Stereo History

Starting way back in the dark ages of the early 1970s, a few of the high points as well as the low points of my stereo history are chronicled here.

To get where you are today — assuming your stereo is any good at all — no doubt required that you go through a great many changes, and probably in much the same way I have.

A list of any audiophile’s current equipment tells the lifelong enthusiast very little about the sound of his system.

What changes were made as a result of tweaking and tuning, what records were used in the process, and what effects these changes had on the sound — these are far more important than any tweak, or amp change, or new cartridge, although those can be dramatic too.

Robert Brook has a lot to say about these issues, and you can find his story by searching the site for “Robert Brook.”

Small Speakers and Some Audio Lessons I’ve Learned Over the Last 50+ Years

These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

UPDATE 2026

The video linked to below is now private.

However, as you will see from our commentary, it really doesn’t make much of a difference whether it is or not. What we had to say about it years ago is nonetheless true.

Do not believe a word you hear in this video. [Not a problem!]

You probably shouldn’t even watch it. [Same.]

Let me state clearly one of our core beliefs here at Better Records.

Small speakers are incapable of lifelike musical reproduction in the home.

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The Townshend Seismic Platform: Essential in Analog Playback

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

The Townshend Seismic Platform: ESSENTIAL in ANALOG Playback

Robert mentions that his original commentary for the Seismic Platform has been lost. Here is what’s left of it.

I shared my story of starting out with the ‘bladder” version of the sink (now called a platform) back in the early 2000s, noting what a pain it was and how the amount of air in each of the three bladders changed the sound of the turntable.

Fortunately, those days are gone. It is now set and forget (although, like everything else in audio, you need to tweak it a bit to get the most benefit from it). You can contact Townshend for pricing and the cost of shipping direct to you, no middleman (that used to be us!) involved. We cannot recommend any piece of audio gear more highly.

(Please note that we do not make a dime from this product. We want you to buy them — yes, ideally you’re going to need more than one — so that your stereo can show you just how much better our vintage vinyl pressings are when directly compared to any and all others.)

Some background:

A few years back I discovered something wonderful about the Seismic Sink I was using under my turntable to control vibration. In our experience, vibration control is one of the most important revolutionary advancements in audio of the last twenty years or so. This commentary should help to give your tweaking efforts more context.

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Some Speakers Don’t Let Frampton Come Alive

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Frampton Available Now

When I was first getting serious about audio in the mid-70s, electrostatic and screen-type speakers were quite common in audio showrooms. Classical music aficionados in particular seemed to prefer them to other designs. They were more often than not big, open and clear, and never boxy or sour.

Another quality they had going for them was that they were exceptionally transparent.

Alas, they were inadequate or wrong in almost every way a speaker can be, but transparency was their strong suit and everybody could hear it. All of the qualities noted above — big, open, clear — worked together to fool a great many audiophiles into thinking that theirs was the right approach to reproducing music.

(Circa the Pretzel Logic era, Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan fame were apparently big fans of Magnepan speakers, to the consternation of everyone else in the band — especially the engineers, one imagines — who thought they were overly-smooth, incapable of reproducing the frequency extremes high and low, soft, and lacking in their ability to reproduce many of the most important aspects of music, energy especially. Count me among their harshest critics.)

It was my good fortune at the time that I liked to play my rock music good and loud, so screens, panels and full-range electrostats were never going to cut it for me.

I once heard the giant Magnaplanar 1D system — a series of ten panels that stretched all the way across the long wall of the audio showroom I frequented at the time, standing about 7 feet tall to boot — try to reproduce a favorite Peter Frampton record of mine. (It was Wind of Change, a Desert Island Disc I still play regularly to this day.)

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I Owe a Debt of Gratitude to Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

For me, Crime of the Century worked like a gateway drug to get me addicted to the amazing soundscapes found on so many 70s Prog Rock and Art Rock recordings, although I didn’t know what the term Art Rock meant or whether it even existed yet.

I just knew I loved Supertramp’s music. Both Crime and Crisis? What Crisis? were in heavy rotation in the cheap apartment I rented three blocks from the beach in San Diego where I was living in the mid-70s.

(It shared no common walls with any other units, which was an absolute necessity for someone who liked to play his music good and loud and often late into the evening. The police came knocking on my door once at two in the morning after I got a bit too carried away with the “running around the airport” song on Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently the next door neighbors were not enjoying it as much as I was.)

MoFi Rocks

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have had to have been Crime of the Century released by Mobile Fidelity in 1978.

It was that label’s first rock release and it showed me the kind of Big Rock Sound I didn’t think was possible for two speakers to produce no matter how big they were, and mine were very big indeed.

In my mind it sounded to me like live music at a concert. I had simply never heard sound like that in my livingroom.

Partly that was because a few years earlier I had upgraded to some very big speakers and some awesomely expensive tube gear in 1976.

When I threw that super Hi-Fi Audiophile pressing on the turntable and turned the volume up good and loud, I thought there could be no question that finally, after all these years and after so many different stereo systems, I had reached the pinnacle of home audio. How could the sound possibly get any better? (Of course, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would devote the next 40-plus years to exploring that question.)

By 1978, Crisis? What Crisis and Even in the Quietest Moments had already come out, and though you couldn’t buy either of those albums on a super-duper disc from Mofi, there was a Half-Speed of Crisis which, I have to admit, sounded great to me at the time and well after it should have. (I don’t know what I thought of the Sweet Thunder pressing of EITQM, but I know what I think now: it sucks.)

I became an even bigger fan of Crisis than I had been of COTC, if you can believe such a thing. (None of my friends could.)

Since Crime… is one of those albums that I still listen to regularly, I can say with confidence that it is the better album by a small margin, and one that would come with me to my desert island even if I were limited to as few as ten titles — that’s how good it is.

And I owe a debt of gratitude to a label that comes in for a lot of criticism on this blog, the one that took Supertramp’s best album and made it a Demo Disc the likes of which I had never heard before, Mobile Fidelity.

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Not that Long Ago Blue Was a Nut We Just Could Not Crack

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

Allow me to tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

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Abandoned Luncheonette – Remembering the Glorious Sound of Tubes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hall and Oates Available Now

This record has the sound of TUBES. I’m sure it was recorded with transistors, judging by the fact that it was made after most recording studios had abandoned that “antiquated” technology, but there may be a reason why they were able to achieve such success with the new transistor equipment when, in the decades to come, they would produce nothing but one failure after another.

In other words, I have a theory.

They remember what things sounded like when they had tubes. Modern engineers appear to have forgotten that sound. They seem to have no reference for Tubey Magic. If they use tubes in their mastering chains, they sure don’t sound the way vintage tube-mastered records tend to sound.

Transistor Audio Equipment with Plenty of Tubey Magic

A similar syndrome was then operating with the home audio equipment manufacturers as well. Early transistor gear by the likes of Marantz, McIntosh and Sherwood, just to name three I happen to be familiar with, still retained much of the smooth, rich, natural, sweet, grain-free sound of the better tube equipment of the day.

I once owned a wonderful Sherwood receiver that you would swear had tubes in it. In fact it was simply an unusually well-designed transistor unit. Anyone listening to it would never know that it was solid state. It has none of the “sound” we associate with solid state, thank goodness.

Very low power, 15 watts a channel. No wonder it sounded so good.

Stick with the 4 Digit Originals (SD 7269)

If you’re looking for a big production pop record that jumps out of your speakers, is full of TUBEY MAGIC, and has consistently good music, look no further. Until I picked up one of these nice originals, I had no idea how good this record could sound. For an early ’70s multi-track pop recording, this is about as good as it gets (AGAIG as we like to say). It’s rich, sweet, open, natural, smooth most of the time — in short, it’s got all the stuff we audiophiles LOVE.   

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The Difficulties of Being a Self-Taught Audiophile

What Kind of Audio Fool Was I?

When I was starting out in this hobby back in the 70s, some of the audiophiles I came in contact with preferred Half-Speed mastered LPs, others liked Japanese pressings, and almost everyone thought direct-to-disc recordings were the ne plus ultra of sound quality.

Now audiophiles appear to prefer SACDs, Heavy Vinyl and pressings mastered at 45 RPM on multi-disc sets. Same mediocre (at best!) wine, different bottle.

It is our opinion that none of these are the answer to finding and acquiring higher quality pressings.

They are relatively cheap and convenient temporary fixes, but as a solution to the actual problem facing the serious audiophile they are little more than stopgaps, and, worse than that, many will retard the progress you are hoping to make in this hobby.

For those of us who never wavered in our commitment to radical and revolutionary progress, they can be recognized in hindsight as the dead end they always were.

The path forward is exactly the path we have taken and charted for everyone.

With our approach to finding the best sounding records, cleaning them the way we do, playing them against each other the way we do, using the sound improving devices and equipment we recommend, we know you can succeed.

If we can do it, you can do it.

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The Second Best Day of My Life in Audio

Advice on Making Audio Progress

In the late-90s I had tried to power various speakers I owned with Mac 30s. I could never actually get  them to reproduce music faithfully, but they did wonderful things for some recordings.

In 2005, long after I had moved on from the Macs, I found a low-power integrated transistor amp from the 70s that was vastly superior to the custom tube preamp and amp we were using for shootouts at the time. 

It was, simply put, much more musically truthful. It sounded more like live music and less like recorded music.

It is this quality that is hardest to find in all of audio.

It is also the one quality of our system that, more than any other, makes it possible to do the kind of work we do.

Our equipment (along with our room treatments, setup, electricity and such) lets us hear the naked sound of the record being played, uncolored and unadorned.

Back to Mac

They started building them in 1954. Steve Hoffman was a big fan. We spent a fair amount of our time together tube-rolling back in the late-90s. Based on some of the recent interviews I’ve read, he appears to still be enamored with their sound.

Like the fellow who bought his first boat, buying a pair of Mac 30s was the second best day of my life, exceeded only by the day I got rid of them.

Regardless of what they might have said in their ads, they were not 99.60% perfect by any stretch of the imagination. To this day I consider them to be the most colored and inaccurate — albeit perhaps the most Tubey Magical — amp I have ever heard in my life. Having been actively involved in this hobby for more than fifty years, I regret to say that I’ve heard plenty of amps that didn’t do their jobs right.

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Sinatra At The Sands through Dahlquist DQ-10’s – My Neophyte Audiophile Mind Is Blown

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Sinatra Available Now

Back in the early 70s this was actually the album that first introduced me to honest-to-goodness “audiophile” sound.  

I was at my local stereo store listening to speakers one day, and the salesman made a comment that the speakers we were listening to (the old Infinity Monitors with the Walsh tweeter) sounded “boxy.”

I confessed to him that I didn’t actually know what that meant or what it would sound like if it weren’t boxy. 

So he hooked up a pair of Dahlquist DQ-10s and put Sinatra at the Sands on. I was amazed at how the sound just floated in the room, free from the speakers, presenting an image that was as wide and deep as the showroom we were in. That speaker may have many flaws, but boxiness is definitely not one of them.

This description is pretty close to what I thought I heard all those years ago:

The presence and immediacy here are staggering. Turn it up and Frank is right between your speakers, putting on the performance of a lifetime. Very few records out there offer the kind of realistic, lifelike sound you get from this pressing.

This vintage stereo LP also has the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s missing from the later reissues. As good as some of them can be, this one is dramatically more real sounding. It gives you the sense that Frank Sinatra is right in front of you.

He’s no longer a recording — he’s a living, breathing person. We call that “the breath of life,” and this record has it in spades. His voice is so rich, sweet, and free of any artificiality, you immediately find yourself lost in the music, because there’s no “sound” to distract you.

Or so I thought at the time.

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Letter of the Week – “Way too many egos that don’t want to be bruised or admit to something that’s not theirs.”

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

Hey Tom,

Several weeks ago I read your blog article about a person named Ray that sent you an interesting letter a while back. I had to laugh and shake my head after reading the content. To accuse anyone of being jealous of another is quite childish!

If anything here, Ray seems to be the one who is jealous and probably has never heard a genuine Hot Stamper on a quality sound system. It’s my understanding you have 40 years of research and experience doing what you do.

The record companies are giants and we, the consumer, have been, unfortunately, at their mercy. Myself included. Until now.

Ray and all others like him need to know that those of us out there in the world that listen to music (vinyl) passionately need to know the truth about the deception, propaganda, lies and crappy sounding records that the record companies are selling to an uninformed public.

There is a local business in this area that caters to the wealthier side of town in audio. I had a conversation with the owner a while back and these people are 100% convinced and brainwashed that all the remastered Heavy Vinyl pressings are the best thing ever…

Obviously they haven’t heard a hot stamper on one of those pricey systems. They are so convinced that they will not keep an open mind for a different view.

One thing I have noticed in the audiophile community, way too many egos that don’t want to be bruised or admit to something that’s not theirs. May the force be with all of us who listen to hot stampers.
Thx
Mike P.

Mike,

Thanks so much for your letter.

How anybody is fooled by the awful sound of the currently available Heavy Vinyl releases is hard to fathom, but I bought into that crap in the 90s, so who am I to talk? I was as lost as anyone. It took a lot of time and effort to figure out how wrong I was.

Yes, I had to work to figure all this stuff out, but it’s just not in the cards for most audiophiles and never will be.

None of that stops us from enjoying great vintage vinyl, so I don’t let it bother me.

Here is hoping the new year brings health and happiness to you and yours and lots of great music.

TP

Mike replied:

Thanks for your feedback. I do truly appreciate it, especially because you have done the homework and the result is hot stampers. Yeah baby!

I have a friend who has been into vinyl since high school as I have. Back in the mid-70s. We reunited our friendship about 5 years ago and he has been an inspiration for the sound system I have today. We enjoy listening sessions at each other’s place, especially now that my system has reached a high level of sound quality.

However, there is a big difference in philosophy and quality of sound in our systems. He insists on listening to vintage domestic copies (not hot stampers) and remastered heavy vinyl. Also, he is using EQ (compressed and lifeless) and a DAC in his tape loop for the turntable circuit.

It is truly painful for me to listen to his system. I used to think it was awesome!

Because he is so set in his ways and not open to suggestion, his sound will never change. I have talked to him about hot stampers and even brought a couple copies over to play. He has closed his mind to a better thing and will not consider spending $ on them.

Back to my comment about how many audiophiles out there have this ego thing that will keep them from ever experiencing what I have on my system with hot stampers!
Mike

Mike, anyone in audio who is set in his ways and refuses to open his ears is doomed to a life of mediocre quality playback.

I heard it everywhere I went until I finally just gave up going to places just to hear more mediocre sound.

I’m glad I went where I did and found what I found — the EAR 324P, the Legacy speakers — but, to be honest, most of what I ended up with I found as a matter of good friends and good fortune.

I just happened to have very good luck. And two open ears. Not everybody does.

I consider myself very fortunate. Thanks again for writing,

TP

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