left or the right, the record is either better sounding or worse sounding than average.

Hot Stampers are simply those copies that, for whatever reason, are far to the right of center, far “better” than the average. And as the curve above demonstrates, there are a lot fewer of them than there are copies in the middle. 

Measuring the Record

Malcolm Gladwell has a bestselling and highly entertaining book about outliers which I recommend to all. Last year I read The Black Swan (or as much of it as I could stand given how poorly written it is) which talks about some of these same issues. Hot Stampers can be understood to a large degree by understanding statistical distributions. Why statistics you ask? Simple. We can’t tell what a record is going to sound like until we play it. For all practical purposes we are buying them randomly and “measuring” them to see where they fall on the curve. We may be measuring them using a turntable and registering the data aurally, but it’s still very much measurement and it’s still very much data that we are recording.

No Theory, Just Data

Many of these ideas were addressed in the recent shootout we did for BS&T’s second album. We played a large number of copies (the data), we found a few amazing ones (the outliers), and we tried to determine how many copies it really takes to find those records that sound so amazing they defy not only conventional wisdom, but our understanding of records per se.

We don’t know what causes these records to sound so good. We know ’em when we hear ’em and that’s pretty much all we can say we really know. Everything else is speculation and guesswork.

We have data. What we don’t have is a theory that explains that data.

And it simply won’t do to ignore the data because we can’t explain it. Hot Stamper Deniers are those members of the audiophile community who, when faced with something they don’t want to be true, simply manufacture reasons why it can’t or shouldn’t be true.

That’s not science. Practicing science means following the data wherever it leads. The truth is found in the record’s grooves and nowhere else. If you don’t think record collecting is a science, you’re not doing it right.

Ignoring Outliers

Wikipedia has a good line about ignoring outliers. Under the heading of Caution they write: “… it is ill-advised to ignore the presence of outliers. Outliers that cannot be readily explained demand special attention.” Here here.

Now let’s see where the grooves for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second album led us. They demanded special attention and by god we gave it to them.

The Grooves

We noted some new qualities to the sound that we would like to discuss; they’re what separated the men from the boys this time around. What we learned can be summed up in a few short words: it’s all about the brass. Let me give you just one example of how big a role the brass plays in our understanding of this recording. The best copies present a huge wall of sound that seems to extend beyond the outside edges of the speakers, as well as above them, by quite a significant amount. If you closed your eyes and drew a rectangle in the air marking the boundary of the soundscape, it would easily be 20 or 25% larger than the boundary of sound for the typically good sounding original pressing, the kind that might earn an A or A Plus rating.

Size Matters

The effect of this size differential is ENORMOUS. The power of the music ramps up beyond all understanding — how could this recording possibly be this BIG and POWERFUL? How did it achieve this kind of scale? You may need 50 copies to find one like this, which begs the question: why don’t the other 49 sound the way this one does? The sound we heard on the Four Plus copy has to be on the master tape in some sense, doesn’t it? Mastering clearly contributes to the sound, but can it really be a factor of this magnitude? Intuition says no. More likely it’s the mastering of the other copies that is one of the many factors holding them back, along with worn stampers, bad stampers, bad metal mothers, bad plating, bad vinyl, bad needles and all the rest — all of the above and more contributing to the fact that the average copy of this album is just plain bad news.

Conventional Wisdom

Any reason you like for why a record doesn’t sound good is as valid as any other, so you might as well pick one you are comfortable with; they’re all equally meaningless. Of course the reverse of this is just as true: why a record sounds good is anyone’s guess, and a guess is all it can ever be.

People like having answers, and audiophiles are no different from other people in this respect. Since there are no answers to any of these questions, answers in this case being defined as demonstrable conclusions based on evidence gained through the use of the scientific method, most people, audiophiles included, are happy — if not better off — making up the answers with which they are most comfortable.

This is precisely why the term Conventional Wisdom was coined, to describe the easy answers people readily adopt in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually finding out the truth.

Do You Need Fifty?

The short answer this time around is Yes, you need fifty. We had one Four Plus Side One and one Four Plus side two, on two different copies obviously, and I would say we had pretty close to fifty copies in our data pool if you count the first round needle-drop rejects, of which there were probably thirty or more I would guess, with more than fifteen making the cut for the final rounds. Forty to fifty, that seems to be about the right number.

The Recipe or the Pudding?

Fortunately for us we have more than just opinions; we have records. Our records are really all we need to make our case; in fact they do a pretty good job of making it for us, week in and week out, Hot Stamper sales having doubled or almost tripled over the last two years. [From 2004 to 2006.]

The truth is that our opinions, like any opinions, right, wrong or somewhere in between, are entirely superfluous. Anything other than the actual sound captured in the grooves of the record we are selling is of almost no consequence. That sound, in those grooves, cannot be denied. No amount of commentary, for or against, will change it in any way.

That fact apparently won’t shut us up, as you can see by the length of this commentary, but this is precisely what we referred to above when we mentioned “sharing” with you, our readers, the experiences we had on our — how to describe it — journey of discovery.

We’re not selling recipes; we’re selling pudding, and this is some mighty fine tasting pudding if we don’t say so ourselves. Blood, sweat and tears as ingredients may not strike you as especially mouthwatering, but somehow the end result, in this case anyway, turned out to be unusually satisfying.

Who can explain why this pudding tastes so good? Not us, that’s for sure. We can name it though. It’s an outlier. We prefer to call them Hot Stampers, but outlier works too.

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Baskets of Recordings and Facets of Reproduction

More of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones

Reviews and Commentaries for Rickie Lee Jones’ First Album

You need to use a basket of roughly five to ten recordings to test your equipment, tweaks, room, cleaning regimen and the like.

Don’t rely on any given recording to be The Truth. None of them are.

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 seems to have bad bass, must be 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 will have been achieved, and another step forward will have been taken in that very long and often frustrating journey we are all 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.

Testing with Rickie Lee

Rickie Lee Jones’ first album is what we would call a bad test disc, for the simple reason that it’s too easy to get it to sound good on a mediocre system.

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 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 invite you to have at ’em.

Here are some other titles that are good for testing the same qualities we listen for on Rickie Lee’s first album, many with specific advice on what to listen for.

Further Reading

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Back in the Day, Blue Was Just Too Tough a Nut to Crack

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for Blue

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

I must tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

Figure twenty grand minimum as a budget.

It can be done for less but only if you have the skills to make it work, and those skills are hard to come by. They can’t be bought, which is why so many megabuck systems sound so unbelievably bad.

And if you’ve only budgeted a modest amount of money toward your system, it stands to reason that you’ve probably only budgeted a modest amount of time and effort into improving the quality of its playback.

In 2005 We Gave Up

Hey, I’m living proof of how hard it is. In 2005 I gave up on Blue, remember? You can read about it here.

I didn’t have the equipment or the room I would have needed to crack that nut. That was in 2005, but it was before we had our EAR 324P (acquired in 2007), before we had discovered the Walker Record Cleaning System (2007, again), before we had all of our room treatments, and before we had made about fifty other changes to the system.

Here I was playing records all day every day, tweaking my stereo like crazy, trying all kinds of new equipment all the time, and even I found it hard to make much headway with Blue.

So don’t feel bad if your copy of Blue on domestic vinyl sounds terrible at your house. It sounds terrible almost everywhere. It used to sound terrible here. Most copies aren’t any good to begin with, and most stereos aren’t up to playing the few copies that are any good. Our stereo can play Blue beautifully now, but it took a lot of effort and a fair amount of money.

And now the new version sound positively sick in comparison.

So-Called Great Stereos

Audiophiles generally think they have great sounding stereos. I haven’t met too many that didn’t.

But most of these so-called great sounding stereos utterly fall apart when confronted with Difficult to Reproduce material played at anything above a whisper. Those are precisely the kind of albums we love to crank up good and loud here at Better Records, albums like Ambrosia, Fragile, Sticky Fingers, and on and on.

Got a Tough Nut like Blue? We say bring it on.

If your stereo is up to it, a good domestic copy of Blue will kill the new 180 gram reissue.