*Stereo, Playback, Setup, etc.

Amazing Grace – A Bit of VTA Experimentation Can Really Pay Off

More Setup Advice for Turntables and Cartridges

UPDATE 2026

Although we liked it well enough, this title unfortunately did not get much love from our customers.

Years ago it was tagged here as a never again title, which simply means we would stop doing shootouts for it because they were no longer profitable. (It’s possible we could do it again, expecially if we were to get hold of an amazing sounding pressing or two, but at this point that does not seem to be in the cards, if for no other reason than we have stopped buying them altogether. Cheap records are a thing of the past and have been for quite a while now.)

We encourage you to find a nice copy for yourself. Stick with the early label. If you don’t hear the sound we describe below, you might consider buying more copies until you do, assuming you like the music.

Amazing Grace is a handy record for VTA setup, a subject we discuss below.

On the better copies Aretha’s vocals are as dynamic as any you will ever hear, and unlike all the records she did with Tom Dowd, her voice never breaks up on this record. If you have big speakers that can play at loud levels, with the right volume level you can really get Aretha to belt it out like nothing you have ever heard on record. 

Like most modern churches, the kind that have upholstered pews and lots of carpeting, the natural reverberation of the sound isn’t as pronounced as it would be were the recording taking place in a 16th century cathedral.

Note also that the recording is from 1972, not 1962, so the Tubey Magic that would have been on a recording such as this ten years earlier is not going to be as great either.

When we play a big stack of copies of a record like this, the limitations of the recording have to be taken into account.

The best copies will do what the best copies do; we can’t ask them to sound like something they were never designed to sound like.

The best copies of the album clearly sound quite a bit better than the average copy we played, but they still sound like the same recording, just bigger, richer, clearer and more alive.

To set your VTA right, don’t try to make Aretha too smooth — she should sound a bit “hot” when the spirit fills her and she shouts her loudest. If you get her to sound correct you lose a lot of space and ambience. What space and ambience there is on the tape need to be there for the recording to sound “real.”

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The Reward Comes After

Richard Feynman Is Another Guy with Good Advice on Making [Audio] Progress

But first let’s check in with Shane Parrish, who writes:

You have to train before the race, not after. You have to build the skill before you get the job that requires it. You have to be trustworthy for years before anyone trusts you with something important. The bill comes first. The reward comes later.

The universe does not offer financing.

This is hard to accept because modern life trains us to expect the opposite. We are addicted to “Buy Now, Pay Later.” You live in the house before you pay off the mortgage. You get the degree before you pay off the loan. You eat the meal before you ask for the check.

We are conditioned to enjoy the benefit today and pay the cost tomorrow.

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Imagine on Mobile Fidelity from 1984

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

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Problem Solving in Audio

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

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 the highest fidelity — and are willing to go the extra mile and pay the extra dollar to make that happen.

PROBLEM SOLVING in AUDIO

We have a section on the blog under the heading Making Progress that digs into the kinds of issues that audiophiles tend to run into, especially when they are first getting started. They’re the ones Robert Brook writes about in his commentary above, and they’re the ones that tripped me up over and over for decades after I first got started in this hobby sometime in the mid-70s.

It wasn’t until around 2005 that I stumbled upon, mostly through luck and audiophile friends, the elements that make up my current system.

Imagine being so clueless that you actually had to spend thirty years in a hobby before you figured out. That was me!

Of course I thought I had it all figured out right from the start. I was the proud owner of monstrously-large, ridiculously-expensive speakers, tube equipment (also expensive, and the latest and greatest cutting edge technology back in those days), Half-Speed mastered records, records made live directly to disc, fancy cables — you name it, I had everything required to play music at nearly-live levels with near-perfect fidelity.

All the most important boxes I was told about had been checked off right from the get-go in the 70s. I was all in, and for the next thirty years I did everything the audiophiles I knew liked to do: find and evaluate better gear, try new tweaks, and, more than anything else, learn to appreciate music that I had never heard before — some of it new, some of it very old.

These are all stories that have been told here on the blog in hundreds and hundreds of posts.

Everything changed when I started doing audio and records in ways that nobody I knew had ever done them before. (That also is a story that has been frequently told here.)

Taking the approach to audio and software that audiophiles tend to take — the bulk of the story Robert Brook tells in his commentary — can only get you so far. That’s the lesson I learned after spending my first thirty years in the hobby.

It’s why this blog is devoted to one concept above all others — the importance of being skeptical.

Requiring empirical evidence to back up whatever I might choose to believe was the shock that my system — my nervous one, as well as my audio one — needed to jolt it out of its comfort zone and force it to come up with a better way.

At the start I believed what I was told — hey, it seemed to be working, and who was I to argue with the “experts” anyway? I went along with the crowd, and I got the average results crowds tend to get.

This blog, as well as Robert’s, is simply trying to help you circumvent the bad ideas that we run into everywhere in audio these days. We’ve tried lots of them, most of them didn’t work, or didn’t work very well, and the good news for you, dear reader, is that we found others that we know do work.

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Port’s Rule and The Song of the Volga Boatman

More Records that Helped Me Make Progress in Audio

The track that started us down the road to our first Sauter-Finegan shootout is, to this very day, our Number One Test Track of All Time, a little ditty known as the Song of the Volga Boatman.

We first heard it back in the 90s on Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular, which is still the version we test with, but this album of forward-looking big band contains that track  as well as 10 others, all with truly amazing sound.

Why is the Song of the Volga Boatman our ultimate test track?

The simplest way to understand it is that all the instruments are being played live in the studio, and all of them in the huge soundfield are real and acoustic — string bass, drums, horns of every size and type, woodwinds, percussion, tubular bells, etc.

In addition, the arrangements given to this roomful of players is so complex and lively that if anything sounds “funny,” to use the precise audiophile nomenclature, it really calls attention to itself.

Port’s Rule states: If it isn’t easy for your Test Discs to sound wrong, they are not very good Test Discs.

Wrong is the natural order of things.

Getting it right is where the work comes in to play.

And it should seem more like play than work or you are unlikely to get very far with it. (That’s another one of Port’s Rules, sometimes referred to as music does the driving.)

When the stereo is right from top to bottom, this song is right from top to bottom, and every other record we know the sound of will have the sound it’s supposed to have.

It seems simple and in some ways it is.

We’ve been getting the Song of the Volga Boatman to sound bigger and better now for years, through scores and scores of changes. At our current stage of audio evolution, at the very loud levels we play it at, it’s shocking how big, powerful and real it seems. It has more of the “live music” qualities we prize than almost any other studio recording I can think of.

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Robert Brook Knows a Better Way to Do Analog – Part Two

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

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 the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

There’s a BETTER WAY to do ANALOG – Part 2


Further Reading

Not that Long Ago Blue Was a Nut We Just Could Not Crack

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

Allow me to tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

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Getting the Electricity Right Made All the Difference in Our New Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

In response to a customer’s letter, I wrote the following a few years back:

The vast majority of audiophiles never get to the higher levels of audio because of the compromises they make at every step in their rooms, speakers, wires and practically everything else.

For example:

  • Speakers too small,
  • Shoved up against a wall,
  • In an untreated room that
  • The family uses to watch TV in?

You can’t get very far that way.

Some of the worst off of these folks end up with a collection of crap Heavy Vinyl because their systems simply will not let them hear how much better their vintage pressings sound.

Better Electricity Made All the Difference

When we moved the business into an industrial park a few years ago, I took the opportunity to build the largest playback studio I could fit on the premises. It was 17 by 22 with a 12 foot high ceiling, with a concrete slab floor and six inch thick double drywall for walls, as well as a complicated system of dedicated electrical circuitry.

It took a surprising amount of work carried out over months to get it to sound right. Day after day we ran experiments. Most of the time it was just me. I actually like working alone. It’s not hard for me to stay focussed.

Oddly enough, what made the biggest difference was getting the electricity right: computers and cleaning machines on isolation transformers, stuff unplugged, stuff left plugged in that made the sound better, lights hooked up to batteries rather than plugged in to the main circuits, etc. 

Over the course of about two months, the sound became night and day better.

More on unplugging here.

Also, Robert Brook has done a great deal of work along these same lines, which he explains in detail here.

This kind of work is not hard for me. We’ve been doing it for decades, but we have a very big advantage over everyone else: we have good sounding records to test with.

We have Hot Stampers! The records are correct. If they sound wrong, it’s not their fault. They are almost never the problem.

I used But I Might Die Tonight from Tea for the Tillerman for weeks and weeks. It was very difficult to get all the parts right, but in the end it was more glorious than I had ever heard it. I wrote an extensive commentary on the experience I went through which you can read all about here.

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One Man’s Experimental Approach to Audio Reveals Some Inconvenient Truths

Here Are Some of Our Favorite Orchestral Test Discs

UPDATE 2025

The following was originally posted by Robert in 2020. We have added a link at the top to test discs that we’ve found to be good for tweaking and tuning your system, room, electricity and such like.

Robert has also reviewed a fair number of difficult to reproduce orchestral recordings, titles that are sure to challenge the playback quality of any system. They should make it easy to hear whether the changes you make are actually getting closer to sound that is more like live, unamplified music, which, from our point of view, should be the goal of any audiophile.

This is the one true test for any system.

Here’s an especially good test disc to get you started.

POWER CORDS: Is THIS the Difference You Want?

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a comparison Robert Brook carried out with a group of power cords he had on hand. I did the same thing about fifteen twenty years ago and it taught me a lot (although strangely in my case I’ve never taken the time to write about it, mostly because my notes are long gone).

The experience he went through is instructive and easily replicated by anyone for any system. The benefits are likely to be substantial, maybe even life-changing. (Robert has had many life-changing experiences with audio and music since this was written, and we couldn’t be happier that we played some small part in the evolution he underwent.)

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“We want the outcome, but we need the journey.”

Experiments Taught Us Everything We Know about Records

Thought for the Day

We want the outcome, but we need the journey.

Falling in love with outcomes doesn’t move you forward.

Falling in love with the process does.

Shane Parish

It’s amazing how far you can get in this hobby if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough. (See links below for more on these two drivers of success.)

To achieve real success you must be willing to devote huge amounts of time, money and effort to the pursuit of better home audio.

You will really go far if you’re willing to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding and appreciation of the sound of the various pressings you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles — that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best — we would currently be very unlikely to have a business selling a million dollars or more worth of Hot Stampers every year.

(For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how one goes about acquiring them.)

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