*Developing More Skepticism

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UPDATE 2026

We wrote this commentary a couple of years back and now, having played some of the Tone Poets pressings we thought would have bad sound, have updated it with all the latest information on that sorry label.

Credibility is at the heart of our many disagreements with the online audiophile community, so we felt we needed to offer a way for audiophiles to do a better job of giving some context to their opinions.

When we run experiments that include modern remastered Heavy Vinyl records, comparing them to the vintage vinyl pressings we have on hand for our shootouts, the one thing we can say about them is that they are almost certain to be inferior. (Well, almost, but not quite.)

Some are a great deal worse than others, to be sure, but they are all inferior to one degree or another.

On another blog we were taken to task — by those who felt their systems were more than adequate to judge the sound quality of the real Blue Notes compared to the new releases — for predicting that Joe Harley’s Tone Poets releases, once we finally got around to playing them, would be just as awful as all the other records he has had a hand in producing

For the thirty years since these Heavy Vinyl pressings have come along, it has seemed to us that all the evidence pointed in the same direction — namely that audiophile systems are rarely capable of showing their owners the strengths and weaknesses of the records they play.

We discussed that very issue here in some depth. Curiously, the audiophile systems of reviewers has seemed to fail them every bit as badly.

If you, speaking as an audiophile, want to make the case for the superior quality of the records put out on the Tone Poets label, we are happy to entertain the possibility. Having played Heavy Vinyl pressings by the hundreds over the past three decades, the chances of their records having sound we would find acceptable are vanishingly small, but we can’t say the chances are zero.

Repeating the tiresome truism (aren’t they all?) that because reviews are subjective, your review is as credible as any other, simply will not do.

When we wrote the above we had yet to play a Tone Poets reissue in one of our shootouts. (We’d dropped the needle on a couple, but to get deep into the sound we really needed to do a shootout with a good-sized pile of cleaned Blue Note pressings, with special emphasis on those mastered by RVG. They’re the ones that most often win shootouts.)

We actively started to search out real Blue Note pressings, on various labels from various eras, for a couple of titles. After about two years we were able to do the shootouts and report our findings.

UPDATE 2026

We have now played a couple of the Tone Poets releases, for two of the very best sounding Blue Note recordings we’ve had the pleasure to play: Dexter Gordon’s One Flight Up and Lee Morgan’s Cornbread.

To read our reviews, click on the respective links for either or both of them: One Flight Up and Cornbread.

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Turning Skeptics into Believers, One Hot Stamper at a Time

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

About 15 20 years ago we received a letter from a fellow on our email list who found our prices for vinyl curious, as he considered vinyl a bygone technology. (You may have noticed that it has since made quite a comeback.)

Bygone technology? Can’t say I agree with that assessment. It sure would be nice to demonstrate for him how much better records sound than the supposedly superior technologies that have — for most people, perhaps even for this gentleman — replaced them.

Wait, there is a way!

A Hot Stamper, 100% Guaranteed to Satisfy or Your Money Back. One click is all it takes. Which is pretty much what I said in my reply to his letter below.

Tom,

I receive your HTML email regularly. Along with the curious prices of your offerings, I occasionally wonder about the opinions expressed in your e-missives. A Roman senator once said that all mortal things are ‘only perfect in death.’ Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust aside: vinyl (of which I own a considerable library) is merely a bygone technology at this point in time. The opinions expressed on your website rarely credit the writer. Whose words are these? And why should I accept the opinions of someone who only stands to profit from their fanaticism?

Cheers, 
Bruce R. 

Bruce, most of us write the commentary, there are five of us fanatics here. (Six if you count our record cleaning person, but I’m not sure how fanatical she is, so let’s go with five.)

UPDATE 2019

There are ten of us now, a number that has remained constant for about the last ten years. That’s how many people it takes to do the work we do.

If you don’t have a staff of your own, you can still make plenty of progress by doing your own shootouts, one title at a time. It won’t be easy, but you will learn more from doing them than you could from all the audiophile reviews ever written, including the ones on this blog.

Please keep in mind one very important thing: it matters not a whit what we say about a record, it only matters what you hear on your stereo when you play it. If for any reason you are not happy, we give you all your money back.

(Some number of times a year this actually happens and we really do pay up. If we didn’t your credit card provider would make us refund your money anyway, but that’s hardly the point. It’s our written policy; there’s no fine print — that’s not how we run our business — so we pay. The same record, sold to the very next customer, has never in the history of Better Records ever been returned. Hey, we can find you good records, but we sure can’t fix your stereo for you, know what I mean?)

There’s a great deal of commentary on the site about how easy it is to verify the truth of what we say about pressing variations, and the nice thing about it is that you can actually run the tests using records you already own. A good start is to play side one of any record against side two, and of course the best test if to play two different copies of the same record against each other. If your stereo is even halfway decent, the differences should be noticeable, if not pronounced.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Unlike audio reviewers, we actually have something to back up our claims: the record we send you. If you find us to be in error, you get your money back, no two ways about it. This is what makes us unique and successful in the record business — we actually can send you the record that’s as good as we say it is. Would love to have you try one. Like we say, you have nothing to lose.

Hey, I’m a skeptic myself and proud of it. But I know good sound when I hear it. I’ve found it’s best to let my ears guide me in this hobby. If some piece of expensive audio gear sounds good, then it sounds good, whether I like the price or not. I may not be able to afford it — hell, I can’t afford the records I sell either — but that has nothing to do with the fact that it sounds good. Most expensive audio gear doesn’t sound good, but some of it does, and there is no point denying it.

Same goes for our records. They sound amazing. Like you, I wish they were cheaper, but that doesn’t change the fact that they really do sound amazing. If you would let us prove it to you, we would love to be given the opportunity to do so. Even though it happens all the time, we can’t really take credit for turning skeptics into believers. The records do that for us.

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Getting Fooled, or Fooling Yourself?

Basic Concepts Every Audiophile Should Understand

This excerpt is from a longer commentary we wrote in 2022 about the digital step (the horror!) Mobile Fidelity was secretly using to make their so-called One Step pressings.

What follows is one way to look at what happened and who it happened to.

This gentleman you see pictured, a certain Mike Esposito, made a foolish mistake.

He bought into the hype of the Modern Audiophile Remastered Record hook, line and sinker.

Rather than being skeptical, he wanted to believe what they told him.

He did not use his own ears to make judgments, he let others — reviewers, fellow audiophiles, the label itself — tell him what was pure and good.

Now he has learned that he was misinformed by those in whom he placed his trust. Even worse, he was lied to by the label he… is worshipped to strong a word?

He was also misinformed by the audiophile reviewers who should have known something was wrong. Not being able to recognize the shortcomings in the sound of these pressings was entirely predictable, since these reviewers never developed listening skills much better than those of Mr Esposito. (For more on just how out of his depth the man was, click here.)

His world has been turned upside down. But that’s not technically true — it was always upside down.

We know of practically no evidence to support the proposition that this label knows how to make good sounding records.  We wondered how they were still in business and have no expectation of ever getting any answer more helpful than “shut up.” (If you actually have evidence to support any claim you wish to make, we can help you do that.)

Finding good records and being able to reproduce them properly is hard. Perhaps now Mr Esposito is coming to appreciate just how little he knew about either.

UPDATE 2025

Based on the fact that he charges $1.99 per month — I kid you not — to advise his clients which are the best sounding pressings of the albums he auditions, it’s doubtful that he has learned anything from his experience of being fooled by Mobile Fidelity, along with all the other audiophile reviewers who apparently are as easily duped as he is. (Is there any job in the world requiring less in the way of qualifications than “audiophile record reviewer”?)

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To Find Better Sounding Records, Neglect Your Beautiful Ideas

Important Lessons We Learned Through Record Experiments

On the Big Think website, Michael Strevens has outlined some ideas from his recent book about how science advances.

I stumbled upon Strevens through Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Podcast. Shermer and his professor guest discuss at length (about an hour and a half) his singular insight that trying to understand and promulgate a Big Picture of Reality is what kept the scientists of the past (they used to call themselves natural philosophers) for hundreds of years from actually making the breakthroughs necessary to come up with one.

What was needed was data, and lots of it, with no concern for theories of any kind, elegant, inelegant or otherwise.

Here is the link to the podcast, which we feel is well worth your time if a deeper understanding of how we gain knowledge is a subject that interests you.

Some of the key takeaways from the book:

  • Modern science requires scrutinizing the tiniest of details and an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.
  • Many scientists believe that theories should be “beautiful,” but such argumentation is forbidden in modern science.
  • Neglecting beauty would be a step too far for Aristotle.

My heart raced a bit when I read the line “an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.”

This describes our obsession with finding the best sounding pressings of our favorite music better than any seven words I’ve ever come up with, that’s for sure. If only I were a better writer!

However, I did have some skills to bring to bear on the problems I was trying to solve, the most important of which was the fact that I was a naturally a skeptic.

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Seems as Though the Shaded Dogs Pressed in Indianapolis Actually Do Sound Better

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

As painful as it may be for us to admit it, sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be right!

For RCA classical and orchestral recordings, collectors have long held that the earliest pressings on the Shaded Dog label, in stereo, pressed in Indianapolis, tend to be the best sounding. That qualifier “tend” may not be necessary — plenty of audiophiles think they simply are better sounding, no question about it.

Maybe. If we tallied all the copies we’ve played and created a very large spreadsheet using the data, perhaps we could give you a better answer than “maybe,” but we’ve definitely never tallied them up and have no plans to do so. It sounds like a lot of work.

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somwhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.

You can be sure, based on our most recent shootout for this mystery RCA title, that in future we will focus our efforts on the Indianapolis pressings and avoid the Richmond pressings unless they are cheap and minty.

When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct, in other words, when it comports with reality, at least for the seven copies of this album that we played, we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn from what this title is trying to tell us.

Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.

The reality is that most of the time we are not able to predict which stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.

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Analog Shmanalog – Why Avoid the Only Question Worth Asking?

Saving the world from bad sound you say? Hey, that’s what I’m about too!

The following is my reply to the friend who sent me the NYT article linked above.

He had been to my studio and heard for himself the sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that “The Wizard of Vinyl” produces. Up against properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LPs, they are rarely better than mediocre, and more often than not just plain terrible. (We actually play one of his remastered records in this video.)

Mr. Kassem can’t seem to stop stepping on rakes, no doubt because he never made any effort to develop his critical listening skills, which for some reason he thought he already possessed. As a consequence of this mistaken judgment, he literally has nothing to guide him, a fact that should be obvious to anyone who has played any of his company’s records.

My letter:

This “pure analog versus analog tainted with digital” debate needs to stop.

It completely avoids the only question worth asking: are these new records any good?

Who cares how they make them?

Only the deaf! Those who can actually hear know how badly they suck and could not care less.

You sat me down and we played a batch of modern remastered records. They all failed. (More or less.)

That is the only true test.

Put all of these new records to the same test! Please, somebody!

Somebody with a top quality system can volunteer to do shootouts for any and all of them and let the chips fall where they may.

Finding such a system may be impossible, but we can at least try. This talk of master tapes and pure analog sound is getting us nowhere.

There is no testing going on, just claims being made with almost nothing to back them up.

None of this matters. Literally, none of it.

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Hot Stampers Simply Do Not Exist for Some Audiophiles

Please Consider Taking Some of Our Hard-won Audio Advice

It is an unfortunate fact that, at least for some audiophiles, Hot Stampers simply do not exist.

They may be lovers of sound, the dictionary definition of an audiophile, but their systems are not revealing and accurate enough to allow them to hear how good a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned vintage (or maybe not so vintage) pressing can sound relative to whatever other version of the music they may have — Heavy Vinyl, cassette, CD, etc.

They simply do not possess a system (power, equipment, room, tweaks) of the quality required to play them at their best. 

Others won’t have developed the rudimentary listening skills needed to recognize the superior sound of a Hot Stamper pressing when it’s playing on their turntable.

Speculation? Opinion? Not really. Not when the evidence is this overwhelming. Let’s look at some of the facts.

A great many analog-oriented audiophiles are quite happy with the sound of Heavy Vinyl LPs, the kind that we regularly trash around here.

Those pressings set a decidedly low standard for sound quality, to our ears anyway, so if the typical audiophile is happy with them, what does that tell you about the quality of his audio chain and the nature of his critical listening skills?

It may be hard to wrap your head around this unfortunate and depressing fact, but many of the audiophile records being made today are even worse sounding than the audiophile pressings that were made back in the bad old days of the 70s, 80s and 90s. (Maybe the bad old days, like the poor, will always be with us.)

Boat Rocking

Our Hot Stampers will of course sound quite a bit better on even a run-of-the-mill audiophile system than practically any Heavy Vinyl pressing you care to name. But if you’re happy with a $30 reissue, what’s your incentive to spend five or ten or twenty times that amount based on nothing more than our say-so?

Even with a 100% Money Back Guarantee, why rock your own boat?

On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile — even a novice — can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns.

You don’t have to spend a dime to discover the reality underlying the concept of Hot Stampers.

We not only tell you how to go about finding them, we also help you to do a better job of playing them.

Have You Noticed?

But perhaps you may have noticed, as we have, that most audio skeptics rarely go out of their way to prove themselves wrong.

And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call confirmation bias practically guarantees that they won’t hear something they don’t want to hear.

Which is fine. At Better Records we don’t let that slow us down. Instead, we happily go about our business turning skeptics into believers (one record at a time of course), taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any audiophile LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason.

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How Is It that the Earliest Pressings from the Tube Era Often Lack the Sound of Tubes?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music on Island Records Available Now

Please note that the album you see pictured on the left is not the one we are discussing here.

It has been our experience going back many years that the earliest pressings for many records on the Island label are not very good.

To be fair, this one — again, not Mr. Fantasy — is not a bad sounding pressing.

With grades of 1.5+ on both sides, it fits comfortably in our section for good, not great sounding LPs. But the right reissues are a big step up in class sonically. They’re the ones that win shootouts, not these Pink Label LPs.

It’s big and clear but dry and spitty and badly needs tubes — or the sound of tubes — in the cutting chain.

That’s not supposed to happen, the early pressings are supposed to be the most Tubey Magical ones, with the reissues being less Tubey Magical — but in the world of records, when has that rule of thumb ever counted for anything?

Been There, Done That

We’ve run into so many sonically-flawed Pink Label Islands by now that hearing one sound lackluster if not actually awful doesn’t phase us in the least. Some of the other Pink Labels that never win shootouts can be found here.

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Why Do the Later Stampers of this Shaded Dog Sound So Much Better than the Earlier Ones?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

For RCA classical and orchestral recordings, the earliest pressings on the Shaded Dog label, in stereo, tend to be the best sounding, right? 

Maybe. It’s an open question, at least it is for us when we consider how many exceptions to the rule we’ve run into over the 30+ years we’ve been buying and selling them.

If we tallied all the copies we’ve played and created a very large spreadsheet using the data, perhaps we could give you a better answer than “we don’t know,” but we’ve definitely never tallied them up and have no plans to do so. It sounds to me like a lot of work.

However, in our experience, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, sometimes the higher-numbered pressings are better sounding than the lower-numbered pressings. This is true of the stampers for the Shaded Dog pressings below.

Keep in mind that the stamper numbers you see belong to a different album.

The questions that audiophiles who collect shaded dog pressings should be asking themselves right about now are:

  • Why is 17s/20s consistently better sounding than any copy with any other stampers?
  • Why is the 16s pressing worse sounding than even the worst 17s pressing when they are both Indianapolis pressings only one digit apart?
  • Why does the 20s side two potentially win the shootout with a 3+ grade, but more often only earn a grade of 2.5+ or 2+?
  • And the hardest to stomach of them all are those second-rate 10s stampers. How on earth can they come in last in a shootout against all the copies with higher numbers?

It turns out that the old rule of thumb that the lower-numbered stampers will sound better than the higher-numbered ones is not nearly as reliable as some folks would like it to be.

If it were more reliable, we could all just buy the lowest-numbered stamper copies we could find and know that we had the best available pressing. Then, if we were lucky enough to encounter an even lower-numbered stamper copy, we could buy that one and know that we now had an even better sounding pressing, all without having to play the old “best” one against the new “best” one.

It’s so convenient and logical this way, why would anyone want to bother with a different illogical, inconvenient and obviously counterintuitive method when the other one has so much going for it?

There is only one problem with the idea of collecting the earliest shaded dog pressings in order to secure the best sounding pressings — the fact that the evidence to support such an approach is so spotty. Yes, early stampers win lots of shootouts. No, early stampers do not win all the shootouts, or even a majority of them, judging by a rough calculation using the data from the many hundreds of stamper sheets we’ve created over the years.

Predictions Are Futile

The unfortunate reality we run into is that most of the time we are not able to predict which stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.

Although it’s true that there are many pressings in which one set of stampers always wins, the odds are that any particular pressing with those stampers will do well but won’t win, and it sometimes happen that some pressings with those stampers won’t do well at all.

This is why we have to do shootouts, and why you have to do them too, if finding the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.

We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.

I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them, painful and costly as those experiences may have been.

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We Don’t Know — And We’ve Learned Over the Years Not to Pretend To

More on the Subject of Pretentious Knowledge

In our twenty-year-old review for the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan we made the following claim, a claim which we obviously had no evidence to back up.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

It was foolish of us to declare any such thing, especially with such certainty. How on earth could we possibly know what tapes were used to master the record, in Germany of all places? The very idea is absurd. We call people out for saying things they have no evidence to support all the time. Running into this review today, I have to call myself out for such nonsense. What I should have said was the following:

This reissue sounds to us as though it has been made from copy tapes.

Just to be clear, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that it sounds like a copy tape was used to master the record, but I am not at all justified in saying that a copy tape was actually used to master the record.

Nor do I have any business talking about about the sound of a master tape I’ve never heard.

I can certainly talk about the sound of the best London pressings. Those I have played. I’ve critically listened to batches of them over the course of many years. They may be expensve but they are not hard to find. We’ve sold dozens of them as Hot Stamper pressings and played plenty of others with sound not good enough or surfaces not quiet enough to offer to our customers.

Whatever approach Decca may have used in the mastering, with whatever tape they may have used to make the records that we’ve auditioned, is information that would be nice to have. But it’s really none of my business, since it doesn’t alter the sound of the pressings we auditioned.

More importantly, it’s none of Better Records’ business.

Our business is about one thing and one thing only: records that sound better than other pressings.

Discussions of master tapes and what they should sound like or what they do sound like is not part of our remit. Nor should it be. At bottom it is nothing but speculation, and it is rarely if ever supported by anything resembling evidence.

We are firmly on record as opposing that sort of thing.

We’ve Been Saying This for Twenty Years

After our dubious claim to knowing that the record was mastered from a copy tape, we went on to say:

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