“She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came
apart. These days, she just wants to make music.”
This was true as of 2020, when Geoff Edgers wrote his touching and insightful story about her.
To give you the flavor of the piece, a series of text messages she sent him can be seen below.
I do feel like I was a monster. I feel awful. I do beat the living s- - - out of myself. Am full of grief about it would be a better way of describing it
Was Not my purpose on the planet to have hurt anyone …
But no one ever minded if they hurt me
Is the thing
That’s part of the code also
All artists have one dream that will never come true
If you can figure that out you know them
They teach that in acting school. Key to finding a character is what dream does he or she have that will never come true
One thing I have noticed about PF is that they do not seem to employ editors of any kind. My friend Robert Pincus writes for them — here is his review of a Dillards album that no one would be likely to buy from us but is probably worth picking up for the five or ten dollars a record store might charge — and there are plenty of typos throughout his reviews and others I have read. You’re on your own with PF. And they are good with however many exclamation marks you may want to use. Four in one paragraph? Bring it on they say!
The following paragraph from Youman’s review contains a ridiculous mistake that any knowledgeable editor should have noticed. Can you spot it? If so, email me at tom@better-records.com
Mastered by George Marino, the 1978 original would seem hard to beat, as the level of detail and attack is quite impressive. It absolutely rocks, and I would be very happy if this was my one and only copy. The 1980 Nautilus, which was half speed mastered by Jack Hunt, is surprisingly very much like the original with some minimal improvement in transparency and dynamic punch. Most would be hard pressed to hear the difference. Of course, the super quiet Japanese vinyl might be contributing to this. We also have the 2009 Mofi, which was half speed mastered by Shawn Britton. In my system, I found it to be dark and somewhat veiled. Bass was just too prominent to my ears. It was almost impossible to sit through the entire Mofi after hearing the OG and the Nautilus. I am a huge Mofi fan, so this was very disappointing.
When someone as clearly lacking in critical listening skills as this fellow has the temerity to compare “the” original and the Nautilus remaster (reviewed here) and declare “Most would be hard pressed to hear the difference,” it upsets me no end. I want to sit such a person down and say that it’s unlikely that anyone with two working ears and a halfway-decent stereo would not hear the difference. You can hardly hear it, that seems clear, but why insult others of a Cars-loving persuasion?
The reference to Giant Steps below is yet more evidence of this fellow’s inability to recognize a bad record when he hears it:
Let’s return to that Rhino catalog and all that it could possibly offer to the audiophile enthusiast. We need to send our wish lists and raise our hands if not bring out the megaphones! Of course we have the Led Zeppelin catalog, but that has been debated ad nauseum on several internet websites and forums. It seems that those in control will not allow it. Can you imagine a Kevin Gray mastering for Led Zeppelin II? There have been several very good reissues for the Black Sabbath catalog, but the original UK pressings are still the ones to beat based on my own comparisons with various other collectors. Lets [sic] get those original analog UK tapes and hand them over to Kevin! I also have a copy of the 45 RPM John Coltrane, Giant Steps released by Rhino in 2008. Some argue that this is best pressing ever and by a wide margin! One of the top ten jazz releases of all time as ranked by many jazz experts. Bernie Grundman did a fantastic job on that reissue but there was only a limited production of 2500 copies. Lets [sic] take another shot at those tapes as part of the new Rhino High Fidelity series!
We make the case that Bernie’s recutting of Giant Steps for Rhino is possibly the worst sounding version of the album ever, and perhaps by a wide margin! He already had his shot, the patient did not survice the operation, what good would it do to put another bullet in the corpse?
Jazz experts may rank it one of the top releases of all time — I certainly would — but it is unlikely they have ever heard Rhino’s bloated, thick, dull, lifeless and altogether unsatisfactory pressing of the album. We gave it an a F and felt that we were being too kind. There is some consolation to be had though: The limited production meant that only 2500 people had to suffer through it upon release. (According to Discogs, these days the average price paid for a copy is $225. We may charge a lot for records, but we charge a lot for good sounding records, not bad sounding records, and that should count for something, shouldn’t it?)
And Kevin Gray already ruined the album once for Rhino, so why would anyone want to hand him the tapes to do it again? Is he now a better mastering engineer than he was in the mid-2000s? What evidence to support this proposition could you possibly supply to those of us who doubt his competence? The shockingly bad sounding records he’s cut recently — Stand Up, Moondance and Rickie Lee Jones are three that spring to mind — make a mockery of the very idea that this guy knows what he is doing.
More comments from the above paragraph of the exploding head variety:
There have been several very good reissues for the Black Sabbath catalog…
Have there? Would someone please name one? We would love to hear it.
but the original UK pressings are still the ones to beat based on my own comparisons with various other collectors.
Then you need to get out more. The UK pressings we have played are not competitive in the least with the best domestic originals. Maybe there are some new reissues that are comparable to the UK pressings, but that is clearly setting the bar much too low. For our last shootout, we noted:
Back in 2018 we wrote: This title will surely make the cut next time we update our Top 100 Rock and Pop List. I would go so far as to say that the best copies of this album have sound as good or better than anything I’ve heard all year, and that’s an awful lot of great sounding records, hundreds and hundreds of them.
It did in fact make the Top 100 a while back. The album is hard to find in audiophile playing condition, but we make the effort and this killer Hot Stamper is the result.
Sabbath recorded their set list more or less live in the studio. This give the recording an unprocessed quality that really stands out on the best copies. The best Green Label pressings sound raw and real, with sound that is a perfect match for the band’s powerfully dark music.
No UK originals ever gave us that sound. The idea that the British pressing would be the best sounding for a British band such as Black Sabbath is something we used to characterize as a myth. Our preference now is to use a less pejorative term and call it a Misunderstanding.
To help our customers better understand why so many of our Hot Stamper pressings are from the “wrong” country, or have the wrong label, or are in stereo instead of mono, or are reissues, even budget reissues, we often add these lines to our listings:
Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one. Those of us who actually play lots of records and listen to them critically know that that is simply not true and never has been.
We don’t guess. We don’t assume. We just play lots and lots of records and find out which ones sound better and which ones sound worse.
But enough about this silly review. We laid out for all to see a detailed account of the shortcomings of Kevin Gray’s Cars remaster back in June. Having just reread it, I find no reason to change a word. It’s still awful (the record, not the review).
Kevin Gray is a hack, turning out one junk pressing after another for the benefit of those whose stereos must be exceptionally good at hiding the many faults of his awful records. (We do not have the luxury of being able to hide the faults of the records we play. In order to find the best sounding records ever pressed — our mission here at Better Records — we had no choice but to take our system in the opposite direction, and we and our customers are very glad we did.)
Bernie Grundman and Doug Sax often come in for criticism from us here on the blog, but at least they used to make good records. Nothing Kevin Gray cut without the help of others has ever impressed us in the least, which is why we have a special link for our reviews of those records here.
One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE.
He recently made a youtube video for his shootout for Revolver, which we wrote about here.
Now he has posted some context and talked about his journey in audio which we think you will enjoy reading. Robert and I will be doing a video next week about his shootout, so expect to see that here on The Skeptical Audiophile soon.
One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE. You can find it by clicking the link below.
We recently loaned Robert some copies of Revolver so that he could do the first youtube-acceptable Record Shootout video in the history of mankind. He had three copies of his own to play along with the five we loaned him, plenty to work with.
We hope to be able to discuss the experience of doing the shootout and the video with him soon, but for now, let’s just enjoy the first of its kind.
Robert now knows firsthand something few audiophiles have made the effort to learn:
Shootouts are a great deal of work if you do them right.
If you have just a few pressings on hand and don’t bother to clean them carefully, or follow rigorous testing protocols, that kind of shootout anyone can do. You can find those kinds of shootouts on youtube, but we have never seen fit to take them seriously.
The results of shootouts that are not carried out in the serious way that we do and the way that Robert did cannot be trusted, for reasons that anyone reading this blog should find obvious.
Art Dudley illustrates this approach, but you could pick any reviewer you like — none of them have ever undertaken a shootout worthy of the name to our knowledge.
We ourselves struggled back in the old days. in 2005, our attempted shootout for Blue could not get off the ground. Two years and scores of shootouts later, we had been able to find and clean some amazing sounding copies, which is how we were able to tell how far off the mark this pressing was.
For a quick tutorial on shootouts, please click on one or both of the links below:
A tenet of conservatism is that we must all accommodate ourselves to living in the world that exists, not the world we might want to pretend exists, or the world we would like to exist.
The laws of physics are laws, not theories, not recommendations, and they operate independently of how convenient any of us may find them.
It follows from this — if you will allow me to make the case — that not everybody with a stereo can play Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings properly, and some people cannot play Tarzan at all. (See below.)
There is a fellow, rl1856, who made some comments on Robert Brook’s blog, addressing the Tone Poets pressings of RVG’s recordings vis-a-vis vintage pressings that RVG mastered. (Bolding has been added by me.)
rl1856 writes:
An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.
My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.
When someone reveals that their equipment is simply not capable of reproducing the sound of live music, we can safely ignore whatever opinions they have offered about the records being discussed.
It should be obvious that they have played them with unacceptably low levels of fidelity.
Let’s Talk About the Real World
The science behind my argument is as follows.
Acoustic instruments make sounds by moving air, whether in the studio or the concert hall.
Speakers replicate the sound of those instruments in your listening room by the same process. They move air.
Big dynamic speakers are good at moving air in a listening room, and small ones are not.
Therefore, speakers that do not move enough air are failing fundamentally to reproduce the sound of recorded instruments with fidelity.
On a hot day you can fan yourself with an album jacket or you can fan yourself with a guitar pick. One moves enough air to cool you off, the other does not, no matter how hard you try. (See: physics, laws of, above.)
Box speakers with five inch drivers may move enough air in the home listening environment, especially in smaller rooms, to play music with enough fidelity to make it enjoyable.
What they cannot do is move enough air to play music that sounds anything like live music.
The right pressings (we admit that this phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) of Rudy Van Gelder’s better recordings do a remarkable job, in this writer’s view, of reproducing the feeling one gets from listening to live music.
If the speakers you own fail to reproduce that sound — the kind of big, lively sound some of us have spent a lifetime pursuing — how can your judgment be of any value to those of us who own large speakers in dedicated rooms, all working together to reproduce music at live levels?
Colorblind people rarely make good art critics. They know better than to talk about the colors they can’t see.
Some actors who want to play Tarzan are simply not equipped to play Tarzan. They may be foolish enough to audition, but no one could possibly be foolish enough to give them the part. (See video below.)
A Poor Guide
Some speakers give an incomplete picture of what the record is getting right and what it is getting wrong. Due to the laws of physics mentioned above, speakers with “woofers” that are 5.25 inches in diameter can be safely placed in this category.
No recording of a jazz group with a bass player can be reproduced properly using a five inch woofer.
Rudy recorded many jazz groups, and few of them did not have someone playing bass.
If you have that kind of ‘incomplete” speaker, regardless of how much you may like what it does well in other respects, the first step in the long road to better sound is to recognize that it is preventing you from appreciating a great deal of what makes Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings the powerful listening experiences they most certainly are.
Little speakers are not powerful. To be powerful, a speaker has to move air well, and that is one thing, among many, that small speakers cannot do.
They also do not do a good job in my experience of capturing frequency extremes, especially at the low end, which makes this fellow’s comment that “the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes” rather absurd. His speaker goes down to 80hz. I looked it up. There are two full octaves of bass below 80hz. I guess those aren’t important. (When audiophiles tell you some aspect of the reproduction of music is “not important,” this should be seen as nothing more than motivated reasoning. You don’t want to be that guy either.)
Something I’ve never taken the time to write about on this blog is the correct sizing of instruments.
Some speakers — typically those with smaller drivers — create images of instruments that are too small, smaller than you would picture them if you were sitting in the audience. Other speakers — typically screens of one kind or another — produce larger-than-life images of instruments and vocalists. In the ’70s, I heard a lot of screens and full-range electrostats — these come to mind, and there were plenty of others like them, Magneplanars and the like — and the images never seemed right-sized or real enough to be taken seriously. I opted for a big dynamic system and never heard anything that would give me a reason to doubt my choice.
Yes, he may think that his system is “Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.”
But what about all the differences his system does not allow him to hear? Failing to recognize the shortcomings of a stereo system doesn’t make them go away.
When you close your eyes while listening to a system that looks like this (I found this one randomly on the web), do you feel that you’re in the presence of live musicians?
Of course you don’t. How could you?
But when I listen to the system seen below (that’s me at the table) turned up good and loud, that is precisely the sound I get from the hottest of the Hot Stamper pressings I play. Here is one example from not that long ago. I could easily describe hundreds of others, many of which are unforgettable.
Some of our customers have written to us that they got the same feeling we did, the sense of being in the presence of live musicians.
The remarkable White Hot stamper pressings we discuss on this blog were made from the greatest recordings ever put on tape, and that group includes a fair number that were engineered by RVG.
Rudy Is the Man
Of the many hundreds of jazz albums we have listened to critically over the past thirty plus years, our pick for the best sounding jazz record of them all has Rudy’s name in the credits. Even better, it’s a reissue from the ’70s, because the originals, at least the ones we’ve played, don’t sound remotely as good as the right reissues.
We didn’t read that on a forum, or a website, or in a magazine. We heard it with our own two ears.
It’s the kind of thing that an obsessively-tuned full-range system, set up in a heavily-tweaked, dedicated room, can reveal about just how remarkably different various pressings of recordings can sound. These differences are often obscured by the manifold shortcomings of smaller, more limited systems, the ones most audiophiles own.
That’s why some audiophiles believe what they read from self-described experts about master tapes and mastering approaches and all the rest. Their systems can’t show them how mistaken all this talk really is.
To convince others that you know something about “a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape,” as if that could be known by someone with no access to the master tape and speakers you could fit in a backpack, is the height of self-deception. It’s the worst kind of pretend knowledge.
We’ve learned that the only way to understand records is by ignoring what everybody says and just play as many different pressings as possible in blinded, carefully controlled experiments. The data derived from these experiments should inform your opinions, not the other way around.
If you really want to make the case for your expertise in record reviewing, it’s never a good idea to claim that the laws of physics don’t apply to you. It’s the kind of thing that upsets irredeemably skeptical types such as me, who then spend all afternoon writing longwinded commentaries about the things that misinformed audiophiles believe.
Never Played One
To be clear, we have never played a Tone Poets record. We’ve played many titles mastered by Kevin Gray, and we know that he is credited with mastering some records for the label. Without exception we find that his remastered records leave a lot to be desired. You can find many of them in our Hall of Shame. Anyone defending his work to me has some heavy lifting to do.
A couple of titles we will be doing shootouts for soon will include the Tone Poets pressings, and you will be able to read all about them right here on the blog.
Until then, allow us to leave you with a few things to think about.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out the interview Wired conducted with me a few years back.
If you have some time on your hands, maybe too much time on your hands, go to the comments section and read the 300 plus postings that can be found there, the writers of which seem to be offended by the very idea of Hot Stampers. They also decry the obvious shortcomings of analog vinyl itself, as well as the ridiculously expensive equipment some “credulous, misguided audiophiles,” their terms, use to play vinyl records, as if you didn’t know already!
Here is one that I found to be especially interesting, from a psychological perspective if not from an audio one:
Bad, mismatched system setup. Customer base probably has the same. Also evaluation process is questionable. Uses a mediocre solid state amp and looks for “tubey magic” because of some misplaced concept of “accuracy” as I discussed before. [Man, this guy has got our number all right, ouch!]
Yes, there is a lot of bad stuff out there, and it does give the stereo industry as a whole a bad name. I have heard some pretty crappy, expensive setups in my day.
I was listening to Phoebe Snow’s “Second Childhood” on my best system last night. Boy, I love my new turntable!
The only problem I have with my evaluations is that I never heard his records. My comments are probably correct, but it would be interesting to audition a few of his “golden” albums just to confirm he hasn’t really found anything. The reason I am confident that he probably does not have anything is because virtually every repressing I’ve heard is better than the original. Claiming otherwise hurts his credibility.
John
There is one sentence in the paragraphs above that should raise a giant red flag and help you to appreciate how reliable John’s analysis of our stereo and methods might turn out to be. If you didn’t catch it the first time through, give it another shot. Okay, here goes:
The reason I am confident that he probably does not have anything is because virtually every repressing I’ve heard is better than the original.
That’s so strange! Virtually every repressing I’ve heard is worse than the original.
What gives?
If I may paraphrase our writer: the reason I am confident that he probably does not know anything about records or audio is that he thinks repressings are always better than vintage pressings. We’ve critically auditioned tens of thousands of records, including many hundreds of repressings, admittedly on our “bad, mismatched system setup,” and I guess we must have gotten it all wrong over the 34 years we’ve been in the audiophile record business. The shame of it all!
Obviously, John knows he does not need to try one of our Hot Stampers. You can see him talking himself into the wisdom of doing nothing with every succeeding paragraph.
(Knowledge that is not backed up by empirical findings [1] comes in for a lot of criticism here at Better Records, and for good reason. Guessing, speculating and assuming are poor approaches to separating the good pressings from the bad ones.)
And if he did ever order one, and had at least a halfway decent stereo to play it on, it would turn his world upside down so fast it would make his head hurt, and the possibility of that happening would be very, very upsetting. It makes no sense for John to risk such an outcome.
Even if our records were as cheap as the ones he is buying, even the superior sound would not justify the psychological damage that would result. He would basically have to start his collection over again, as this good customer did. A few hundred others just like him have done the same, and they’re the ones that will be keeping us in business for years to come. To paraphrase another famous saying, “They’ve heard the future, and it works!
Better for John to follow the path he is on. It’s working for him. Why would he want to rock his own boat?
We wrote about that issue on this very blog. Here is an excerpt:
Our Hot Stampers will of course still sound quite a bit better on even a run-of-the-mill audiophile system than any Heavy Vinyl pressing you care to name, but if you’re happy with a $30 reissue, what’s your incentive to spend five or ten or twenty times that amount, based on nothing more than my say-so? Even with a 100% Money Back Guarantee, why rock your own boat?
On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile—even a novice—can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns. You don’t have to spend a dime to discover the reality underlying the concept of Hot Stampers.
But perhaps you may have noticed, as I have, that most audio skeptics do not go out of their way to prove themselves wrong. And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call Confirmation Bias practically guarantees that you can’t hear something you don’t want to hear.
Which is all well and good. At Better Records we don’t let that slow us down. Instead we happily go about our business turning skeptics into believers, taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any Heavy Vinyl LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason.
They’re usually so bad it’s actually fun to hear how screwy they sound when played back correctly.
But don’t tell John that.
[1] Pretense of Knowledge
When someone pretends to know things they cannot possibly know, or think they know things that simply are not true and are easily demonstrated to be false, such a person can be said to suffer from a “pretense of knowledge.”
Some of the theories that audiophiles believe — original pressings have the best sound, the first pressings off the earliest stampers sound better than later pressings — are best understood as articles of faith, since there is rarely much data to support them.
“Made from the master tape,” “no compression or equalization was used in the making of the recording,” “AAA, all analog mastering,” etc., etc., are all forms of pretentious knowledge that should never be accepted at face value.
Anyway, these claims and others like them are beside the point.
Records must be judged only by the way they sound, not by what may or may not be true about the processes used to make them.
The interviewer apparently does not know how bad the new version sounds, but we had no trouble recognizing its awfulness here at Better Records. As a public service, we soon set about describing what we heard when we put this remastered piece of junk to the test.
Up against a properly mastered, properly pressed early pressing, it earned a failing grade. Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed on vinyl? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.
The reviewer who interviewed the remastering engineer responsible for this and no doubt many other awful sounding records has never been able to tell a good record from a bad one, and he carries on that tradition with Graceland.
Ryan Smith, the hack who cut this album, has done quite a lot of work for Analogue Productions. We can’t say we’ve played many of his recuts, but the ones we have played are hopelessly bad, with the overly smooth sound so much in vogue today.
We played his recut of Scheherazade, and rather than just give it the failing grade it deserved, we explained how any audiophile can use its mistaken EQ in order to recognize what is wrong with it and others like it.
(Contrary to popular opinion, it is no better than Bernie Grundman’s bad sounding version from the ’90s, the one he cut for Classic Records.)
One of my good customers read this rave review from this same reviewer for the Texas Hurricane Box Set and made the worst mistake any audiophile can make: he believed it.
“His overdriven Stratocaster sound is one that guitar aficionados never tire of hearing live or on record, especially when it’s well recorded. … Yet again, Chad Kassem sets high the box set reissue bar delivering a “must have” package for SRV fans, every bit the equal of the one Doors fans have come to cherish. …every one of these records betters the originals and by a considerable margin. It is not even close…You’ve never heard these albums sound like this. That is a 100 % guaranty. …this is an impeccably produced box set physically and especially sonically. It’s the best these albums have ever and probably will ever sound.” — Music = 9/11; Sound = 10/11 — Michael Fremer
Most of the clips posted here are so modern and phony and wrong they make my head hurt. Really boosted on the top. Who on earth wants that sound? Apparently some people do.
The real pressings never sounded that way. Although they may need some modest help in the EQ department, making wholesale changes to the sound — as was clearly done for most of these modern versions — is just wrong.
Itruins everything that is good about the recording.
Now do you see why we have so little respect for modern mastering engineers?
They ruin classic titles like Surfs Up with their “improvements.” They destroy what is good about vintage analog while promoting themselves as the protectors of vintage analog.
The only people who can be trusted to promote the sound of vintage analog are the people who sell it and write about it.
The rest of them are frauds and charlatans and, as far as I can tell, deaf as a post.
And we don’t need to know anything about how it was made in order to judge it!
For those of you who did not follow this story last year, you may want to catch up here.
Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough.
Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.
Back in August of 2022, I wrote what you see below to Geoff Edgers, the reporter who exposed this ridiculous mess. (I toned it down quite a bit. The original version was not suitable for publication.)
Earlier that same year he had visited me at my studio, where I played him the awful Dire Straits first album that MoFi remastered, one of the worst half speeds ever made (review coming, but you can get a good idea of my take on it here).
By August of 2022 he was starting to see just how crazy the world of audiophiles actually is, and the more he learned about some of these people, the crazier they seemed. And he was not wrong about that. My letter:
Jim Davis (of MoFi) is not one to be trusted and would have loved to cover up this whole thing if he could have figured out how to do it. It got away from him, and as far as I’m concerned, good.
And you heard how shitty their Dire Straits record is. Who cares if it’s digital? The sound is bad. Why bother trying to figure out the reasons this crappy label doesn’t know how to make a good record? It’s just a fact. Accept it.
Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums.
From the article:
“One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.
“These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”
The best ears? Are you kidding me? In their dreams. These guys give every indication that they are virtually devoid of critical listening skills. The evidence has been laid out in this very blog, chapter and verse, for years.
Yes, a perfect blinded test was conducted, the kind we run day in and day out, and every one of these so-called audiophile authorities failed it completely.
Here’s an idea. Test us! We can tell a good record from a bad one, digital or no digital.
We do it for a living.
Based on everything that has happened, here are the conclusions we would draw from this sorry episode revealing the fraud that is at the heart of the Modern Remastered Vinyl LP.
The digital process MoFi used probably resulted in a loss of subtle musical information.
Many audiophiles can’t hear what they are missing on these remastered pressings on account of their untrained listening skills and their playback systems’ relative lack of quality. (Audio is hard.)
We hear what’s missing because we have the records that are overflowing with all that information.
If it goes missing, it’s obvious to us that something is wrong. It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a sort, and the scientific method has been crucial to our success. You just have to learn how to do it properly in order to set you on the right path.
Some of our customers who own Heavy Vinyl pressings are in the enviable position of having in their possession a record that can show them what is wrong with the ones they own. It warms our hearts when they write to tell us of the lessons they learned playing our Hot Stampers against their remastered LPs.
What could be simpler or more obvious? Until now all I had was my opinion about these guys, and let’s face it, talk is cheap.
Finally the facts have come out and they support everything I have been saying for years about this label’s awful records and the misguided souls who collect them.
You really made my day. A great article that lays everything out clearly with just the right amount of information. I hope the article you do on me is as good. (It was.)
Bravo.
TP
One final thought.
Anyone who has been on their audio journey for any sizeable length of time has made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when we’re wrong.
You might even say we are proud of the fact that we used to get so many things wrong about records and audio.
Our experimental, evidence-based approach, requiring that we not only make mistakes but that we embrace them and learn from them, is surely key to the progress we have made in understanding recordings and home audio.
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 as far as I know.
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.
For thirty bucks, I learned a lesson worth a great deal more than the money I sunk into such a worthless piece of vinyl on the say-so of someone whose stereo I had never heard, which is this: never believe a word you read about audio or records, no matter who says it, or where you read it, except under certain circumstances.
What circumstances, exactly?
To my mind there is only one circumstance when it makes sense to believe what somebody — anybody — tells you about the sound of a record: If that advice comes with a 100% money back guarantee of the purchase price if you are not happy with the sound.
It can’t get any more simple than that, now can it?
Do any of these guys ever put their money where their mouths are? Not a one of them ever has to the best of my knowledge, and why would they? Plenty of downside, but not a trace of upside. To quote Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther from Victim of Love, “I could be wrong, but I’m not.”
Of course we do things very differently here at Better Records. Yes, we have strong opinions. Lots of them.
But we back those opinions up with a full money back guarantee. The upside for us is huge — a satisfied customer, our favorite kind — and the downside is practically nil — whatever record someone returns just goes back up on the site, sells to someone else and we never see it again.
Voila, another satisfied customer!
I don’t know how Chad Kassem would react to you trying to return his awful Stand Up or his mediocre-at-best Tea for the Tillerman, but I doubt he would take too kindly to the idea.
And speaking of not being wrong, we actually go out of way to point out when we are.
Sinéad O’Connor is still in one piece
He sure ought to be!
Let’s Talk About the Real World
More Commentaries Prompted by Forums, Videos and Comments Sections
Back in August of 2022, I wrote what you see below to Geoff Edgers, the reporter who exposed this ridiculous mess. (I toned it down quite a bit. The original version was not suitable for publication.)
Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when 