Mono Versus Stereo

Commentary making the case for our preference for either mono or stereo on some of the titles we’ve auditioned.

Your Number Please – Skip the Mono

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

The mono we played (not pictured) in our shootout did not fare well head to head against the stereo pressings we had on hand.

Yes, it is rich and tubey, and Julie’s voice is solid and full-bodied, but the overall presentation is dark, opaque and small.

How do the mono record lovers of the world find this kind of sound to their liking?  We honestly don’t know.

On today’s modern stereos, the mono pressing leaves a lot to be desired, and for that reason we say skip the mono.

For records that we think sound best in mono, click here.

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The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – We Preferred the Mono in 2016

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Back in 2016 we liked the Mono pressings of this album best. We wrote:

We greatly prefer the best Mono pressings to the best stereo copies, but they are very hard to come by.

This is our favorite of the early Dylan albums for both music and sound. We’re picking up both mono and stereo copies when we see them clean (which is rare) but the best mono copies truly take this music to a whole new level.

Now we like them both, and we like the stereo pressings maybe even a bit better.

Live and learn we say!

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

Roy Orbison – Mono? Original? What’s the Best Way to Go?

Records that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

If you think that buying original pressings of an album like this one is the way to find the best sound, you are sorely mistaken. The originals and most reissues on the Monument label are rarely any better than dreadful sounding.

The monos sound bad and the originals sound bad, which means that all the conventional wisdom of record collectors and audiophiles alike has failed to produce the desired result: a good sounding pressing of the album.

What’s a mother to do? 

Well, you could do what we did: try them all! If you keep at it long enough eventually you will run into the right pressing, and then you can focus on getting a large enough batch which will allow you to find one that sounds great and plays quietly.

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The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Leave It Dry, Or Add Some Reverb?

More of the Music of Bob Dylan

The noisy (aren’t they all?) mono copy we keep around as a reference presents Dylan and his guitar in a starkly immediate, clear and unprocessed way. The stereo version of the album is simply that sound with some light stereo reverb added.

More than anything else, on some tracks the mono pressing sounds like a demo.

It’s as if the engineers threw up a mic or two, set the EQ for flat and proceeded to roll tape. This is a good sound for what it is, but it has a tendency toward dryness, perhaps not on all of the tracks but clearly on some. Certainly the first track on side one can have that drier sound.

What the stereo reverb does is fill out the sound of Dylan’s voice respectfully.

The engineers of the late ’50 and ’60s had a tendency to drown their singers in heavy reverb, as anyone who’s ever played an old Tony Bennett or Dean Martin album knows all too well.

But a little reverb actually benefits the vocals of our young Mr. Dylan on The Times They Are A-Changin’, and there is an easy way to test that proposition. When you hit the mono button on your preamp or phono stage, the reverb disappears, leaving the vocal more clear and more present, but also more dry and thin. You may like it better that way. Obviously, to some degree this is a matter of taste.

The nice thing about this stereo copy, assuming you have a mono switch in your system (which you should; they’re very handy), is that you have the option of hearing it both ways and deciding for yourself which approach you find more involving and enjoyable — if not necessarily truthful.

We suspect your preference will be both listener- and system-dependent. Isn’t it better to have the option and be able to make that determination for yourself?

To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound better in mono, click here.

To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound better in stereo, click here.

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Deja Vu in (Awful Sounding) Mono Sells for $1200 and People Complain About Our Prices?

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

A mono copy of Deja Vu (which no doubt sounds terrible; I had one once) went for $1200 on ebay a few years back!

Oh, but it’s an auction, so I guess that makes it all right. The seller didn’t set the price, the market did.

But the market sets our prices too.

We can’t sell a record for more than what our customers are willing to pay. What exactly is the difference?

Man, I sure would love to get $4k+ for one of our killer Hot Stamper pressings of Deja Vu. I guarantee our copy sounds a whole lot better than the one that sold on ebay.

And the music is the same, right? There is no mono mix, so anyone with a mono switch can hear the record in mono if they wanted to. But why do that? The stereo sound is phenomenal on the best copies!

So what did you get for your additional three thousand dollars?

A nice record to put on the shelf.

Which you could get from us for three thousand dollars less.

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Stick with Stereo on the Dvorak & Glazounov Violin Concertos with Milstein

More of the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

Stick with stereo on this album.

The Mono pressings — at least the ones we’ve played — aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time).

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Blonde on Blonde Is a Joke on Sundazed in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, sounding like most of the Sundazed records we used  to play all those years ago. (We admit we even sold a few of their titles too.)

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

Sundazed is clearly a label that should be avoided by audiophiles looking for high quality sound. Their incompetent remastering hack work on Blonde on Blonde is just more evidence to back up our low opinion of them.

There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are downright awful.

Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have!

Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.

(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and was avidly collecting records in the Seventies.)

How could so many be fooled so badly? You would think that some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how substandard these records sound.

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The Original A Hard Day’s Night on CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

The Old CD – You Know, the Original Mono One that the General Public Used to Say Was So Great…

(That is of course the stereo record you see pictured to the left.)

I have the early generation mono CD of this album. Although my car has a very good stereo system, you would never know there was any magic to the sound of these recordings by playing that CD. The whole thing is hopelessly flat and gray.

It starts to perk up by the song Things We Said Today, the 10th (!) track.

Before that it just sounds compressed, with all the voices and instruments mashed together. There’s no transparency to the sound. It reminds me of listening to this music on the radio. If that’s the effect George Martin was going for with the old mono mix, he succeeded brilliantly. I prefer the twin-track unapproved stereo mixes found on the LPs.

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Dream With Dean – Watch Out for Hard and Honky Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

Dream with Dean is great for finding any traces of “honk” in your midrange. Getting Deano’s baritone to sound tubey and rich, to get the sound that Bing Crosby could get just by opening his mouth, is not all that easy on some systems, mine included.

Correctly set VTA is critical in this regard, but pretty much everything must be working at its best for Dean to sound as intimate and natural as we know he can on the best pressings.

Balancing the lower mids with the upper mids is the goal, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. This album is great for testing, and guaranteed to bring practically any high-dollar system at a stereo showroom, a convention, or your very own home to its knees.

This is my favorite Dean Martin record of all time; just Dean and a jazz guitar quartet behind him (featuring Contemporary favorites Barney Kessel and Red Mitchell!) doing standards. On the best copies, the immediacy is absolutely mind-blowing. It’s a shame that there aren’t more Frank Sinatra records that sound like this.

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Letter of the Week – “The stereo is immersive and big. The mono is palpable and solid.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now

Ella Fitzgerald Albums We’ve Reviewed

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

Hey Tom, 

No two copies of a record sound the same. To put an even finer point on it, not even two White Hot Stampers sound the same.

I’ve been delightfully going back and forth between the stereo and mono white hots of Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie and taking great interest (and pleasure… and some frustration…) with how different they sound.

The stereo is immersive and big. The mono is palpable and solid. I prefer the band on the stereo, but the mono puts Ella in the room with me. Since this album is all about Ella, I’ll be returning the stereo.

Thank you for the chance to hear both versions. Your generous return policy is helping me build a collection of records I really love.

Aaron

Aaron,

Thanks for your letter.

It is indeed interesting to take two top copies of the album — our White Hot Stamper pressings — and play them against each other. In this case it is even more interesting because you were able to compare the best sounding Mono pressing with the best sounding Stereo pressing, something, by the way, we would do in the course of every shootout for this album.

We’ve written about the album extensively, and you can find our commentaries using the link below:

As for your preference for the mono, we can’t disagree with you about the sound. We used to prefer the mono ourselves. Lately we prefer the stereo. This is probably something that would be both system-dependent and listener-dependent. To each his own.

Either way, mono or stereo, when you play one of our White Hot Stamper pressings, you are hearing the greatest female vocal recording of all time with better sound than you would have ever thought possible.

At least that’s the way we feel about it.

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