Testing Grit and Grain

We’ve found that the titles linked heremake good test records.

When comparing pressings of these titles, the copies that are tonally correct and highly resolving, yet have the least amount of grit and grain, are likely to be the best sounding overall.

We Don’t Offer Domestic Pressings of Pour Down Like Silver for One Very Simple Reason

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

In spite of the fact that the domestic pressings of this Richard and Linda Thompson classic from 1974 were mastered by the likes of Kendun and Sterling — two of the greatest mastering houses of all time, — they have never impressed us with their sound quality.

The biggest problems with this record would be obvious to even the casual listener: gritty, spitty vocals; lack of richness; bright tonality; lack of bass; no real space or transparency, etc.

The domestic Island pressings did not do nearly as well in our shootout as the best Island imports, no surprise there as the early UK records were mastered by one of our favorite engineers.

Avoid the Carthage pressings mastered by Sterling. They came in last in our shootout.

The domestic breakdown follows:

Black Island Domestic #1

  • Tubey but hot and spitty.

Black Island Domestic #2

  • Flat, dry and hot (glary or bright)

Carthage Domestic recut from 1983, Sterling on both sides

  • So sandy and lean! They really wanted to add some top end (!)

Defending the Indefensible

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A Better Way to Get Rid of Grit and Grain on Jumpin’ Jive

More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain

Jumpin’ Jive is one of the clearest examples of an album where it is critically important to make sure your stereo is running on good electricity before you make any attempt to play it. This is the kind of recording — bright, full of energy — that will bring most stereo systems to their knees. Of course, when you play a good copy and it really sounds good, it’s a record that rewards all the time and effort you’ve put into your system.

So much of the aggressiveness, grit and grain that we hear in immediate, high-energy recordings such as this are really the fault of the electricity feeding the stereo, not the fault primarily of the record or even the equipment used to play it.

Now it should be noted that this recording has a ton of high frequency information that will be difficult to reproduce on most systems. If you leave a lot of appliances and electronic devices plugged in around the house when you listen to your stereo, you can forget ever hearing this record right. The grit and grunge caused by polluted electricity will make this record practically unlistenable, at the levels we listen at anyway. (At lower levels most of the garbage is masked, one reason no doubt that audiophiles rarely turn their stereos up to anything approaching live levels.) 

So do as we do: unplug everything you can get your hands on before you sit down to listen. Make sure your tubes (if you have tube equipment) are nice and warm too.

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Thoughts on Hearing an Amazing Copy of Thriller in the 80s

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

The killer copy of Thriller that we discovered in our 2006 shootout gave us a whole new appreciation for just how good the album could sound. It was a real breakthrough, and proof that significant progress in audio is just a matter of time and effort, the more the better.

Our review from 2006

I remember twenty years ago (that would be 1986) playing Thriller and thinking the sound was transistory, spitty, and aggressive.

Well, I didn’t have a Triplanar tonearm, a beautiful VPI table and everything that goes along with them back then. (More here.)

Now I can play the record.

I couldn’t back then.

All that spit was simply my table, arm, cartridge and setup not being good enough, along with all the garbage downstream from them feeding the speakers.

The record is no different, it just sounds different now. Which is what makes the record a great test. If you can play this record, you can probably play practically any pop and rock record. (Orchestral music is quite another matter.)

This Pressing Changes Everything

This pressing has a side two that’s so amazing sounding that it completely changed my understanding and appreciation of this album. The average copy is a nice pop record. This copy is a Masterpiece of production and engineering.

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Counting Down to Ecstasy Can Get Congested

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of the biggest problems with the average copy of this album is congestion in the loudest passages.

On King Of The World, for example, many copies never quite open up at the chorus.

The Hot Stamper copies are much more spacious, giving the voices and instruments plenty of room to breathe.

The soundfield needs to be big and wide for this album to work, and on the best copies we played the sound is huge.

Another problem with the typical copy is a lack of bass. This is Steely Dan, man: last I heard they had a pretty good bass player by the name of Walter Becker. (On later albums he plays guitar, but with Denny Dias and Jeff Skunk Baxter still in the band at this point, the guitar duties were already in the hands of the truly gifted.)

We have to imagine that the band wanted you to hear bass — and plenty of it. Any copy of this album that doesn’t have lots of deep, punchy, well-defined bass just isn’t gonna cut it.

Three Demo Discs

Of all the great albums Steely Dan made, and that means all seven of their original albums and none of the ones that came along later — the less said about those the better — there are only three in our opinion that actually support their reputation as studio wizards and recording geniuses.

Chronologically they are Pretzel Logic, Aja, and Gaucho. Every sound captured on these albums is so carefully crafted and considered that it practically brings one to tears to contemplate what the defective DBX noise reduction system did to the work of genius that is Katy Lied, their best music and their worst recording.

(The cymbal crashes on Katy Lied can really mess with your mind if you let them. To get a better sense of what the DBX system did to the sound, try banging two trash can lids together are hard as you can and as close to your head as possible.)

Countdown to Ecstasy is the only Steely Dan album recorded by a working live band.

One of the most important qualities we look for in a Hot Stamper pressing is the ability to convey the fun and energy of these seriously hard-rockin’ sessions. Look for the essence of the sound of a real band in whatever pressing you play and you’ll surely be on the right track to counting down to the ecstasy that awaits you.

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The Best Pressings of Love Over Gold Have Surprisingly Natural Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

This modern album (1982) can sound surprisingly good on the right pressing.

On most copies the highs are grainy and harsh, not exactly the kind of sound that inspires you to turn your system up good and loud and get really involved in the music. I’m happy to report that the best pressings have no such problem – they rock and they sound great when playing loud.

We pick up every clean copy we see of this album, domestic or import, because we know from experience just how good the best pressings can sound.

What do the best copies have?

REAL dynamics for one.

And with those dynamics you need rock solid bass. Otherwise the loud portions simply become irritating.

A lack of grain is always nice — many of the pressings we played were gritty or grainy.

Other copies that were quite good in most ways lacked immediacy, and we naturally took serious points off for that.

The best copies of Love Over Gold are far more natural than the average pressing you might come across, and that’s a recognizable quality we can listen for and give weight to in our grading.

It’s key to the sound of the better pressings, which means in our shootouts it’s worth a lot of points. Otherwise you might as well be playing the CD.

Domestics or Imports?

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Listening in Depth to So Far

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

This is a very difficult record to find with proper mastering (and good vinyl, ouch!). It seems that all of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s albums are that way. The average domestic pressing rarely even hints at how well recorded this band really was (and the imports are even worse — we’ve never heard one that didn’t sound dubby, veiled and compressed).

In my experience not even one out of ten LPs sounds right; I put the figure at one out of twenty. Most of them are shrill, dull, grainy, flat, opaque, harsh and in varying degrees suffer from every other mastering and pressing malady known to man.

But the best ones have some tracks in superb sound. When you hear the Hot Stampers for records like this you will simply be AMAZED. If you’ve ever heard a really good If Only I Could Remember My Name, an album that CAN be found with proper mastering, that should give you some idea of how good the first two albums can sound.

Side One

Déjà Vu

When you get a good copy of this album, this song sounds like it was lifted right off of a Hot Stamper copy of Deja Vu itself. It’s so rich and Tubey Magical you’d swear it couldn’t get any better. Huge amounts of deep bass. Acoustic guitars that ring for days. Midrange magic to die for. Not many of them sound this way, unfortunately.

If I could indulge in some more MoFi and Half-Speed bashing for a moment, the bass “solo” at the end of this song is a great test for bass definition. The notes are relatively high, and it’s easy for them to sound blurred and wooly. The MoFi, like virtually all Half-Speed mastered records, has a problem with bass definition. If you own the MoFi, listen for how clearly defined the notes are at the end of this track. Then play any other copy, either of So Far or Deja Vu. It’s a pretty safe bet that the bass will be much more articulate. I know how bad the MOFI is in this respect. Rarely do “normal” records have bass that bad.

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Testing for Life-Size Images and Living Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

On the song Blackbird Paul moves the microphone, scraping it along the floor, which causes a huge wave of bass to spread through the room.

I was over at one of my customer’s houses a while twenty years ago, doing some testing with electronics and tweaks, and I remember distinctly that the microphone stand was shrunken and lean sounding in a way I had simply never heard before.

Now this customer, whose system was in the $100K range, had no idea what that microphone stand could really do. I did, because I’ve been hearing it do it for years.

Some speakers can’t move enough air down low to reproduce that sound properly.

And some speakers, usually those with woofers under 12 inches, shrink the size of images.

These are many things to test for for in a given system, dozens and dozens in fact, but two of the important ones are these: if it doesn’t have a solid foundation (read: a big bottom end), and it doesn’t have correctly-sized images for the instruments, that’s a system that is failing in fundamentally important ways. 

If you close your eyes, you’re not in the presence of full-size musicians. Ipso facto, the fidelity to the live event has been compromised.

That’s precisely what makes this a good test disc. The band is right there.

To the extent that you can make them sound live in your living room, you are getting the job done.

The last bit of resolution is not the point. Full-sized live musicians in your living room is the point. Either Paul and his band are in front of you, or they’re not.

When they’re not, it’s time to get to work and find out what part of the system is not doing its job.

Hint: you can be pretty sure it’s the speaker. Most audiophile speakers are not very good at moving enough air. You need multiple large dynamic drivers with plenty of piston area to do the job correctly. Speakers of that design are usually large and expensive. I recommend the original Legacy Focus (not the current model) as the best sounding, most affordable full-size speaker on the used market.

Make Me Better

The bulk of this commentary was written in 2006. Most of it is based on what we had learned from the shootout we’d just done, our first for the album.

I bought my first copy of Unplugged upon its release. I credit it with helping me advance in this hobby of ours. Back in those dark days of the 90s, although I was completely clueless at the time about pretty much everything having to do with vinyl and equipment, I can take some solace in the fact that everybody else appeared to be as clueless as I was.

This blog is dedicated to sharing some of what I’ve learned — with the unflagging help of my staff of course — about records and audio over the last fifty years.

Testing with Unplugged

This record is good for testing all of the following areas, and here are some links to other titles that will also make good test records for those of you looking to improve the quality of your analog playback:

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Graceland, Where Clarity Is King

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

We regularly do shootouts for Graceland. Having played so many copies over the years we’re become quite familiar with the range of sound on the album, what constitutes good, better and best, and we understand precisely what qualities the premier copy must have in order to win one of our shootouts. 

Above all the thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It has many other good qualities as well: It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals.

The better copies have all these qualities to some degree, but the one thing a good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s especially good about the sound of Graceland. (more…)

Listening in Depth to The Royal Scam

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

We really went overboard with the track commentary for this one many years ago. This should make it easy for you to compare what we say about the sound of these songs with what they sound like to you on your system, using the copy you own or, better yet, one of our Hot Stampers. 

If you end up with one of our pressings, listen carefully for the effects we describe below. This is a very tough record to reproduce — everything has to be working in tip-top form to even begin to get this complicated music sounding the way it should — but if you’ve done your homework and gotten your system really cooking, you are in for the time of your Steely Dan life.

Side One

Kid Charlemagne

By far the most sonically aggressive track on this album, Kid Charlemagne is a quick indicator of what you can expect from the rest of the side. The typical copy is an overly-compressed sonic assault on the ears. The glaring upper midrange and tizzy grit that passes for highs will have you jumping out of your easy chair to turn down the volume. Even my younger employees who grew up playing in loud punky rock bands were cringing at the sound.

However, the good copies take this aggressive energy and turn it into pure excitement. The boys are ready to rock, and they’ve got the pulsing bass, hammering drums, and screaming guitars to do it.

Without the grit and tizz and radio EQ — which could have been added during mastering or caused by the sound of some bad ABC vinyl, who can say which — the sound is actually quite good on the best copies.

It’s one of the toughest tests for side one. Sad to say, most copies earn a failing grade right out of the gate.

The Caves of Altamira

This is the best test for side one.

There are sweet cymbals at the beginning, and Fagen’s double tracked voice should be silky and smooth, but on the really hot copies it’s also big and alive.

When I was first doing these shootouts, I noted that the hi-hat is front and center in the mix of this song, and when that hi-hat sounds grainy or aggressive, it’s positively unlistenable.

That hi-hat needs to sound silky and sweet or this song is going to give you a headache, at least at the volume I play it at: GOOD and LOUD.

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Most Domestic Pressings of On The Border Suck, and We Know Why

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some songs.

The domestic copies of On The Border have many tracks in reversed absolute phase, including and especially Midnight Flyer, a lifelong favorite of mine. The front and center banjo will positively tear your head off; it’s bright, sour, shrill, aggressive and full of distortion. Don’t look at me — that’s what reverse polarity sounds like!

I’ve known for some time that domestic pressings of On The Border have their phase reversed — just hadn’t gotten around to discussing the issue because I wasn’t ready to list the record and describe the phenomenon.

A while back [January 2005, time flies] I happened to play a copy of One Of These Nights and was appalled by the dismal quality of the sound. Last night I put two and two together. I pulled out both Eagles records and listened to them with the phase reversed. Voila! (On The Border is a favorite record of mine, dismissed by everyone else, but loved by yours truly.)

[I don’t think One of These Nights has its polarity reversed anymore, although some copies may.]

I’m of the opinion that only a very small percentage of records have their absolute phase reversed. Once you’ve learned to recognize the kind of distortion reversed polarity causes, you will hear recordings that may make you suspicious, and the only way to know for sure is to switch the positive and negative, wherever you choose to do so. 

With the help of our EAR 324 Phono Stage, the phase is reversible with the mere touch of a button, a wonderful convenience that we have grown to love, along with the amazingly transparent sound of course. (Hard to imagine living without either at this point.)

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