HV Com

Commentaries on Heavy Vinyl

Our First Shootout for The Voice from 2007

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Sinatra

By 2007 we were doing regular shootouts for albums such as Sinatra’s The Voice (1955) whenever we had the stock, and of course we naturally would throw the Classic Records pressing in the mix to see how it compared to the real thing.

I was selling the Classic when it was in print back in 1999 although it had never impressed me much at the time. It was a “good enough” record for $30 back then.

We used to tolerate the differences between good vintage pressings and Classic Records reissues, but by 2007 the sound of many of these remastered titles was just too second- and third-rate to ignore, when they weren’t just awful as in the case of most of their orchestral titles.

By 2007 we had much better equipment, a better sounding room due to the room treatments we had purchased, and others we had developed, better cleaning technologies with our discovery of the Walker Enzyme Record Cleaning System, and probably a lot of other things to go with them.

Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records, although we certainly did not know it at the time.

Our review from 2007 follows.

This is a Six Eye Mono Original Columbia pressing. These originals have the Tubey Magical Midrange that is missing from the Classic Records heavy vinyl pressing.

In our experience these Six Eye Mono Original Columbia pressings are the only ones with any hope of having the Midrange Magic that is fundamental to the sound of Frank’s early Columbia LPs — and is clearly missing from the Classic Records heavy vinyl pressing. The Classic is clean and clear and tonally correct like a CD. Without the warmth and sweetness of analog and, in this case, tube mastering, the sound just isn’t “the real Frank”. (more…)

“Tom, what about the argument that the engineers had to make the records sound good on the equipment of the day?”

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

OK, what about it?

Let’s dig in.

One of our good customers had some questions about a commentary we wrote entitled a kinder, gentler approach to record reviewing.

Tom, what about the argument that the engineers had to make the records sound good on the equipment of the day? Now that we have better gear, these guys can make the record sound the way it was originally intended. I think Chad said this about Rudy Van Gelder at some point in the video.

For the benefit of the reader, the video in question can be found on youtube under the title “Michael Fremer, Chad Kassem, Geoff Edgers: A Journey Back to Vinyl.”

Edgers was invited, apparently under pretext as it turns out, to talk about his article, but instead he was pressed into defending me most of the time. Kassem and Fremer — two individuals whose talents, such as they are, could not be more ill-suited to the work they have chosen for themselves — beat up on Edgers for about two hours.

As an aside, Geoff is a good guy and he certainly didn’t deserve this kind of mistreatment. Fremer and Kassem won’t apologize to him — that’s not something they are known to do — so please allow me to apologize to Geoff on their behalf.

I’m sure he has trouble understanding to this day why he was forced into acting as a spokesman for Better Records. Regardless of how he feels about it, we thank him for his service to the cause. (To be clear, he didn’t exactly take my side, which is the right thing for a reporter to do. He wanted to know why our disagreements upset them so much.)

For those of you who like to watch bickering and sniping from a couple of thin-skinned egomaniacs who can’t stand the fact that someone doesn’t think the records they like — or in the case of Chad, produce and sell — are any good, have I got a video for you. If you want to undertand how seriously you should take these two guys, both at the top of their respective mountains, watch the video and make your own judgments.

Our letter writer continues:

Suppose, that the RL cut of Zeppelin 2 had never existed, because Ludwig knew better than to cut it that way, knowing that most stereos couldn’t play it? And then Chad released something that sounded like that. Or, the argument that albums were engineered for listening to on the AM radio.

I think these guys believe they are improving on the mastering, and giving it the sound it should have had all along.

Dear ab_ba,

Yes, you are correct, this is indeed their position. They think these newly remastered pressings are a big improvement over earlier editions, and on quieter vinyl to boot!

Allow me to quote Michael Fremer, a man who apparently cannot get enough of the new records, even though his shelves are stuffed.

With all of the reissues coming from questionable sources or proudly proclaiming their ‘digital-ness’ ala The Beatles Box, we’re fortunate to have labels like Analogue Productions, Mobile Fidelity, ORG, IMPEX, Rhino and the others cutting lacquers from analog tapes…

So, we are lucky to have these companies that are doing things correctly lavishing vinyl goodies on us all year long. Sometimes we wish they’d stop long enough for us to catch up, but then we come to our senses and say “more please!” even when the shelves are stuffed.

Fremer was discussing a Stevie Ray Vaughan box set that Analogue Productions had recently put out.

One of my customers made the mistake of believing all the rave reviews he read from Fremer and his ilk and ordered the set. He quickly learned that his $400 had bought him some of the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl he’d ever heard in his life.

Did Chad manage to improve upon the sound of the originals, like the ones we sell? According to this customer, he did not.

“So the results are in … after comparing to the White Hot Stamper versions of the same albums I can say… as a musical experience it’s incomprehensible. It just doesn’t rock, doesn’t uplift, and it’s veiled, so you lose the whole meaning of this music, the energy, soul, life.”

If these companies are “doing things correctly,” then perhaps you can explain to me why their records sound so bad.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Which of these records do you think is an improvement over the best earlier pressings?

And that’s just a small sampling of the rock and pop. There are plenty of awful jazz and classical titles I could mention.

I would expect that even fans of modern mastering would be at pains to defend these mediocre-at-best and mostly-abominable releases on the merits. Outside of Mr. Fremer, who in his right mind thinks these are good records? And if they do, have they had their hearing checked lately?

I could go on about the sound of these pseudo-audiophile pressings — our Heavy Vinyl disasters section currently boasts 181 entries — but why beat a horse that’s been dead for more than two decades?

For those keeping score at home, the winners number 69 and the mediocrities number 62, for a grand total of 312.

Now, listen up all of you out there in audio land: if you personally have critically auditioned more than 300 Heavy Vinyl pressings, please raise your hand. (Not you, Mikey, you get paid to play these records in order to make sure everybody knows just how much better they are than the other copies you have randomly at hand.)

I’m talking about rank and file audiophiles. Who has played more Heavy Vinyl titles head to head with the best originals and vintage reissues than we have?

There can be no one, for the simple reason that the best originals and vintage reissues can only be found using these two methods: in small numbers by luck, and in large numbers by doing shootouts.

300 is a large number, and we seriously doubt there is anyone who has managed to 300 comprehensive shootouts for records in their own collection. The cost, in time and money, would be prohibitive unless you’re getting paid to do it.

We don’t get paid to review these modern pressings. We do it as a public service.

Our job is to find the records that beat the pants off them.

Cui Bono?

If you want to know how good the quality of modern records is, you don’t ask someone who gets paid to make them and you don’t ask someone who gets paid to review them.

You buy some and you play them. That’s how you go about determining if they are any good.

The “null hypothesis” is our friend here. If someone were to ask “Why are new records better than old ones?,” we would simply say that since there is no evidence to support the proposition that they actually are any better, the question does not need to be answered.

To take just one example, not one of them can hold a candle to this Mercury produced in 1958.

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Shostakovich – Another “Problematical” Classic Records Reissue

More of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as nothing special.

Like a lot of the records put out by this label, it’s tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all, Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a Victrola reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D for below average.

The Classic Records pressing can currently be found on the TAS list, but we don’t think it has any business being there.

The Big Blowout

When Classic Records was blowing out its unsold inventory through the Tower Records Classical Annex in Hollywood, this was a title you could pick up for under ten bucks. (I remember it being $7, but some were $10 and some were $12, and my memory may not be correct about which were which. Let’s just say they were all very cheap.)

And even at that price it seemed nobody really wanted it.  Which is as it should be. Heavy Vinyl or no Heavy Vinyl, a bad record is a bad record and not worth the bother of sitting down and listening to it.

If you own this record, my guess is it is mint. If you played it at all, you played it once, at most twice (just to be sure it wasn’t really very good) and put it away on a shelf where it sits to this very day.

You may not have been able to put your finger on exactly what was wrong with it, but on some level, perhaps subconsciously, you knew there was something missing, something “off.”

Whatever it was doing, good or bad, it wasn’t a record you felt the need to return to again.

And that’s why it’s mint. It was played once or twice and stored. You kept it perhaps because it filled a hole in your classical collection. Shostakovich Age of Gold? Yes, I have that one, here it is right here, in the S’s.

An important work, right? Yes, of course, I agree, it is an important work. That’s why I own it.

Mediocre Records.

The world is full of them. This is not the brilliant insight it appears to be. They are mediocre by definition, since the average record is average. Classic Records made quite a number of them. They were joined in these efforts by lots of other incompetent mastering houses marketing their wares to audiophiles, the self-described “lovers of sound,” the ones that are so often fooled by fancy packaging, quiet vinyl and a good story.

(You, dear reader, are unlikely to be so easily fooled, or you would have stopped reading this post before now.)

Our records don’t come in fancy jackets, they rarely have quiet vinyl, and most people, audiophiles included, don’t think our story of the Hot Stamper records we sell and how we find them is the least bit plausible.

But our records actually have good sound, and we think that ought to count for something.

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Venerable or Execrable? If It’s Athena the Chances Are Good It’s the Latter

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

More on the Subject of Reviewer Malpractice

I spied an interesting quote on the Acoustic Sounds site years ago:

“…Analogue Productions’ 45rpm remastering improves upon the venerable Athena LP release from the late 80s, with better dynamics and a fuller ‘middle’ to the orchestral sonority.” – Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound, October 2010

For some reason Andrew uses the word “venerable” when a better, certainly more accurate term would have been “execrable.” Having played the record in question this strikes us as the kind of mistake that would not be easy to make.

Athena was a godawful audiophile label that managed to put out all of five records before going under, only one of which was any good, and it’s not this one.

It was in fact the Debussy piano recording with Moravec, mastered by the venerable Robert Ludwig himself, a man who knows his classical music, having cut scores if not hundreds of records for Nonesuch and other labels in the 60s and 70s.

From the jacket:

Analogue Master Recording™

Unlike other remastering companies, Athena Records always uses the ORIGINAL ANALOG MASTER SESSION TAPES. In this case, The Master Lacquers were cut directly by Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab so you know it will sound superb.

Our Hot Stamper listing for the Vox pressing:

This famously good sounding Vox pressing has been remastered a number of times, but you can be sure that the Hot Stamper we are offering here will beat any of those modern pressings by a wide margin in any area that has to do with sound (surfaces being another matter and one we won’t go into here).

The sound of this recording on the best pressings is dynamic, lively and BIG. The music just jumps out of the speakers, bringing the power and vibrant colors of a symphony orchestra right into your listening room. Guaranteed to put to shame 95% or more of all the classical records you own, even if you own lots of our Hot Stampers. [Can’t say I would agree with that in 2023.]

The bass is phenomenal on this recording, assuming you have a copy that has the bass cut and pressed right. This one sure does! Practically no Golden Age classical recording will have the kind of bass that’s found on this record.

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Cat Stevens – Can the Brightness Problem on the UHQR Be Fixed?

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

More Reviews and Commentaries for Tea for the Tillerman

Can adjusting the VTA for the heavier weight vinyl of the UHQR fix its tonality problems?

(This subject also came up in a discussion of the remastered pressings of Scheherzade.)

Probably not. VTA is all about balance.

Adjusting for all the elements in a recording involve tradeoffs. When all the elements sound close to their best, and none of them are “wrong,” the VTA is mostly right.

Try as you might, you cannot fix bad mastering by changing your VTA.

Tea for the Tillerman on UHQR

When I first got into the audiophile record business back in the 80s, I had a customer tell me how much he liked the UHQR of Tea for the Tillerman.

This was a record I was selling sealed for $25. And you could buy as many as you liked at that price!

I was paying $9 for them and could order them by the hundreds if I’d wanted to. Yes, I admit I had no shame.

I replied to this fellow that “the MoFi is awfully bright, don’t you think?” (My old Fulton system may have been darker than ideal, but no serious audio system can play a UHQR as bright as this one without peeling the paint.)

His reply: “Oh no, you just adjust your VTA until the sound is tonally correct.”

At the time I could not adjust my VTA, so I filed that bit of information away for a later time.

When I finally did get a tonearm with adjustable VTA, I quickly learned that trying to correct the tonality of a poorly-mastered or poorly-pressed record with VTA adjustments was a fool’s game.

The tonality might be better, but the bass would get wonky and weird, the deepest notes would disappear or become boosted, the highs would sound artificial, various elements of the recording would randomly become louder and softer, wreaking havoc with the balance of the mix, and on and on.

In other words, fixing one thing would cause lots of others to go wrong.

This fellow couldn’t hear it, and like a lot of audiophiles writing about records these days, he simply did not have the critical listening skills, or a sufficiently revealing system, to notice all the problems he was creating with his “fix.”

My skills were pretty poor back then too. I have worked very hard for the last 30 years or so to improve them. I did it by experimenting with records.

Experimenting with VTA adjustments has also taught me a lot. It showed me that I could get dramatically better sound by playing with the VTA for ten or twenty minutes until I found the ideal setting.

It also taught me that trying to fix a mastering problem by adjusting the VTA never works.

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Our Search for Shootout Winning Sound on Modern Vinyl Finally Pays Off

A List of Potentially Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings

A List of Probably Not Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings

It has finally come to pass. A modern pressing has won a shootout.

Having auditioned more than a dozen modern (post-2000) OJC pressings and having had them fall short of the mark again and again — when they weren’t just plain awful — we have now discovered one that can win a shootout.

As you imagine, this came as quite a shock.

We weren’t sure precisely which of the many OJC pressings our shootout winner was until we looked up the stamper numbers on Discogs. To our surprise, it had clearly been made sometime in the the 21st century.

This has never happened before. No record made since 2000 has ever won a shootout. Modern records range from awful to very good, but one quality they have never had is the ability to win a shootout, to be the best of the best.

Now one has.

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Our Filmed Tapestry Shootout Was a Real Shocker

More of the Music of Carole King

Reviews and Commentaries for Tapestry

The Washington Post article that Geoff Edgers wrote includes a video of a little shootout we did for Tapestry, using, without my knowledge, the MoFi One-Step, a Hot Stamper pressing, and a current, modern, standard reissue of the album. Could I spot the Hot Stamper without knowing what record was playing?

First up (and of course unbeknownst to me), the MoFi. My impressions from the video:

That’s probably tonally correct for this record. It’s just missing everything that’s good about this record, which is a meaty, rich piano. And the vocal sounds very dry. There’s no Tubey Magic. It’s tonally correct. If you were playing me a CD right now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you weren’t. 

Next up, the cheap ($20?), current reissue:

Piano’s better.

Voice is better!

Richer and smoother.

That’s what this is supposed to sound like.

Her voice sounds mostly correct.

This might not be a particularly good record. If I played a real one for you, you might just say, oh, my God, there’s so much more.

But this is not a wrong record. It’s not awful. It’s doing something… I don’t know if I would say most things right. I’ll just say something right.

At least the person understands what she’s supposed to sound like.

Then the Hot Stamper (a Super Hot copy as it turns out):

She sounds pretty right on this copy.

I think there’s more space.

You hear more space, more three-dimensional space.

The piano: there’s more richness to the tone of the various notes that she’s playing.

I would probably pick this one.

Jeff sums it all up as follows:

So we have a winner, and I couldn’t fool the Hot Stamper king.

Without knowing what he was listening to, he chose the hot stamper of Tapestry.

If he still had it, that copy would be sold for about $400 on the Better Records website.

When we went back and played each of the pressings again, the differences were much more pronounced. The MoFi still sounded like a CD, the current Columbia reissue was still no better than passable, and the Hot Stamper became even better sounding than it had been earlier, with sound the other two could not begin to offer.

Our grades for the three pressings would have been F, C and A, in that order.

In the video, you can see that it took me a few minutes to get deep into the sound, but once I was there, it turned out to be no contest. The Hot Stamper was the only pressing capable of showing us just how good Tapestry can sound.

Colorations Are Bad Now?

The MoFi was by far the worst sounding of the three. As I said, it sounded to me like a CD.

How shocking is it that the most colored label in the history of audio produced a record with no colorations, one that sounds like a bad CD. I would not have predicted the possibility!

I would have thought just the opposite, that they would monkey with the sound and make it richer and smoother, maybe boost the shit out of the top end, but instead they apparently just took a CD and transferred it flat.

The worst of all possible worlds, and at a premium price no less.

Chad may make awful sounding records, but they are recognizable as records, just not very good ones.

Mobile Fidelity, at least in this case, made a record that doesn’t even sound like a record. That is quite a feat.

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We Can Help You Back Up Your Claims

Hot Stamper Shootouts for Heavy Vinyl Pressings

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

When we run experiments with Heavy Vinyl records, comparing them to the vintage vinyl pressings we have on hand, the one thing we can say about them is that they are certain to be inferior.

Some are a great deal worse than others, to be sure, but they are all inferior to one degree or another.

We have yet to play a Tone Poets reissue in one of our shootouts. We have a couple of titles scheduled and should be able to report our findings soon.

If you, speaking as an audiophile, want to make the case for the superior quality of the records put out by this label, we are happy to entertain the possibility. The chances of their records having sound we would find acceptable are vanishingly small, but we can’t say they are zero.

Repeating the tiresome truism (aren’t they all?) that because reviews are subjective, your review is as credible as any other, simply will not do.

Back Up Your Claims

If you want y0ur claims to be taken seriously by us, we will need you to provide some context for them. Here are some of the things we would like to know.

  • Tell us about your system, room, electricity, etc.. What do you feel are your system’s strengths and weaknesses?
  • Tell us what specific pressings you compared.
  • Tell us if you cleaned them, and if so, by what method.
  • Tell us what protocols you used to make sure the comparison was a fair one.
  • Tell us how you optimized the playback for each pressing, accounting for the difference in vinyl thickness, playback levels and the like.
  • Tell us what specifically you were listening for.
  • Tell us what tracks you played and what about those tracks made them good for testing.
  • Tell us in as much detail as possible the specific strengths and weaknesses of each of the pressings.

Got all that? OK. Please do your best to answer all eight questions and send them to tom@better-records.com.

Let’s be honest.

You are never going to tell us all of these things, because you are never going to do what would be required of you to carry out this kind of serious testing.

You are simply going to assert that, since one opinion is as good as any other, no further effort of the kind described above is required.

But it is required if you want your opinion to be taken seriously by other audiophiles, especially by audiophiles like us, the ones who know the importance of doing all of these things and more. (A small group, but a dedicated one to be sure.)

We encourage everyone who is serious about the sound quality of his records to follow our approach and do the kind of work we do. For us, in order to be sure that the records we offer are objectively superior to all others, we have to follow the strictest protocols and do everything according to the highest standards.

Like Consumer Reports, we design and follow protocols and set clear standards in our testing because that is what gives the tests we carry out credibility. Based on tens of thousands of hours of testing, we are convinced that no other approach can possibly work.

If you’re looking for the best sounding pressings, either we can do this kind of work for you, or you can do the work for yourself, but either way, in order to be successful the work we describe must be done.

Pretending that one opinion has just as much validity as any other is the most obvious kind of motivated reasoning, borne out of pure laziness. It doesn’t get you off the hook. In fact, by giving you a license to be lazy, it insures that you will never get very far in this hobby. Examples of poorly-constructed comparisons of multiple pressings, carried out by audiophiles with underdeveloped critical listening skills, have never been in short supply.

Because audio is hard. So is finding good sounding records. Anyone who thinks otherwise is likely not doing it right.

Robert Brook is showing everyone the way. He’s on the right path. I happen to be very familiar with the path he’s on because I myself have been on that same path for a very long time.

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The Law of Large Numbers Can Help You Find Better Records

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Roy Orbison

More Commentary Concerning the Remastered Heavy Vinyl LP

Presenting another entry in our series of Big Picture observations concerning records and audio.

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

Hey Tom,   

I’m going out of my frigging mind on this White Hot stamper of Roy Orbison Greatest Hits. What a piece of sh*t is my DCC test pressing.

Naz

Naz,

I used to like the DCC vinyl too.

Then my stereo got a lot better, which I write about under the heading progress in audio.

Eventually it became obvious to me what was wrong with practically all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that were put out by that label.

The good ones can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.

The bad ones can be found in this group.

And those in the middle end up in this group.

Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are most likely not doing it right,, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be not only addictive, but a great deal of fun.

Every listing in this section is about knowing now what I didn’t know then, and there is enough of that material to fill its own blog if I would simply take the time to write it all down.

Every album shootout we do is a chance to learn something new about records. When you do them all day, every day, you learn things that no one else could possibly know who hasn’t done the work of comparing thousands of pressings with thousands of other pressings.

The Law of large numbers[1] tells us that in the world of records, more is better. We’ve taken that law and turned it into a business.

It’s the only way to find Better Records.

Not the records that you think are better.

No, truly better records are the records that proved themselves to be better empirically, by employing rigorous scientific methodologies that we have laid in detail for anyone to read and follow.

Being willing to make lots of mistakes is part of our secret, and we admit to making a lot of them

Knowing what I know now, and having the system currently that I’ve put together over the course of the last twenty years or so, I guarantee you the DCC Gold CD is dramatically better sounding than their vinyl release. They almost always are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I much prefer the DCC’s CDs to their records.

DCC’s CDs did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we have discussed on the blog in some depth here.

[1] Wikipedia on the Law of large numbers:

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Arrogant and Elitist Skeptics – They’re the Worst!

Some Thoughts on Tubes in Audio

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound

Below you will find a link to a reasonably fair and balanced look at the battle between transistors and tubes from Brian Dunning’s skeptoid website, worthwhile reading for those of us who favor a skeptical approach to life (and especially this hobby).

Thirty plus years ago, when I started my little record business, I knew that most records marketed to audiophiles offered junk sound (half-speed masters, Japanese pressings) or junk music (direct to discs by artists nobody ever heard of). As our playback has improved, fewer and fewer of these “specialty” pressings have survived the test of time, a subject we write about endlessly on our site and here on this blog.

For the longest time our motto has been “Records for Audiophiles, Not Audiophile Records,” and we see no reason to change it.  If anything, the modern manufacturers of Heavy Vinyl pressings are making records that get worse sounding by the day. Many of the most egregious offenders can be found here.

More commentaries about Heavy Vinyl can be found here. We are not fans of the stuff, not because it’s our competition, but because it just doesn’t sound very good to us.

I Confess

Here is the article. I confess I sped through it quickly, barely skimming it, because I have heard plenty on the subject of  tubes versus transistors, most of it, in my opinion, misguided, if I’m being honest.

This is my fifth decade in audio and I know where I stand on the subject. I offer it to those who might be interested in a less conventional view.

Our Approach

In order to do the work we do, our approach to audio has to be fundamentally different from that of the audiophile who listens for enjoyment. Critical listening and listening for enjoyment go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

The first — developing and applying your critical listening skills — allows you to achieve good audio and find the best pressings of the music you love.

Developing critical thinking skills when it comes to records and equipment is not a bad idea either.

Once you have a good stereo and a good record to play on it, your enjoyment of recorded music should increase dramatically.

A great sounding record on a killer system is a thrill.

A Heavy Vinyl mediocrity, played back on what passes for so many audiophile systems these days — regardless of cost — is, to these ears, an intolerable bore.

If this sounds arrogant and elitist, so be it. We set a higher standard. Holding our records to that higher standard allows us to price our records commensurate with their superior sound and please the hell out of the people who buy them.

For those who appreciate the difference, and have resources sufficient to afford them, the cost of our records is acceptable. If it were not we would have gone out of business years ago.

Hot Stampers are not cheap. If the price could not be justified by the better sound quality and quieter surfaces, who in his right mind would buy them? We can’t really be fooling that many audiophiles, can we?

Our Approach

Our approach to equipment and records is explained in more detail below, in a listing centered around an early pressing of a Ted Heath Big Band album from the Fifties that knocked our socks off.  The right record at loud levels on Big Speakers can do that.

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