Records that Are Good for Testing Midrange Tonality

Lincoln Mayorga – Listen for Strained and Blary Brass

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

More Reviews and Commentaries for Direct to Disc Recordings

Most copies of this album are slightly thin and slightly bright.

They give the impression of being clear and clean, but some of the louder brass passages start to get strained and blary, or glary if you like.

The good copies are rich and full.

The sound is balanced from top to bottom.

The sound is smooth, which allows you to play the album all the way through at good loud levels without fatigue.

On the best pressings, the trumpets, trombones, tubas, tambourines, and drums, all have the true tonality and the vibrancy of the real thing. The reason this record was such a big hit in its day is because the recording engineers were able to capture that sound better than anybody else around [not really, but that’s what it seemed like at the time].

That’s also the reason this is a Must Own record today — the sound and the music hold up.

Just listen to that amazing brass choir on Oh Lord, I’m On My Way. It just doesn’t get any better than that. If ever there was a Demo Disc for Brass, this is one!

I used to think the Tower label copies were not as good — that the later pressings were pressed better. Now I know that it doesn’t matter what era the pressing is from: the tonal balance is the key to the best sound.

Notes from an Older Shootout

Side One has all of the texture and transients you could ever want to hear from this title. The bass is big and full-bodied and the drums have all of the energy and presence we love. Again, the CLARITY and clean sound of all the instruments is OFF THE CHARTS!

The beginning of That Certain Feeling is so warm and smooth it makes the typical hard copy sound like crap.

When we dropped the needle on You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, we knew we had a Side Two that was something special.

Immediately we heard more LIFE and ENERGY than we had heard before.

It was so spacious and transparent we felt as if we were in the studio, which is, after all, the point of listening to recording like this, isn’t it?

The bass is PUNCHY and full.

The saxophone solo on ‘Sunshine’ is so breathy and textured and you can hear the keys clacking as he does his trills.

If you have another copy listen for different sax solo performances to see if you have a different take. I believe there are two and they are easily distinguished from one another.

A Round Of Applause For Sheffield

As I’m sure you’ve read on the site, time has not been good to the sound of the typical Mobile Fidelity record. We may have been impressed back in the day, but now it’s clear their mastering approach was disastrous for most of the titles they did.

Sheffield, in this period anyway, turns out to have made some truly amazing sounding records: this one, in particular, as well as the other two Mayorga titles. The Grusin has a few problems [not really when you correct for the polarity issues], and after that their catalog is hit and miss. But the early days at Sheffield produced some wonderful, wonderful albums.

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

Pink Floyd – “Breathe” Is a Good Check for Midrange Tonality

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Letters and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

Breathe is my favorite test track for side one for any version of Dark Side Of The Moon, Half-Speed or otherwise. When the voices come in about halfway through the song, you can tell that most copies are too bright simply by listening to the vocals on this track. The cymbals might sound wonderful; lots of other instruments might sound wonderful; and there might be plenty of ambience, detail and transparency.

But all of that counts for nothing if the voices don’t sound right.

And on most copies the voices sound bright, aggressive, grainy and transitory. (This is the case with the 180 gram 30th Anniversary Edition, unfortunately. That pressing will wake up a sleepy stereo, but my stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play that recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.)

The discussion below may shed light on some of the issues involved in the remastering of Dark Side.

Of course, most audiophiles are still under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity, with their strict ‘quality control’, which they spend hundreds of words explaining on their inner sleeves, eliminates pressing variations of these kinds.

Isn’t that the reason for Limited Edition Audiophile Records in the first place? The whole idea is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Copy money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 99% of what we do around here would be a waste of time.

Everybody knows what the audiophile pressings are, and there would be nothing for us to do but find them and throw them up on the website for you to buy. Why even bother to play them if they all sound so good?

Mobile Fidelity

If you’ve spent any time on the site at all you know we are not fans of Mobile Fidelity’s mastering. There are a few potentially excellent MoFis, and certainly Dark Side Of The Moon would be included in that group.

But it’s vitally important to keep in mind that the average copy of DSOTM on MoFi is not at all good. We had a 2-Pack a while back that illustrated that point perfectly — two copies, each with one amazing side and one mediocre side, allowing the buyer to hear for himself the good and the bad side of Dark Side. We wrote:

The person who buys this two LP Package will have the opportunity to hear for himself just how bad most MoFi pressings of Dark Side are. With these two LPs, you are getting an Amazing Side One and an Amazing Side Two – just not on the same piece of vinyl. (The joke here at Better Records is that I should label which side sounds good and which side doesn’t in case the buyer has trouble telling them apart. Since so many audiophiles like so many bad sounding records – don’t get me started – this is not as ridiculous as it sounds. But the difference between the two sides is so OBVIOUS that virtually anyone will hear it. (Even those people who still think that MoFi was a great label.)

$250 is a lot to pay for the MoFi of Dark Side Of The Moon. But consider this: the UHQR sells for two to four times that amount, and doesn’t sound as good as the Hot Stampers found here. Of course, the people that buy UHQRs would never notice that, because they would have simply assumed that they had already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and wouldn’t need to try another. [More on that kind of mistake here.]

The complete text for our Mobile Fidelity shootout can be found here.

I was guilty of the same Mistaken Audiophile Record Collector Thinking myself about 40 years ago. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper in the early ’80s (right before the box set came out in ’83) and thinking how amazing it sounded and that I was so lucky to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now, I suspect that all I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice) and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard plenty of good pressings of Sgt. Peppers, like the wonderful UK reissues we regularly put on the site, I suspect that now the MoFi UHQR would sound so phony to me I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

Back to Dark Side. We’ve found that the album, along with the others linked below, is helpful for testing the following qualities:

  1. Midrange Tonality
  2. Midrange Presence

I would make one other quick point here. The bad MoFi pressings of Dark Side are veiled and recessed in the midrange on Breathe. I remember playing the record in the ’80s and thinking how muffled it sounded on that song. Looking back and thinking about those days, I realize I had a lot to learn, about a lot of things. I had no idea that MoFi’s standard operating procedure was to suck out the midrange. Here is another, equally famous MoFi with similar midrange issues.

  1. Upper Midrange Brightness

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The Beatles / A Hard Day’s Night – It’s (Almost) All About the Midrange

More of the Music of The Beatles

More Reviews and Commentaries for A Hard Day’s Night

This music has a HUGE amount of upper midrange and high frequency information. (Just note how present the tambourines are in the mixes.) If the record isn’t cut properly, or pressed properly for that matter, the sound can REALLY be unpleasant. 

One of our good customers made an astute comment in an email to us — the typical copy of this album makes you want to turn DOWN the volume. Sad but true.

It’s (Almost) All About The Midrange

There are two important traits that all the best copies have in common. Tonally they aren’t bright and aggressive (which eliminates 80 percent of the AHDN pressings you find) and they have a wonderful warmth and sweetness in the midrange that really brings out the quality of the Beatles’ individual voices.

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 this case, it really is true.

Super Session – A Poster Boy for Gritty, Spitty Vocals

More of the Music of Al Kooper

A Great Record for Getting Your Turntable Setup Dialed In

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.

Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals can be a real problem on this album. The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, the music on this album — like any rock and pop album — pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes.

On the better copies, the ones with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and Grain
  2. Midrange Tonality
  3. Sibilance (It’s a Bitch) 
  4. Upper Midrange Shrillness

Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, about every three to four months.

Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.

Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and think we know well.

For the longest time our favorite test discs for this purpose have been these three:

  1. Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular,
  2. Tea for the Tillerman, and
  3. Led Zeppelin II.

Further Reading

Dire Straits – The Best Pressings Have Surprisingly Natural Sound

More of the Music of Dire Straits

Reviews and Commentaries for Love Over Gold

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 both sides here have no such problem – they rock and they sound great 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 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 weight in our grading.

It’s essential 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?

Both can be good. The good copies tend to be good in the same way, and the bad copies, domestic or import, are likewise bad in the same way. It just goes to show, once again, that the only way to know how a record will sound is to play it.

If I had only one or two copies to judge by, I might have preferred an import over a domestic or vice versa. In the old days (before the advent of Hot Stamper shootouts), I would probably have drawn some surely erroneous conclusion concerning the relative merits of one or the other. Small sample sizes are the primary cause of these mistaken judgments. Unless you have a big batch of copies to play, you really can’t be sure about the sound of a recording.

And If I’m not mistaken, aren’t all the original copies, imports and domestics, mastered here in the states at Masterdisk, some by RL, some by BK (Bill Kipper) and some by HW (Howie Weinberg)? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all three sets of initials in the dead wax of the copies we played over the years.

Further Reading

If you would like to run some tests on the copy of Love Over Gold that you own, listen for the qualities we describe above.

Here are some other titles that are good for testing these same qualities, many with advice on specifically What to Listen For.

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Audiophile Wire Testing with Jethro Tull and His Friend Aqualung

More of the Music of Jethro Tull

Reviews and Commentaries for Aqualung

… who seems to have a rather nasty bronchial condition…

[This commentary is from 2008 or so I’m guessing. Still holds up though.]

Like Heart’s Little Queen album, Aqualung presents us with a Demo Disc / Test Disc that really puts a stereo through its paces, assuming it’s the kind of stereo that’s designed to play an album like Aqualung.

Not many audiophile systems I’ve run across over the years were capable of reproducing the Big Rock Sound this album requires, but perhaps you have one and would like to use the album to test some of your tweaks and components. I used it to show me how bad sounding some of the audiophile wire I was testing really was.

Here’s what I wrote:

A quick note about some wire testing I was doing a while back. My favorite wire testing record at the time (2007)? None other than Aqualung!

Part One

Here’s why: Big Whomp Factor. Take the whomp out of Aqualung and the music simply doesn’t work, at all. To rock you need whomp, and much of Aqualung wants to rock.

Part Two

But not all of it. Some of it is quite pretty, so you must make sure to preserve the breathy flutes and recorders, and the delicate harmonics in the strummed acoustic guitar parts. That’s more or less the job of the top end; the whomp is the bottom end’s job. There’s no real mystery to either of those sonic elements.

Part Three

But the third and most important quality Aqualung has that makes it an ideal test disc is the honky midrange it has in places, especially in the “singing through a telephone” break in the middle of the title track. Why is this important?

Simply because many audiophile wires lean out the lower midrange and boost the upper midrange, which adds “clarity” and “detail” to the sound. (Detail can be a trap, something we discuss here.)

It’s not always easy to tell that that’s what’s really happening if you play the typical audiophile test record (whatever that may be. I don’t use them but I suspect there might be others that do.) On Aqualung that extra boost in the voice is positively ruinous. It already has a little problem there, so if that problem gets worse, it’s easy to spot.

Phony Audiophile Sound

The phony “presence” of most audiophile wire is exactly what Aqualung helps to guard against, because Aqualung doesn’t need any more presence.

It needs rich, full-bodied, punchy sound, with plenty of weight from 250 Hz on down. These are qualities found in few audiophile interconnects or speaker wires in my experience.

Come to think of it, none of the audiophile wires I’ve tried in the last two or three years [this was 15 years ago] would pass the Aqualung test. (I used different recordings before the recent discovery of the Hot Stamper Aqualung, but the recordings I used all showed up the same problems in wire after wire.)

Wire shootouts are very frustrating. Most wires do wonderful things in some part of the frequency spectrum — that’s why their inventors and proponents love them so much. They are often highly resolving and amazingly transparent.

But what they give with one hand they take away with the other — leaning out the sound, transforming rock records that used to really rock into rock records that kinda rock. When that happens I put them in their fancy boxes and ship them back from whence they came.

An Invitation

Here’s an idea. Next time you want to test some audiophile wire, invite your non-audiophile friends over to hear Aqualung with the new wires. My guess is they’re less likely to be fooled by the wire’s tricks than we audiophiles would be. They’ll know when the music works and when it doesn’t; you’ll be able to see it on their faces.

It’s easy to lose sight of what this hobby is all about when the money and the egos and the “new improved technologies” all get mixed up with the sound.

Fortunately Aqualung doesn’t care about all that crap. That’s why he’s a good guy to keep around.

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Michael Jackson – Our Thoughts in 2007 on Hearing Thriller in the ’80s

More of the Music of Michael Jackson

Reviews and Commentaries for Thriller

This review for a killer copy of Thriller that we discovered in our 2006 shootout gave us a whole new appreciation for just how good the record 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 playing Thriller and thinking they were all so transistory, spitty, and aggressive sounding.

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

Now I can play the record.

I couldn’t back then.

All that spit was simply my table not being good enough as well as all the garbage downstream from it that was feeding the speakers.

The record is no different, it just sounds different now. In other words, this record is a great test. If you can play this record, you can probably play practically pop and rock record. (Classical is another matter.)

This Pressing Changes Everything

This pressing has a side two that is 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.

After playing a bunch of these we noticed some recurring shortcomings on most of the pressings. Either they lacked extension on the top end or they lacked bass definition and weight, or both. When this copy hit the table, the first thing we noticed was that the top end was Right On The Money and the bottom end was also Right On The Money. Not surprisingly, the middle fell right into place.

It ended up having the most ambience, the most transparency, the most resolution, the most dynamic contrasts, the most presence — in short, it had more of EVERYTHING than any copy we’ve ever heard.

The lesson to be learned there may be that when the extremes are somehow properly transferred to the vinyl, the middle will take care of itself. Since the extremes seem to be the hardest thing to get right, at least on this record, that might explain why so many copies don’t seem to cut it.

Side one fits perfectly into this theory. The bottom end is MEATY with plenty of punchy, solid bass, but the top end is lacking a bit of extension compared to the very best. The result is that there’s a trace of hardness in the vocals that shouldn’t be there. If you can add a dB or two of extreme highs, EVERYTHING will sound right on side one. It all comes back to life.

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Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but detail can be a trap we all too easily fall into if we are not careful.

Tonal balance is the key. Without it no judgments about detail have any real value. 

One example: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar doesn’t have the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word detail, since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful “detail.” Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind.

The MoFi guys and the CD guys often fall into this trap.

Get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is usually have systems that make my head hurt.

But most people will never know what they’re missing on Helplessly Hoping, because they will never have an amazing sounding copy of this album. The hot copies are just too rare.

This record is good for testing the following sonic qualities:

Midrange Congestion 

Midrange Presence 

Midrange Tonality

Transparency 

Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars 

Listening in Depth to A Hard Day’s Night

More of the Music of The Beatles

More Reviews and Commentaries for A Hard Day’s Night

Play it against your MoFi or Heavy Vinyl pressing and you will quickly see why those lifeless LPs bore us to tears. Who in his right mind would want to suffer through a boring Beatles record?

Drop the needle on any song on the first side to see why we went crazy over a recent Shootout Winner on side one. The emotional quality of the boys’ performances really comes through on this copy.

They aren’t just singing — they’re really BELTIN’ it out. Can you imagine what that sounds like on the title track? We didn’t have to imagine it, WE HEARD IT!

TRACK LISTING

Side One

A Hard Day’s Night
I Should Have Known Better
If I Fell

This is a wonderful example of The Beatles’ harmonies at their best. Toward the end of the song, during one of their harmonic excursions, you can hear John’s voice drop out when something apparently catches in his throat, and I could swear that you can hear Paul McCartney react to it with a little laugh.

If their voices sound warm, sweet, and transparent on this track, at the very least you have a contender, and possibly a winner. Not many pressings are going to bring out all the timbral qualities of their voices.

I’m Happy Just to Dance With You
And I Love Her
Tell Me Why
Can’t Buy Me Love

Always starts with a bit of grit and grain, but usually sounds better by the second verse.

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Herb Alpert / Whipped Cream & Other Delights – Top End Extension Is Key

More Sixties Pop Recordings

More 5 Star Albums

The better pressings have the kind of Tubey Magical, big-bottomed, punchy, spacious sound that we’ve come to expect from Larry Levine‘s engineering for A&M. If you have any Hot Stamper pressings of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66’s albums, then you know exactly the kind of sound we’re talking about.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack the full complement of harmonic information.

In addition, when the top end is lacking, the upper midrange and high frequencies get jammed together — the highs can’t extend up and away from the upper mids.

This causes a number of much-too-common problems that we hear in the upper midrange of many of the records we play: congestion, hardness, harshness, and squawk.

Painstaking Vertical Tracking Angle adjustment is absolutely critical if you want your records to play with the least amount of these problems, a subject we discuss in the Commentary section of the site at length.

Full-bodied sound is especially critical to the horns.

Any blare, leanness or squawk ruins at least some of the fun, certainly at the louder levels the record should be playing at.

The frequency extremes (on the best copies) are not boosted in any way. When you play this record quietly, the bottom and top will disappear (due to the way the ear handles quieter sounds as described by the Fletcher-Munson curve).

Most records (like most audiophile stereos) are designed to sound correct at moderate levels. Not this album. It wants you to turn it up. Then, and only then, will everything sound completely right musically and tonally from top to bottom.