Testing Upper-Midrange Brightness

The records linked here are good for testing upper-midrange brightness and shrillness.

The Gayne Ballet on Mercury Can Be a Little Bright

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The review you see below was written more than ten years ago.

Having just done another shootout for SR 90209, Dorati’s recording of the two works, The Gayne Ballet and Romeo and Juliet, I can now confirm that there are some stampers that are indeed way too bright.

Side one of a recent copy had a sour midrange. Side two of the same copy was brash and metallic.

As for side two not sounding as good as side one in the older review before, seems we clearly got that wrong, the result, to some degree, of having an inadequate sample size.

Also,  we didn’t have as good a stereo as we do now, and we weren’t as good at doing shootouts back then either.

Our Old Review

This side one is truly DEMONSTRATION QUALITY, thanks to its superb low-distortion mastering. It’s yet another exciting Mercury recording. The quiet passages have unusually sweet sound.

This kind of sound is not easy to cut. This copy gets rid of the cutter head distortion and coloration and allows you to hear what the Mercury engineers accomplished.

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Bashin’ Is a Good Test for Setup, Tweaks, Room Treatments, etc.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

On side one of Smith’s (and Oliver Nelson’s) Masterpiece, Bashin’, the bell tree in the right channel on track one is a great test for top end extension, resolution of harmonic complexity, overall clarity and freedom from smear.

Get all the top end you can from whatever turntable adjustment, tweak or room treatment you’re messing around with, then check to make sure that all the brass instruments still sound right. If they do, you are probably good to go.

Blary, smeary, leading-edge-challenged horns are the kiss of death on this album, as are grainy, gritty, transistory ones.

When the horns have clarity, correct tonality, plenty of space around them and a solid, full-bodied sound, probably every other instrument in the soundscape will too. Other records with brass instruments that are good for testing can be found here.

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The Yellow Label Reissues Can Sound Very Good, But Great? Not a Chance

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

The earlier pressing on the site as of this writing is an amazingly well recorded album with many fine qualities:

Boasting seriously good grades from top to bottom, this vintage Contemporary pressing is doing just about everything right.

These sides are bigger and more open, with more bass and energy, than most others we played – the saxes and trumpets are immediate and lively.

Mr. Earl Hines himself showed up, a man who knows this music like nobody’s business – Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne round out the quartet.

“Great musicians produce great results, and most of the LP’s tracks were done in one or two takes. The result is ‘a spontaneous, swinging record of what happened’ when Carter met Hines ‘for the first time. . . .'”

Our notes for the Yellow Label reissues point out that they are always more compressed, with some added upper midrange. The intro benefits from this but the peaks can get congested.

The earlier pressings, especially the originals on the Black Label, are the most likely to sound right, but they are tough to find in audiophile playing condition.

If you see a copy on the site with these grades — less than 2+ on both sides — it will proabably have a Yellow Label and some of the shortcomings we mention above.

Correct, In This Case

Some people like to search for relationships between the sound of the pressing and the label it has, but in our experience that is more often than not a fool’s errand once confirmation biases and other kinds of mistaken audiophile thinking are taken into account.

When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — in other words, when it comports with reality, at least for the six copies of this album that we played — we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn the lessons playing a stack of copies of this title has taught us.

Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.

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Donald Fagen / The Nightfly

More of the Music of Steely Dan

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Warner Bros. pressing
  • Punchy and high-resolution, check out the cymbals and muted guitar on “I.G.Y.” — they sound pretty much right on the money here
  • Big, open and spacious with virtually no smear, this copy is doing just about everything we want it to
  • The sound may be too heavily processed and glossy for some, but we find that on the best copies that sound works about as well as any for this album
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late ’50s/early ’60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date.”
  • We played the Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing not long ago — I hope to god no one reading this blog thought it was anything better than passable
  • Of course the Mobile Fidelity Half-Speed pressing is not right either — it has the sloppy bass and boosted top end that almost all of their records have, perfect for the stereo systems of the 80s but not a good fit for the best of what came after

Energetic and present, this copy is on a completely different level than most pressings. We just finished a big shootout for Donald Fagen’s solo effort from 1982 (just two years after Gaucho and the end of Steely Dan) and we gotta tell you, there are a lot of weak-sounding copies out there. We should know; we played them.

We’ve been picking copies up for more than a year in the hopes that we’d have some killer Hot Stamper copies to offer, but most of them left us cold. Flat, edgy and bright, like a bad copy of Graceland, only a fraction had the kind of magic we find on the better Steely Dan albums.

Both sides here are incredibly clear and high-rez compared to most pressings, with none of the veiled, smeary quality we hear so often. The vocals are breathy, the bass is clear and the whole thing is open and spacious.

How Analog Is It?

The ones we like the best will tend to be the ones that sound the most Analog. The more they sound like the average pressing — in other words, the more CD-like they sound — the lower the sonic grade. Many will not have even one Hot Stamper side and will end up in the trade-in pile.

The best copies sound the way the best copies of most Classic Rock records sound: tonally correct, rich, clear, sweet, smooth, open, present, lively, big, spacious, Tubey Magical, with breathy vocals and little to no spit, grit, grain or grunge.

That’s the sound of analog, and the best copies of The Nightfly have that sound.

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The Strings on this Album Are a Tough Test

jobimthecomposerHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim Available Now

Credit engineer Phil Ramone for correctly capturing the sound of every instrument here: the guitars, piano, flutes, strings, drums, percussion instruments — everything has the natural timbre of the real thing.

I used to think this recording erred on the bright side, but not the Hot Stamper copies. They are tonally right on the money.

When the balance lacks lower midrange, the sound can get lean, which causes the strings to seem brighter than they really are, a not uncommon problem with some of the pressings we heard.

We had quite a batch of these to play, including imports, originals, reissues (all stereo), and one lone mono, which was so ridiculously bad sounding we tossed it right out of the competition and into the trade pile.

For those of you playing along at home, we are not going to be much help to you here in finding your own Hot Stampers. Every version had strengths and weaknesses and all are represented in the three listings we are putting up today.

The sound of this side one blew our minds — no other copy could touch it. So open and airy, yet with real weight to the piano and a clear and strong bass line, this copy did EVERYTHING right.

The strings are very much part of the ensemble on this album, and getting good string tone, with just the right rosiny texture, the least amount of smear, freedom from shrillness or hardness — this is not easy to do. 

Side two was quite good at A+ to A++, but we found other copies that bested it, including one Triple Plus that was in a league of its own. Even so, this copy on side two would be hard to beat without a number of carefully cleaned pressings to choose from. 

Here are some records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.

Here are some records we’ve discovered that are good for testing midrange tonality.

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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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What to Listen For on Child Is Father to the Man

bloodchild_1501_1233141856

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears Available Now

At the end of a long day of listening at loud levels to multiple copies of this album you may want to run yourself a hot bath and light some candles. If you have an isolation tank at your disposal, so much the better.

You could of course turn down the volume, but what fun is that?

This music wasn’t meant to be heard at moderate levels. Playing it that way is an insult to the musicians who worked so hard to make their music sound big and lively.

The Right Balance

Every once in a while you hear a pressing in which the right balance has been struck, and we played one years ago that clearly belonged to that group. It’s not perfect; you have to put up with a few rough patches to get the sound that serves most of the music properly. No copy will do it all; with this album the goal is to do the best you can.

When it’s working it’s fantastic. The big Al Kooper productions (I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know, My Days are Numbered, I Can’t Quit Her, Somethin’ Goin’ On) really work when they have the energy and dynamic drive to carry the emotion of the lyric.

What to Listen For

This record needs fullness; the copies that were thin, like most of the reissues, were unlistenably shrill and spitty.

Next you want the life of the music to come through, which means presence and dynamics.

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What the Shootout Winning Copies of A Hard Day’s Night Really Get Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

I wrote this bit of commentary about twenty years ago:

When comparing pressings of this record, the copies that get their voices to sound both present and warm, smooth, and sweet, especially during the harmonies, are always the best.  All the other instruments seem to fall in line when the vocals are correct. This is an old truism — it’s all about the midrange — but in the case of A Hard Day’s Night, it really is true.

Now that we are putting our unredacted (!) shootout notes on the blog for everyone to see, here are the actual notes for the shootout winning pressing we just played (6/2025), notes that back up what we said so many years ago 100%.

What’s does this amazing side one sound like?

  • Very full guitars and vocals for this
  • Less glare
  • More midrange energy
  • Breathy and full vocals
  • Pretty rich and focussed
  • The fullest, most present and breathy vocals

And this amazing side two?

  • Much fuller vocals and drums
  • Great energy
  • Most “tubey” yet
  • Gets very big
  • Fullest and warmest yet
  • Not edgy

Both sides had qualities that did much to set them apart, coupled with fewer of the shortcomings we found in practically all the other pressings we played.

Less glary and less edgy are critical to the better pressings, simply because few copies are not glary and edgy in the midrange to some degree.

But the real keys to the shootout winners are vocals that are full, present, warm and breathy.

For The Beatles in 1964, nothing else about the sound of their recordings could possibly compete with those four qualities.

We could add two more. Energy would probably be the next most important one, followed by Tubey Magic.

That brings the total of most important qualities to a grand total six.

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Our Shootout Winner Needed to Solve Some Common Problems with Mercury Recordings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

We described our shootout winning copy of Szeryng Plays the Music of Fritz Kreisler this way:

With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last, this Plum Label Mercury stereo pressing (the first copy to ever hit the site) is doing everything right.

The violin is so sweet and present, so rich, natural and real, you will forget you’re listening to a record at all.

This recording is not your typical dry, bright, nasaly, upper-midrangy Merc – the sound is rich and smooth like a good London, with a big stage and lovely transparency.

As is sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, there are marks that play, but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind.

Here are the notes that back up what we said above:

Notice that on side one, track four, we mention “not strident,” and the second track we note it’s “not too dry.”

Side has a note to the effect that it’s “kinda rich” and “not too bright.”

This tells you that practically all the other copies had these kinds of problems, something that anyone with a good selection of Mercury violin recordings is sure to know.

Our job is to find the pressings that not strident, not dry, not bright, and richer than others.

When you buy a top copy of an album from us, you don’t hear those problems because they are mostly not there.

What you hear is a side one that is:

  • Much fuller and 3-D, with a
  • Sweet and lively violin, one with
  • The most space

On side two you hear more of the same, and that’s a good thing:

  • 3-D and alive violin
  • Kinda rich
  • More dynamic and jumping out
  • Not too bright

Probably not the best solo violin recording we’ve ever sold, but certainly one of the best.

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Are All MoFis Created Equal? A Pair of Pink Floyd LPs Proved They Aren’t

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

[This commentary was written about twenty years ago.]

Many audiophiles are operating under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity managed to eliminate pressing variations of the kind we discuss endlessly on the site.

That is simply not the case, and it’s child’s play to demonstrate how misguided this way of thinking is, assuming you have the following four things: good cleaning fluids and a machine, multiple copies of the same record, a reasonably revealing stereo, and two working ears.

With all four the reality of pressing variations for ALL pressings is both obvious and incontrovertible.

The discussion below of a Hot Stamper pair of Dark Sides from long ago may shed light on some of the issues involved.

Remember Classic Records Comparison Packages?

This is our first Hot Stamper Comparison Package.

For those who remember the 45 RPM/ 33 RPM Classic Records comparison packages, this is somewhat in the same vein. Of course, we don’t know that they kept the EQ the same for the 45 versions compared to the 33s of the albums included in the package, so the comparison is suspect at best.

You’re not really comparing apples to apples unless you keep the EQ exactly the same. I rather doubt they did, because on Simon and Garfunkel the sound was noticeably worse at 45 than it was at 33. This is the main reason we don’t carry the 45 versions of Classic’s records: they are a lot more money, and who knows if they’re even any better?

[This one sure wasn’t better. This guy liked it, but he is rarely right about any of this record and equipment stuff, as I hope everyone knows by now.]

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