Digital Matters Because…?

Which Art Pepper Today Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written in 2010 or thereabouts.

There is new information about the album as of 2024, which can be found here.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; in our experience, the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

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How Does the Heavy Vinyl Rubber Soul Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

This review was originally written in 2015.

We are so excited to tell you about the first of the Heavy Vinyl Beatles remasters we’ve played! As we cycle through our regular Hot Stamper shootouts for The Beatles’ albums we will be of course be reviewing more of them*. I specifically chose this one to start with, having spent a great deal of time over the last year testing the best vinyl pressings against three different CD versions of Rubber Soul.

The short version of our review of the new Rubber Soul vinyl would simply point out that it’s awful, and, unsurprisingly, it’s awful in most of the ways that practically all modern Heavy Vinyl records are: it’s opaque, airless, energy-less and just a drag.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to take Michael Fremer, the foremost champion of thicky vinyl, to task in expectation of his usual rave review, when to my surprise I found the rug had been pulled out from under me — he didn’t like it either. Damn!

MF could hear how bad it was. True to form, he thinks he knows why it doesn’t sound good:

As expected, Rubber Soul, sourced from George Martin’s 1987 16 bit, 44.1k remix sounds like a CD. Why should it sound like anything else? That’s from what it was essentially mastered. The sound is flattened against the speakers, hard, two-dimensional and generally hash on top, yet it does have a few good qualities as CDs often do: there’s good clarity and detail on some instruments. The strings are dreadful and the voices not far behind. The overall sound is dry and decay is unnaturally fast and falls into dead zone.

It strikes me as odd that the new vinyl should sound like a CD. I have listened to the newly remastered 2009 CD of Rubber Soul in stereo extensively and think it sounds quite good, clearly better than the Heavy Vinyl pressing that’s made from the very same 16 bit, 44.1k remixed digital source.

If the source makes the new vinyl sound bad, why doesn’t it make the new CD sound bad? I can tell you that the new CD sounds dramatically better than the 1987 CD I’ve owned for twenty years. They’re not even close. How could that be if, as MF seems to believe, the compromised digital source is the problem?

Lucky for me I didn’t know what the source for the new CD was when I was listening to it. I assumed it came from the carefully remastered hi-rez tapes that were being used to make the new series in its entirety, digital sources that are supposed to result in sound with more analog qualities.

Well, based on what I’ve heard, they do, and those more analog qualities obviously extend to the new Rubber Soul compact disc. At least to these ears they do.

It’s possible my ignorance of the source tape allowed me to avoid the kind of confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — that is surely one of the biggest pitfalls in all of audio and a pit that Fremer falls into regularly.

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The Best Pressings of Love Over Gold Have Surprisingly Natural Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

This modern album (1982) can sound surprisingly good on the right pressing.

On most copies the highs are grainy and harsh, not exactly the kind of sound that inspires you to turn your system up good and loud and get really involved in the music. I’m happy to report that the best pressings have no such problem – they rock and they sound great when playing loud.

We pick up every clean copy we see of this album, domestic or import, because we know from experience just how good the best pressings can sound.

What do the best copies have?

REAL dynamics for one.

And with those dynamics you need rock solid bass. Otherwise the loud portions simply become irritating.

A lack of grain is always nice — many of the pressings we played were gritty or grainy.

Other copies that were quite good in most ways lacked immediacy, and we naturally took serious points off for that.

The best copies of Love Over Gold are far more natural than the average pressing you might come across, and that’s a recognizable quality we can listen for and give weight to in our grading.

It’s key to the sound of the better pressings, which means in our shootouts it’s worth a lot of points. Otherwise you might as well be playing the CD.

Domestics or Imports?

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Brothers in Arms – Not Bad When It’s Properly Mastered and Pressed!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

Many copies suffer from harsh, digital-sounding highs.

Pull out your old copy and listen to the beginning of side two and you should have no trouble hearing what we’re on about.

Compare that to the silkier, sweeter top end on even the lowest-graded Hot Stamper pressing you may have picked up from your friends at Better Records and it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself going back to listening to whatever pressing you had been playing.

The comparison, we hope, will be edifying.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

In our experience, this record sounds best this way:

And that means that it’s Robert Ludwig’s initials you should be looking for in the dead wax. Accept no substitutes.

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Is Digital Really the Problem on this Cowboy Junkies Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Sound 

The RCA domestic pressings cut at Sterling are not worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

Don’t be one of those die-hard analog types who point fingers at the fact that there was digital in the recording chain when their pressing doesn’t sound good.

It’s got nothing to do with digital. It has everything to do with Sterling doing a bad job mastering the domestic vinyl.

(Keep in mind that a very large group of audiophiles, including some well-known reviewers, had no idea there was a digital step used in the process of making some of the records they had raved about. Apparently the only way to hear it is when you already know it’s there.)

Our notes for the domestic pressing below read:

  • Flat and dry vox.
  • Shifted up [tonally]
  • A bit scooped [or “sucked out” in the midrange, meaning the middle of the midrange is missing to some degree]

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart from each other and you can get that sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Why Defend the Indefensible?

When good mastering houses like Kendun and Sterling and Artisan make bad sounding records, we offer no excuses for their shoddy work. The same would be true for the better-known cutting engineers who’ve done work for them, as well as other cutting operations.

Individuals working for generally good companies sometimes produce substandard work product.

How is this news to anyone outside of the sycophantic thread posters, youtubers, and self-identified record experts who write for the audiophile community?

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Revisiting the Analog Vs. Digital Debate with Donald Fagen

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Many years ago we did a big shootout for this album. Afterwards we asked this question:

Do all the pressings of The Nightfly sound like CDs?

The average copy of this digitally recorded, mixed and mastered LP sounds just the way you would expect it to: like a CD.

It’s anemic, two-dimensional, opaque, thin, bright, harsh, with little extreme top and the kind of bass that’s all “note” with no real weight, solidity or harmonic structure. Sounds like a CD, right? (That’s the way many of my CDs sound, which is why I rarely listen to them these days.)

But what if I told you that the best copies of The Nightfly can actually sound like a real honest-to-goodness ANALOG recording, with practically none of the nasty shortcomings listed above? You may not believe it, but it’s true.

How do I know it’s true?

The same way I came to learn practically everything I believe about the sound of equipment and records. I heard it for myself. (Keeping in mind that I am sure to be wrong about some things. Not to worry. When I find out which things those are, I will post them in this section of the blog where they can join the other 175+ entries.)

I heard a copy sound so natural and correct that I would never have guessed it was digital. On my honor, that’s the truth. The best copies of The Nightfly can actually be shockingly analog.

Simply put, the question before the house is: Can this record sound analog? We’ll be taking the affirmative.

The problem with the typical copy of this record is gritty, grainy, grungy sound — not the kind that’s on the master tape, the kind that’s added during the mastering and pressing of the record. When that crap goes away, as it so clearly does on a copy we played recently, it lets you see just how good sounding this record can be. And that means really good sounding.

On most copies, the CD-like opacity and grunge would naturally be attributed to the digital recording process. That’s the conventional wisdom, so those with a small data sample (in most cases the size of that sample will be one) could be forgiven for reaching such a conclusion. Based on our findings it turns out to be false.

The bad pressings do indeed sound more like CDs. The best pressings do not.

If you like having your biases confirmed, then by all means, keep your digital-sounding copy and pretend you know why The Nightfly sounds bad on vinyl.

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