Alan Parsons, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

The Pareto Effect in Audio – The 80/20 Rule Is Real

Please Consider Taking Some of Our Audio Advice

Even thought this commentary was written close to twenty years ago, we proudly stand behind every word.

Ambrosia’s first album does exactly what a good Test Disc should do. It shows you what your system is doing wrong, or poorly, and once you’ve fixed it, or made it better, it shows you that it actually is better, maybe even right, or at least more right than it was before.

We audiophiles need records like this. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become better audio tweakers. Because the amount of tweaking 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 unfortunate reality audiophiles must eventually come to grips with in their journey to higher quality sound is that you cannot simply buy equipment that will 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. To notice aspects of the sound — the nuances and subtleties — you’ve been missing in your favorite recordings.

Breaking It Down

At most 20% of the sound of your stereo is what you bought.

At least 80% is what you’ve done with it.

Based on my experience I would put the number closer to 90%.

This is known as the Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, The Law of the Vital Few and The Principle of Factor Sparsity, illustrates that 80% of effects arise from 20% of the causes – or in laymen’s terms – 20% of your actions/activities will account for 80% of your results/outcomes.

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Listening in Depth to Ambrosia

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

AMBROSIA is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it. It’s also part of our extensive Listening in Depth series. There is no question that this band, their producers and their engineers sweated every detail of this remarkable recording. They went the distance. In the end they brought in Alan Parsons to mix it, and Doug Sax to master it. The result is a masterpiece, an album that stands above all others.

It’s not prog. It’s not pop. It’s not rock. It’s Ambrosia — the food of the gods.

The one album that I would say it most resembles is Dark Side of the Moon. (Note the Parsons connection.) Like DSOTM, Ambrosia is neither Pop nor Prog but a wonderful mix of both and more. 

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back on it over the last thirty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with a handful of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile, and managed to stick with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music like this sound so good?

Although I didn’t discover the album until some time later in the 90s, I recognized the challenge it presented to my system, setup and room immediately, a subject I write about here.

The band’s first album is yet another record the deserves a great deal of credit for helping me become a better listener.

Side One

Nice, Nice, Very Nice

Once you know this record well, you can easily tell if you have a good side one within the first minute of this song. Side one has a tendency to be somewhat bright and even aggressive in places. This problem is further exacerbated by the typical copy’s lack of bass. The best copies have incredibly tight, punchy bass at the beginning of this song, and plenty of it. Phenomenal bass. Demo Disc quality bass.

If that’s not what you hear, you know you will soon be in for more problems. The vocals need to start out smooth, because they get brighter later on. Missing bass or added brightness are sure signs of trouble ahead. The lines “I wanted all things to make sense/ so we’d be happy instead of tense” will be aggressive on copies that are not tonally correct. And copies without tons of bass are not tonally correct, because the recording has tons of bass. It’s essential to the music. Any stereo incapable of providing the power in the lower octaves demanded by this recording is going to make a real mess of this one.

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Ambrosia Is Right at the Top of Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

You can play hard-to-reproduce records all day long if your system is tuned up and working fine.

Ours has to be, all day, every day. Our shootouts require that everything is working properly or we wouldn’t be able to trust the results.

But you can’t play this record on such a system without testing everything, because this is the Single Most Difficult to Reproduce Recording I know of.

This is what makes it such a great test disc; to call it a challenge doesn’t begin to convey the difficulty of playing a record that places such heavy demands on a system.

Which means I had to retweak a lot of my table setup to make sure it was 100% right, by ear. Getting the VTA right on this record was fundamentally critical to hearing it sound its best.

(None of those silly setup tools for us here at Better Records. You can hear when it’s right and if you can’t then you need to keep at it until you can.)

Detail Freaks Beware

This is the kind of record that will eat the detail freaks alive. If your system has any extra presence, or boost in the top end — the kind that some audiophiles mistake for “detail” — this record with beat you over the head with it until blood runs out of your ears.

You need balance to get the most out of this album.

The more your system is out of whack, the more this album will make those shortcomings evident.

Once you have balance, then you can unleash the energy in a way that’s enjoyable, not painful.

When this record is sounding right, you want to play it as loud as you can. It’s pedal to the metal time. This music wants to overwhelm your senses. When the system is up to it, it can, and will.

This is what a Test Disc is all about. It shows you what’s wrong, and once you’ve fixed it, it shows you that now it’s right. We audiophiles need records like this. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become better tweakers. You cannot buy equipment that will give you this kind of sound. You can only tweak the right equipment to get it. At most 20% of the sound of your stereo is what you bought. At least 80% is what you’ve done with it.

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Letter of the Week – “All I can say about that one is wow!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

One of our good customers wrote to tell us about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Good evening!

My 4 recent Hot Stamper purchases are all outstanding, particularly Ambrosia’s debut album. All I can say about that one is wow! I have a lot of great audiophile LPs, and this one is one of the best sounding in my collection of around 750 LP’s.

Sonically it is outstanding and every bit as good as you describe. I had never heard anything off of the album, other than “Holding on to Yesterday,” and I agree with you that it’s a killer album! Thanks!
Randy

Randy,

So glad to hear you liked my favorite album of all time! Thanks for taking a chance of it.

I created this group of recordings to throw some light on titles audiophiles may not know well but should, and Ambrosia is one of those:

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Ambrosia’s debut is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should.

Thanks again for your business and we hope to find you lots of Better Records in 2023!

TP

Obsession Is the Best Predictor of Audio Evolution

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

Ambrosia‘s debut is an album we admit to being obsessed with.

It is our contention that to reach the most advanced levels of audio, you have to do two things.

First, you must become obsessed with getting your favorite albums to sound their best, and,

Second, you must then turn your obsession with those albums into concrete action.

What kind of action?

Finding better sounding pressings and improving your stereo and room.

We wrote about it here. An excerpt:

As a budding audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the ’70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was then using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists like them, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.

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How Novel Patterns Emerge During Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

When you sit down to play ten or twelve copies of an album, one right after the other, patterns in the sound are going to emerge from that experience, patterns which would be very likely to pass unnoticed when playing one copy against another or two over the course of the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to do it.

In the case of this album, the pattern we perceived was simply this: About one or two out of that dozen or so will have punchy, solid, rich, deep bass. (There is a huge amount of bass on the recording, so recognizing those special copies is not the least bit difficult if you have a full-range speaker and a properly treated room.)

About one or two copies really get the top end right, which is easily heard when the cymbals splash dynamically, with their harmonics intact, and they extend high about the rest of the soundfield (precisely the way they do in live music).

(Fewer copies have an extended top end compared to those with tight punchy bass by the way.)

Like so many Mastering Lab tube-mastered records from the era, most copies tend to be somewhat smooth.

Only one copy had both the best bass and the best highs.

All the other copies fell short in one or both of these areas.

Think about it: if you do your home shootouts with three or four or even five copies of an album, what are the chances that:

1. You will detect this pattern? Or,
2. That you will run into the one copy that does it all?

This is precisely the reason we have taken the concept of doing comparisons between pressings to an entirely new level.

It’s the only way to find the outliers in the group, the “thin tails” as the statisticians like to call them. (More on outliers here.)

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Which One’s Pink? And What Do All Those Numbers Mean?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

This commentary was written at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution, circa 2006 I believe. We felt it necessary to explain why we did not give out the stamper information for the pressings we were offering.

UPDATE 2024

We’re so fascinated by the unpredictable nature of the stamper information we often discover in our daily Hot Stamper shootouts that we thought it would be a good idea to create a section on the blog just to draw attention to it. You can find it under the heading of Record Mysteries. Please to enjoy.

Our Letter from 2006

An erstwhile customer wrote to us a while back asking a question about Dark Side of the Moon: “What is the FULL stamper matrix for this record… all the way around the dead wax?”

I replied that we never give out stamper numbers for the records we sell. The only way to find out the stampers for our records is to buy them.

He then countered with this bit of information:

Well, ok. I don’t understand the logic, but it’s your show.

Floyd stampers are probably the most uniquely well documented stampers on [a site that no longer exists] that they’re pretty much common knowledge. If I understand your logic, a first pressing may not be a “Hot Stamper” while a 3rd, 4th or 5th might be. Just a function of the stars aligning when that record is pressed. So what’s the diff?

I would think this would be pretty obvious. If we say pressing X is the best, this is information that you cannot get anywhere else, certainly not on the site you linked to. The day that such a site tells you which stampers sound the best is the day that such a site can have any value to those who are not collecting for the sake of collecting, but actually want to find pressings with the best sound to play. 

The information on that site has absolutely no value to me, or to any of my Hot Stamper customers, of that I can assure you. [It no longer exists by the way. Why should it?]

If you told me what the stampers were and it was a first pressing and /or issue, it would enhance the marketability of that particular record and I would be more inclined to buy it…not that I would sell it, but just knowing it was a first press would have more value to me.

Why would you want a first pressing if it didn’t sound as good? Or, if a later pressing sounded better, why would that make any difference in your desire to buy it? Isn’t the idea to get good sound?

If you buy records principally to collect original pressings, you will end up with some awful sounding records, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.

On the other hand, if you want the best sounding pressings, we are the only record sellers on the planet who can consistently find them for you. This is precisely the service we are able to offer, unique in the world as far as we know. 

Anyone can sell originals. Only we can sell the best sound.

Others could of course, but none of them have ever bothered to try, so the result is the same. Finding the best sound is far more difficult and far more rewarding to both the seller and the buyer, as any of our customers will tell you.

I guess the only problem for the “collector” who cares about sound as well as rarity is that your “Hot Stampers” aren’t “certified” in any way. That is, if I went to re-sell a Hot Stamper I bought from you, no one else would know it to be different from any other pressing of the same record. Ever thought about coding your records so that individual record had some kind of verifiable marking that it was a certain level of “hot stamper”???

We do have a customer who makes us fill out hot stamper certificates, but they are really of little value for resell in the real world.

Records aren’t to sell, they are to play and enjoy.

Btw, I collect for sound first, but “collectability / rarity” is up there too. My stone mint MFSL Muddy Waters Folk Singer #0005 / 5000 might fetch a couple more bucks on ebay than number 4999 say, right? I know, 4999 might sound better, but hey, a lot of people don’t have the equipment to tell the difference.

[This is where I got a little fed up and a little testy, or maybe I should say testier than usual.]

Since that is an AWFUL sounding pressing, I hope your equipment is able to tell you what is wrong with its sound. Mobile Fidelity is one of the worst labels in the history of the world; surely you don’t buy their lousy sounding records to play them? Collect them all you want, it’s your money, but who in his right mind thinks they sound any good? There are tons of commentaries on the site detailing their deficiencies. Please take the time to read them.

The fastest way to improve your record collection is to get rid of all your audiophile pressings, since only one out of every ten or twenty is even passable. If your stereo isn’t showing you how wrong the sound of those records is, it’s time to make some serious changes.

Best, 
TP

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Letter of the Week – “Now you’re on a ‘mission from god’ to find the HOLY GRAIL COPY”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

Our good customer Ed likes doing his own shootouts, and to that we say Hear Hear — more power to ya. He had about a dozen copies of Ambrosia’s debut on hand and thought he might actually have one or two that were pretty special. Then he popped for one of our Super Hot Stamper copies and heard why we’ve been such big fans of the album. Here is his story.

So let’s assume that you have either spent enough on good advice or evolved a stereo system that simply resolves what is in a vinyl groove.

Let’s also assume that you have discovered that there ARE actually substantial audible differences among the various copies of a given vinyl record title i.e. harmonics, resolution, detail, musicality, transparency, micro-dynamics, macro-dynamics, “whomp” factor, IGD (inner groove distortion), all kinds of surface noise and defects (film, dirt, grit, burnt regrind, scrubbed record label particles, and oh yes, the end products of styli that were never replaced until they fell off. Whoops, almost forgot the Mastering Engineer. (more…)

Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled – We Broke Through in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This listing is for our 2012 Shootout Winner wherein we discussed the breakthrough we had made five years before.

Around 2007 I stumbled upon the Hot Stampers for this record, purely by accident of course, there’s almost no other way to do it, and was shocked — shocked — to actually hear INTO the soundfield of the recording for the first time in my life, this after having played copy after frustratingly-opaque copy decades.

Yes, the stereo got better and that helped a lot. Everything else we talk about helped too. But ultimately it came down to this: I had to find the right copy of the record. 

Without the right record it doesn’t matter how good your stereo is, you still won’t have good sound. Either the playback source has it or it doesn’t. It’s not what’s on the master tape that matters; it’s what’s on the record.

More than any other, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.

Our Shootout Winner

This SUPERB WHITE HOT STAMPER copy is our overall winner from the recent huge Hot Stamper shootout we did for Ambrosia’s second — and second best — album. Friends, it’s been a long time coming but, judging by this copy and the others which fared well, it was worth it. We LOVE this music.

Ambrosia is one of the few groups that has mastered the technique of being both far-out galactic in scope of vision and mainstream AM commercial in execution… There is an unusual dreamlike quality that pervades its work. The songs seem to be reaching the listener direct from some strange and beautiful realm of the unconscious. It is an experience rare in popular music today, or at any time.

Billboard, 1977

We here present one of the best sounding copies for Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled we have ever played. Side one rated A+++, As Good As It Gets, with a side two that was not far behind at A++. From beginning to end this pressing is KILLER. (more…)

Paul McCartney / Wild Life – Our Last Shootout Was in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

This Apple UK Import LP has TWO outstanding sides! We were not all that familiar with the album going into this shootout, but after spending the day listening to copies like these we found ourselves LOVING IT!

Let’s face it: finding good sounding McCartney records with the exception of the first album is practically impossible. From Ram on it’s slim pickings, even on import. Most of those later albums sound like cassettes; they’re as dead as the proverbial doornail. They bore us to tears.

Wild Life stood up and showed us that there’s more good sound to be found after McCartney’s debut. Band On The Run on the right imports can sound quite good, but I would say without hesitation that the best copies of Wild Life kill it in the sonics department.

If you want the ultimate nexus of music and sound for McCartney, a Hot Stamper of the first album is the way to go. Expect to pay (us anyway) at least $500 for such a record, which is neither here nor there. This album is MUCH BETTER sounding than we ever suspected, and it’s much better music than we were led to believe by the critics. If you aren’t happy with it we will give you your money back.