*The Audiophile Skeptics

Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part One

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions.

Hi Tom,

I read your recent post about Sticky Fingers and the European TML reissues you included in shootouts.

It raised a question for me that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while now.

The fact that the UK TML earned an A+ to A++ grade and that, with just a one copy sample, you wouldn’t consider that pressing to have shootout winning potential, suggests to me that the US pressings you favor will grade at A++ or higher.

In other words, if you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [redacted numbers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

All good questions! I could go on for days with this kind of inside baseball stuff. I’ve been living it full time for more than twenty years, and it obviously interests you because you are actually trying to hone your shootout skills and figure out how many of what pressings you need to get one going, etc., etc.

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Why Does “Why” Matter in Analog 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.

Why Does “WHY” Matter in Analog AUDIO?

 

I wrote a piece about this subject years ago, exhorting audiophiles to forget their theories. An excerpt:

We don’t know what causes some copies to sound so good.

We know them when we hear them and that’s pretty much all we can say we really know. Everything else is speculation and guesswork.

We have data. What we don’t have is a theory that explains that data.

And it simply won’t do to ignore the data because we can’t explain it. Hot Stamper deniers are those members of the audiophile community who, when faced with something they don’t want to be true, simply manufacture reasons why it can’t be true or shouldn’t be true. That’s not science. It is in fact the very opposite of science.

Practicing science means following the data wherever it leads.

The truth can only be found in the record’s grooves and nowhere else.

If you don’t understand record collecting as a science, you won’t be able to do it well and you certainly won’t achieve the success that’s possible by using a scientific approach.

(For those who like to get into the weeds with data in the form of stamper numbers, we’ve got plenty on the blog to share with you.)

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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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What Do Audiophiles Think about Analog?

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.

What Do AUDIOPHILES THINK About ANALOG?

Looking at the picture above, I’d say it probably gives a great many of them a headache.

And why shouldn’t it? It sure looks easy, and the fact that everyone who writes about it, reviewers and forum posters alike, seems to think it is easy. They all seem to think that all you have to do to get good sound is to buy the right equipment and play the right records — mastered by the right people, of course — and you are good to go.

But it actually turns out to be hard, so hard that some people — no doubt many of the ones who bought into the idea that it was easy in the first place — want to throw in the towel and move on to something else, preferably something that offers more bang for their hard-earned bucks.

If I had taken the above advice, and bought the remastered records the so-called experts have been recommending to audiophiles like me for decades, who knows, I might have thrown in the towel too.

But I was obsessed with music, and obsessed people don’t give up on anything easily. (The result, for what it’s worth, is hundreds of great sounding records for sale and thousands of blog postings.)

My Two Cents about Robert’s Post

(the slightly edited version taken from the comments)

Robert,
Thanks for taking on some of the more specious arguments — as well as some very good ones, to be sure — advanced by the music lovers you quote.

Job well done, and one that I could never have taken on as it would have made my head explode right at the start.

I wrote a piece recently about what I believe is fundamentally at the heart of the many misunderstandings music lovers of these various persuasions are unable to overcome.

It’s far more esoteric than the many good points you make. I’m assuming that at this stage of the game we can all agree that analog is superior to digital.

What I am trying to do is to get audiophiles to listen critically enough to recognize that no two sides of the same record have the same qualities in the same proportion, that variations in sound quality are almost unavoidable, and that record shootouts are the only way to bring this idea home to the typical analog audiophile enthusiast.

You can find it under the heading of breaking barriers and crossing bridges.

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Coaches? We Don’t Need No Stinking Coaches!

More on Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

Audiophiles have rarely had anything remotely like a coach — someone with the kind of expertise one gains from years of hands-on experience — to guide them.

They are, with few exceptions, self-taught, and that turns out to be a lot harder than it looks.

For the last few years I’ve been sharing some ideas and methods with Robert Brook as he’s gone about pursuing better audio, and I am happy to report that he has achieved tremendous success. Better yet, he has shared a great deal of that knowledge on his blog.

He put in the work, stayed focused, and it paid off for him in a dramatic improvement to his enjoyment of recorded music.

He did so by approaching the various problems he encountered scientifically, methodically and carefully, mostly along these three fronts:

Maybe We Do Need an Audio Coach

If someone were to offer his services as an audio coach, I know of no one better suited to the task.

In other words, the title of this piece may be true for most audiophiles under most circumstances, but is clearly in error in one particular:

If you have someone like Robert to help you — a guy who has been getting his audio hands dirty for years and has nothing to sell you — the benefits could very well turn out to be dramatic, even life-changing.

Getting from good to great typically takes a decade or more. With Robert’s help you could easily cut that time in half. Just do what he does. His success is beyond question. He hears what we hear.

What to Do

Figuring out what to do can seem to take forever — at least it did in my case, with me starting out in 1975 and not really achieving higher levels of reproduction until about 2007 — but once you know what works, you can get that project going immediately.

Aaron B. has been doing good work and making progress along these lines as well.

Gaining Expertise

The piece I wrote back in 2006 was entitled thoughts on becoming an expert listener. A few of the ideas found therein:

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There’s a Better Way to Do Analog – Part One

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 One

Robert’s Approach

Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:

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Robert Brook Compares Different Hot Stamper Pressings of Crosby’s Must Own Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for one of our favorite records, If Only I Could Remember My Name.

In this review he compares two Hot Stamper pressings, one a Super Hot, and one the next grade up from a Super, a Nearly White Hot stamper pressing.

When an amazing recording meets a system that can play it right, inevitably sparks fly, and these two copies were apparently giving off a lot of sparks.

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER MY NAME & The NW HOT STAMPER

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Speaker Placement — The Room Coupling Method

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble efforts to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love the sound of music reproduced with the highest fidelity and, more importantly, are serious enough to be willing to spend a great deal of their money and their time in order to make that happen.

If you aspire to great things in audio, Robert’s blog is for you, as is the one you are now on.

SPEAKER PLACEMENT: The ROOM COUPLING METHOD

An excerpt:

[A] few months ago I came across an article on a Room Coupling Method for speaker placement. Encouraged by finding some common ground with author Richard Mak’s thinking, I started trying it out, and it has helped me make some meaningful progress.

One thing I particularly appreciated in Mak’s article was his assertion that “measurements” and “analysis” are not a substitute for “listening.”

“Charts, graphs, room nodes, reflection coefficients, or even a Ph.D. in room acoustics won’t get you there. Many who are armed with an arsenal of scientific knowledge do not even know how or what to listen for on a reference test track.”

To Mak’s point, as I attempted to apply his approach to my speaker and listening chair positions, I realized in the process that even though the placement of my speakers and listening chair have been suboptimal for some time, that time was far from wasted.

Because in that time I’ve done A LOT of listening, and that listening has led to a special kind of knowledge, which for a long time was without a clear application. Mak’s methodology has since given me an outlet for this knowledge, and all that listening is now paying off.

In his article, Mak walks us through a process that begins with how to determine the distance of the speakers from the back wall. From there he describes how to determine their width, then their toe-in angle, and finally how to dial in the position of the listening chair.

For those of you who would like to tune and tweak the location of their speakers, the article seems to have some good advice for doing that, with plenty of tests to challenge both your setup and your critical listening skills. (We have some great test records you might find useful as well. The more difficult ones to get to sound right can be found here.)

This subject is so complicated that to say much more might send me down a rabbit hole I’d have a hard time climbing out of, but here’s a thought or two.

I’ve had many different big speaker systems set up in a number of good-sized rooms over the years, starting in 1975. When I moved into the house I bought in Thousand Oaks in the early 2000s there was a “great room” with a piano on the far end (where the speakers are now) and a dining table at the opposite end. It measured 15×30 with about a nine foot ceiling.

I was hoping to use my Legacy Whisper speakers in this room so that I could audition records all day (my desk can be seen there on the right). I spent about two years trying to make the speakers sound good where you see them in the picture below.

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Find the Dubs = Less Records = Progress!

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s posting from 8/26/2025 containing a great deal of good advice for record collectors and audiophiles of all ages, especially us old ones.

He admits to being wrong about the sound of a record he wrote about on his blog. When have you ever seen an audiophile admit to being wrong about a record? The very idea!

Why was he wrong? Because his stereo got dramatically better, so much better that he could see how mistaken he was about a Japanese pressing he thought for sure was made from the master tape. Now it sounds dubby. It was always dubby; he just hadn’t gotten his system, room, electricity, setup and who knows what else to the point where the true nature of that copy could be revealed.

Robert revisited a record he was sure he knew well, well enough to rave about on his blog, and found out things had changed — apparently quite a lot! — while he wasn’t looking.

A great deal of audio progress had been made, and that audio progress is what allowed Robert to also make some progress on the record collecting front, a win-win if every there was one. Congratulations are in order.

We here at Better Records live with this reality every day. Our mea culpas are occassioned by the shootouts we do for the same records over and over again, which is what allows us to discover even better pressings of albums than the ones we thought were the best. It’s surely the most rewarding part of the job.

FIND the DUBS = LESS RECORDS = PROGRESS!

Please to enjoy the lessons Robert learned.

I wrote about a similar experience I had myself back in the early-2000s.

If presently you are the happy owner of many Japanese pressings, perhaps now would be a good time to pull them out and play them. Very few master tapes went to Japan, and, as a result, most Japanese pressings in our experience sound like they are made from copy tapes, which of course they are.

Some of them have the potential for top quality sound, but most do not.

If your stereo is not revealing enough to show you their shortcomings, the way Robert’s was not revealing enough just five years ago, please take his advice and make the kinds of changes he has made.

The steps you take next will be the most satisfactory of all. Now you can clear the shelves of all your second- and third-tier records, which, of course, will not be limited to Japanese pressings, but should in fact include most of your Heavy Vinyl LPs, if not all of them. Let the culling begin!

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Good Advice on Reducing System Distortion

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

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Compounding DISTORTION in ANALOG AUDIO

Some excerpts:

Your Hot Stampers will sound WAY better when you get your turntable set up right, isolate it properly and get the equipment you need to make the speed of your platter accurate and stable. And that’s because all of these system improvements are highly effective ways of reducing distortion and its effects on your system.

Aside from our records, our analog front end, our amp and our speakers, our electricity and its effects on our equipment represents yet one more source of distortion in our system. I’ve posted more than one article touching on this issue, and I have shared the ways in which I’ve learned to manage the electricity powering my gear.

When I posted my last article on electricity, I was convinced that improving the electricity going to my system by limiting the effects of other electrical devices in my home was absolutely essential for getting my system to sound its best. The reason being that improving my electricity seemed to greatly reduce the level of distortion in my system.

I still feel this way, but my views on why improving electricity helps have evolved. What I’ve come to understand, or at least understand better, is that back when I wrote that article and for a long time after, I had a lot more front-end distortion than I realized. That distortion was compounded in different ways, one of which was by way of the electricity.

Throwing breakers and unplugging appliances was and is an effective way of reducing compound distortion in my system and improving the way my records sound. But since revamping my turntable setup and learning to better control the platter speed, the improvements I hear by ameliorating the negative effects of my electricity are significantly less than they once were. In other words, with less front-end distortion there’s a lot less distortion to be compounded by bad electricity.

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