Top Artists – Blood, Sweat and Tears

After You’ve Played 100 Copies of the Album, What’s Left to Learn?

bloodchildMore of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Child Is Father to the Man

This commentary is at least ten years old. We can’t say that a red label reissue like the one discussed below would do as well under the improved shootout conditions in our new studio, but the possibility exists, which is the point of the story we are telling here.

A common misconception of many of those visiting the site for the first time is that we think we know it all.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We definitely do not know it all. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

Not This Title

Case in point: the record you do NOT see pictured above. (The record we recently learned something new about — this, after having played scores and scores of copies over the years — will remain a secret for the time being. At least until we find another one.)

In 2013 we played a red label Columbia reissue of a famous 60s rock record (again, not shown) that had the best side two we had ever heard. Up to that point no copy other than the 360 original had ever won a shootout, and we’ve done plenty. Lo and behold, here was a reissue that put them all to shame.

I’m still in shock from the experience to tell you the truth, but what a blast it was to hear it!

The recording, which I first played more than 40 years ago at the tender age of 16, was now bigger, less murky and more energetic than ever before. Had you asked me, I would have confidently told you not to waste your time with the second pressing, to stick to the 360s on that title, and I would have been wrong wrong wrong.

How Wrong?

But wait a minute. The 360 original will probably beat 49 out of 50 red label reissue copies on side two, and the best 360 original could not be beaten on side one by any other pressing. When you stop to think about it, we weren’t very wrong at all.

Let’s just say our understanding was incomplete.

This is why we prefer to offer actual physical records rather than just advice, although it’s clear for all to see that we happily do both, and, moreover, we certainly feel qualified — as qualified as anyone can be — to offer up our opinions, since our opinions are based on a great deal of experimental data.

Having big piles of cleaned records at one’s disposal is fundamentally important to this kind of operation. In our experience, shootouts using only a small number of pressings have relatively little value. They are best seen as a guide for the next, more comprehensive attempt to find out what might be the truly killer pressings of any given album.

Sometimes we guess about the sound quality of pressings on Heavy Vinyl, usually when we just can’t be bothered to order up a copy and take the time to audition it. So many labels today produce such consistently second- and third-rate pressings, can you blame us for not wanting to hear where the latest one went wrong? 

Ultimately what makes our case is the quality of the records we sell. And I’m glad to report that we don’t get many complaints, even at these prices. ( Some of our customers seem to think they got their money’s worth, and who are we to argue with our own customers?)

How Do We Do It?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

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What’s the Average Record Worth?

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

What follows is an excerpt from a very old letter (circa 2005) in which the writer attempted to make the case that spending lots of money on records is foolish when a dollar buys a perfectly good record at a thrift store and provides the listener with exactly the same music and decent enough sound.

We think this is silly and, with a few rough calculations, along with a heavy dose of self-promotion and not a little bullying, we set out to prove that the average record is practically worthless. Prepare to confront our exercise in sophistry.

(Yes, we are well aware that our reasoning is specious, but it’s no more specious than anybody else’s reasoning about records if I may say so.)

Jason, our letter writer, points out this fact:

Your records are a poor value in terms of investment. Until you convince the whole LP community that your HOT-STAMPER choices are the pinnacle of sound a buyer will never be able to re-sell B S & T for $300. Even if they swear it is the best sounding copy in the world.

We replied as follows:

If records are about money, then buying them at a thrift store for a buck apiece and getting something halfway decent makes perfect sense. As the Brits say, “that’s value for money.” If we sell you a Hot Stamper for, say, $500, can it really be five hundred times better?

The Math

I would argue that here the math is actually on our side. The average pressing is so close to worthless sonically that I would say that it isn’t even worth the one dollar Jason might pay for it in a thrift store. I might value it somewhere in the vicinity of a penny or two. Really? Yes indeed.

Assuming it’s a record I know well, I probably know just how wonderful the record can really sound, and what that wonderful sound does to communicate the most important thing of all: the musical value.

A copy that doesn’t do that — allow the music to come alive — has almost no value. It’s not zero, but it’s close to zero. Let’s assign it a nominal value. We’ll call it a penny.

What Have You Got to Lose?

You see, when I play a mediocre copy, I know what I’ve lost.

Jason can’t know that. All he knows is what he hears coming from his mediocre equipment as his mediocre LP is playing. To him it sounds fine. To me it sounds like hell. (Hell is in fact the place where they make you listen to bad sounding records all day.)

If I’ve actually done all the hard work I talk about on the site, I will find myself in the unique position of knowing what he’s missing, and he is in the (to me) unenviable and all-too-common position of only knowing what he’s getting. (It may be a little or it may be a lot, but it’s certainly nowhere near what I’m getting. I hope.)

Ignorance is bliss, and he is welcome to his. Being average is the lot of most of us, right? I’m average in most areas of life and make no bones about it. But I’m not average when it comes to this hobby. Because I enjoy it so much, I’ve worked very hard to become good at it.

Hard Work Pays Off

This is precisely what Jason has utterly failed to grasp: that all the hard work we encourage you to do really does pay off. The end result is a dramatic increase in your enjoyment and appreciation of the music you play. Here his obtuseness is at its pig-headed worst. He wants us to believe he gets more out of his records by hearing less? If I understand the formula correctly, it goes something like: Mediocre Pressing plus Mediocre Stereo equals Real Musical Satisfaction.

Uh, you want to run that by me again?

Another way to look at it would be: Cheap Mediocre Pressing played on Cheap Mediocre Stereo gives The Most Musical Satisfaction Per Dollar.

Now, that actually may be true. A five hundred dollar record may not be five hundred times more satisfying than a one dollar record. Ten or fifty or a hundred times more satisfying, but probably not five hundred.

So if you want to get one or two or five percent as much enjoyment out of your records as we do out of ours, you should take Jason’s advice.

If you want to get more than that, you should definitely try some of our Hot Stampers.

Further Reading

Blood, Sweat & Tears – Child is Father to the Man

More Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Child Is Father to the Man

  • An original 360 Stereo pressing of BS&T’s debut LP with an INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy will show you just how big, full-bodied, lively and powerful this music can be on the right pressing
  • Not many records on this site are harder to find with top quality sound and reasonably quiet surfaces than this one
  • 5 stars: “Child Is Father to the Man is keyboard player/singer/arranger Al Kooper’s finest work, an album on which he moves the folk-blues-rock amalgamation of the Blues Project into even wider pastures… One of the great albums of the eclectic post-Sgt. Pepper era of the late 60s.”
  • If I were to make a list of my Favorite Rock and Pop Albums from 1968, this album would definitely be on it.

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Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound

More Commentaries for the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

More Outlier Pressings We’ve Discovered

This commentary was written about ten years ago and updated more than a few times since.

A while back we did a monster-sized shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second release, an album we consider THE Best Sounding Rock Record of All Time.

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds — a copy we gave a Hot Stamper grade of A with Four Pluses, the highest honor we can bestow upon it — various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne, How did it get here?

  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we usually place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

Which brings us to this commentary, which centers around the concept of outliers.

Wikipedia defines an outlier this way:

In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data.

In other words, it’s something that is very far from normal. In the standard bell curve distribution pictured below, the outliers are at the far left and far right, far from the vast majority of the data which is in the middle.

In the world of records, most copies of any title you care to name would be average sounding. The vertical line in the center of the graph shows probability; the highest probability is that any single copy of a record will be at the top of the curve near the middle, which means it will simply be average. The closer to the vertical line it is, the more average it will be. As you move away from the vertical line, the data point — the record — becomes less and less average. As you move away from the center, to the left or the right, the record is either better sounding or worse sounding than average.

Hot Stampers are simply those copies that, for whatever reason, are far to the right of center, far “better” than the average. And as the curve above demonstrates, there are a lot fewer of them than there are copies in the middle. 

Measuring the Record

Malcolm Gladwell has a bestselling and highly entertaining book about outliers which I recommend to all. Last year I read The Black Swan (or as much of it as I could stand given how poorly written it is) which talks about some of these same issues. Hot Stampers can be understood to a large degree by understanding statistical distributions. Why statistics you ask? Simple. We can’t tell what a record is going to sound like until we play it. For all practical purposes we are buying them randomly and “measuring” them to see where they fall on the curve. We may be measuring them using a turntable and registering the data aurally, but it’s still very much measurement and it’s still very much data that we are recording.

No Theory, Just Data

Many of these ideas were addressed in the recent shootout we did for BS&T’s second album. We played a large number of copies (the data), we found a few amazing ones (the outliers), and we tried to determine how many copies it really takes to find those records that sound so amazing they defy not only conventional wisdom, but our understanding of records per se.

We don’t know what causes these records to sound so good. We know ’em when we hear ’em 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 or shouldn’t be true.

That’s not science. Practicing science means following the data wherever it leads. The truth is found in the record’s grooves and nowhere else. If you don’t think record collecting is a science, you’re not doing it right.

Ignoring Outliers

Wikipedia has a good line about ignoring outliers. Under the heading of Caution they write: “… it is ill-advised to ignore the presence of outliers. Outliers that cannot be readily explained demand special attention.” Here here.

Now let’s see where the grooves for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second album led us. They demanded special attention and by god we gave it to them.

The Grooves

We noted some new qualities to the sound that we would like to discuss; they’re what separated the men from the boys this time around. What we learned can be summed up in a few short words: it’s all about the brass. Let me give you just one example of how big a role the brass plays in our understanding of this recording. The best copies present a huge wall of sound that seems to extend beyond the outside edges of the speakers, as well as above them, by quite a significant amount. If you closed your eyes and drew a rectangle in the air marking the boundary of the soundscape, it would easily be 20 or 25% larger than the boundary of sound for the typically good sounding original pressing, the kind that might earn an A or A Plus rating.

Size Matters

The effect of this size differential is ENORMOUS. The power of the music ramps up beyond all understanding — how could this recording possibly be this BIG and POWERFUL? How did it achieve this kind of scale? You may need 50 copies to find one like this, which begs the question: why don’t the other 49 sound the way this one does? The sound we heard on the Four Plus copy has to be on the master tape in some sense, doesn’t it? Mastering clearly contributes to the sound, but can it really be a factor of this magnitude? Intuition says no. More likely it’s the mastering of the other copies that is one of the many factors holding them back, along with worn stampers, bad stampers, bad metal mothers, bad plating, bad vinyl, bad needles and all the rest — all of the above and more contributing to the fact that the average copy of this album is just plain bad news.

Conventional Wisdom

Any reason you like for why a record doesn’t sound good is as valid as any other, so you might as well pick one you are comfortable with; they’re all equally meaningless. Of course the reverse of this is just as true: why a record sounds good is anyone’s guess, and a guess is all it can ever be.

People like having answers, and audiophiles are no different from other people in this respect. Since there are no answers to any of these questions, answers in this case being defined as demonstrable conclusions based on evidence gained through the use of the scientific method, most people, audiophiles included, are happy — if not better off — making up the answers with which they are most comfortable.

This is precisely why the term Conventional Wisdom was coined, to describe the easy answers people readily adopt in order to avoid doing the hard work of actually finding out the truth.

Do You Need Fifty?

The short answer this time around is Yes, you need fifty. We had one Four Plus Side One and one Four Plus side two, on two different copies obviously, and I would say we had pretty close to fifty copies in our data pool if you count the first round needle-drop rejects, of which there were probably thirty or more I would guess, with more than fifteen making the cut for the final rounds. Forty to fifty, that seems to be about the right number.

The Recipe or the Pudding?

Fortunately for us we have more than just opinions; we have records. Our records are really all we need to make our case; in fact they do a pretty good job of making it for us, week in and week out, Hot Stamper sales having doubled or almost tripled over the last two years. [From 2004 to 2006.]

The truth is that our opinions, like any opinions, right, wrong or somewhere in between, are entirely superfluous. Anything other than the actual sound captured in the grooves of the record we are selling is of almost no consequence. That sound, in those grooves, cannot be denied. No amount of commentary, for or against, will change it in any way.

That fact apparently won’t shut us up, as you can see by the length of this commentary, but this is precisely what we referred to above when we mentioned “sharing” with you, our readers, the experiences we had on our — how to describe it — journey of discovery.

We’re not selling recipes; we’re selling pudding, and this is some mighty fine tasting pudding if we don’t say so ourselves. Blood, sweat and tears as ingredients may not strike you as especially mouthwatering, but somehow the end result, in this case anyway, turned out to be unusually satisfying.

Who can explain why this pudding tastes so good? Not us, that’s for sure. We can name it though. It’s an outlier. We prefer to call them Hot Stampers, but outlier works too.

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Blood, Sweat & Tears – 3

More Blood, Sweat and Tears

  • An excellent copy with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Here is the big jazz-rock sound we love, stretching from wall to wall and extending from floor ceiling, with energy and power that only a handful of albums can begin to compete with thanks to the engineering prowess of Roy Halee
  • This copy shows you just how good Roy Halee‘s engineering used to be, comparable to his brilliant work on BS&T’s previous album, the one we salute to this day as (probably) the best sounding rock record ever made
  • “David Clayton-Thomas remained an enthusiastic blues shouter, and the band still managed to put together lively arrangements, especially on the Top 40 hits ‘Hi-De-Ho’ and ‘Lucretia Mac Evil’… BS&T 3 was another chart-topping gold hit.”
  • This is an excellent title from 1970, which just happens to be a great year for Rock and Pop Music, maybe the greatest of them all

On the best copies, the brass is rich, solid, and present, with correct timbre for every instrument from the bass trombone all the way up the scale to piccolo trumpet — exactly the sound we were looking for and struggle to find.

The right pressing is BIG down low. The vocals are clear and present. The huge 30+ member chorus on the first track works; it doesn’t most of the time. It obviously presents a real challenge to any engineer, but Halee is up to it, judging solely by the sound on this very copy. Mastering and pressing issues end up making that chorus sound small, thin and opaque most of the time.

“Lucretia MacEvil,” a minor hit, has more compression than the rest of the side, to make it more radio-friendly of course, but here it holds up much better than on most copies.

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Robert Brook Hears Something Funny on the MoFi One-Step of B,S&T

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a review Robert Brook has just written for the MoFi One-Step pressing of one of our favorite albums of all time, BS&T’s second album.

I do not doubt for a minute that it’s every bit as awful as Robert says it is. Probably worse! I made some rather extensive notes in the comments at the end of his review you may find of interest.

Blood, Sweat & Tears: How Do MoFi’s 2 Disc 45 rpm’s STACK UP?

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, played copies of it by the score as a matter of fact, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for the album on this very blog.

Based on everything I am reading these days from Robert Brook, he has a good stereo, two working ears, and knows plenty about records and what they are supposed to sound like.

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Child Is Father to the Man on Speakers Corner – What The Hell Were They Thinking?

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Blood, Sweat and Tears

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl Disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty).

When this record came out back in 2007, we auditioned one and were dumbfounded at the quality of the sound. We noted:

This is the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl Reissue LP I have heard in longer than I can remember.

To make a record sound this bad you have to work at it. What the hell were they thinking?

Any audiophile record dealer that would sell you this record should be run out of town on a rail.

Of course that will never happen, because every last one of them (present company excluded) will carry it, of that you can be sure.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, out comes a record like this to prove that no matter how negative you are about the quality of audiophile record production these days, things can always get worse, and they have.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition in that regard.

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Letter of the Week – “It’s mind blowing!”

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Child Is Father to the Man

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

Hey Tom, 

I just received my shipment and played Blood Sweat and Tears – it’s mind blowing! Exquisite and pristine with no surface noise.

Absolutely worth it. 

Sujay

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What to Do If a Record Changes Its Sound

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Blood, Sweat and Tears

This commentary was written around 2010 if memory serves.

Our last big shootout was back in early 2008. Since we never tire of discussing the Revolutionary Changes in Audio that have occurred over the last quite eventful year (really more like five quite eventful years) , we here provide you with yet another link to that commentary.

Suffice to say, this record, like most good records, got a whole lot better. (Some records do not, but that’s another story for another day. If your audiophile pressings start to sound funny, you are probably on solid ground. They sure sound funny to us.) 

What We Learned This Time Around

All the best qualities of the best copies stayed the same; this is to be expected.

If records you have known well, over a very long period of time, suddenly start to sound different*, you can be pretty sure that you’ve made an error of some kind in your system, room, electricity, setup or something else.

You need to find it and figure out how to fix it as quickly as possible, although as a rule this process can turn out to be very time consuming and difficult.

The first place I would look is to any changes you might have made in your wiring, whether speaker, interconnect or power cord. Robert Brook has done some work in this area that should be helpful.

It has been my experience that bad audiophile wire is the source of much of the unnatural sound in audiophile systems.

*Other records that took on a whole new sound can be found here. No audiophile should want anything to do with them.

Further Reading

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Two Reviews of Child Is Father to the Man – Fremer Vs. Better Records

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Audiophile Reviewers – Who Needs ‘Em!

In 2010 MF reviewed both the Sundazed and Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl pressings of the album.

I think his review is mistaken on a number of counts, and mostly unhelpful. The commentary below will discuss his errors in detail, in the hopes that you, dear reader, will not make the same mistakes yourself. 

He talks about his history with the album for a while, and then notes:

Anyway, the original “360 Sound” edition of this record sounds fantastic. It’s a high quality Columbia studio recording, with vivid harmonics, impressive transparency and dynamics, shimmering highs and tight extended bass. The soundstage is expansive and the images tightly presented. I’m not sure it can get much better than the original given how well-pressed Columbia records were in those days, especially if you have a clean original.

We, however, seem to hold precisely the opposite view. I quote from our review:

Why did it take us so long [to do a Hot Stamper shootout]? Let me ask you this: have you ever played this album? The average copy of this record is a sonic MESS. Even the best copies have problems.

We then go on to discuss in detail what most copies do wrong and what to listen for in order to find a copy that gets it right. (More on that later.)

Shortcomings? What Shortcomings?

Fremer continues:

There are two reissues of this. One is from Sundazed and there’s a far more expensive one from Speakers Corner…

The Speakers Corner reissue, which uses the wrong label art is pressed at Pallas and consequently it’s quieter and better finished overall. However, the Sundazed copy I got was very well finished and reasonably quiet, but not as quiet.

On the other hand the Speakers Corner version was somewhat more hyped up at the frequency extremes and cut somewhat hotter, but not objectionably so. The Sundazed sounds somewhat closer to the original overall, so for half the price, you do the math!

“Somewhat hyped up”? We liked it a whole lot less than Mr. Fremer apparently did. Early last year I gave it a big fat F for failure, writing at the time:

This is the worst sounding Heavy Vinyl Reissue LP I have heard in longer than I can remember. To make a record sound this bad you have to work at it.

What the hell were they thinking? Any audiophile record dealer that would sell you this record should be run out of town on a rail. Of course that won’t happen, because every last one of them (present company excluded) will be carrying it, of that you can be sure.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, out comes a record like this to prove that it can. I look forward to Fremer’s rave review.

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