*Collecting Better Records

Ideas and methods for finding the best sounding pressings of your favorite music.

Did Carlos Santana want to make music or produce fireworks?

More of the Music of Santana

Reviews and Commentaries for Abraxas

Our good customer Aaron has lately been putting a great deal of time and money into the pursuit of perfect sound. His progress in audio since he discovered Hot Stampers and the kind of high quality vintage equipment we’ve recommended he use to play them has been remarkable.

In 2022 he wrote to tell us that the Super Hot Stamper Abraxas we had sent him and the Mofi One-Step he already owned were comparable in sound quality. Knowing what an awful label Mobile Fidelity is, and what a foolish idea Half-Speed Mastering is, you can imagine that we might have been a wee bit skeptical of this estimation, and we asked him to clarify his position.

Aaron also has made many improvements to his system since then. He carefully listened to both versions of Abraxas again and reported his findings. We believe that there is much to be learned from the kind of shootout that Aaron did for the album.

Hey Tom,

Oh it’s a fascinating comparison! Here’s some data points, with the final one being the most relevant to your question.

I did another series of shootouts yesterday with my new vintage amp and speakers, and I included Abraxas in it. The bass on the onestep is monstrous and unreal. Sometimes the cymbals and chimes leap out of the speakers. I understand why people go gaga for this record. If you listen for sound, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Then I put on the hot stamper. The bass was back under control. Driving, but not dominating. The overall character was lighter and less ponderous. It was more listenable, more musical, and overall it was a relief to be less distracted by the fireworks. The vocals are back in front where they belong, and more palpable.

But, the hot stamper simply doesn’t grab ahold of you the way the onestep does.

When you describe the sound of the MoFi One-Step of Abraxas, with bass that’s “monstrous and unreal. Sometimes the cymbals and chimes leap out of the speakers,” all I hear in my head is a classic case of smile curve equalization, the kind MoFi has been using since the day they produced their first rock record in 1978, Crime of the Century. Years ago we noted:

We get these MoFis in on a regular basis, and they usually sound as phony and wrong as can be. They’re the perfect example of a hyped-up audiophile record that appeals to people with lifeless stereos, the kind that need amped-up records to get them to come to life.

I’ve been telling people for years that the MoFi was junk, and that they should get rid of their copy and replace it with a tonally correct version, easily done since there is a very good sounding Speakers Corner 180g reissue currently in print which does not suffer from the ridiculously boosted top end and bloated bass that characterizes the typical MoFi COTC pressing. [Of course, we no longer recommend anyone buy Crime of the Century on Speakers Corner. The better our system gets, the less we like them.]

That’s the sound of MoFi all right. The Hot Stampers we offer would never have those “qualities,” if you care to call them that.

Leaping cymbals and chimes? Are they supposed to do that?

Also, the bass on our early pressing would have to be “back under control” or we wouldn’t have sold it to you as a Hot Stamper.

Unsurprisingly, without all that extra added bass, the sound is “lighter and less ponderous.” Saints be praised.

Smile Curve Redux

With the smile curve adding to the top and the bottom, what suffers the most? The midrange. There’s less of it relative to the  now-boosted frequency extremes. We described the effect here:

The Doors first album they released was yet another obvious example of MoFi’s predilection for sucked-out mids. Scooping out the middle of the midrange has the effect of creating an artificial sense of depth where none belongs. Play any original Bruce Botnick engineered album by Love or The Doors and you will notice immediately that the vocals are front and center.

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart and you can get that MoFi sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Nowadays I would place it under the general heading of My-Fi, not Hi-Fi. Our one goal for every tweak and upgrade we make is to increase the latter and reduce the former.

Or as Aaron might have phrased it, “The vocals are back in front where they belong, and more palpable.” You sure got that right.

Musicality

Aaron was impressed with how much more musical our pressing is, noting: “It was more listenable, more musical, and overall it was a relief to be less distracted by the fireworks.”

Then he concludes with this, sending my head into a spin: “But, the hot stamper simply doesn’t grab ahold of you the way the onestep does.”

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Letter of the Week – “…most of my LP purchases over the years, whether heavy vinyl or not, were lousy representations…”

New to the Blog? Start Here

More Hot Stamper Testimonial Letters

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

Hey Tom, 

Thanks to you guys, I finally get it. I realize now that most of my LP purchases over the years, whether heavy vinyl or not, were lousy representations of what was out there. I think that conditions you.

If you’ve only ever known sex with a condom, you have no idea how much better sex is without. Hope that wasn’t too out of line. Thanks again, guys, for fighting the good fight.

Cheers,
Dave R.

Dave,

Not out of line, I know what you mean!

As for run-of-the-mill records, I wrote a commentary many years ago criticizing the idea of buying lots of music on the cheap as a good way to get your money’s worth.

The micro-budget guys in audio and record collecting really have almost no chance to get good at either audio or record collecting. Both are difficult and expensive if you are actually serious about them.

It’s simply not a hobby that lends itself to doing it on the cheap, especially these days. (It used to be; I bought my monster Fulton J speaker system for under $2,000 a pair in 1975 ($11,000 is today’s money). That speaker today would sell for perhaps as much as fifty times that two grand.)

The Heavy Vinyl crowd are getting not-especially-good pressings at an affordable price, but they fool themselves into thinking all such pressings are better than mediocre in order to justify collecting them. Apparently this is where some folks think the real fun is. We obviously do not subscribe to that view, nor would we recommend it. Years ago we wrote:

We like to play records, not just collect them, and we like to play records with the best sound we can find, using the shootout process we developed over the last two decades. We call those kinds of records Hot Stamper pressings, and finding them, and making them available to other like-minded audiophiles, has been the focus of our work for close to twenty years.

Audiophiles collect records for lots of reasons, and if they enjoy having a collection of audiophile pressings, and find that they derive satisfaction from owning and discussing them with other similarly-interested individuals, then more power to them. Who am I to tell them what they should be doing with their spare time?

One good copy of Way Out West was all Robert Brook needed in order to see how pointless an exercise and how wasteful an approach this turns out to be, assuming you, like him and plenty of readers of this blog, are willing to devote the time and effort it takes to get to the next level.

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“Ultra High Quality Records” or “Lipstick on a Pig”?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Audiophile Recordings Available Now

More on the Subject of Collecting Better Sounding Records

Today’s vinyl-loving audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making more than forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just audiophile fads, each with a track record of underperformance that seems to worsen with each passing year? Would you really want to defend this piece of junk in 2023?

uhqrb

In my formative years in audio, starting in the mid-70s, it would never have occurred to me to buy more than one copy of a record. I didn’t need to do a head-to-head comparison in order to find out which one sounded better. I approached the subject Platonically, not scientifically: the record that should sound better, would sound better.

Later on in the decade, a label by the name of Mobile Fidelity would come along claiming to actually make better sounding pressings than the ones the major labels put out, and cluelessly I bought into that nonsense too. (To be fair, sometimes they did — Waiting for Columbus and American Beauty come to mind if you don’t have properly-pressed, properly-mastered originals, but my god, Katy Lied, Year of the Cat and Sundown have to be three of the worst sounding records I’ve ever played in my life.)

And isn’t it every bit as true today as it was in the past that the audiophiles who buy these “special” pressings, like the ones I bought back in the 70s and 80s, rarely seem to notice that many of them don’t actually sound good? (Some of the worst can be found here, the worst of the worst here.)

CofAEasy Answers and Quick Fixes

Turns out there are no easy answers. There are no quick fixes. In audio there’s only hard work and more hard work. That’s what gives the learning curve its curvature — the more you do it, the better you can do it.

And if doing all that work is also your idea of fun, you just might get really good at it.

If you actually enjoy playing five or ten or even fifteen copies of the same album to find the few that really sound good, and the one that sounds amazing — because hearing your favorite music the way it was meant to be heard is a positive thrill — then you just might end up with one helluva record collection, worlds better than one filled with audiophile pressings from any era, most especially the present.

Further Reading

Who Can Explain Why This Cheap Reissue Sounds So Good?

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for The Music of Claude Debussy

This Decca reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet. Roy Wallace was the engineer for these sessions from 1955 to 1962 in Geneva’s glorious sounding Victoria Hall, and his work here is superb in all respects.

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording, with the added benefit of mastering using more modern, but apparently still good, cutting equipment from the ’70s, 1972 to be exact.

We are of course here referring to the often amazing modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the mediocre-at-best modern mastering of today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that it excelled in so many areas of reproduction. The illusion of disappearing speakers is one of the more attractive aspects of the sound here, pulling the listener into the space of the concert hall in an especially engrossing way.

Thread It Up and Just Hit Play Already

What might be seen as odd — odd to some audiophiles but not to us — was how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the best copies.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the tape, and that all one has to do to get that vintage sound on to a record is simply to thread up the master on a good machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record these days makes clear that in fact I’m wrong to think that this approach would work. It seems to me that somebody should be able to figure out how to do it. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years.

Old Tapes, New Tapes

The master tapes were about fifteen years old when this record was mastered.

Compare that to a current cutting which would be made from approximately fifty year old tapes.

Perhaps that explains it.

Or maybe it doesn’t.

Either way it’s pure guesswork.

We don’t really feel the need to have reasons for why the records sound the way they do.

We hear the differences, and more importantly our customers hear the differences, and what else could possibly matter?

Listening to records with an open mind is critical to your ability to find better sounding pressings, but thinking about them the right way is every bit as important.

This blog is dedicated to helping audiophiles like you do both.

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Badfinger – Porky Not So Prime Cut

More of the Music of Badfinger

Reviews and Commentaries for Badfinger

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another record misunderstanding.

We had an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last. The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played. We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He could be! 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.

How did we come by that information?

By conducting carefully controlled experiments to find out.

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.

To be fair, we have played exactly one copy of the album with Porky/Pecko stampers. Did we get a bad one and the gentleman quoted above got a good one? Nobody knows, because nobody can know with a great deal more evidence to make the case one way or the other. Would we buy another Porky pressing? If we found one for cheap, sure. But that is not very likely to happen. Those kinds of records are not cheap these days.

If you have a great sounding UK copy, we would love to hear it. Until then we remain skeptical.

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Scheherazade – Yes, Sometimes There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

More of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

More Stamper and Pressing Information

In 2015 we wrote:

There are certain stampers that seem to have a consistently brighter top end. They are tolerable most of the time, but the real magic can only be found on the copies that have a correct or even slightly duller top. Live classical music is never “bright” the way recordings of it so often are.

On the other hand, it’s rarely “rich” and “romantic” the way many vintage recordings are — even those we rave about — but that’s another story for another day.

We recently did the shootout again, and now with a much more resolving, clear, accurate upper midrange and an even more extended top end, the stampers that we used to find “brighter than ideal” are almost always just too damn bright, period.

We will never buy another copy with those stampers if we can help it.

We was wrong and we don’t mind admitting it. We must be learning something in our shootouts, right?. We ran an experiment, we discovered something new about this album, and that should be seen as a good thing.

If you have been making improvements to your system, room, electricity, etc., then you too own records which don’t sound as good as you remember them. You just don’t know which ones they are, assuming you haven’t played them in a while.

One Stamper to Rule Them All

Which leaves one and only one stamper that can win a shootout. There is another stamper we like well enough to offer to our discriminating customers, but after that it is all downhill, and steeply.

Of course the right stampers are the hardest ones to find too. All of which explains why you rarely see a copy of the album for sale on our site.

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After Years of Searching, We Finally Found an Old Beatles Record that Sounds Really Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles for Sale

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Beatles

Updated 2023 — See Below

On the Yellow and Black Parlophone label! This is best sounding early label pressing we have ever played. Not a Shootout Winner, but a perfectly enjoyable copy of one of the best sounding Beatles albums we play on a regular basis.

NEWSFLASH FROM 2022

We just played another original pressing of For Sale and this copy had a Triple Plus (A+++) side one, mated to a Double Plus (A++) side two. For Sale is still the only studio album with top quality sound on the original pressing that we have ever played, but now we can say with some authority that if you have a bunch of originals, you might just have one with killer sound like the one we had. There was a later pressing that also earned our top grade, a subject we touch on in this commentary for Kind of Blue.

NEWSFLASH FROM 2023

We’ve just played another original pressing of For Sale in a shootout and amazingly it earned Triple Plus (A+++) grades for its sound on both sides. Most original Beatles pressings on the early label do not even qualify to make it into our shootouts. Their mastering is so crude, congested and distorted that the sound simply cannot be taken seriously on a modern hi-fi rig. On a jukebox, maybe. Mine’s in the shop.

Note that this label information, like most label information, is not as helpful as it might seem. The Yellow and Black Parlophone label was used in the UK all the way up until 1969, during which time a lot of copies of For Sale, first released in 1964, were sold. In other words, if you want to find a great sounding pressing of For Sale on the early label, you have your work cut out for you.

This finding about For Sale is precisely why live and learn is our motto.

We don’t know it all, and we’ve never claimed that we did. We constantly learn things about pressings in our daily shootouts. That should not be too surprising, as record shootouts are the only way to learn anything about the sound of records that’s actually worth knowing.

Start doing your own experiments and your record knowledge might just take off the way ours has. 99% of what we think we know about the sound of records we’ve learned in shootouts over the course of the last twenty years.

Here is our advice on getting started.

Before this, the only Beatles record we would sell on the Yellow and Black Parlophone label was A Collection of Oldies… But Goldies. That title does have the best sound on the early label. In numerous shootouts, no Black and Silver label pressing from the ’70s was competitive with the best stereo copies made in the ’60s.

Until now, it was clearly the exception to our rule. From With the Beatles up through Yellow Submarine, the best sounding Beatles pressings would always be found on the best reissue pressings.

Here are the notes for the best sounding For Sale on the early label we played in our 2022 shootout.

For those who have trouble reading our writing, the notes say:

Side One

  • Track one is clear enough, a bit recessed.
  • Track two is clear, open and lively, with good space, but not as weighty as the best.

Side Two

  • Track one is relaxed, solid and musical, with good size.
  • Track two is full, solid and musical, with good bass.

We Was Wrong

A very good sounding record, with few of the problems we heard on the other early label Beatles pressings we’ve played in the past. Most of them had the kind of old record sound — compressed, congested, harmonically distorted, bandwidth limited, etc. — that kept them from making the cut.

But that’s the reason to play records, not judge them by their labels, right? How else would you possibly learn anything about their sound? And you have to play them head to head against other copies, a normally crude process we’ve refined over the last twenty years into a science we like to call the Hot Stamper shootout.

The Bottom Line

Will we ever buy another one? Probably not. [Ah, but we did!] The right later label pressings always win the shootouts, and the second tier copies on the later label will tend to be cheaper to buy, in better condition and pressed on quieter vinyl.

If you really must have an early label pressing, like this guy, you will have no trouble finding one in good shape.  Well, maybe not no trouble, because buying records over the internet is a major pain. Let’s just say it can be done.

Cleaning the record is another matter. For that you need a lot of expensive equipment and plenty of time on your hands.

Some Current Thoughts on Old Paradigms

It is our strongly held belief that if your equipment (regardless of cost) or your critical listening skills (regardless of the esteem that you may hold yours in) do not allow you to hear the kinds of sonic differences among pressings we describe, then whether you are just getting started in audio or are a self-identified Audio Expert writing for the most prestigious magazines and websites, you still have a very long way to go in this hobby.

Purveyors of the old paradigms — original is better, money buys good sound — may eventually find their approach to records and equipment unsatisfactory (when it isn’t just plain wrong), but they will only do so if they start to rely more on empirical findings and less on convenient theories and received wisdom.

A reviewer we all know well was clearly stuck years ago in the old paradigm, illustrated perfectly by this comment:

It’s not my pleasure to be so negative but since I have a clean UK original (signed for me by George Martin!) I’ll not be playing this one again. Yes, there are some panning mistakes and whatever else Martin “cleaned up” but really, sometimes it’s best to leave well-enough (and this album was well-enough!) alone.

We are not aware that he has subsequently recognized the error of his ways. We can’t imagine how anyone can have a system in this day and age that can obscure the flaws of the original Parlophone pressings of Rubber Soul (or any other Yellow and Black label Parlophone pressing for that matter). The reviewer quoted above apparently does (as do some of our customers, truth be told), but we have something very different indeed. One might even consider it the opposite of such a system.

Our system is designed to relentlessly and ruthlessly expose the flaws of every record we play. Only the best of the best can survive that level of scrutiny. Our system (comprising equipment, set-up, tweaks, room, room treatments, electricity) operates at the highest level of fidelity we are able to achieve. In addition, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system in search of even better sound.

Real Progress

But wait a minute, who are we to talk about being easily fooled? Bear in mind that as recently as 2000-something we were still recommending the DCC and other Heavy Vinyl pressings, records that I can’t stand to listen to these days. My system couldn’t show me how sterile and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

It’s amazing how far you can get in 10 years if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough, and are also willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio. This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we approached this hobby like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are sure to be the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers.

Old thinking and wrong thinking can really slow down your progress.

Follow our advice and you will be amazed at the positive changes that are bound to come your way.

Better ears lead to better stereos, but some stereos make it hard to develop better ears.

That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile. 

Yes, I made a lot of mistakes, but taking an empirical approach to this hobby practically guarantees that that I would eventually find a better way.

Now I know that making mistakes is a key to progress. Thank goodness for that, because I’ve sure made my share of them.

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Original Is Better? Sez Who?

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Which albums sound better on the right vintage reissue pressing?

These do.

Original Vs. Reissue

The original Reprise pressing, whether in mono or stereo, has never sounded very good to us. The mono is quite a bit worse than the stereo – no surprise there – but both must be considered poor reflections of the master tape.

We sold one many years ago, describing it this way: “Beautiful Original with decent sound — rich, smooth and sweet.” Which it was, but from us that’s little more than damning it with faint praise.

The Discovery pressing is so much bigger, clearer and livelier it’s almost hard to imagine it and the 1962 Reprise original were both made from the same tape.

Something sure went wrong the first time around — I think it’s safe to say at least that much.

Original equals Better? Not for those of us who play records rather than just collect them. Leave the originals for the Jazz Guys. The Hot Stamper reissues are perfect for us Music Loving Audiophiles.

Don’t be put off by the title; these are not some sleepy old-fashioned waltzes. This is swingin’ West Coast jazz at its best. Of course, the arrangements are done in waltz time, but that doesn’t keep them from swingin’.

And the amazingly good sound? Credit Bones Howe, a man who knows Tubey Magic like practically no one else in the world. The Association, The Mamas and the Papas, The Fifth Dimension, and even Tom Waits — all their brilliant recordings are the result of Bones Howe’s estimable talents as producer and engineer.

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Every Day Is Record Store Day at The Electric Recording Company

Our Review of The Electric Recording Company’s Release of Forever Changes

Recently we took the Electric Recording Company to task for their botched mastering of Love’s Forever Changes.

At ERC they like to point out they are doing things differently, and boy are they ever. They do not remaster the tapes, they simply transfer the tapes onto disc without any interference from equalizers, compressors and the like.

Naturally, they seem less willing to discuss the sludge-like sound their vintage tube cutting amplifiers bring to every tape that’s forced to go through them before it gets to the cutting stylus. I hope to discuss this issue in more depth down the road.

What Is It, Exactly

For now, let’s try to get to the heart of what this pressing is.

This is not an audiophile record, properly understood.

No member of the audiophile community, those lovers of sound you’ve heard so much about, could possibly put up with a record that sounds as bad as this one does.

Having played two of their releases and knowing how all of them are made, I would be surprised if any of this company’s records are any better than awful.

No, this is plain and simply a collectible.

It exists because it could be made as a very limited edition at a profit.

It exists because it could be made with exceptionally high quality packaging.

The vinyl inside the fancy packaging is only there to make sure that all the elements of a collectible release are accounted for.

All the value is tied up in the collector appeal of the release, none in the vinyl, because the vinyl is junk.

Record Store Day

If the price were a tenth of what ERC is asking, it would have made a perfectly good Record Store Day release.

Think about it: Collectors would have lined up around the block to get one of the only 350 numbered pressings made available. At 35 bucks, no doubt they would sell out within minutes of the doors opening. At 350 bucks, maybe it would take a bit longer, but they would sell out just the same.

Of course, Pete Hutchison does not want to wait a whole year to put out his cool, collectible records, one at a time. He sends them out to the customers on his waiting lists all year long.

Record lovers are buying these records with no way of having the vaguest clue as to how they sound. By the time the reviews come out, they are already out of print and on the collector market at multiples of their original price.

Why would an audiophile rush out to buy a record whose sound quality he has no way of knowing?

An audiophile wouldn’t. A record collector would though.

Record Collectors and Audiophiles

There are a great many more record collectors — here defined as those folks who just like collecting records — than there are audiophile record collectors, defined here as those who are trying, not always successfully, to collect good sounding records.

I suspect that most audiophiles of an analog persuasion fall into both camps.

They like having a collection of high quality pressings, and they like owning collectible records, often viewing the latter as a kind of investment that will pay off with profits in the future.

Collectors scramble to get in on the ground floor to own a cool new release, knowing that it’s sure to be worth more than they are paying for it.

If the sound quality is abysmal, what difference does that make?

No self-described audiophile should want a record that sounds as bad as those being produced by this ridiculous label.

But collectors should. The attention to detail in the packaging, the oh-so-limited production run, the fact that the records are indeed sourced from the master tape and mastered with tubes — these are qualities that appeal to collectors.

None of these things has a lot to do with the sound quality of the finished product except, in the case of this label, guaranteeing that it will be terrible.

A Nutty Approach to Making Records

As a lifelong skeptic, I know a crackpot when I see one, and Pete Hutchison is the dictionary definition of a crackpot. The idea that records don’t need to be mastered is not quite the same as the earth is hollow or the government is run by lizard people, but it falls into the same category: anything for which supporting evidence is non-existent.

crackpot: “one given to eccentric or wildly foolish notions.”

Transferring the tapes without the benefit of mastering equalization? That is a crackpot idea. Nobody does that except under the rarest of circumstances.

Are the great mastering engineers of the past — men like Robert Ludwig, Doug Sax, Bernie Grundman and others — known for their flat transfers? Did they ever hook up archaic tube equipment to their cutting lathes?

In the case of Robert Ludwig, we know his interventions in the case of Led Zeppelin II were as intense as they come. That explains why no other version of the album sounds like his version.

Would the world be better off had he not altered the sound of the tape in such a massive way? Is the bass on any other version of the album remotely as good as the bass on his version?

He put that bass on the record. It’s not on the tape. If it were on the tape somebody else would have come along and mastered it on to a record in the intervening 54 years since its release.

Without Robert Ludwig’s efforts, and the mastering equipment he had available to him in 1969, there can be no “hot mix” for Le Zeppelin II.

If you were to tell me that somebody new would get into the business of “remastering” records, on heavy vinyl, with fancy packaging, I would say “of course they will.” The world is full of these guys and they are making a fortune. Why wouldn’t somebody else want a piece of thet action? That’s how the free enterprise system is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to drive down prices and drive up quality.

Marketing Everything But High Quality Sound

Which is what makes The Electric Recording Company’s records so interesting.

They take a different approach to the market.

They offer the worst sound with the best packaging at the highest prices.

They engage in the pretense of offering audiophile sound when in fact they are doing no such thing.

But the audiophiles who are falling for this scam apparently cannot tell how bad sounding these ERC records are.

Perhaps they are so impressed by the packaging, the backstory, the collectability and who knows what else that they fail to notice how bad the sound is.

That would be the most charitable way of understanding how this label came to be so successful. I’m quite sure Mr. Hutchison is a millionaire many times over.

His snake oil is no cure for anything, but the story behind it and the fancy bottle it comes in is all that matters to the gullible types who are standing in line to fork over their cash and take their punishment.

And surely there are a good many owners of these records who know they are terrible and are just in the game to profit off those who have fallen for the collector hysteria that accompanies each new release.

As long as the status quo holds, and there simply are no audiophile reviewers with even the most rudimentary critical listening skills — the kind of basic skills that would be required to expose this fraud — then our English crackpot can continue to offer a product that appeals to the three groups who buy his records:

  1. collectors,
  2. speculators, and
  3. the hard of hearing.

Audiophiles with any sense — hopefully those who read this blog! — will steer clear of this man’s cosmetically appealing trash.

One Final Note

You may have seen this elsewhere on the site. We feel it bears repeating here.

For us, record collecting for the sake of record collecting has never held much appeal.

We like to play records, not just collect them, and we like to play records with the best sound we can find. We call those kinds of records Hot Stamper Pressings, and finding them, and making them available to other audiophiles, has been my life’s work.

All the collecting we leave to other people who enjoy that sort of thing.

Further Reading

This would include new pressings that were made with vintage tube equipment of shockingly poor quality, the kind that Mr Hutchison apparently finds to his liking, why, we cannot begin to imagine.

Hutchison is not alone in his predilection for ridiculously muddy records that sound like they are playing on your parent’s old console stereo. Here’s a good example of a title with plenty of Electric Recording Company “tubey magic,” if that’s what you’re after. It sounds every bit as bad, and it’s a lot cheaper than $350. Here’s another one.

If you’re searching for the perfect sound, you came to the right place.

Building a Store of Knowledge, One Record at a Time

More of the Music of Elton John

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Elton John

We recently ran across the commentary below in a reply to a Hot Stamper testimonial for Honky Cat. Based on our own experience, we give a quick and dirty primer on how one can build up one’s knowledge of records, stampers, labels, pressing variations and the like.

We don’t really give out much in the way of specific information about any of those things; we just tell you how it can be done. It’s your job to go out and do it. It’s simple: just follow the path we have laid out for you. How tough can it be?

Phil wondered how we could find such an amazing sounding record, which in this case is a rhetorical question.

Phil knows exactly how we find them, because he shops at the same L.A. stores we do and finds a few himself — the only way it can be done, the old-fashioned way.

We buy them, clean them and play them, just like Phil does.

The difference these days is one of scale. With seven or eight people [now ten to twelve] finding, cleaning and playing records every day, we can probably shootout forty or fifty or even a hundred times as many records as any suitably dedicated single person working by himself could. [It turns out, as a practical matter, no such person seems to exist. At least we can find no evidence to support the existence of anyone doing shootouts like the ones we do. These kind get done, which may fool some people, but they don’t fool us.]

And to find the raw material (LPs, what else?), it helps immensely if you live in a major city like L.A., where records, even high-quality ones, are still abundant, if not ubiquitous. [Not so much anymore.]

After a shootout, one of my favorite things to do is [was, I’m retired now] jot down the stampers for the hottest copies.

I then head right out to my favorite record stores to search through the bins and — even better — the overstock underneath.

So many times I’ve thrilled to the purchase of an album with exactly the right stampers that very day, a copy that I would never have known to buy had we not just done the shootout.

Streamlining the Process

This is how record knowledge builds: one LP at a time. To that end we’ve streamlined the system of finding Hot Stampers, turning the process into a rough kind of science and devoting well over a hundred manhours a week to the effort.

It’s time-consuming and expensive, but every week we find Hot Stamper copies of great albums that MURDER the competition, in the process often dramatically changing our expectations of how good that music can sound. We call them breakthrough pressing discoveries.

It’s the most fun part of the record business.

The rest of it, if I can be honest, I could happily do without. 

Further Reading

If you’re searching for the perfect sound, you came to the right place.