*Stereo, Playback, Setup, etc.

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

Shane Parrish quotes comedian Jerry Seinfeld on being 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 audiophiles must face in their journey to higher quality sound is that buying good equipment, regardless of price or quality, will not get you there.

You can only teach yourself — painstakingly, over the course of many, many years — how to tweak and tune your equipment, regardless of its cost or purported quality, in order to reach the highest levels of audio fidelity.

And learning how to tweak and tune your equipment has other, fundamentally more important benefits in addition to its original purpose.

It helps you become a better listener, so that you notice aspects of the sound you were not aware of on your records.

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Are You a Soundphile? I Used to Be One

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

About 30 years ago I got hold of a Japanese pressing of Marriner conducting Haydn’s Toy Symphony and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and was blown away by the absolutely phenomenal quality of the Haydn. Listing the record for sale, I raved:

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is the best sounding Toy Symphony you will ever hear!

…all the little toys that play along with the music just JUMP out of the speakers. The recording is so transparent and the toys are so well miked it’s like hearing the work for the first time, or live.

Now we know definitively that this is clearly not true, assuming yoy have one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the EMI original. They are better in every way than the Japanese pressing, which is the one purporting to have audiophile sound.

If this sounds familiar to you, I’m guessing this is not your first visit to the blog or our site. There is almost always a vintage pressing with superior sound when compared to the audiophile pressings made from the same recording.

The problem is: You just don’t know which vintage pressing will have superior sound. Maybe they all will. Maybe none of the copies you own will. There is one, but how do you find it?

In order to get that answer, you have to know how to do carefully controlled shootouts, and not just once, but more often than not a number of them over a period of years. Whatever answer you may come up will most likely be provisional, not definitve, because that’s the only way the process of discovery can work when applying scientific methodologies to the solution of a problem like “which pressings sound best on record X?”.

We did the shootout in 2022 and found out that the best of the original EMI pressings are quite a bit better, a classic case of live and learn, as well as one of the hundreds of breakthrough discoveries we’ve made over the years. That’s what happens when you are in the business of playing records and then selling the best of them to audiophiles looking for superior sound.

I believe I had at least one or two UK EMI pressings to play against the Japanese ones, but all the details of how I came to this conclusion — a proto-shootout, carried out long before I knew how to do a real one — are lost to the mists of time.

Keep in mind that my stereo was dramatically less revealing back then. Also I had not learned how to clean records properly. Those two facts, combined with the underdeveloped listening skills that go with them, helped me to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

No, the Japanese pressing, specifically targeted to audiophiles, or “soundphiles” if you like, is not superior to a properly mastered and pressed UK LP.

If you have more than a handful of Japanese pressings in your collection, you can be sure that there is still plenty of room for improvement in your audio system.

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This Pressing of Carmen Had Dry Strings on One Side, Rich Strings on the Other

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

My notes for side two on a copy we recently auditioned read:

Could use more tubes.

Strings could be a bit smoother.

Needs a bit more weight down low.

My notes for side one:

Side one had all of this and more!

Some Common Issues with Londons and Deccas

Many London and Decca pressings lack weight down low, which thins out the sound, easily heard in the lower strings, which sound washed out.

On some sides of some copies the strings are dry, lacking Tubey Magic. This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.

Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

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

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Professional Skateboarder Danny Way on Flow

Confessions of a Thrillseeking Audiophile

This quote comes courtesy of Shane Parrish’s Brain Food newsletter.

“Skateboarding is a game of failure. That’s what makes this sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure.

“But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there’s a zone I get into. Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It’s the most peaceful state of mind I’ve ever known. I’ll take all the failures. As long as I know that feeling is coming, that’s enough to keep going.”

I expect that Danny would understand exactly why someone would want to go into a room to listen to a record by himself. Good sound tends to make everybody in the room stop talking.

Exceptional records take it to the next level. They cause those in the room to to go silent in order to listen more intently — because the music and the sound demand it.

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Traveling Back in Time with Cat Stevens on Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Our good customer Roger wrote us a letter years ago about his Tea for the Tillerman on Mobile Fidelity, in which he remarked, “Sometimes I wish I kept my old crappy stereo to see if I could now tell what it was that made these audiophile pressings so attractive then.”

It got me to thinking. Yes, that would be fun, and better yet, it could be done. There are actually plenty of those old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s still around. Just look at what many of the forum posters — god bless ’em — are running. They’ve got some awesome ’70s Japanese turntables, some Monster Cable and some vintage tube gear and speakers designed in the ’50s.

With this stuff you could virtually travel back in time, in effect erasing all the audio progress made possible by the new technologies adopted by some of us over the last 30 years or so.

Then you could hear your Mobile Fidelity Tea for the Tillerman sound the way it used to when you could actually stand to be in the same room with it.

My question to Roger was “What on earth were we hearing that made us want to play these awful half-speed mastered records? What was our stereo doing that made these awful records sound good to us at the time?”

In Search of a Bad Stereo

I know how you can find out. You go to someone’s house who has a large collection of audiophile pressings and have him play you some of them. Chances are that his stereo will do pretty much what your old stereo and my old stereo used to do — be so wrong that really wrong records actually start to sound right! It seems crazy but it just might be true.

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Breaking Through Barriers and Crossing Bridges

More on the Subject of Critical Listening Skills

The Invisible Barrier Theory

Your ability to recognize that one side of a record more often than not will have sonic qualities that are different from the other side of the same disc is limited by an invisible barrier that exists between you, in your role as a listener, and you, in your role as a judge of the sound.

This barrier also goes by another name: “the stereo.“ There really can be no other explanation for it, assuming you have something in the range of normal hearing.

What the stereo is incapable of showing you must be seen as a limit on what you can hear, regardless of how skilled a listener you may be, or how much money, time and effort you may have dedicated to your system, or how good a job you think it is doing.

There is only one solution to this problem: get better sound.

Then the differences between any two sides of the same record will become as obvious to you as they are to us.

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Mozart – VTA and Balance

More of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

What to listen for ask?

Dry sound.

Some of the copies lacked the richness to balance out the clarity and were dry sounding. There is a balance to be found.

The right VTA will be critical in this regard.

When you have all the space; the clearest, most extended harmonics; AND good weight and richness in the lower registers of the cello, you are where you need to be (keeping in mind that it can always get better if you have the patience and motivation to tweak further).

For more advice on setting your VTA properly, please click here.

On the other side of that coin is smear, usually from too much tubey richness. Again, finding the balance is key.

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

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Five Major Problem Areas in Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

UPDATE 2026

There was a time, perhaps ten years ago, that many EMI pressings finally started to sound a lot better to us than they had in the early- to mid-2000s when this commentary was written.

(2007 was the year everything changed, but it wasn’t 2007 yet. After being deep into audio for close to thirty years, it wasn’t until a few years later that we learned we still had a long way to go.)

Nowadays we can say that we are proud to offer some truly outstanding recordings conducted by Previn, Fremaux and others for EMI.

What to listen for on this album?

That’s easy: The all-too-common 70s EMI harshness and shrillness.

We could never understand why audiophiles revered EMI the way they did back in the 70s. Harry Pearson loved many of their recordings, but I sure didn’t. 

The longer I stay in this hobby, the more clear it becomes that many of the records on the TAS list are better suited to the old school audio equipment of the 60s rather than the modern approach to audio that is possible today thanks to the many revolutionary changes to every aspect of music reproduction that have come along in the last thirty years or so.

(Obviously there are plenty of audio systems from every era that, for all appearances, seem unlikely to reproduce music well, which goes a long way in explaining most of the rampant enthusiasm for the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.)

These kinds of records used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s. Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.

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Gino Vannelli, Big Speakers and The Amazing SP3A-1 Preamp

Rock Records that (Potentially) Sound Amazing on Big Speakers at Loud Levels

At one time Storm at Sunup was easily my favorite Gino Vannelli album. When it came out in 1975 I immediately fell in love with the music and put it into heavy rotation on my turntable (a phrase that had not been invented yet but perfectly describes how easy it is to become obsessed with an album).

It was one of a group of recordings that made me want to pursue higher quality equipment, hoping that any improvement in playback would allow the music to sound even bigger and more exciting.

It was pretty damn big and exciting already, but I wanted more. 

Right around that time I got my first tube preamp, the Audio Research SP3A-1, which replaced a Crown IC-150. As you can imagine, especially if you know the IC-150 well, playing this album through that state-of-the-art tube preamp was a revelation.

From that point on there was no going back. I started spending all my money on (what I took to be) better and better equipment and (often mistakenly) better records by the score. That was fifty plus years ago and I haven’t stopped yet. [Not so much now that I’m retired, but you get the point.]

Even at the age of 21 I wanted to pursue Big Systems driving Big Speakers.

You need a lot of piston area to move enough air to bring the dynamics of a recording like this to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts, or at least to seem to, this being a multi-track studio recording.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than fifty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1973 or so.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me, mostly because the music I love demands the big sound, whether the listener is aware of that fact or has anything like the system required to reproduce it.

With few exceptions, the records that helped us improve our playback required big speakers that could play at loud volumes.

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Mozart’s Quintet / Trio Is a Great VTA Test Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now

CS 6109 is a handy record for VTA adjustment.

Listen for fullness and solidity, especially in the piano, although a rich, full sounding clarinet is a joy here as well. 

Some of the copies we played in our shootout lacked the weight and solidity to balance out the qualities of transparency and clarity.

The resulting sound is less natural, with the kind of forced detail that CDs do so well, and live music never does. There is a balance to be found.

The right VTA will be critical in this regard. When you have all the space; the clearest, most extended harmonics; AND good weight and richness in the lower registers of the piano, you are where you need to be (keeping in mind that it can always get better if you have the patience and drive to tweak further).

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