11-2022

Hearing Is All It Should Take, Right?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Well Recorded Classical Albums – The Core Collection

Some person on some audiophile forum might feel obligated at some point to explain to you, benighted soul that you are, that the old classical records you, and other audiophiles like you, revere so highly have to be recognized these days for what they are: drastically compromised by the limits of their old technology. Simply put, there’s just no way they can sound good.

It’s just a fact. It’s science. Technology marches on and those old records belong on the ash heap of history collecting dust, not sitting on the platter of a modern turntable.

That’s why the audio world was crying out for Bernie Grundman to recut those Living Stereo recordings from the 50s and 60s on his modern transistorized cutting equipment and have RTI press them on quiet, flat, high-resolution 180 gram vinyl, following the best practices of an industry that everybody knows has been constantly improving for decades.

Right?

For those of us who actually play these records, there is little evidence to support this narrative. It’s a story, made up mostly of assertions, along with an unhealthy amount of faith in so-called experts.[1]

(Note that Bernie had no experience cutting classical music. He was a rock, pop and jazz guy. Robert Ludwig was the classical guy, cutting hundreds of albums for labels like Nonesuch in the 60s. What a different world it would be if he was the guy who cut for Classic Records!)

However, the contrarian view outlined above only really holds true for a very small minority of audiophiles of the analog persuasion: those given to empirical testing of such propositions. [2]

For an audiophile to compare the new pressings to the old ones, proper testing requires the following four conditions to be met:

  1. He or she has a revealing, accurate stereo,
  2. A good record cleaning system, and
  3. Knows how to do shootouts using his or her
  4. Well-developed critical listening skills

If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you’ve probably read by now that the first three on this list are what allow you to achieve the fourth.

Compromises?

The best classical recordings of the 50s and 60s, similar to the one you see pictured here, were compromised in every imaginable way.

Yet somehow they still stand sonically and musically head and shoulders above virtually anything that has come after them, now that we have much higher quality equipment on which to play them.

The music lives and breathes on those old LPs. When they are playing, you find yourself in the Living Presence of the musicians. You become lost in the music and the quality of the performance.

Whatever the limitations of the medium, they seem to fade quickly from consciousness. What remains is the rapture of the musical experience.

That’s what happens when a good record meets a good turntable.

We live for records like these. It’s the reason we all get up in the morning and come to work, to find and play good records. It’s what this site is all about — offering the audiophile music lover records that provide real musical satisfaction.

It’s hard work — so hard nobody else seems to want to do it — but the payoff makes it all worthwhile. To us anyway. Hope you feel the same.

The One Out of Ten Rule

If you have too many classical records taking up too much space and need to winnow them down to a more manageable size, pick a composer and play half a dozen of his works. Most classical records display an irredeemable mediocrity right from the start. it does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it.

If you’re after the best sound, it’s the rare record that will have it, which makes clearing shelf space a lot easier than you might imagine. If you keep more than one out of ten, you’re probably setting the bar too low, if our experience is any guide.

[1] “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman

[2] “When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it – how did the scientists find out – how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific.” — Richard Feynman

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Moondance on Heavy Vinyl Is a Disgrace to Audiophiles and Record Lovers All Over the World

xxxMore of the Music of Van Morrison

More Reviews and Commentaries for Moondance

Sonic Grade: F

The original grade I gave out in 2015 when last I played this remastered version as part of a shootout was “D.” I explained at the time:

Just listen to how strange Van’s voice sounds, so lean, hard and sour. That alone qualifies it for an “F,” but considering how bad most pressings of this album are, let’s be fair, if not downright generous, and call it a “D.”

I just revisited the record in a current shootout, and after giving it some thought I have decided that the right grade is in fact “F.” It cannot be any other, for reasons I discuss below.

In 2014 I had written:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we debunked Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

Having just played a marvelous shootout-winning early pressing, this time around I found the reproduction of Van’s voice on the reissue to be so leaned-out, artificial and unpleasant that I could hardly stand to listen to it.

We had reset the VTA correctly; the overall tonal balance of the recording from top to bottom was correct. It was only the voice that sounded so off. All the other shortcomings I had mentioned before were still true of course, but none of that mattered. The singer on this record just sounded awful.

As you know, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system. The real Moondance we had just played sounded better than ever. The fake Moondance, however, was sounding worse than ever. That’s what higher quality playback can do for you. It makes your good records sound better than they’ve ever sounded, and shows you just how bad your bad records really are.

Do I have a bad copy of the Heavy Vinyl pressing? Maybe, can’t say I don’t. If any of you out there in the real world have a copy of this pressing that you like, and would be willing to send it to me to hear for myself, I would be more than happy to give it a listen and report my findings on this blog.

Short of that I’m not sure what more I can do. I certainly do not feel the least bit inclined to waste a nickel of my hard earned money on another copy of this ridiculously badly mastered crap vinyl.

If you want to read about other records that have these same shortcomings, there are links below to the ones we’ve auditioned and identified to date. Our advice would be to avoid them, and if you own some of these pressings, perhaps now is the time to give them another listen and see if you don’t hear the same faults we did.

And, of course, the Hot Stamper pressings we offer, when played side by side with any of these Heavy Vinyl remasters, can help you to see more clearly just where these new records are going wrong, or, in the case of Moondance, completely off the rails.

Here are more records that we found to have similar shortcomings. They are, to one degree or another,

Some Fun Quotes (bolding added)

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Hot Stampers and Occam’s Razor

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide

This is an excerpt from a commentary I wrote many years ago in reply to a letter writer who thought our records were ridiculously overpriced. (The original letter is here.)

When people ask us how our records can possibly be worth the prices we charge, this is our answer.

As a skeptic, I require evidence for what I believe in order to believe it. Although it’s certainly possible that our customers are willing to pay our admittedly high prices on nothing more than our say so, I see no evidence that this is the case. Absent evidence to the contrary, I think they must really like our records.

They tell us so all the time, and they keep buying them week after week, so if they really are just fooling themselves, they apparently can’t stop doing it.

Occam’s Razor

The scientist’s and skeptic’s best friend, Occam’s razor, comes into play here. It holds that “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.” It’s often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions…”

Why assume people who buy expensive records are crazy? Why assume that the records they buy aren’t every bit as good as advertised, if not better? Why assume that the “other resources available for buying music” are even remotely as good, absent any evidence?

People assumed that the CD was going to be a cheap and easy source for their music, and look where that got them.

Assumptions? Us?

I could go on for days about assumptions. We try very hard to make as few as we have to around here. We bend over backwards to let the pressings speak for themselves. Most of the time when we’re doing our shootouts we have no idea what pressing is on the table. All we have to go on is the sound.

It may be relative — everything is — but people seem to be able to replicate our findings in their own homes pretty well. Well enough anyway. When they write to us, they really don’t sound all that crazy. In fact they seem fairly rational to us.

More than anything they seem to be enthusiastic about the great sound they’re finally hearing on a favorite album of theirs, courtesy of Better Records. After having played the records ourselves, we don’t think it’s the least bit crazy to believe them.

Some of the assumptions we really do take issue with are these:

  • Carefully remastered records pressed on heavy vinyl and marketed to audiophiles typically sound better than vintage mass-produced records sold to the general public.
  • Original pressings sound better than later pressings.
  • Records that look the same sound the same.
  • Brand name Audiophile equipment is essential for high-fidelity sound.
  • Expensive brand name audiophile equipment is even minimally correlated with high-fidelity sound.

I could go on for days about assumptions or theories that are easily disproved.

All you need to do is play a representative sample of the pressings of any album you choose, on a highly revealing, accurate system, and listen to them critically using a blinded approach. (We call them shootouts.)

If you want to find out whether something about records is true or not, then find out.

Don’t guess and don’t assume. Get the evidence.

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Steely Dan – A MoFi that Beggars Belief

Sonic Grade: F

Katy Lied is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity Hall of Shame. If it isn’t the perfect example of a Pass/Not-Yet record, I don’t know what would be.

By the time I was avidly collecting Mobile Fidelity records in the late ’70s, this title had already gone out of print, one of the first to do so. My guess is that even the cloth-eared audiophiles at MoFi knew when they had a turkey on their hands and mercilessly put this one out to pasture.

Yes, the sound is so bad that even the brain trust at MoFi could hear it. 

Compressed and lifeless (almost as lifeless as the screen speakers so popular at the time), it’s hard to imagine any version sounding worse than this one.

And yet I continued to play my copy, for enjoyment of course, oblivious — I must have been oblivious, right? — to the bad sound.

Why? That’s hard to say, but here’s a stab at it.

The vinyl was exceptionally quiet for one thing, and for another, as an audiophile I knew this MoFi pressing had been made with tender loving care, using a superior process, Half-Speed Mastering, from The Original Master Tapes, and had been pressed in Japan on the quietest, flattest vinyl in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

My old story about One Man Dog gets to the heart of it. I didn’t understand records very well and I sure didn’t understand the value of doing shootouts or even how to do them with different pressings of the same album.

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Andy Johns Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Andy Johns Engineered Albums with Hot Stampers

Andy Johns Engineered Albums We’ve Reviewed

More of Our Favorite Engineers

ANDY JOHNS is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

Many of his recordings can be found in our Rock and Pop Top 100 List of Best Sounding Albums (limited to titles that we can actually find enough copies to do our Hot Stamper shootouts).

Partial Discography

You may notice that we have done shootouts for a great many of these titles!

  • Stand Up – Jethro Tull (1969)
  • Town and Country – Humble Pie (1969)
  • Spooky Two – Spooky Tooth (1969)
  • Ssssh -Ten Years After (1969)
  • Blind Faith – Blind Faith (1969)
  • Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin (1969)
  • Traffic – John Barleycorn Must Die (1970)
  • Led Zeppelin III – Led Zeppelin (1970)
  • Highway – Free (1970)
  • Led Zeppelin IV – Led Zeppelin (1971)
  • Sticky Fingers – Rolling Stones (1971)
  • Brain Capers – Mott the Hoople (1971)
  • Exile on Main St. – Rolling Stones (1972)
  • Living in the Past – Jethro Tull (1972)
  • Goats Head Soup – Rolling Stones (1973)
  • Houses of the Holy – Led Zeppelin (1973)
  • It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll – The Rolling Stones (1974)
  • Physical Graffiti – Led Zeppelin (1975)
  • “Eddie Money” – Eddie Money (1977)
  • Shadows and Light – Joni Mitchell (1980)
  • Coda – Led Zeppelin (1982)

Borodin on Speakers Corner – You Say the Budget Stereo Treasury Has Better Sound?

More of the music of Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Recordings Available Now

A decent enough Speakers Corner Decca.

The Heavy Vinyl reissue of this title is not bad, but like a number of reissues, it lacks the bottom end weight found on the early London pressings.

(Classic Records pressings rarely had that problem. Just the opposite in fact. The bass was boosted most of the time, especially the deep bass, but for some reason the lower strings are never rich the way the best vintage pressings can be.)

I remember this Speakers Corner pressing being a little flat and bright.

Since I haven’t played it in years, there is some chance that I could be wrong. I have never had trouble admitting to the possibility, a fact that makes us practically unique in the world of audiophile reviewers.

The glorious sound I hear on the best London pressings is not the kind of thing I hear on 180 gram records by Speakers Corner, or anybody else for that matter.

They do a good job some of the time, but none of their records can compete with a vintage pressing when that vintage pressing is mastered and pressed properly. 

The best pressings of this UK London Stereo Treasury from the Seventies will beat the pants off of it. That ought to tell you something, right?

A budget reissue that is clearly superior to the best that modern mastering has to offer?

It happens all the time. It’s the rule, not the exception.

The second symphony is a work that audiophiles should love. It shares many qualities with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which you will surely recognize.

It also has some lovely passages that remind me of the Tale of The Tsar Saltan, another work by the same composer.

If you like exotic and colorfully orchestrated symphonic sound, you will be hard-pressed to find better.

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Michael Jackson – Our Thoughts in 2006 on Hearing Thriller in the 80s

More of the Music of Michael Jackson

Reviews and Commentaries for Thriller

This killer copy of Thriller that we discovered in our 2006 shootout gave us a whole new appreciation for just how good the album could sound. It was a real breakthrough, and proof that significant progress in audio is just a matter of time and effort, the more the better.

Our review from 2006

I remember twenty years ago playing Thriller and thinking the sound was transistory, spitty, and aggressive.

Well, I didn’t have a Triplanar tonearm, a beautiful VPI table and everything that goes along with them back then.

Now I can play the record.

I couldn’t back then.

All that spit was simply my table, arm, cartridge and setup not being good enough, as well as all the garbage downstream from it that was feeding the speakers.

The record is no different, it just sounds different now. Which is what makes the record a great test. If you can play this record, you can probably play practically any pop and rock record. (Classical is another matter.)

This Pressing Changes Everything

This pressing has a side two that is so amazing sounding that it completely changed my understanding and appreciation of this album. The average copy is a nice pop record. This copy is a masterpiece of production and engineering.

After playing a bunch of these we noticed some recurring shortcomings on most of the pressings. Either they lacked extension on the top end or they lacked bass definition and weight, or both. When this copy hit the table, the first thing we noticed was that the top end was Right On The Money and the bottom end was also Right On The Money.

Not surprisingly, the middle fell right into place.

It ended up having the most ambience, the most transparency, the most resolution, the most dynamic contrasts, the most presence — in short, it had more of everything than any copy we’ve ever heard.

The lesson to be learned in this case may be that when the extremes are properly transferred to the vinyl, the middle will take care of itself. Since the extremes seem to be the hardest thing to get right, at least on this record, that might explain why so many copies don’t seem to cut it.

Side one fits perfectly into this theory. The bottom end is meaty with plenty of punchy, solid bass, but the top end is lacking a bit of extension compared to the very best.

The result is that there’s a trace of hardness in the vocals that shouldn’t be there. If you can add a dB or two of extreme highs, everything will sound right on side one. It all comes back to life with a little more top end.

Robert Brook Knows the Way

Robert has written a great deal about the various problems he’s encountered along these same fronts:

  • He’s dramatically improved his equipment, and
  • He’s taught himself how to do a better job of dialing in turntable setup.

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Recent Revolutions in Audio Can Make a Huge Difference on Familiar Recordings

More of the Music of Ambrosia

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Ambrosia

This White Hot Stamper Ambrosia LP from some years ago had the kind of sound you would never expect to find in the grooves of this album. It was a THRILL to hear it, especially at the volumes at which we were playing the record.

The transparency and openness were off the charts, and unmatched by any other copy in our shootout. We’re big fans of this band here at Better Records — we love their take on complex, big production arty rock.

It’s also yet another example of the value of taking part in the myriad revolutions in audio.

If you never want your prized but sonically-challenged records to sound any better than they do right now, this minute, don’t bother to learn how to clean them better, play them back better or improve the acoustics of your room.

No one can make you do any of those things. The only reason you might have for doing them is so that you can enjoy more of your favorite music with much better sound. 

Is that a good enough reason? If you’re on this site I’m guessing it is.

That’s the reason we do it. We want records like this one, which didn’t start sounding good until about 2005, and now sound MUCH better than I ever thought they could, to keep getting better and better. Why shouldn’t they? Because some people think we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns in audio? Those people do not know what they are talking about.

(There is a reference to racing cars in the WAPO article [1] which is pure poppycock, or at least those of us who have been in audio for a long time know it is. Lap times are not a good analogy. We need to be thinking about immersive experiences being ten times more immersive for a hundred times as many recordings as was possible when I started.)

And these improvements we talk about have allowed us to enjoy records we could never fully enjoy before because they never really sounded all that good to us.

Now they do, and they will keep getting better, as more and more developments come along in all areas of analog reproduction.

Some reviewers think they know when records are not well recorded. We call that blaming the recording and we try to avoid it whenever possible.

Music Does the Driving

As a newbie audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make my favorite records from the 70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than whatever gear I currently owned.

It’s the challenging recordings by Ambrosia, 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.

Because the love of your favorite music is the only driving force in audio that can possibly work if you want to have world class sound.

The Real Test for Audiophiles

And here I am — here we are — still at it, forty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.

That kind of progress is proof that we must be doing something right. It’s a good test for any audiophile.

If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year.

As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some will be revealed, but for the most part, with continual refinements and improvements to your system, room and (especially) cleaning techniques, vintage pressings of your favorite albums should get better sounding with each passing year.

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Tchaikovsky / 1812 Overture – Speakers Corner Reviewed

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Reviews and Commentaries for the 1812 Overture

Our catalog from the 90s recommended this Heavy Vinyl Decca pressing from Speakers Corner.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back in the ’90s when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

Excellent, one of the best of the Deccas. Better sound by far than the Classic with Reiner, although of course the original of that record is quite good [actually it is not].

You may get better results if you reverse your polarity when playing this record. It’s been a while since I did it so better to check it yourself and see how you like it each way.

Years ago we wrote the review you see above. Doubtful that we would still find the record as good sounding as we did back then, in the 90s, so take it for what it’s worth. (What I couldn’t hear on my system back in those days may be of interest to some of you.)

If you can pick one up for cheap, it’s probably a good record for the price.

What to Listen For

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

Further Reading

The sonic signature of the modern Heavy Vinyl Classical reissue in four words: diffuse, washed out, veiled, and vague.

Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 200 at this stage of the game.

And finally,

A Confession

Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still somewhat impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records sound have such poor sound, they had me so pissed off I was motivated to create a special ring of hell for them.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.

James Taylor – Two Qualities Are Hard to Come By on This Album

More of the Music of James Taylor

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of James Taylor

As usually happens in these shootouts, we learned that there’s so much more to this album than just great songs. What really makes this music work on the best copies was the result of two qualities we found were in fairly short supply:

Correct Tonality

Most copies have a phony MoFi-like top end boost in the 10k region that we found irritating as hell. The longer we listened the less we liked the copies that had that boost, which adds a kind of “sparkle” to cymbals and guitars that has no business being there.

Now if you’re a MoFi fan and you like the boosted highs that that label is famous for, don’t waste your money buying a Hot Stamper copy from us. Our copies are the ones with the correct and more natural-sounding top end. The guitars will sound like real guitars and the voices will sound like real voices.

Lower Midrange and Bottom End Weight

When the vocals sound thin, bright and phony, as they do on so many copies of this album (partly no doubt the result of the grainy crap vinyl Columbia is infamous for) that hi-fi-ish sound takes all the fun out of the music. Many tracks have background vocals and big choruses, and the best copies make all the singers sound like they are standing in a big room, shoulder to shoulder, with the full lower midrange weight that that image implies.

The good copies capture that energy and bring it into the mix with the full-bodied sound it no doubt had live in the studio. When the EQ or the vinyl goes awry, causing Taylor and crew’s voices to take on a lean or gritty quality, the party’s over.

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