Testing High Frequency Extension

The records linked here are good for testing high frequency extension.

This Carmen Ballet Is a Great Test Disc for Shrill, Gritty Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

I’ve added some tubes-versus-transistors commentary at the bottom of this posting.

This Angel Melodiya pressing of Bizet’s Carmen, rearranged by Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin for strings and 47 percussion instruments, has two incredible sides. Demo Quality Sound barely begins to do it justice. If you have the system to play it, this copy is a KNOCKOUT.

But boy is it a difficult record to reproduce. You better have everything working right when you play this one — it’s guaranteed to bring practically any audiophile system to its knees.

Speed, resolving power and freedom from distortion are what this record needs to sound its best.

Is your system up to it? There’s only one way to find out.

And if you have any peaky audiophile wire in your system, the kind that is full of detail but calls attention to itself, you are in big trouble with a record like this.

More than anything, this is a record that rewards your system’s neutrality.

Testing

This is a superb Demonstration Disc, but it is also an excellent Test Disc. The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce.

Musicians are banging on so many different percussion instruments (often at the far back of the stage, or, even better, far back and left or right) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge — and when you’ve met it, a thrill. If you’ve done your homework, this is the kind of record that can show you what you’ve accomplished.

On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly gritty as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem.

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Why Do So Few Living Stereo Pressings Sound as Good as This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

We introduced our most recent shootout winning copy of The Reiner Sound from 1958 this way:

The Reiner Sound returns to the site for the first time in years, here with big, bold, dynamic Triple Plus (A+++) Living Stereo sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing.

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended up top”…”sweet and rich”…”supremely dynamic and spacious!!!” (side one)…”massive and tubey and 3D”…”like no other” (side two)…”explosive finish.”

These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard.

This record will have you asking why so few Living Stereo pressings actually do what this one does.

The more critical listeners among you will recognize that this is a very special copy indeed.

Everyone else will just enjoy the hell out of it.

And here are the notes to prove it!

Side one was at least 3+.

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Oscar Peterson’s Best Recording? Sure Sounds Like It to Us

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

It sounded great to me at the time, although I had nothing to compare it to. I was not an Oscar Peterson fan in those days. The CD may be very good, but it is unlikely to hold a candle to any of our Hot Stamper vinyl pressings.

I now realize that this album is clearly one of the best jazz piano recordings ever made. In its own way it’s every bit as good as  another landmark recording we talk about, The Three, recorded in 1975.

This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

The description for the amazing copy we found in our shootout more than a decade ago has been reproduced below.

The Right Sound from the Get Go

Side one starts out with a solid, full-bodied piano and snare drum, a sure sign of great sound to come. This side was richer and fuller than all the other copies we played. That rich tonality is key to getting the music to work. It keeps all the instrumental elements in balance. The natural top on this side is just more evidence that the mastering and pressing are top drawer. Great space and immediacy, powerful driving energy — this side could not be beat.

And side two was every bit as good! The sound was jumpin’ out of the speakers. There was not a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Ray Brown’s bass is huge, probably bigger than it would be in real life, but I can live with that. Once again, with this kind of extended top end, the space of the studio and harmonics of the instruments are reproduced brilliantly.

Testing with Oscar

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term)
  • We like them to be solidly weighted
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that for some reason is rarely mentioned in the audiophile reviews we read [more on smear at the end of this commentary]

Here are some of our favorite jazz records with top quality piano sound

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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Driving My Car into a Ditch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Mobile Fidelity made a mess of Drive My Car on their Half-Speed mastered release of Rubber Soul in 1982.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say Stan Ricker, MoFi’s go-to mastering engineer, did.

He equalized out far too much upper midrange and top end.

What fuels the energy of the track are the cow bell, the drums and other percussion. Instead of a scalpel, Mobile Fidelity took a hatchet to this slightly bright track, leaving a dull, lifeless, boring mess.

Some Parlophone copies may be a little bright and lack bass, but at least they manage to convey the musical momentum of the song.

Even the purple label Capitol reissues can be quite good. A bit harsher and spittier, yes, but in spite of these shortcomings they communicate the music, which ought to count for something.

As much as I might like some of the MoFi Beatles records [not so much anymore], and even what MoFi did with some of the other tracks on Rubber Soul, they sure sucked the life out of Drive My Car.

We all remember how much fun that song was to hear when it would come on the radio. Playing it on a very high quality stereo should make it more fun, not less.

If you’ve got a Rubber Soul with a Drive My Car that’s no fun, it’s time to get another one.

By The Way

The best $250 — to the penny! — I ever spent on records is the price I paid for my brand new, still-in-the-shipping-carton MoFi Beatles Box. I ordered it in 1982 when I first learned of it, and it finally came the next year. I already owned all The Beatles albums MoFi had done by that point, including the UHQR of Sgt. Peppers, which, like a fool, I got rid of once the set came out.

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Touch – A Great Test for Tweeters

Hot Stamper Pressings of Well Recorded Jazz Albums In Stock Now

Mobile Fidelity, maker of some of the worst sounding records in the history of the medium, is the KING on this title. We know of no better pressing than the right version of the MoFi. (There are three different stampers for the MoFi, and only one of them ever wins shootouts.)

Klemmer says pure emotion is what inspired the album’s creation. Whatever he tapped into to find the source of that inspiration he really hit pay dirt with Touch. It’s the heaviest smooth jazz ever recorded. Musically and sonically, this is the pinnacle of Klemmer’s smooth jazz body of work. I know of none better. (If you want to hear him play more straight-ahead jazz try Straight from the Heart on Nautilus Direct to Disc.)

High Frequency Testing

MoFi was famous for demonstrating on an actual scope that the standard domestic ABC pressing had nothing above about 8 or 10 thousand cycles up top, which is why they all sound insufferably dull and dead. Some MoFi copies have no real top end either, which is the reason to we do these shootouts — to find the copies that are actually mastered and pressed right, not just the ones that should have been.

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An Amazingly Good Nashville Skyline, But Side Two Fell Short in One Area

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

You just can’t beat a well-produced, well-engineered Columbia from this era. There’s a richness and a naturalness to the sound that’s almost completely disappeared from the modern world of music, and by “modern world” we mean both modern recordings and modern remasterings of vintage recordings.

Practically none of them ever have the qualities of this wonderful record from 1969.

You really do have to go back to these old originals to find it. And then you have to find just the right old originals for it to be there. Here are the notes for one we played not long ago.

As you can see from the notes, side one of our most recent White Hot stamper shootout winning copy was doing everything right. We marvelled at these specific qualities in the sound:

Track three

  • Big and spacious and lively
  • The vocals and guitars are big and weighty and jumping

Track one

  • Spacious and great size and detail
  • Vocals jump out
  • Realistic acoustics

However, we had a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side two of another copy showed us there was potentially even more presence to Dylan’s vocals in the recording than we had assumed. As a consequence, we felt it best to drop side two’s grade a half plus to 2.5+.

Track one

  • Tubey bass
  • Weighty
  • Very full vocals
  • A bit veiled but better than most

Track one on side two was doing practically everything right, but it slightly lacked presence, and for that we dropped the grade one half plus to 2.5+.

Midrange presence is one of the most important qualities of any rock or pop recording we might evaluate, and for a Bob Dylan album it is absolutely essential.

You want Dylan to be front and center, neither recessed nor behind a veil.

To aid you in doing your own evaluations, here is a list of records that we’ve found to be good for testing midrange presence.

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Lincoln Mayorga Volume 1 and Obvious Pressing Variations

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

After doing our first shootout many years ago for the record that single-handedly introduced the audiophile community to Direct to Disc recording, Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues, Volume One, I have to confess I was taken aback by the significant pressing variations we heard among the copies we played, 

These LPs are all over the map sonically.

Some Sheffield pressings are aggressive, many of them are dull and lack the spark of live music, some of them have wonky bass or are lacking in the lowest octave — they are prey to every fault that befalls other pressings, direct to disc and otherwise.

Which should not be too surprising. Records are records. Pressing variations exist for every album ever made. If you haven’t noticed that yet, start playing multiple copies of the same album while listening carefully and critically. If your stereo is any good at all, it should not take you long to notice how different one record sounds from another in practically every case.

Biggest problems on S9?

I would have to say smear is Number One.

When the brass loses its bite and the bells don’t have the percussive quality of metal being struck, this is not a good thing. The band also seems to lose energy when the pressing suffers from smear.

Number Two would be a lack of top end extension.

The harmonics of the sax and trumpet are muted on some copies, and the harpsichord really suffers when the top end isn’t all there. This lack of extension is most noticeable on all the lovely bells and percussion instruments that pepper the soundstage, but you can actually hear it on practically every instrument once you recognize the problem. It’s there on guitar harmonics, cymbals and snares, and on down the list.

Linked here are other records that are good for testing these same shortcomings:

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What to Listen For on Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now

On most copies the strings are slightly drier and more harsh and steely than one would want, occasionally turning strident in the louder passages.

As always, proper VTA adjustment — by ear — is critical to getting the strings to sound their best.

More advice on setting your VTA.

An extended top end helps the harmonics of the stringed instruments immensely.

Here are some other records that are good for testing string tone and texture.

The more resolving copies will show you more of the hall, which greatly adds to the sense that you are listening to live music, not a record.

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Farmers Market Barbecue – First Among Equals, or The Best Pablo Ever?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Count Basie Available Now

Musically FMB is a Top Basie Big Band title in every way. This should not be surprising: many of his recordings for Pablo in the ’70s and early ’80s display the talents of The Count and his band of veterans at their best.

Sonically it’s another story. Based on our recent shootout for this title, in comparison to the other Basie titles we’ve done lately, we would have to say that FMB is the best Basie big band title we’ve ever played. Since so many Basie big band recordings are so good, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves; after all, we haven’t done shootouts for all of his Pablo large group recordings. To be safe we’ll just call this one First Among Equals.

The following are some general guidelines as to What to Listen For while you critically evaluate any of the Basie Big Band Pablo recordings (or any other big band recordings for that matter).

Simply put, we offer here a short list of qualities that we’ve come to appreciate on the best of the Basie Big Band pressings, qualities that we find are often in short supply on lesser LPs (and, as a rule, those that have been remastered onto Heavy Vinyl). (more…)

What to Listen For and More on Ruben and the Jets

More of the Music of Frank Zappa

Is the thought bubble on the cover the real story behind the album?

Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?

Amazing sound for this record of greasy love songs and cretin simplicity to offer to audiophiles and music lovers alike from all corners of the world. We absolutely LOVE this album here at Better Records, or at least that portion of Better Records that remembers it from high school still loves it (which would narrow it down to a subset of just me I guess, but who’s counting?). Anyway, it’s a classic of twisted Doo-Wop that belongs in your collection. At least we think you should give it a chance anyway; hearing it sound this good might just make a believer out of you.

Tubey Magic Is Key

Many copies are just too thin and edgy to be as fun and enjoyable as we have every right to expect from this kind of purposely un-hip, un-cool, goofy retro-pop. We were gratified to find that the top finishers had a healthy dose of the Tubey Magical richness found on the best analog recordings from the latter half of the 60s (1968 in this case).

This is a very good recording indeed, judged, as is only fair, solely by the best of the pressings we’ve heard. In other words, the bad pressings sound like crap, but that’s no reflection on the quality of the master tape.

As with most Zappa records, an extended top end is devilishly hard to come by. (In that respect, it is good for testing.)

That said, on a primarily vocal album such as this one, the midrange is where the music lives or dies.

The copies that were rich and full-bodied, with natural vocal reproduction, tended to score the highest grades in our shootout.

Copies that failed to convey the energy and exuberance of the singers and musicians — their love of this music that time had forgotten even by 1968 — as you may well imagine scored relatively poorly. This music is supposed to be fun, and really not a whole lot else, so the copies that aren’t fun scored sub-Hot Stamper grades. (Lifelessness is of course our main beef with Heavy Vinyl these days. When we play one of these new thick LPs the sound is often so blase that I feel that the longer it plays, the more the air is being sucked out of the room.)