*Core Insights

A High Quality Stereo System Gets You into the Starting Gate

Hot Stampers and Audio Progress Go Hand in Hand

It doesn’t put you at the finish line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(more…)

“Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

One of our erstwhile customers asked me a question not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

Some audiophile guy professes to me that he prefers his Japan and German pressings of Dire Straits’ 1st LP over the UK press. How can I tell him in a kind way that he is wrong?

Dear Sir,

You can’t, in a kind way or any other way.

You have to play the two pressings for him, on his stereo or yours, and that’s simply not possible unless he lives near you, which is rarely the case, audiophiles being fairly thin on the ground in my experience.

Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

All forums — whatever their benefits — cannot overcome this problem.

Next time someone posts an opinion about a record, ask yourself “What does his system sound like?”

If you don’t know the answer, why on earth would you put any stock in his opinion? For all you know his system sucks and his critical listening skills are non-existent. He might have a pair of JBL 100s in the basement and a Dual turntable (or the modern equivalent of same).

He may hate the records whose sound you love and love the records whose sound you hate.

I Look Forward to Being Proven Wrong

Along those lines, I had a new customer tell me that this record was one of the better Heavy Vinyl reissues he had heard recently. Rather than just paint every Heavy Vinyl pressing with the broad brush of disgust I normally reach for when doing reviews for them, I thought maybe I should actually give this one a listen.

It might change my mind. It might help me see the light. Maybe I could even learn a thing or two instead of being so relentlessly negative about modern reissues. They can’t all be as bad as I say, can they?

So I took his advice and ordered one right then and there.

(more…)

Hot Stampers and Good Sounding Records Are Not the Same Thing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan Available Now

They are barely even related. Here’s why.

A good customer wrote to us recently to say that he was not happy with the Stevie Ray Vaughan White Hot Stamper pressings we had sent him.

Tom,

I also have a couple more returns for you: SRV Couldn’t Stand the Weather and SRV Soul to Soul. While these are good, they’re just not quite up to White Hot Stamper quality like some of the other records clearly are.

I took the opportunity to reply at length.

Dear Sir,

You appear to be conflating two concepts, Hot Stampers and good recordings. They are not the same thing. They are barely even related.

Hot Stampers are especially good sounding pressings of specific albums that we found through shootouts.

The recordings of these albums may be better or worse than others you are familiar with. That has nothing to do with how hot the stampers are of the pressings we sell.

It works this way: if you had a hundred copies of The Dark Side of the Moon, the median pressing– the one that would have ranked number 50 out of 100 — would sound substantially better than either of those two SRV albums.

Pink Floyd: amazing recording. 

SRV: good, not great recording.

We would never sell an average pressing of DSOTM. We only sell the best sounding versions of it.

We would never sell the average version of any SRV album. We only sell the best sounding versions of them.

But no SRV album is ever going to sound like a good Dark Side of the Moon! (more…)

2-Packs – The Best Case for Dramatic Pressing Variations

More of the Music of The Eagles

Just today (3/16/15) we put up a White Hot Stamper 2-pack of the Eagles’ First Album. One of the two pressings that made up the 2-pack had a killer side two, practically As Good As It Gets. 

What was interesting about that particular record was how bad side one was.

Side one of that copy — on the white label, with stampers that are usually killer — was terrible.

The vocals were hard, shrill and spitty. My notes say “CD sound.”

When a record sounds like a CD it goes in the trade-in pile, not on our site.

We encouraged the lucky owner to play the bad side for himself, just to hear how awful it is. Yet surprisingly, one might even say shockingly, it has exactly the qualities that audiophiles and collectors are most often satisfied with: the right label, and, in this case, even the right stampers (assuming anyone besides us would know what the right stampers are).

The problem was it didn’t have the right sound.

I know our customers can hear the difference, but can the rest of the audio world? Most of my reading on the internet makes me doubt that they can. When some people say that the differences between pressings can’t be all that big, I only wish they could have played the two sides of this copy.

Or  had higher quality reproduction so that these differences become less ignorable.

(more…)

Better Records’ Abandoned Record Collecting Axiom Number One

What’s the Big Idea?

UPDATE 2026

This commentary about axioms is being reworked. Stay tuned for further developments.

However, you are free to enjoy it for the time-capsule insights from 2021 you will find here. We still agree with practically all of what we wrote, so no worries there.

It’s clear to us now that axiom is not at all the right word to use in describing what it is that we believe to be true about records and audio.

An axiom is often described as one of these three things:

1. A statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference.
2. An established rule or principle or a self-evident truth.
3. A maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit.

We stumbled upon the term Core Insight not long ago and realized it would be a much better fit for what we think we know.

A version of Core Insights as they apply to Hot Stampers would go something like this:

  1. A core insight is a fundamental understanding that helps identify better approaches to finding solutions.
  2. Core insights in our case come from testing thousands of record pressings to assess their sonic characteristics.
  3. Testing is the main way we acquire useful data about the records we sell.
  4. The data is then used to guide future strategies for finding even better sounding records.
  5. The underlying patterns or truths about the records we played are revealed through this process.
  6. Continuing research helps us understand the records we test at the deepest levels.
  7. This understanding allows us to refine our core insights and create new ones.
  8. The use of core insights insures that our experiments will continue to become both more revealing and accurate.

So Axioms are out and Core Insights are in!

(more…)

Identical Stampers and New Vinyl Somehow Produce Clearly Different Sounding Records?

nirvaneverMore Milestone Events in the History of Better Records

In this listing from 2007 we recount our experience with some copies of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. It was an important milestone in the evolution of Better Records.

We learned our lesson – no more sealed records.

Not if you’re the kind of audiophile record dealer who cares what his records sound like (which appears to put us in a class of our own.)

That same year we decided to stop carrying any new Heavy Vinyl release, prompted mostly by the mediocrity of the Rhino reissue of Blue.

So, all in all 2007 was a good year for us. We stopped playing their game and invented a new one all our own. Judging by the enthusiastic response of our customers we think we did the right thing.

Nevermind Circa 2007

The dirty little secret of the audiophile record biz is that the purveyors of these pressings cannot possibly know with any certainty the quality of the sound of any sealed record they are selling. (Whether they can tell what the sound quality is of any record they sell is an open question, and one we would have to answer in the negative based on the hundreds of audiophile pressings we’ve auditioned over the last 40 years.)

They turn a blind eye to the fact that some copies are simply not going to measure up to the sound of the review copy that they auditioned and described.

This is a good reason not to sell sealed records, which, of course, we don’t.

That’s because we’ve done the experiments and found out the things they cannot be bothered to learn.

But wait a minute. Even that’s giving audiophile record dealers far too much credit.  Only a small fraction actually review the records they sell. Most cut and paste a review from the manufacturer and let it go at that. And the few that do write reviews are often so far off the mark that they might as well be talking about another pressing entirely.
 (more…)

Better Records’ Abandoned Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

What’s the Big Idea?

UPDATE 2026

This commentary about axioms is being reworked. Stay tuned for further developments.

However, you are free to enjoy it for the time-capsule insights from 2021 you will find here. We still agree with practically all of what we wrote, so no worries there.

It’s clear to us now that axiom is not at all the right word to use in describing what it is that we believe to be true about records and audio.

An axiom is often described as one of these three things:

1. A statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference.
2. An established rule or principle or a self-evident truth.
3. A maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit.

We stumbled upon the term Core Insight not long ago and realized it would be a much better fit for what we think we know.

A version of Core Insights as they apply to Hot Stampers would go something like this:

  1. A core insight is a fundamental understanding that helps identify better approaches to finding solutions.
  2. Core insights in our case come from testing thousands of record pressings to assess their sonic characteristics.
  3. Testing is the main way we acquire useful data about the records we sell.
  4. The data is then used to guide future strategies for finding even better sounding records.
  5. The underlying patterns or truths about the records we played are revealed through this process.
  6. Continuing research helps us understand the records we test at the deepest levels.
  7. This understanding allows us to refine our core insights and create new ones.
  8. The use of core insights insures that our experiments will continue to become both more revealing and accurate.

So Axioms are out and Core Insights are in!

(more…)

First Get Good Sound – Then You Can Recognize and Acquire Good Records

Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress

You know why this guy has a wall full of records?

Because it’s easy to be a record collector — you just collect records.

To get your stereo and room to sound right, and recognize when they do sound right, or at least better than before, that is much, much harder. It literally takes a lifetime of effort.

I’ve been at it for forty-five fifty years. I still work at it and try to learn new things every day.

UPDATE 2022

Or at least I did. I retired in 2022 and left the running of the business to my dedicated, hard working and exceptionally talented staff.

Until you get your stereo, room and ears working, collecting good sounding records is all but impossible.

You will very likely waste a fortune on “collectible audiophile records.”

The kind with collector value and not much else.

These are precisely the opposite of Hot Stamper pressings.  Practically all of the value of a Hot Stamper is tied up in its wonderful music and superior sound quality, which is where we think it should be.

(more…)