*Robert Brook’s Guide

Robert Brook’s Guide for the Dedicated Analog Audiophile

Robert Brook Revisits a White Hot Stamper Pressing of The Eagles

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is a posting Robert wrote many years ago and has recently updated.

EAGLES: WHITE HOT and SOARING HIGHER!

A quote I rather liked:

You can throw a Hot Stamper onto your rig and hear that it sounds better than your crappy “audiophile” 180g reissue, but when you compare it to your high res digital file, you’re not quite sure which one you like better.

The digital vs. analog debate, perhaps the most enduring in all of audio, persists because only a handful of audiophiles have truly realized the full potential of analog in their systems.

You may be reading this thinking “hey whad’ya mean! My analog system sounds great!.” And it very well may sound great, but I thought and still think that my copy of Eagles sounds great, and let me tell you, the White Hot Stamper is a WHOLE new platter of wax!

The tubey jangle of the guitars, the room filling weight of the drums and bass, the airy, spacious, luscious vocal harmonies, and every last sumptuous element of the mix, unmoored, liberated from obscuration so completely that the music, freed from every conceivable resolution constraint, SOARS to life in the listening room.

That’s what this White Hot Stamper of Eagles sounds like, and that’s what analog is ALL ABOUT!

This record, The Dude be damned, is one of my all time favorites. It’s a delicious recording on even a decent copy. My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Here is our description of a recent copy that is up on the site at this time.

Super Hot and $699 — affordable maybe for some, certainly not cheap, but as Robert makes clear in his review, one of the most amazing sounding recordings in the history of popular music on the right pressing, and the right pressings are the only ones we offer.

The notes for our Shootout Winning copy from 2024 can be seen at the very end of this post. Side two was a “strong 3+, ” which we would have called 4+, Beyond White Hot, way back when, but we stopped doing that many years ago.

Side two was HTF — Hard To Fault. This may have been the side two that Robert is raving about in his review.

My current copy, which bested several others, was competitive on side 1, but laid to waste by the White Hot on side 2. And that was the side I thought mine had nailed!

Eagles lives and dies by the vocal harmonies, and when the backing vocals are as clear and present and alive as the lead vocal is on most other records then you know you’re hearing a very special copy.

Can’t argue with any of that! That’s what we heard too.

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What Does Neutral in Audio Really Mean?

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

What Does NEUTRAL in Audio REALLY MEAN?

I wrote about this very subject in one of Robert’s postings from 2024, this one. Here is most of what I had to say at the time:

Dramatic limitations and massive amounts of colorations are endemic to home audio systems.

The only way to get rid of them is by doing the unimaginably difficult work it takes to learn how to identify them and then figure out practical ways to root them out.

This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished, even by the truly dedicated. It unfolds slowly, over the course of decades, and only for a very small percentage of audiophiles. Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. To attempt to go further feels like banging your head against a wall.

Regrettably, to push on in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves is for the few, not the many.

(Of course it didn’t hurt that we got paid to do it. An undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder also played a part, as did certain records that I fell in love with a long time ago.)

Pass/Not-Yet

In our opinion, some of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely.

They thought they’d come a long way, and perhaps they had, but there was still plenty of potentially life-changing improvement possible.

Can you blame them? Devoting the seemingly endless amounts of time and money necessary to climb the greased ladder leading to better sound is not a choice most audiophiles are in a position to make.

Wives, children, jobs, mortgages, and a great deal more — especially the lack of a dedicated listening room — all conspire to limit the efforts of even the most committed audiophile.

Not to pile on, but there is an easy way to spot these folks, the ones who could only take it so far:

    1. By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
    2. Or want to buy (ditto),
    3. Or have nice things to say about (ditto again, read the posts found on every audiophile forum).

We’ve made a partial list of the records that best identify this group, and it can be found here.

It should be noted that bad records, the kind being made by audiophile labels of every stripe these days, are no good for any of this work. The goal is to figure out how to make top quality vintage pressings sound right. (More on that subject here.)

Most new pressings will only sound enjoyable if the system playing them is good at hiding their flaws. We hope it goes without saying that no right-thinking audiophile should want anything to do with such a system, or such records.

And with his latest post, Robert Brook proves once again that he is an audiophile who knows what the goal of playing music in the home should be — to make it sound as natural and lifelike as possible — and, even more importantly, he recognized that it would take years of work to make that sound a reality, and knowing all that, committed himself to the task.

And why has he done all this work?

Because he is the one who gets all the benefits.

He gets to hear the greatest music ever recorded in a more powerfully immersive way than 99% of the audiophiles who share neither his approach nor his ambition. (You can add work ethic for the trifecta.)

If you want easy answers and quick fixes, Robert (and I) will tell you there are no such things in the world of audio. Until you’ve done the work, this way of thinking may seem counterintuitive and confusing, especially if you’ve spent much time on audiophile forums.

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The Cure for Audiophile Burnout, Upgrade-itis and Other Audiophile Ailments

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting. I think he really knocked this one out of the park. If you have yet to read any of his posts, this is a great place to start.

Later today I hope to have some thoughts to share about the issues Robert has raised. (Here they are,)

“HOLY GRAIL” System- the CURE for Burnout, UPGRADE-ITIS & Other AUDIOPHILE Ailments

Robert’s Approach to Audio and Records

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

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.

And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.

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Pet Sounds: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out between two pressings of Pet Sounds – the Analogue Productions pressing and one of our Hot Stampers.

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for Pet Sounds on this very blog.

PET SOUNDS: Analogue Productions Takes on the Hot Stamper

I have never heard the AP pressing, and have no plans at this time to get one, mostly because not a single one that I have heard on my system was better than mediocre. If your experience has been different, we have some questions for you.

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Turntable Setup Guide Part 2 – What to Do for Excellent Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

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.

Here is Robert’s piece from 2024. Apologies for the lateness of posting it. I have no excuses so I won’t bother trying to make up any.

Part 3 is already available and can be found here. Robert recommends you read Part 2 before Part 3, and we recommend that you leave Robert a respectful comment or two concerning any and all thoughts you may have regarding his advice.

Turntable Setup Part 2: What To Do For EXCELLENT SOUND

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Lady in Satin – What It Takes to Hear It Right

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

LADY IN SATIN: What it Takes to HEAR it RIGHT

Robert writes:

A few years ago, Better Records founder Tom Port told me something that I’ve never forgotten. I had just demoed my system for an industry guy, and while relaying the experience to Tom, he asked me what records I had played for him. I mentioned a few, including Charles Mingus‘s Ah Um.

Tom said (paraphrasing here) “Not a good choice. You want to play records that can only sound good one way. Ah Um can sound good a lot of different ways.”

At the time I didn’t fully understand what Tom was getting at. Ah Um, or at least the copy of it I had, always sounded great. Wasn’t it therefore a great record to demo my system with?

Since then I’ve come to understand that this was exactly Tom’s point. If you really want to show someone what your system can do, by all means, play a great sounding record, but also one that requires your turntable and your system as a whole be at their best to reproduce it.

Lately I’ve come to understand something that I feel every audiophile, analog audiophiles in particular, would do well to recognize and come to terms with. When we play a record, each of us is listening for different things, and these things are very often not the things that we should be listening for if we want to determine if our system is sounding its best.

Robert continues:

But a pretty steady diet of Ah Um for a number of years now has taught me that the right copy will sound good, even with the most basic turntable setup, and even on a system that’s not performing its best.

Meanwhile, it would seem that Lady In Satin is a record that only sounds good, great even, one way and one way only. It needs us to attend to all the little details in our system before it will reveal its magic.

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Turntable Setup – What It Takes for Mind Blowing Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

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.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

Turntable Setup: What It Takes For MIND BLOWING Sound!

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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Turntable Setup Guide Part 1: Updated

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

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.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

Turntable Setup Guide Part 1: UPDATED

Nothing will bring you as much joy as when you manage — by whatever means, probably against all odds — to make significant audio progress. (Just ask our good friend Bill S. how he feels about his stereo sounding so much better.)

The more progress you make, the more enjoyment you will get from your favorite music.

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“Robert directly improved my stereo to achieve levels of sonic performance I didn’t think were possible.”

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Bill, who also happens to be a very good customer of ours, recently had Robert Brook over for a visit to help him tweak and tune his setup.

The changes Robert was able to make to Bill’s system took it to the next level, or maybe even the one that comes after that. There are a lot of levels in audio!

As Bill said, even with a $6k phono stage and other comparably expensive equipment, the sound was still just OK.

Tedious, painstaking setup is the only thing that can make all that fancy equipment sound good, and Robert was the man with the patience to help out a friend who needed some guidance.

The magazines and the websites don’t talk much about these things, but we here at Better Records know that high fidelity sound is simply not possible without learning how to do the work and sweating all the details.

“TRANSFORMED MY SYSTEM from OK to GREAT!”

I only know of three people who followed my audio advice: Robert, Bill and Aaron, all of whom can be seen in the picture below.

For years I’ve been banging on about Legacy speakers, low-power transistor integrated amps, EAR 324p phono stages, Triplanar tonearms, 17dx cartridges, VPI turntables, Super Platters and motor controllers, Townshend Seismic Platforms, Hallographs, suspended cables, clean electricity, and the kind of tuning and tweaking that can take your system beyond where you thought it could go.

Even buying all this stuff used, the resulting system would still end up being a few tens of thousands of dollars. That said, I honestly don’t think you can achieve this level of sound with standard audiophile equipment, the kind you might see in a showroom or advertised on websites, at any price*.

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Azimuth – A Little Can Make a Lot of Difference

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 higher fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting. He recently spent some time with our favorite recording of the Beethoven First Piano Concerto, and needless to say, he’s glad he did.

AZIMUTH: A LITTLE Can Make A LOT of Difference!

You may enjoy our piece on azimuth and other aspects of turntable setup in this posting from many years ago.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

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