Alan Parsons, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “I just wanted to thank you for enriching the lives of us audiophiles.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pink Floyd Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Pink Floyd

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

I just wanted to thank you for enriching the lives of us audiophiles.

As I upgrade my system (and this time I made quite a breakthrough), I am beyond astounded each time one of the Hot Stampers you all sent me comes right along for the ride and blows my mind all over again.

I recently ordered a Hot Stamper of Dark Side Of The Moon. You know I’ve been dreaming of the day I can buy a grand copy from you. Until then, I buy the just nearly not as good copies you sell.

The A Side 1 and A to A+ Side 2 of DSOTM that you sold me a while back still has the power to blow my mind at parts. I am looking forward to seeing what a copy that costs almost four times the price can do. If it can! But I believe it one exists, you are the ones that found it.

You guys rock.

Best, Jeremiah

Thanks, Jeremiah. We aim to please, and, if I may say so myself, we do rock.

Thanks very much for writing. We’ve published a number of other letters like yours, written to us about Dark Side of the Moon. It’s a title we have difficulty keeping in stock.

As you point out, making progress in audio is key to getting these amazing vintage recordings to sound their best. We’re glad to know that you are hearing our records sounding better and better, something the Heavy Vinyl crowd doesn’t appreciate, especially those who still cling to the idea that this is a good pressing of Dark Side.

Here is an overview of the album you may enjoy reading.

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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.

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Letter of the Week – “…makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

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

Hey Tom, 

I absolutely love my Hot Stamper of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and of Dark Side of the Moon, and so many others that you have sold to me.

I find myself just playing the same side over and over, never tiring of the music. Which is something I never do with a CD….. no matter with a Reimyo CD player, or CEC TL-1X with Audiologic DAC, or even Acoustic Arts DAC, which actually sounds pretty good, but still fatiguing, and missing the immediacy and soul of a good LP — and in addition to sounding better, there is just something about having an original copy made back when the music was fresh and newly released, putting me back in my college years, and somehow linking up the past to the present.

The music is living there in those grooves, even better now because I can actually hear the music with a decent system. I don’t think many record players back in 1972- 1978 could begin to do these records justice.

Thanks so much for all the great music – makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.

Kurt B.

Kurt, you are welcome!

We love both these albums and we’re in agreement with you that the music is more alive in these grooves than it could ever be in the digits of a CD.

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Letter of the Week – “As an obsessive compulsive individual, I can say without a doubt that they are providing a hugely valuable service to audiophiles.”

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

I wanted to comment on the discussion as to the validity of the ‘Better Records’ business model and offerings to audiophiles. As a backgrounder, I am an electrical engineer that grew up in the 60s and 70s listening first hand to many of the classic LPs that Better Records now offers for sale. I was also a musician with perfect pitch (playing French Horn in the Symphony and keyboards in various bands), I had a killer stereo and spent a lot of time in recording studios that produced some of the top acts and albums of the era so I certainly had exposure to the best equipment and listening environments back in the day.

I went on to being a CEO of various telecom/mobile software companies and somewhat lost touch with my musical purist roots. But I had 3 boys and one of them turned out to have the same music bug I had and he has gone on to pursuing a career as a recording engineer, re-introducing me to analog vinyl LPs, pushing me to re-engage in my greatest love, which I eventually did in spades: I tossed out my electrostatics and full digital sound chain and I built a set of Altec 604 monitors driven by a 300B tube amp and a killer turntable, and I went about spending about $30,000 on 1st pressing vinyl from around the world, cleaning them with an ultrasonic platform, and I learned a great deal during that process.

For one, I fell back in love with high efficiency speaker systems, for another I realized that I was spending an average of $200-300 per LP to get what I wanted and in some cases, over $1000 in total (buying 7 different DSOTM pressings and travelling to the UK multiple times to find the best pressings), and I found out that Better Records was on to something: I got burned more than once myself when I was buying clean, never played 1st pressings of some of the top LPs and ending not feeling the love for the results. I appreciate the complexities of the old school vinyl pressing sound chain and its infinite variables, and more times than not I was back sourcing additional copies of the same LP looking for that ‘magical pressing’.

I eventually got a stunning DSOTM 2nd pressing (A3/B3) and bought another only to find that the 1st one was way ahead of the 2nd so it shows that even the same pressings can be highly variable – in sound quality/feel/depth/clarity/warmth, but also noise floor. So, yes, there are magical ‘Hot Stampers’ out there, but to find them takes patience and lots of $ and effort.

When you score the perfect ‘Hot Stamper’ the result can be to draw you close to the very soul of the artist – bringing you right into the recording room with them, sometimes 50+ years after the fact. And when you put on a digital download or CD of the same LP it is a shocking insult in many many cases.

So, back to Better Records: they are doing all of the foot work for you, and as an obsessive compulsive individual, I can say without a doubt that they are providing a hugely valuable service to audiophiles. They are purists and they listen on ‘big’ speaker systems that will highlight the limitations of MOFI 1/2 speed mastered LPs (typically flawed low frequency response and some mid-range colouration).

I am very happy with Better Records and must say that they reduce my stress and have me impatiently waiting for their next shipment. 5 stars.

Derek

Derek,

As an obsessive-compulsive individual myself, I know very well the suffering you must have gone through with the colorations of the MoFi pressings and what passes for audiophile “product” these days.

Glad we could help reduce the stress you felt pursuing good sounding vinyl. Finding that so little of what was supposed to sound good actually does is frustrating for anyone who is serious about this hobby.

Best, TP

New to the Blog? Start Here

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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 for Dark Side of the Moon was written at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution, circa 2006 I believe.

We were asked why we did not give out the stamper information for the pressings we were offering and we felt an explanation was in order.

UPDATE 2024

We’re so fascinated by the unpredictable nature of the stamper information we discover in our Hot Stamper shootouts that we thought it would be a good idea to create a section on the blog just to draw more of our readers’ 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:

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 will have any value to those who are not collecting for the sake of collecting, but are actually searching for the  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, nor should it. [It no longer exists by the way. Why would 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 offer, unique in the world as far as we know. 

Anyone can sell originals.

Only we can sell the best sound because we are unconcerned with which pressing has it. May the best man win!

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Year Of The Cat – Our Shootout Winner from 2009

For the first time on our site, TRIPLE PLUS MASTER TAPE SOUND ON BOTH SIDES! We play stacks of copies of this one a few times every year, but I don’t recall ever hearing one that sounded so correct from the first song to the last.

Let me tell you — when this album sounds as bad as most copies do, the music just plain does not work. So many copies add a nasty layer of grit to the vocals, and the effect is positively painful. This copy shows you a Year Of The Cat that is just not available on the typical copy, and certainly not on the MoFi pressing either.

This White Hot Stamper is the UNDISPUTED WINNER and Current Heavyweight Champion of our latest Hot Stamper shootout for Al Stewart’s Masterpiece, Year of the Cat. How come more of these don’t turn up on the site? Simple — most copies of this record just plain SUCK. We kept asking ourselves Where is the Famous Alan Parsons’ Dark Side of the Moon Magic that’s supposed to be on this recording? This record was THE Demo Disc in every stereo store in town when it came out back in the day, but we could not find any correlation between that fact and the sound we were hearing on copy after copy. The full, rich sound we knew so well from other Alan Parsons’ productions was simply nowhere to be found.

Until this bad boy copy came along. Folks, here is the True Audiophile Demo Disc Sound you remember. It wasn’t all a dream. It was real! Rich acoustic guitars, tubey-magical sweetness on the vocals, ambience around everything and everyone, huge amounts of space revealed by the breathtaking transparency of this pressing, top and bottom extension completely unlike the average copy. Everything that this album was supposed to do was finally happening when we dropped the needle on this side one. Talk about BIG SOUND, here it was! (more…)