Stereo History

My stereo history, beginning in the early 1970s.

If your stereo is any good at all, you’ve undoubtedly gone through lots of changes much the way I have.

A list of one’s current equipment tells the experienced audiophile very little about the sound of the system in question.

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, must be recognized as being far more important than any amp or cartridge change, although those can be important too.

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

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

(more…)

We Love Our Triplanar Arm Just as Much as Robert Brook Loves His

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

In the listing below, Robert Brook recommends you buy a Triplanar tonearm. So do we. If you would like one, as dealers for this wonderful arm we may be able to help, although the wait is typically about a year. Worth the wait I say!

I hope to write a bit about getting my first Triplanar back in the late-90s, a life-changing event in my evolution as an audiophile.

Once I had learned how to dial in the VTA adjustment for every record I played, I quickly discovered that I was able to operate at a completly different level.

This is a sophisticated piece of equipment with very fine adjustments for every aspect of playback. I confess it actually took me about five years to be in full control of all the ins and outs of the Triplanar. The more I experimented with the settings, the more I learned and the better I could play records.

In 2005 I made a breakthrough while working with a favorite Borodin record I had been trying and failing to get to sound right. I wrote about the hours I spent adjusting the azimuth, VTA, anti-skate and tracking weight for that record, and what dramatic improvements resulted from my efforts all those years ago.

If you don’t have an arm of this quality, or don’t know how to adjust it for every record you play, it is our belief that you have not begun to hear how good your records can sound.

The TRIPLANAR MK VII is at the PINNACLE OF PERFORMANCE

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use.

Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered scientifically, methodically and carefully, along these three fronts:

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “Nothing I’ve done has ever offered a more DEEPLY SATISFYING audio improvement than Hallographs.””

More Audio Advice

Revolutions in Audio, Anyone?

Many years ago one of our good customers had this to say about the Hallographs he had purchased.

They are no longer made, but if you have a chance to get hold of a pair, take it. You may find yourself as knocked out by the sound as Dan was.

Hey Tom, 

Man, you weren’t kidding. Hallographs, utilizing a process as comprehensible to me as voodoo magic, have got to be the most AMAZING sonic upgrade ever. Hallographs allow my stereo to induce not just pleasure, but euphoria. That’s not hyperbole.

I don’t know how these tall sticks of wood, albeit expertly crafted, do whatever it is they do, but the sound emanating from my speakers reached a whole new league of sonic reproduction.

Edginess to the highs? Gone.

Bass bloat? Gone.

High volume distortion? Gone.

Meanwhile, it adds rich tones, warmth, detail, clarity, dynamics, life-like three-dimensional sound, and a wonderful ease and naturalness to the overall sound. To top it off, I’ve been able to calibrate focus and immediacy vs. soundstaging and depth. Did I mention it adds a beautifully rich tone?

That I could achieve such wonderful sound with Hallographs in my mid-sized room should be an encouragement to any of your customers who, like me, are still working their way up to a large listening room. I was worried that I might not get much out of the Hallos in the absence of a full range of placement options, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the tens of thousands of dollars of stereo equipment I’ve purchased, nothing I’ve done has ever offered a more DEEPLY SATISFYING audio improvement than Hallographs. When can I get a second pair?

Dan L.

Dan,

Thanks so much for your letter. We are as enthusiastic about the Hallos ability to improve the sound of the stereo as anyone, as can be seen from the photo below. Three Hallos can be seen in the picture surrounding one old man, but we actually use a total of six of them, with two in the back corners of the room behind the listener.

Discovering these room treatments right around 2004 completely changed audio for me. I’m glad you had the same experience. Unfortunately, they never caught on the way they should have, so finding them in the secondary market is difficult, but some of our customers have managed to do it.

(more…)

Robert Brook Can Help You Set Your Anti-Skate

More of the music of Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Robert Brook writes a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert recently recounted a story that aligned very much with my own experience.

Way back in the dark ages of the 90s, I was afraid to mess with my turntable, arm and cartridge for fear of getting them “out of alignment.”

Of course, I had simply assumed at the time that they were in alignment. I had followed all the instructions to the best of my ability, but it wouldn’t be until years later that I learned just how crude an approximation that way of doing it turned out to be.

Robert writes:

For years, even decades, I was afraid to touch any of the settings on my turntable, only to discover that when I finally did, I wished I’d done it a lot sooner. Turntable setup has taught me a lot, and as I’ve gotten better at it and better informed about it, I now need to go back and revise the turntable setup guides I posted a few years ago, which are in need of revision and updating.

Here is the complete story. I hope to write more about anti-skate in depth down the road, but for now, check out Robert’s story and then return to this listing and scroll down to read what we’ve written about the subject to date.

System Sounding BRIGHT? 🕶 Might Be Time to ADJUST YOUR ANTI-SKATE

Dialing in the Anti-Skate with Massed Strings

Here we discuss one of our favorite test records. Strings are one of the hardest elements in any recording — including pop and jazz records — to get right. They also make it very easy to spot when something, somewhere, is off.

Listening in Depth to So Far

Advice for using vocals on pop albums to tweak and tune your setup.

Azimuth, VTA, Anti-Skate and Tracking Weight

Way back in 2005 we discussed the four major imputs that go into setting up tonearms and cartridges.

Cartridge Tweaking and Turntable Setup Advice

Wherein we discuss the use of our three favorite test discs, while also providing links to hundreds of other records that are good for testing various aspects of reproduction.

These are the records that challenged me to make more progress in audio. If you want to improve your stereo, these are some of the records that can help get you to the next level.

(more…)

Mussorgsky – Big Speakers, Loud Levels and More Power to the Orchestra

Hot Stamper LPs that Should Be Played on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

More Recordings that Sound Their Best on Big Speakers at Loud Levels 

The darker brass instruments like tubas, trombones and french horns are superb here. Other Golden Age recordings of the work, as enjoyable as they may be in other respects, do not fully reproduce the weighty quality of the brass, probably because of compression, limiting, tube smear, or some combination of the three.

The brass on this record has a power like practically no other. It’s also tonally correct. It’s not aggressive. It’s not irritating. It’s just immediate and powerful the way the real thing is when you hear it live. That’s what really caught my ear when I first played the recording.

There is a blast of brass at the end of Catacombs that is so big and real, it makes you forget you’re listening to a recording. You hear every brass instrument, full size, full weight. I still remember the night I was playing the album, good and loud of course, when that part of the work played through. It was truly startling in its power.

Back then I had the Legacy Whisper speaker system, the one with eight 15″ woofers. They moved air like nobody’s business. If you want to reproduce the power of the trombone, the loudest instrument in the orchestra, they’re the speaker that can do it.

Some of Ansermet’s recordings with the Suisse Romande are absolutely the best I’ve ever heard. It was a magical combination of the right hall, the right engineers, the right orchestra and the right technology — the pure tube ANALOG technology of the ’50s and ’60s!

Dynamics

Another thing this recording has going for it is dynamic power. This is a dynamic piece of music. Few recordings I have ever heard have the dynamic contrasts that this one does. It really gets loud when it needs to. The best pressings sound completely uncompressed. Although I’m sure there has to be compression of one kind or another, the listener is rarely made aware of it.

Dynamics such as these are thrilling. They let the music come alive. Here at Better Records we are fans of big speakers and loud music and that combination is exactly what allows this record to be as powerful and moving as it is. We love that sound and have been proselytizing for equipment capable of recreating it in the home for more than 30 years.

How on earth is a speaker system like this one going to reproduce the power of all that brass?

The big finish with cymbal crashes and that amazing gong is worth the price of the album — when and if you can find one that’s not compressed and distorted from bad mastering or abuse. If you can find a more thrilling climax to a more powerful orchestral work, you must have one helluva classical collection. My hat’s off to you.

Powerful Bass

The third quality this record has is tremendous, powerful deep BASS. As you know, bass drum thwacks are called for throughout this composition. This is one of the few recordings where those bass notes don’t get “clipped” because the cutting amplifiers have run out of juice. That’s a sound that’s common to many Living Stereos. We put up with it because we like all the other qualities they have, but it’s a shortcoming of many of the tube cutting amplifiers from that era. The deep bass on this record is prodigious, as Dr. Strangelove might say. It really rocks the room.

If you prize Golden Age richness, lushness and Tubey Magic, this copy is going to be hard to beat. The hall is huge with tremendous depth and lovely reverberation. (Our Disney Hall here in L.A. does not have this kind of sound, I regret to say.)

Production and Engineering

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from 1958 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

The gorgeous hall the Suisse Romande recorded in was possibly the best recording venue of its day, perhaps of all time. More amazing sounding recordings were made there than in any other hall we know of. There is a solidity and richness to the sound that goes beyond all the other recordings we have played, yet clarity and transparency are not sacrificed in the least.

It’s as wide, deep and three-dimensional as any, which is of course all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the weight and power of the brass, combined with timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

Further Reading

What I Couldn’t Hear on My 90s Tube System

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

More Piano Recordings that Are Good for Testing

I have a very long history with Bells Are Ringing, dating back to the ’90s. My friend Robert Pincus first turned me on to the CD, which, happily for all concerned, was mastered beautifully and comes highly recommended if you want to work on your digital playback or other non-analog aspects of your system such as your room, electricity, speaker placement and such like. (More recommended CDs here.)

Back in the day we often used it to test and tweak some of the stereos in my friends’ systems.

Playing the original stereo pressing, all I could hear on my 90s all tube system was

  • blurred mids,
  • lack of transient attack,
  • sloppy bass,
  • lack of space and transparency,
  • as well as other shortcomings too numerous to mention.

All of which I simply attributed at the time to the limitations of the vintage jazz pressing I owned.

A classic case of me rather foolishly blaming the recording.

I know better now. The record was fine. I just couldn’t reproduce it.

Well, things have certainly changed. I have virtually none of the equipment I had back then, and I hear none of the problems with this copy that I heard back then. This is clearly a different LP, I sold the old one off years ago, but I have to think that much of the change in the sound was a change in cleaning, equipment, setup, tweaks and room treatments, all the stuff we prattle on about endlessly on this blog.

My Old System

By the mid-90s I had been seriously into audio for more than twenty years.

I had the Legacy Whisper Speaker System with eight 15″ woofers and added subs.

I had a Triplanar tonearm and a VPI Aries turntable sitting on Aurios, using a Synchronous Drive System for the outboard motor.

I had custom tube amps and a custom tube preamp and phono stage. They were the best of their kind that I’d heard, at any price.

In short, I had a lot of expensive, high-quality equipment that sounded great to me.

Now, looking back on those days, I can see I was not at the level I needed to be in order to play Bells Are Ringing with any real fidelity to the recording. My stereo was simply not resolving enough.

This system can play the record and make it sound like live music. I thought my old one could too, because I didn’t have a clue as to just how good audio in the home could get.

Clearly I had a lot to learn.

This is, once again, what progress in audio in all about. As your stereo improves, your good records should sound better, and your mediocre-to-bad records should show you how mediocre to bad they really are. You need high quality sound before you can tell which are which.

The title of this letter gets right to the heart of it: “My stereo upgrades have widened the sonic chasm between good, old-fashioned records and their nouveau imposters.”

Still at It

We constantly strive to improve the quality of our cleaning and playback.

And we’re still at it. With this much money on the line, we had better be able to deliver the goods every time out.

Our customers seem to like the records they’ve been getting. They’ve written us hundreds of letters telling us so.

And we especially like the letters they write to us once they’ve compared our Hot Stamper pressings to the copies they owned that were Half-Speed mastered or pressed on Heavy Vinyl, or both.

(more…)

DBX “Making Good Sound Better” – But Did It Really?

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

More on My Old System

Yes, I actually owned a DBX device, but not the one used to restore the dynamics to records. The one I had (seen below) was a simple dynamic range expander. I later stepped up to the 3BX, seen below.

I tried to get it to make my compressed rock records sound more lively, but what I really needed was equipment that could actually reproduce the dynamics of the records I owned.

Some of the most compressed records I owned were made by Mobile Fidelity and their ilk, and there is nothing you can do for those records. The compression is baked into them like flour is baked into a cake. (More on that subject here.)

The equipment I own now is by far the most dynamic I have ever heard, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

When I first got serious about reel to reel, I bought a Tandberg unit with no noise reduction. My stereo store in San Diego told me that the DBX noise reduction unit they offered was better than Dolby. This, I found out the hard way, was not true. The DBX pumped like crazy. I took both units back, got a Tandberg with Dolby and was reasonably happy ever after.

I think. I may have bought an outboard Dolby unit to use with my Tandberg. I remember having one. It was a very long time ago.

(more…)

For the Best Kinks Sound, Stick with the Tri-Color Mono Pressings

More of the Music of The Kinks

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Kinks

This Pink and Green Reprise original MONO pressing is lively, balanced and vibrant, with a healthy dose of the Tubey Magical Richness The Kinks’ recordings need in order to sound the way we want them to, which is less irritatingly bright, thin and harsh.

“Tired of Waiting For You” is the big hit here, and like most Kinks albums from back in the day, they put the hit at the end of the side, so you had better make sure whatever copy you find has not been played much or it will be full of Inner Groove Distortion.

Inner Groove Distortion caused by the non-anti-skate-equipped turntables of the day is a chronic problem with rock and pop records from this era. We check all our records for Inner Groove Damage (IGD) as a matter of course when condition checking the surface quality of the vinyl.

The Poster Boy for Inner Groove Distortion is the song “Thank You” on this album from 1969. That record got played a lot back in the day, on the only turntables that we had available to us at the time, crappy ones.

My first “audiophile” table was the extremely plasticky Garrard 40B. I think I bought mine in 1973  and I probably paid about $69 for it. As I recall, this was their entry level model. If any table had been cheaper I would have bought it, which shows you what my starving-college-student budget must have been. Sounded just fine to me, though. What did I know about sound in 1973?

By 1976 I would have some of the best audiophile electronics in the world and the massive speakers you see below. That’s some head-spinning progress if you ask me. Once I had heard how good all my favorite albums were sounding, I got very motivated. For real progress to occur, you must let music do the driving.

The mystery is why it took me until 2007 to get my system, room, electricity and tweaks to a level advanced enough that the shortcomings of the Modern Heavy Vinyl Record became obvious.

Actually, it’s not really all that mysterious. Audio is hard. It took me decades to learn how to do it right, and if you work hard at it, you can expect it to take you decades too. [1]

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.

In our experience, this record sounds best this way:

We admit that we have not played many early British pressings of Kinks albums in mono, stereo or any other way.

As you can well imagine, few of them have survived the turntables of the day and are in audiophile playing condition.

[1] When I 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 massive 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.

A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level we needed to in order to do our record shootouts, and be confident about our findings, and we pursued every one of them about as far as time and money allowed. For a more complete discussion of these issues, please click here.

(more…)

My Stereo from the 70s and the Audio Cult I Was In

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

More on Our Stereo System

A somewhat strange coincidence occurred not long ago. I found an old commentary describing the speakers I used to own, part of a discussion explaining why I have never wanted to settle for small speakers.

At the same time I saw a fellow on Audiogon was selling the electrostatic tweeter array for the very same speaker I owned, the RTR 280DR. Let me tell you, it really took me back; I haven’t seen a pair in over twenty years. 

Here is the story from the old listing talking about the RTRs, sparked by a discussion of Demo Discs.

Fooled Again

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I desperately wanted them then and there. It was only later when I got home with them that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording. To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in; it really was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280DR’s. Now that was a great speaker! 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

This was the mid-70s, more than forty five years ago, and I am proud to say I have never owned a small speaker since.

I’ve heard a lot of them — some good, most of them not so good — but that’s not a sound I could ever live with.

Small speakers can do many things well; that is not at issue.

In my experience, what small speakers don’t do is move enough air to bring the music on records to life in a way that gives meaning to the term Hi-Fidelity.

(more…)

What Recordings Are Audiophile Writers Writing About Now I Wonder?

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Female Vocal Albums

In the early seventies, when I was first becoming seriously interested in audiophile equipment, this was a well-known Demo Disc at some high-end audio salons.

Five years later I would have speakers larger and more expensive in real dollars than the speakers I now own. At a tender age I acquired Stereophile’s cost no object, state-of-the-art speaker system from the mid-’70s, the Fulton J. I was the youngest person ever to own a pair of the behemoths, a record that has never and will never be broken I suspect.

The other monster speaker from that time was the Infinity Servo-Static 1A, which I auditioned before buying the Fultons. During the audition the electrostatic drivers kept blowing if the level got up too high, so that was the end of that. Who wants a speaker that can’t play at realistic sound levels?

Of course, many of you may never have heard of Carmen McRae’s The Great American Songbook album, because the heyday for this record was probably 30-40 years ago, back when the audiophile magazines were actually writing about exceptionally natural, realistic recordings such as this one.

I don’t know what they write about now; I stopped reading them years ago. But I doubt very much that they are still writing about recordings of this quality.

What’s striking about this album is how immediate and unprocessed everything sounds. It really gives you the feeling of being at a live show in a club. It helps that the performance was captured directly onto analog tape with minimal miking. Michael Cuscuna was the remix supervisor, by the way.

(more…)