*Our System

Our Playback System

Getting the Electricity Right in Our New Studio Made All the Difference

More Milestones in Audio

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

In response to a customer’s letter, I wrote the following a few years back:

The vast majority of audiophiles never get to the higher levels of audio because of the compromises they make with every step: in their rooms, speakers, wires and practically everything else.

Speakers too small, shoved up against a wall, in an untreated room that the family uses to watch TV in? You won’t get very far that way.

Some of the worst off of these folks end up with a collection of crap heavy vinyl because their systems won’t let them hear how much better their vintage pressings are.

Better Electricity Made All the Difference

When we moved the business into an industrial park a few years ago, I took the opportunity to build the largest playback studio I could fit on the premises. It was 17 by 22 with a 12 foot high ceiling, with a concrete slab floor and six inch thick double drywall for walls, as well as a complicated system of dedicated electrical circuitry.

It took a surprising amount of work carried out over months to get it to sound right. Day after day we ran experiments. Most of the time it was just me. I actually like working alone. It’s not hard for me to stay focussed.

Oddly enough, what made the biggest difference was getting the electricity right: computers and cleaning machines on isolation transformers, stuff unplugged, stuff left plugged in that made the sound better, lights hooked up to batteries rather than plugged in to the main circuits, etc. 

Over the course of about two month, the sound became night and day better.

More on unplugging here. Also, Robert Brook has done a great deal of work along these lines, which he explains in detail here.

This kind of work is not hard for me. We’ve been doing it for decades, but we have a very big advantage over everyone else: we have good sounding records to test with.

We have Hot Stampers! The records are correct. If they sound wrong, it’s not their fault. They are almost never the problem.

I used But I Might Die Tonight from Tea for the Tillerman for weeks and weeks. It was very difficult to get all the parts right, but in the end it was more glorious than I had ever heard it. I wrote an extensive commentary on the experience I went through which you can read all about here.

A key excerpt:

We initially thought the room was doing everything right, because our go-to test disc, Bob and Ray, sounded super spacious and clear, bigger and more lively than we’d ever heard it. That’s what a 12 foot high ceiling can do for a large group of musicians playing live in a recording studio, in 1959, on an All Tube Chain Living Stereo recording. The sound just soared.

But Cat Stevens wasn’t sounding right, and if Cat Stevens isn’t sounding right, we knew we had a problem that needed to be solved, and fast.

Nothing could be harder than building a killer system in a room big enough to let it blast away.

The long road ahead is an expensive one, but I’ve always been of the belief that the money you spend on audio — if you do it right — rewards you a hundred times over in pure listening pleasure, and it does so for as long as you live, which I hope is many more decades to come.

Further Reading

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Hi-Fi Beats My-Fi If You Are At All Serious about Audio

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Playback Accuracy Is Key to Audio and Record Collecting

Our system is fast, accurate and uncolored. We like to think of our speakers as the audiophile equivalent of studio monitors, showing us exactly what is on the record, nothing added, nothing taken away.

When we play a modern record, it should sound modern. When we play a vintage Tubey Magical Living Stereo pressing, we want to hear all the Tubey Magic, but we don’t want to hear more Tubey Magic than what is actually on the record.

We don’t want to do what some audiophiles like to do, which is to make all their records sound the way they like all their records to sound.

They do that by having their system add in all their favorite colorations. We call that “My-Fi,” not “Hi-Fi,” and we’re having none of it.

If our system were more colored, slower and tubier, a vintage Living Stereo record would not sound as good as it should. It’s already got plenty of richness, warmth, sweetness and Tubey Magic.

To take an obvious example, playing the average dry and grainy Joe Walsh record on our system is a fairly unpleasant experience. Some added warmth and richness, with maybe some smear and some upper-midrange suckout thrown in for good measure, would make it much more enjoyable.

But then how would we know which Joe Walsh pressings aren’t too dry and grainy for our customers to play and enjoy?

We discussed some of these issues in another commentary:

Our Approach

We have put literally thousands of hours into our system and room in order to extract the maximum amount of information, musical and otherwise, from the records we play, or as close to the maximum as we can manage. Ours is as big and open as any system in an 18 by 20 by 8 room I’ve ever heard. [We recently moved into a new studio and that room is 17 x 22 with a 12 foot ceiling. By all indications, bigger is better.]

It’s also as free from colorations of any kind as we can possibly make it. We want to hear the record in its naked form; not the way we want it to sound, but the way it actually does sound. That way, when you get it home and play it yourself, it should sound very much like the record we described.

If too much of the sound we hear is what our stereo is doing, not what the record is doing, how can we know what it will sound like on your system? We try to be as truthful and as critical as we can when describing the records we sell. Too much coloration in the system makes those tasks much more difficult, if not a practically impossible.

A White Hot copy should have a near-perfect blend of Tubey Magic and clarity, because that’s what we hear when we play it on our system.

We are convinced that the more time and energy you’ve put into your stereo over the years, decades even, the more likely it is that you will hear our Hot Stamper pressings sound the way they should.

Further Reading

Our Playback System – And Why You Shouldn’t Care

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Advice on Making Audio Progress

Below you will find a list of most of the equipment we have been using over the years to carry out our Hot Stamper pressing evaluations, or “shootouts” as we like to call them.

Of course the old 80/20 Rule comes into play here — 80% (probably more like 90 or 95%, truth be told) of the sound is what you do with your audio system, 20% (or 10 or 5%) of the sound is the result of the components you own.

We like to say it’s not about the audio you have, it’s about the audio you do: how you set up your system, what you’ve done to treat your room, how good your electricity is and all the rest of it.

Our VPI Aries (original, not the latest model) with Super Platter (no longer made) and TTWeights Carbon Fiber Platter (a big upgrade, no longer made) / VPI Synchronous Drive System (as of 2016 now sitting on a Townshend Seismic Sink) Triplanar Tonearm / Dynavector 17d3 [now 17dx] / Aurios (no longer made), which sit on a Townshend Seismic Sink (another big upgrade, contact me if interested) / EAR 324P and the hundreds of hours we’ve spent setting up and tweaking this beast is at the heart of everything we do around here.

We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers, even more now that they have much improved high frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.

Mix in extensive room treatments, aided inestimably by three pairs of Hallographs (as we like to say, there is no practically no Hi-Fi without them), more than thirty years of experience and endless hours of experimentation and you have a system that can separate the winners from the losers like nobody’s business.

Exactly like nobody’s business, because nobody does it in this business but us. Having heard hundreds of systems over the years, it’s an open question as to whether anyone else could do what we do.

The Benefits of Low Power Amps

Our preamp and amp are vintage and low power; the Focus can play quite loudly with the thirty-five watts our amp puts out. We are big fans of Low Power (but not single ended) and are not the least bit happy with the current trend toward high-power amps, whether tube or transistor. I remember well when this trend started in the early ’70s with the Phase Linear 400 amp. It has only gotten worse with each passing year.

A few years back we tried using higher power amps when doing shootouts for the likes of Nirvana, AC/DC and such. We found that using a bigger amp involved major trade-offs, trade-offs (opacity; loss of transient information, spaciousness and ambience) whose costs far exceeded their benefits.

With more power comes less Tubey Magic, sweetness, transparency, three-dimensionality and that wonderful relaxed quality which allows the music to flow. High power amps in our experience do none of these things well. As most speakers today are terribly inefficient, they require the use of high power amps, a choice most audiophiles do not even know they are making when they buy inefficient speakers. 

If you own large power amps, there is a very good chance you do not know what you are missing.

Most of our wiring — interconnect and speaker (the Triplanar is hardwired with a top quality phono interconnect) — is custom, although we recommend certain power cords when you buy specific equipment from us (such as the EAR phono stages). We occasionally engage in audiophile wire-bashing in our commentaries.

And Why You Shouldn’t Care

Having said that, we don’t think you should care a whit about what equipment we use.

No, I take that back. Let’s be honest. The equipment we’ve listed is the equipment we use and recommend because it’s the best equipment we have had the opportunity to audition, or managed to acquire, or happened to come our way, and was affordable at the time. In truth, it was some combination of the above. It’s what works for us.

The bulk of audiophile equipment we have auditioned over the last thirty plus years would make our famous Hot Stamper shootouts difficult to carry out.

Most of it sounds far too colored, limited and often — not to put too fine a point on it — just plain wrong.

This commentary about the music of The Beatles targets the issue, but in hundreds of our listings we try to help the reader/ listener focus specifically on what a recording should be doing in the home. The better your equipment and room, the better your Hot Stamper pressing will be able to do what we know it can do.

If you would like to hear your records sound their best, we would love to help you accomplish that goal. There is no greater thrill than hearing your favorite music sound better than you ever thought possible. It’s what Hot Stampers are all about. And the right equipment is a big part of that better-than-you-ever-thought-possible sound. Not the biggest part; the biggest part is you.

Still, a very big part.

A Good Record Is an Education

A good record is an education for us too. This is not only how we’ve managed to learn about the pressing in question; it’s the same process that allows us to make improvements in the sound of the stereo. It’s learning how to identify what is right and what is wrong with the sound of any pressing — the same process that helps us recognize whether any change to the stereo makes it sound better or worse, and to try and figure out by how much and in what way.

And the best part is, like the practice of any skill, the more you do it, the better you get at it. We do it all day, every day. Not because we’re noble or dedicated. We do it because we enjoy it. It’s fun. It’s the most fun part of this job. Discovering great sounding recordings is a THRILL. It’s what this hobby is all about — hearing music sound better than you ever thought it could.

Change For The Better

Of course, as I’ve stated elsewhere on the site, you learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same equipment. What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change. You have to CHANGE something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.

How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record. The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. Most records do not have the same sound on both sides, not the records we play anyway, and we play them by the thousands.

Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to our knowledge. Because few audiophiles and almost no record dealers make the effort to listen critically at anything approaching this level of scrutiny.

Training Your Ears

If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following. Either your system is not good enough to resolve these differences, which is sometimes the case, or, much more likely, you simply haven’t trained your ears to listen for them.

This has nothing to do with listening for pleasure. This is listening like it’s a job. Critically. Analytically.

Try to listen for one quality by itself. Listen for grain, or top end extension, or bass, or dynamics — anything, the list is endless. Focus in on that single quality, recognize it, appreciate it, then flip the record over and judge that one quality for side two.

Cheap Tables

There is a minimum level of resolution your front end must attain before these differences are important. With a cheap rig you certainly don’t need us to find records for you. (More on the limitations of cheap tables here.)

Many of the records we praise highly present a severe test for a playback system, one that less sophisticated setups will have a hard time passing. Sergio Mendes’ records come readily to mind. You need to have one helluva well-setup, high-quality front end before you can play them without sibilance and grain, let alone bring out all the magic. I don’t know a tougher test than Stillness, or Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66. They will bring most stereos to their knees, mine included if I haven’t tuned it right.

Better in What Way?

Much of the commentary on the site is there to explain how to differentiate the better pressings from the not-so-better pressings. The better the system, and the more careful the listener, the more these differences will matter. That’s why we charge so much money for the really hot copies – to us, they are worlds better than the runners-up.

They are right in a way that the typical half-speed mastered or heavy vinyl pressing rarely is. The more critically one listens, the more obvious this distinction becomes. The real thing just can’t be beat, and you can be pretty sure that the real thing is an old record.

Not just any old record of course. It needs to have been cleaned properly, mastered properly and pressed properly. Ideally it should have Hot Stampers, but that is not a requirement for top quality sound. Lots of old records have top quality sound, but not all of them have Hot Stampers. (More on that subject here.)

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play a Record Like This?

Yet Another Album that Comes Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

And One We Recently Added to Our Rock & Pop Top 100 List

Do they have what it takes? Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

Live Is the Way to Hear the Band

This is one of the best — if not THE best — rock concert albums we have ever heard. Can you imagine if Frampton Comes Alive sounded this good?

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton grungy power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound? None that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

To play this record right, you should have, at a minimum:

  • Big dynamic speakers, and they should be pulled well out into the room to create a three-dimensional presentation, in this case of a live rock concert. If they are too big for the room, and stuck in the corners, you haven’t got a chance.
  • A large room — our new studio has a 12 foot ceiling, a big help with recordings such as this.
  • Strong walls with no windows, and a concrete floor to keep the bass from leaving the room (if at all possible).
  • Seating for a single listener far from any boundary, especially the back wall (a common problem with small-ish rooms).
  • Extensive room treatments to deal with the loud levels required by this music.
  • Enough power to move all the air in the listening room with authority.
  • And, finally, high quality electricity, a heavily tweaked front end and all the rest of the audio stuff we discuss so often on this blog.

Without all of these things, it’s hard for us to imagine any audiophile record reviewer being able to hear this record sound the way the artists and engineers wanted it to. Playing a record like this in a small room and moderate levels practically guarantees that the listener will not be able to hear what makes the best copies of this album so special.

Our system evolved over the decades to play these kinds of records, primarily for two reasons:

  1. We love music and want to hear our favorite recordings sound their best, and
  2. With this much money on the line, to stay in business we have to be right about the superior sound of the vintage Hot Stamper pressings we offer

Old Times, Good Times

And when was the last time you read about a record that hadn’t just been reissued on Heavy Vinyl?

There was a time when audiophile reviewers wrote about exceptionally good sounding vintage pressings, records they’d stumbled across while wandering through the world of vinyl. We’ve discovered our share and then some.

Harry Pearson comes immediately to mind, but there were many others back in those day following his lead. Now it seems few if any can be bothered. These days the money is in Heavy Vinyl. That’s what gets the clicks and the ad dollars.

Neither of which have anything to do with better records. Better records are physical objects that live or die by the quality of their sound. They are not advice or opinions or theories or recommendations. They are records you can play in your home to prove — to yourself and anyone else with an open mind and open ears — that vintage pressings are vastly superior to modern ones, once you’ve figured out how to clean and find them.

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Our System Just Loves Certain Records – Why Do You Suppose That Is?

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Ted Heath

More Records that Are Good for Testing Tonality and Timbre

The highest fidelity vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right. That’s a big if.

In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.

Be that as it may. What do we love about vintage pressings like the Ted Heath disc you see pictured?

The timbre of the instruments is hi-fi in the best sense of the word.

The unique sound of every instrument is being reproduced with remarkable fidelity on this old record.

That’s what we mean by “hi-fi,” not the kind of Audiophile Phony BS sound that passes for hi-fidelity on some records.

Older audiophile records, typically those made by Mobile Fidelity in the ’70s and ’80s, suffered from a common group of problems on practically every record they released:

A boosted top, a bloated bottom, and a sucked-out midrange.

Nowadays that phony sound is no longer in vogue. A new, but equally phony sound has taken its place.

What seems to be in vogue these days, judging by the Heavy Vinyl Reissue pressings we’ve played over the last few years, is a very different sound, with a very different suite of shortcomings.

These newer records, with few exceptions, tend to be compressed, thick, dull, opaque, veiled, recessed and lacking in ambience.

These are currently the hallmarks of the Heavy Vinyl LP. Whether made by Speakers Corner, DCC, AP or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-’90s, the sound these labels apparently preferred had an infuriating tonal balance problem we noted in practically every record we played — sound that was just too damn smooth.

The phony boosted highs of the bad old days are gone, replaced by the phony rolled off highs of today.

(Bernie Grundman cut hundreds of records for Classic Records starting in the ’90s, and it’s clear he chose to go a different way, but his way turned out to be every bit as problematical.)

Are the audiophiles who buy these new, super-smooth records any better off?

The ones with bright, phony systems probably are.

As we have been saying for years, first you need to have reasonably good sound. Then you can buy records that actually are good.

Last Question

How do we know we are right about the tonality issues of these modern remasterings?

Stay tuned for part two of this commentary.

The Ideal System for an Exceptionally Well Recorded Album

It’s clear our stereo loves this record. Let’s talk about why that might be the case.

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Question – “How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?”

More Audio Advice

The following came to us recently:

Hey Tom, 

I am trying to make sense of the information on your site and the asking prices for these ‘hot stampers.’

In order to better understand how you assess sound quality, can you let me know what equipment you use for this purpose (what turntable, arm, cartridge, amps, speakers)?

How would you describe the sound signature of your evaluation equipment?

Bas

Bas,

Thanks for contacting us. We wrote a commentary about it, linked here:

As for our sound signature, we’ve labored mightily over the last forty years to build the biggest, most dynamic, most powerful system, limited by only those colorations we don’t know how to rid ourselves of. Here are some thoughts on what we went through in order to achieve our current level of fidelity:

Having done all that work over the course of decades, we feel we are in a good position to offer our readers:

Even the ones that never asked for it!

A lot of the basics about our Hot Stampers can be found at the top of every page under:

Our customers tend to be very enthusiastic about our Hot Stampers, as you can see by the letters they write us:

Any questions, feel free to write me.  Of course, writing is one thing, but

Best, TP

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This Is the Heart of Our System’s Accuracy

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Thoughts on Playback Accuracy

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange, the one that so many moving coils have these days, you may not notice some tonality issues we discuss on the blog and in our Hot Stamper listings quite as easily as we do.

Our Dynavector 17Dx Karat is ruler flat and very unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled Hi-Fi Beats My-Fi If You Are At All Serious about Audio.

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Talisman Testimonial – “… Damn! And to think I doubted you …”

Tom,

I’m in receipt of the Talisman and have tried it on numerous CDs, LPs and DVDs… damn! And to think I doubted you. A truly serious upgrade without spending serious money. A sheen has been removed from the top and I can hear farther into the recording than ever before, whatever the format. It definitely benefits LP playback more, at least on my system (a Linn rig). Mids are more palpable and instruments play more to their natural voice.

I’m a member of the St. Louis Symphony and recordings that I have participated in sound more like the sound I hear when I’m in the midst of my colleagues on stage at Powell Hall. Thanks for your help.

Tom D.

Tom,

O ye of little faith… Seriously, could you ever be without it now? And the private email I sent you explaining how to get even more out of the device surely meant an even greater improvement in the sound of your system. The kind of change you describe — for a couple hundred bucks! — is practically unheard of nowadays, but of course you heard it, I heard it, everybody hears it. The only people who don’t hear it are the people who are so skeptical that they cannot allow themselves the opportunity to hear it.

This is the kind of thinking that I rather unkindly refer to as Stone Age Audio. If you don’t believe audio has made huge strides in recent years, you simply haven’t taken advantage of the Revolutionary Changes in Audio we talk about on the site. Talisman? Magic Pillow? Hallographs? These things can’t work!

Of course it’s easy to say that if you’ve never heard them, not so easy once you have. If you’re happy with the sound of your stereo, don’t really see the need to make it sound any better, hey, you sure don’t need any of these products.

If, however, you, like us, are THRILLED with the fact that the sound of your favorite recordings is constantly improving, then you need to have a little faith in your friends here at Better Records. We talk the talk because we walk the walk, five days a week and twice on Sunday. My [old] annual tweaking budget is easily in the multi-hundreds of hours; that’s what it takes to make improvements of the kind that we have implemented over the years. With a system like mine, nine out of ten things I try don’t work. It’s that tenth one that makes it all worthwhile.

For our customers, however, we make it so easy. The devices we recommend are guaranteed to work or your money back. They do not require hours of tedious tweaking and listening in search of an appreciable change (that might never materialize). The equipment and sound improving devices we recommend make a DRAMATIC and OBVIOUS change right from the get go.

The only people who don’t know that are the ones who haven’t tried them. Perhaps with a little more faith… (more…)

Revolutionary Changes in Audio – What Works for Us Can Work for You

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

This listing, like the stereo itself (mine and yours), is a work in progress. It used to be on our website, but now resides here on the blog.

When I first got started in audio in the early- to mid-70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:

  • Stand-alone phono stages.
  • Modern cabling and power cords.
  • Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
  • Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
  • Carbon fiber mats for turntable platters.
  • Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
  • Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.
  • And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.

Our reason for having this kind of commentary on a site ostensibly devoted to the selling of records is simple: the better your stereo sounds, the better our records sound, and, more importantly, the bigger the difference between our records and the copies you already own. That includes those LPs recommended by “audiophile” record dealers, which tend to be on Heavy Vinyl, at 45 RPM, half-speed mastered or, even worse, Japanese pressed.

We have no interest in any of them. Why? On our system they rarely sound better than second-rate.

We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers, even more now that they have much improved high frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.

Our preamp and amp are vintage and low power; the Focus can play quite loudly with the thirty watts our amp puts out. We are big fans of Low Power (but not single ended) and are not the least bit happy with the current trend toward high-power amps, whether tube or transistor. (This trend started in the early ’70s with the Phase Linear 400 amp and has only gotten more out of hand with each passing year.)

We tried higher power amps to do the shootouts for Nirvana, AC/DC and their ilk but gave up fairly quickly. Using those amps involves major trade-offs; trade-offs whose costs rarely exceed their benefits. With more power comes less Tubey Magic, sweetness, transparency, three-dimensionality and that wonderful relaxed quality which gives the music its flow and sense of ease.

High power amps do none of these things well, but most speakers today are terribly inefficient and require their use, a choice most audiophiles do not even know they are making when they buy them. I made that mistake myself many years ago. Live and learn.

Most of our wiring — interconnect, phono and power cord — is custom.

Having said that, this commentary is all about why you shouldn’t care a whit about the equipment we use. 

Latest Findings

Prelude Step 4

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