*Playback, Setup, etc.

We Can Find You the Best Sounding Pressings – That’s the Easy Part

The most important aspect of audio is that you have to learn how to do it for yourself.

We can find you the best sounding pressings; that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to play them, and learning how to listen to them, well, that’s a fair bit harder. That part takes a lifetime, at least.

This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it, especially if you use our approach.

It has worked for us and it can work for you.

This is what the revolutionary changes in audio link explains. If you haven’t taken advantage of all the newest technologies that make LP playback dramatically better than it was ten or twenty years ago, a great many records won’t sound the way you want them to.

Trust me, there’s a world of sound lurking in the grooves of the best “badly recorded” albums that simply cannot be revealed without good cleaning fluids and machines, vibration-reducing platforms, top quality front ends, room treatments, big speakers pulled well out from the back wall, and much, much more.

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Baby You’re a Rich Man

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Below we discuss listening to Baby You’re a Rich Man from side two of the German Magical Mystery Tour album.

If you own a copy, play yours and listen for what we describe in this track by track breakdown.

For those who want to dig deeper into the sound of scores of other titles, our listening in depth commentaries have track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done shootouts for.

Baby You’re A Rich Man

This track is Demo Disc Quality on the best Hot Stamper pressings. As I was playing this song for the shootout, the following thought occurred to me:

If I had one track to play to someone to demonstrate what a thrill it is to have a big, expensive stereo, it would be hard to pick a better song than Baby You’re A Rich Man.

The only other one that occurs to me off the top of my head is Sergio Mendes’ For What It’s Worth from Stillness, a record we never have in stock by the way.

The sound is wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling and big as life. You can’t get that sound with screens and you can’t get it with smaller speakers and their smaller drivers.

Once you’ve heard that sound it’s hard to get excited about any other.

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Zenith Error and Why You Should Care About It

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with higher fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

An excerpt:

Every so often I make a point of visiting the WAM Engineering website to check out J.R. Boisclair’s latest videos. J.R. is producing the most informative and useful content on turntable / tonearm setup I’ve run across, and as near as I can tell he’s at the cutting edge of advancements in analog transcription.

On my last visit to their website, I was reminded of a tonearm setup parameter that J.R. discusses at length but that myself and many other audiophiles are either unfamiliar with or know very little about – zenith error. Zenith error, also known as stylus yaw, refers to a manufacturing flaw that many cartridges suffer from where the stylus is not aligned precisely with the cantilever.

WAM Engineering offers a service using microscopy to analyze cartridges, and this has afforded them the opportunity to take a very close look at a fairly high number of a wide variety of cartridges. What they’ve learned doing this is that the majority of those fitted with fine-line contact styli, which are directional, have stylus yaw.

This flaw is not directly the fault of the cartridge manufacturers themselves. The cantilever assemblies that companies like Dynavector and Audio-Technica use to build their cartridges are made by other companies that specialize in making those assemblies. Dynavector, for instance, uses cantilever assemblies made by a company called Ogura. Audio-Technica buy theirs from Orbray, formerly Namiki.

From the standpoint of these manufacturers, this zenith error is not actually considered a flaw as it generally falls within their own manufacturing tolerances of 5 degrees. J.R. confirms in his video on zenith error that the average among the cartridges he’s analyzed is just 2.5 percent, well within that tolerance. But he also mentions that this error can in some cases reach above 17%.

After analysis, J.R. returns customer’s cartridges with shims that correct for VTA, SRA and azimuth, but he also provides us with the direction and the number of degrees by which our stylus is rotated off the axis of the cantilever. This way, with the help of a tool that WAM Engineering also sells called the WallyZenith, we can adjust for stylus yaw as part of our installation process.

We are in the process of testing this aspect of cartridge alignment and should be able to report our findings soon.

Until then we would encourage you to try adjusting the angle of the cartridge’s body in the headshell to see if any improvement is possible. My intuition is that it will be.

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Dialing in the Anti-Skate with Massed Strings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

I once adjusted my anti-skate while playing this very album, at the time dialing it in to what I thought was a “T.” 

Over the years I’ve found that the best test for fine anti-skate adjustment is massed strings, and not just at the end of a side but right at the part of the record in which the anti-skate has been engaged. This will vary with different arms.

When you have all the rosiny texture, the high-end harmonic extension, the least shrillness and the widest and deepest staging, you are there — assuming that tracking weight, azimuth and VTA are correct as well.

Four variables to mess with admittedly is a bitch, but having the right record to test with is absolutely critical as well. Maybe we should call it five variables.

And if I only had one record to bring to someone’s house in order to evaluate their equipment, this would certainly be a top choice. If you can make this record sound the way it should, your stereo is cookin’. If you are having problems, this record will show them to you in short order.

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Let’s Face It – Some Truly Great Records Are Almost Always Noisy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. McCartney’s first album is one of them.

Copies of McCartney’s first can rarely be found on the site, but when there are any copies available, they are most likely to be found in our section for records with condition issues. Here you will find about about 30% of all the Hot Stamper pressings active on the site at any one time.

Hot Stampers are almost exclusively vintage vinyl pressings — “old records” you might say — and old records, even after a good cleaning, are rarely quiet. (We lay out the particulars of our grading system here.)

One of our customers noted that the Hot Stamper we sent him of McCartney’s first album was a bit noisier than he would have liked. We replied:

As for surface issues, we wish we could find them quiet, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. In the listing we noted:

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Is Your Suspension Sagging?

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

I wrote a long commentary in 2010 criticizing the advice Mapleshade was giving out regarding cartridge and tonearm adjustments, some of which I agreed with and much of which I did not. You can read all about it here.

However, this excerpt from that commentary will focus on Revolver, to the relief of all who read this blog I suspect. Enough with bashing Mapleshade!

I noted back then that Mapleshade gives out some good advice, but it’s mixed in with a lot of audiophile nonsense. The audio world was drowning in absurdities long before I got into the hobby in the early-70s, and let me be the first to admit that I have fallen for more than my share of bad audio ideas over the years. (That’s partly because I have been doing it for so long, if you will forgive me for using that as an excuse. It’s really the only one I have.)

If you want to get closer to the reality of how audio actually works, watching videos won’t get you there.

Neither will reading blogs.

The audiophile who wants to improve his playback quality has only one option, and that is to get his hands dirty, because doing audio is the only way to achieve meaningful results.

Everyone gives out plenty of advice, including us. Testing that advice and putting what you learn from it into practice is what separates the men from the boys, or the better stereos from the other ones in this case (regardless of price).

Here is the complete quote from Mapleshade:

To get first rate sound and to get your money’s worth from any expensive cartridge, you MUST meticulously adjust VTA or tracking force every 3-4 months — that’s because stylus suspensions always sag with use. This lowers VTA and seriously kills dynamics and treble sparkle. Lots of people misinterpret this as a worn-out cartridge, an expensive error. Instead, raise VTA or lighten tracking force until your test record’s treble sounds too harsh, then drop VTA or lighten tracking force a hair. Your test record must not be thicker or thinner than the bulk of your record collection. Adjusting tracking force yields slightly better sonic results and longer cartridge life than adjusting VTA — and adjusting tracking force on most arms is WAY easier than adjusting VTA.

The basic idea here is that your cartridge sags over time, causing the VTA (Vertical Tracking Angle) to change, which results in less dynamics and “treble sparkle.”

So, with this idea in mind, after doing a serious shootout with Revolver in 2010 and hearing a Triple Plus side one with amazing bass and energy, we decided to reduce the tracking weight on our Triplanar arm a tiny, tiny, practically non-existent amount, something in the range of 1/100th of a gram perhaps. 

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The Ideal Turntable Setup Disc

More Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

We’ve wanted to have Hot Stamper pressings of this album of Paganini’s Caprices (CS-6163) to offer our customers for years, not for the music per se, but to use as a handy test disc for those who are interested in setting up and dialing in their front ends better.

After all, these are only practice pieces. If you want real music written for the violin, we have plenty of albums to choose from that would be much more enjoyable.

If you like the sound of solo violin — and who doesn’t? — you will have a hard time finding a better sounding recording of it than this. That’s assuming you can set your Vertical Tracking Angle (VTA) correctly, not something every audiophile can manage. If you can, look out — you are in for a sonic treat.

Solo violins in live performance are clear, clean and present. You have no trouble at all “seeing” them clearly.

Our vintage Hot Stamper pressings will always have that kind of clear and present sound for the violin. If they didn’t, they would not qualify as Hot Stamper pressings.

Setup Advice

This is truly the perfect turntable setup disc; when your VTA, azimuth, tracking weight and anti-skate are correct, this is the record that will make it clear to you that all your efforts have paid off.

What to listen for you ask?

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Our 2016 Shootout Winner Just Sounded More Like Live Music

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Back in 2016 we had this to say about a copy of the album we had just played:

This copy will put you front and center for the single greatest Paul McCartney recorded concert of all time.

In the final round of shootouts on both sides, this copy showed itself as clearly superior in terms of transparency and three-dimensionality, as well as having the most rock solid bottom end. To sum it up, my notes read “so real,” which is exactly what makes this copy THE one to have. This is Paul and his mates LIVE in your listening room like you have never heard them before.

This copy gave us the feeling that we were right there in the audience for the taping of this amazing performance. It made other copies sound like records — good records, but records nonetheless. This one has the IMMEDIACY of a live show, one which just happened to be fronted by one of the greatest performers in the history of popular music, Sir Paul McCartney.

We shootout this album about once a year, which means that many changes will have occurred to the stereo in the meantime. One of the qualities that we noticed this time around was how much like live music this album can be when the pressings have one specific quality — tons of bass.

Live music, especially live music heard in a club, tends to have plenty of bass. It’s the sonic quality that’s by far the most difficult to recreate in the home.

When a record manages to capture that kind of “live” low end energy, it really helps make the connection between the sound of live music and the sound coming out of your speakers.

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“A lifelong practice to return to”

New to the Blog? Start Here

Allow me to share a story Ryan Holiday at the Daily Stoic tells that should be relevant to those who are seriously committed to improving the sound quality of the records you play.

Ryan writes:

When Junius Rusticus handed the future emperor of Rome a book, it came with an implication. A true philosopher—a true leader—Rusticus insisted, could not be satisfied just getting the gist of something. They had to understand it inside and out.

None of the lessons that Marcus Aurelius took from Epictetus—the book Rusticus gave him in his mid-twenties—would have been possible without first listening to this lesson. He not only inhaled the book, he clearly went over it over and over until it seeped into his very soul. That’s why Meditations is filled with quotes from it. That’s why Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, managed to stay sane, despite the inherent insanity of his position.

Maybe you’ve read Epictetus. Maybe you’ve been meaning to. But chances are, you haven’t treated it like Marcus did, like Rusticus expected, like Epictetus deserves.

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Jerry Seinfeld – “No one’s really that great.”

Shane Parrish quotes comedian Jerry Seinfeld on what it takes to be great:

“No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage.”

Please forgive me in advance for quoting at length from a commentary I wrote long ago concerning a favorite album of mine and how it serves to illustrate The Pareto Effect.

The album in question has been a key test disc for me. It’s one that helped me dramatically improve the quality of our playback over the last 40-plus years.

The albums on the list linked to above do exactly what good test discs should do.

They can show you what your system is doing wrong, or poorly, and once you’ve fixed it, or made it better, they show you that it actually is better, maybe even right, or at least more right than it was before.

We audiophiles need records like these. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become good at building our audio systems. Because the amount of experimenting you do with your setup, components, room, electricity and the like is the only thing that can take you to the highest levels of audio.

The reality we audiophiles must face in our journey to higher quality sound is that buying good equipment, regardless of price or quality, will not get us there.

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