Mistaken Ideas

We used to refer to them as myths but we’ve come to the conclusion that mistaken ideas is more correct.

It’s also a less pejorative way of saying that some things audiophiles believe are lacking in the kind of hard evidence that one would think should be required to defend them.

The fact that good evidence is not required for audiophiles to believe practically anything they think they know about records and audio is one reason we write so much about these subjects on this blog.

Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2025.

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another mistaken idea.

We evaluated an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last.

The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played.

We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Not sure what those two commas are doing there. Pausing for emphasis? Sure, why not? This is a big deal.

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is truly one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He might be, or at least he might choose to describe himself as one.

Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.

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Baskets of Recordings and Facets of Reproduction

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now

Ideally you need a basket of roughly five to ten well known recordings with which to test your equipment, tweaks, room, cleaning regimen and the like.

Don’t rely on any single recording to be The Truth. None of them are. (I found this out the hard way when tweaking the setup in our new studio in 2022.)

To illustrate this idea, imagine your stereo as a huge diamond. Every recording you play is showing you a different facet of that diamond, corresponding to a different strength or weakness of your system’s reproduction.

Audiophile X will play a record and say it has bad bass. His bass reproduction is excellent when playing other recordings, so record X, which he thinks has bad bass, is clearly at fault.

If you have been in audio for very long, you should easily recognize the conclusion this person has drawn as a case of mistaken audiophile thinking. 

Audiophile Y plays the same record and says it has good bass. Assuming the record has good bass for a moment, what is in fact happening in Audiophile X’s system is that most facets of his bass are good, but some facet of his bass is bad, and this record is showing him some shortcoming in his bass reproduction that his other records are not capable of showing him. 

If Audiophile X makes some changes to his stereo, and the record in question now has better bass, and, importantly, other records still sound as good or better than they used to, then some measure of success has most likely been achieved, and another step forward has been taken on that very long and often frustrating journey that we are on.

Flaws in the Diamond

The diamond has many flaws. We find them and fix them by regular tweaking and tuning, both of which have the added benefit of improving one’s critical listening skills.

To help you improve your stereo, room, electricity and the like, we have scores of records that are good for testing a great many aspects of audio reproduction.

Rickie Lee Jones’ first album is what we would call a bad test disc, for one very simple reason:

It can sound good on a system with a great many problems. It doesn’t expose sonic flaws as much as it hides them.

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

If you are looking for tougher test discs, we have you covered there, with more than two dozen ballbusters guaranteed to bring any stereo to its knees. If you like a challenge, and own some of these records, preferably Hot Stamper pressings you bought from us (because we know those have the right sound; we played them), we invite you to have at ’em.

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Take Our Advice and Skip the Original of The Stone Poneys

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

The originals from 1967 have never impressed us much.

Click on the links below for more records that sound best to us on the right reissue pressing 

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound their best on the right reissue (the ones we sell, obviously; there are plenty of reissues that don’t have good sound, but the ones we offer handily beat the originals we’ve — and no doubt you’ve — heard).

Here are all the titles we’ve reviewed to date that have the potential to sound their best on the right reissue

On this album the sound varies quite a bit from track to track.

The best tracks are rich, tubey and clear; the worst thin, bright and hard. 

The first track on side one rarely stayed clean when loud, but here for the most part it does. It’s a good test for whether or not you have a copy with high quality, low distortion mastering.

Listen for the least amount of smear and congestion and the most resolution.

The second track is richer and tubier – it proves that side one is mastered correctly.

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Classic Records Had an Epiphany in 2007 – UHQRs Actually DO Sound Good

More Records Perfectly Suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past

Don’t believe your ears!

Listen to Mike Hobson. After all, he’s the expert, right?

This commentary was written in 2007 and we admit it may be a bit long in the tooth for the brave new world of Heavy Vinyl we currently find ourselves in. Classic Records has been gone for a while now and when that blessed day came we were finally able to say good riddance to their bad records.

Mike Hobson thinks he knows why his pressings often don’t sound good and/or are noisy. We’ll let him explain it. If you want the whole story (which goes on for days) you can find it on the Classic Records website, assuming it’s still active. While you’re there, remember the sound.

One day, while out for a run, I had an epiphany and rushed home to dig out a JVC pressing from the 1980’s pressed for Herb Belkin’s Mobile Fidelity. The Mobile Fidelity UHQR pressings were always revered as sounding better than the standard weight pressings from JVC [citation needed, big time] – but why I thought? To find out, I cut a UHQR pressing in half and guess what I found? First, it weighed 195 grams and IT WAS A FLAT PROFILE! I cut a 120g JVC pressing in half and found that it had the conventional profile that, with small variations, seems to be a record industry standard and is convex in it’s [sic] profile – NOT FLAT.

So, that is why the UHQR JVC pressings sounded better than their standard profile pressings and further confirmation of why our Flat Profile pressings sound better than 180g conversional pressings! [italics added]

This is a classic (no pun intended) case of begging the question, asserting the very thing that Mr. Hobson is trying to prove.

There was no need to saw up a record. Mofi actually explained in the booklet for every UHQR how its shape differed from a conventional disc.

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How Do the The Mastering Lab Pressings of Sticky Fingers Sound?

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

A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced like this:

If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is.

A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).

After hearing so much buzz about it, we finally broke down and ordered a German TML pressing about a year ago. Having played scores of phenomenally good sounding copies of the album over the past fifteen or so years, we were very skeptical that anyone could cut the record better than the mastering engineers who inscribed Rolling Stones Records into the dead wax on the early pressings. (I could find no mastering engineers credited.)

Well, the results were not good. As we suspected would be the case, we were not impressed in the least with what The Mastering Lab — one of the greatest independent cutting houses of all time, mind you — had wrought.

Their version is not really even good enough to charge money for. It might have earned a grade of One Plus, just under the threshold for a Hot Stamper that we would put on the site these days. Decent, but not much more than that.

Wait, There’s More

We subsequently learned that it is the British TML pressings that are supposed to be the best.

So we got one of those in, an A3/B4 copy.

Better, but good enough? Barely.

Here are the notes for the copy we played. For those who have trouble reading our writing, I have transcribed the notes as follows:

Side One

Track one:

Weighty, a bit veiled or smeary. Backing vox kinda lost.

Track three:

Very full, rockin’ but not the sparkle/space.

Kinda compressed.

Not as huge.

Side Two

Track two:

Not as rich, clear.

A bit pushy/dry vox.

No real space.

Thick drums

Track one:

This works better.

A bit hard, but full and lively.

This Sound?

Is this the sound audiophiles are raving about?

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Is the 1s Pressing Always the Best on the Brahms Violin Concerto with Heifetz?

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

This early Shaded Dog pressing of the 1958 recording has surprisingly good sound on side two. On the second side the sound opens up and is very sweet, with the violin becoming much more present and clear.

The whole of side two is transparent with an extended top. Usually the earliest Living Stereo titles suffer from a lack of top end extension, but not this one.

Maybe the 1s pressing is also that way. For some reason audiophiles tend to think that the earliest cuttings are the best, but that’s just more mistaken audiophile thinking if our experience can serve as any guide, easily refuted if you’ve played hundreds of these Living Stereo pressings and noted which stampers sound the best and which do not.

The 1s pressings do not consistently win our shootouts.

About half the time, maybe less would be my guess.

Of course, to avoid being biased, the person listening to the record doesn’t know the stamper numbers, and that may help explain why the 1s loses so often.

If you are interested in finding the best sounding pressings, you have to approach the problem scientifically, and that means running record experiments.

Practically everything you read on this blog we learned through experimentation.

When we experimented with the Classic Records pressing of LSC 1903, we were none too pleased with what we heard. Our review is reproduced below.

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Nirvana’s Nevermind – Live and Learn

More on the Subject of Record Collector Thinking

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently: 

Hey Tom, 

I have purchased about 85 LPs from you in the past 10 years, many of the various types of hot stampers. I was looking at an 11/18/06 article of yours, which said you would verify if my Nirvana/Nevermind LP “is the good one” if I would send you the runout information of side 2.

Well here it is: A339124425S2 320. Hoping you could help me with this. Thanks!

Kind Regards,

Alex 

Alex,

That is not the pressing we like anymore I’m afraid. That’s the old import pressing we used to like, but now we know that those pressings can be very good but they won’t win a shootout against the right domestic original LP. We have no info about that stamper still around either, sorry!

TP

That’s a drag as this is the exact pressing that I purchased from you on 11/18/06 due to an article where you said the following: “The perfect recording, the best of it’s kind, ever. The bass is perfect, the guitars are perfect. The vocals are perfect. Now how in the world could that be you ask?! This import is the first and only version that sounds the way it should: Perfect”. What is the deal here, have things changed so dramatically since then.. Your comments please.

Regards,

Alex

Alex,

It would be great to always be right about which are the best sounding records, but that is simply not possible. We discover new and better pressings for famous albums all the time, once every month or two on average I would say, which means that since 2006 we have found newer, better pressings than our former reference pressings at least a hundred times.

We write about it here under the heading live and learn.

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Here Are the Shootout Winning Stampers for SR 90435

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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Which Art Pepper Today Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written in 2010 or thereabouts.

There is new information about the album as of 2024, which can be found here.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; in our experience, the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

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How Good Are the UK Original Unboxed Deccas of Satanic Majesties?

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

How good are the original Unboxed Deccas on Satanic Majesties?

They can be very good.

But they are never as good as the right later pressings with the Decca in a box label, the ones produced from about 1970 on.

The Unboxed Decca pressing earned a Super Hot Stamper grade (A++). The later pressing, with the right stamper, showed us just how good the album can sound.

Since the originals are pricey and hard to find, and, as a rule, noisier than the later pressings, we don’t pick them up unless we find them for cheap, which rarely happens. They have not won any shootouts, and that is very unlikely to change.

There is one set of stampers for this album that always wins, and those stampers are not found on the early label.

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