12-2021

Small Speakers and Some Audio Lessons I’ve Learned Over the Last 40+ Years

More Speaker Advice

Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

Do not believe a word you hear in this video. You probably shouldn’t even watch it.

Let me state clearly one of our core beliefs here at Better Records.

Small speakers are incapable of lifelike musical reproduction in the home.

You will never feel as though you are in the presence of live musicians with a system like the one below. Real acoustic instruments move lots of air; that’s why we can hear them all the way at the back of the concert hall.

Little speakers, unlike speakers with large dynamic drivers, do a poor job of moving air. Screen speakers are not quite as bad as small speakers like those you see pictured, but they suffer from the same limitation: they don’t move enough air.

I’ve never had speakers this small (or screens), but I’ve heard many systems with little speakers on stands, with and without subs, and all of them left a great deal to be desired. When I find myself in a room with such systems, at most I listen for a few moments, for curiosity’s sake more than anything else, just to hear what they might be doing better or worse, and then I get the hell out of there before I become even more irritated than I normally am.

If you get talked into buying a system like this — novice audiophiles constantly get talked into buying bad stereo systems in every audio salon in the world — you will have a hard time getting very far in audio, and will probably just end up stuck at this unacceptably low level. So don’t do it!

This system may represent a floor, a good entry point for the budding enthusiast, but it is also a ceiling in the sense that it will keep you from making any real progress in the hobby. Which would be a shame. I have dedicated more than 45 years of my life to audio and have no intention of abandoning it. On the contrary, I get better at it all the time.

Can you imagine hooking up a turntable to these little boxes? Why bother?

Everything that’s good about analog would be inaudible on this system, and that right there is all the reason you should not go this route.

And to show you how clueless this setup is, the two towers of record shelving behind and to the outside of the speakers are in the worst possible place you could ever put them. Nothing should go there (unless you have Hallographs).

Keep the rear corners behind the speakers mostly empty unless you know what you are doing. This guy clearly does not.

Some of my old audio history:

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording. To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

This was the mid-’70s, 40+ years ago, and I am proud to say I have never owned a small speaker since. I’ve heard a lot of them — some good, most of them not so good — but that’s a sound I personally could never live with.

Especially if you are enjoy playing orchestral spectaculars like those found on our site.

Small speakers just can’t move enough air to bring orchestral music to life in any way that gives meaning to the term Hi-Fidelity.

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Arrogant and Elitist Skeptics – They’re the Worst!

Some Thoughts on Tubes in Audio

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound

Below you will find a link to a reasonably fair and balanced look at the battle between transistors and tubes from Brian Dunning’s skeptoid website, worthwhile reading for those of us who favor a skeptical approach to life (and especially this hobby).

Thirty plus years ago, when I started my little record business, I knew that most records marketed to audiophiles offered junk sound (half-speed masters, Japanese pressings) or junk music (direct to discs by artists nobody ever heard of). As our playback has improved, fewer and fewer of these “specialty” pressings have survived the test of time, a subject we write about endlessly on our site and here on this blog.

For the longest time our motto has been “Records for Audiophiles, Not Audiophile Records,” and we see no reason to change it.  If anything, the modern manufacturers of Heavy Vinyl pressings are making records that get worse sounding by the day. Many of the most egregious offenders can be found here.

More commentaries about Heavy Vinyl can be found here. We are not fans of the stuff, not because it’s our competition, but because it just doesn’t sound very good to us.

I Confess

Here is the article. I confess I sped through it quickly, barely skimming it, because I have heard plenty on the subject of  tubes versus transistors, most of it, in my opinion, misguided, if I’m being honest.

This is my fifth decade in audio and I know where I stand on the subject. I offer it to those who might be interested in a less conventional view.

Our Approach

In order to do the work we do, our approach to audio has to be fundamentally different from that of the audiophile who listens for enjoyment. Critical listening and listening for enjoyment go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

The first — developing and applying your critical listening skills — allows you to achieve good audio and find the best pressings of the music you love.

Developing critical thinking skills when it comes to records and equipment is not a bad idea either.

Once you have a good stereo and a good record to play on it, your enjoyment of recorded music should increase dramatically.

A great sounding record on a killer system is a thrill.

A Heavy Vinyl mediocrity, played back on what passes for so many audiophile systems these days — regardless of cost — is, to these ears, an intolerable bore.

If this sounds arrogant and elitist, so be it. We set a higher standard. Holding our records to that higher standard allows us to price our records commensurate with their superior sound and please the hell out of the people who buy them.

For those who appreciate the difference, and have resources sufficient to afford them, the cost of our records is acceptable. If it were not we would have gone out of business years ago.

Hot Stampers are not cheap. If the price could not be justified by the better sound quality and quieter surfaces, who in his right mind would buy them? We can’t really be fooling that many audiophiles, can we?

Our Approach

Our approach to equipment and records is explained in more detail below, in a listing centered around an early pressing of a Ted Heath Big Band album from the Fifties that knocked our socks off.  The right record at loud levels on Big Speakers can do that.

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Buffalo Springfield – Extracting the Midrange Magic

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Buffalo Springfield

So many copies of this album sound so bad and play so poorly that most audiophiles have given up by now and written it off as a lost cause.

But we didn’t. We kept at it. Our main motivation? The music.

Extracting the midrange magic from a album like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good sounding copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records such as this one is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.

Within the limitations of the recording, there are still copies that are surprisingly DYNAMIC and TRANSPARENT. Listen to all that space around the guitars and voices — who knew it was there?

Listen also especially to the vocal harmonies — you can separate out all the parts much more clearly on these Hot Stamper pressings. You can really hear precisely who’s in there and what part they are playing in the vocal arrangement. I can’t remember ever hearing it sound so clear. The best copies really let you hear into the music.

The bass is also much better defined and note-like. On most copies the sound is lean, and what little bass there is sounds like a smeary blob underneath the vocals. With the better pressings you can follow every note, which is important if for no other reason than the fact that many of the arrangements are fairly simple, so losing the sound of one instrument is losing a lot of what the song has to offer.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “You guys aren’t kidding… blew me away.”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

Reviews and Commentaries for Their Satanic Majesties Request

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

Hey Tom, 

Just played Their Satanic Majesties Request that I received from you. You guys aren’t kidding. The copy is excellent – blew me away. It replaces my original copy (with the 3D photo). I have a pretty good system, and it really stood out – lots of detail and quite a few surprises.

Thanks for curating such great vinyl.

Rodney

Rodney,

Thanks for your letter. The originals we’ve played are simply not competitive with the best sounding reissues, which is why we sell the best sounding reissues for more money than the originals.

Anybody can buy an original. Only somebody who does rigorous shootouts of multiple pressings from different eras can know which are the best sounding pressings of any given album (keeping in mind that the results from any given shootout, like any scientific finding, are provisional.)

You came to the right place for the best sound and you got it.

Further Reading

Heart – How Wide and Tall Is Your Copy? Compared to What?

More of the Music of Heart

More Reviews and Commentaries for Little Queen

On the right system, this is a Classic Rock Demo Disc to beat practically anything you could ever throw at it.

Love Alive and Barracuda on this copy will deliver the full Rock and Roll Power of your system. If you’ve got The Big Sound, this is the record that will show you just how big it is.

You get HUGE meaty guitars, BIG bass, a smooth top end, full-bodied vocals, incredible rock energy and dynamics, loads of richness and incredible transparency.

Wide and Tall

A key quality we look for in Hot Stamper copies of Little Queen is Wide and Tall Presentation. What exactly does that mean you ask? The best copies, the ones that really jump out of the speakers, tend to present some (usually high frequency) information higher and more forward than others. This is not hard to miss.

When you’re playing ten or fifteen copies of the same side of the same album and suddenly a cymbal crashes higher and more clearly than the others did in the part of the track you are testing, you can’t help but notice it. Wow! How did that get there?

Once you hear it you start to listen for it, and sure enough the next copy won’t do it, nor will the next. Maybe the one after that gets about halfway there: the cymbal crashes are higher than most, but not as high as the one that really showed you how high is up.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Progress in Audio

And of course it all ties in with our Revolutionary Changes in Audio commentary. If you’ve been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, maybe ALL the Little Queen pressings do it now. They might ALL do something they never did before, and in fact they SHOULD be doing most things better now. More in the link below.

Our last shootout was a while back. Since then many, many parts of the chain have undergone improvement. During this shootout we heard things in the recording we’d never heard before. This is the point of all this audio fooling around. It pays off, if you do it right. You have musical information waiting to be unlocked in your favorite recordings. It isn’t going to free itself. You have to do the work to set it free. Do it our way or do it some other way, but do it. You, more than anyone else, will be the one to get the benefit.

Biggest Problems Noted Recently

With continual improvements to the stereo in the year or so since we last did this shootout, the goal of which is to get the stereo out of the way of the sound of the record, we noted that many copies suffer from a degree of dryness and hardness.

This shortcoming is most easily recognized by the lack of studio ambience in what seems to be a pretty dead studio.

Play any good All Tube recording from the ’50s or ’60s and you will hear exactly what a record like this doesn’t do.

But those other records don’t rock like this one either.

Further Reading

Better Record’s Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

Thinking Critically About Records

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

In an old commentary for a shootout we did for Carole King’s Tapestry album, we took shots at both the CBS Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile pressing and the Classic Heavy Vinyl Audiophile pressing, noting that both fell far short of the standard set by the Hot Stamper copies we’d discovered over the years.

This finding (and scores of others just like it) prompted us to promulgate the following axioms of audiophile record collecting. (Axiom Number One can be found here.)

Which leads us to Better Records Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

No two records sound the same.

If that weren’t true we’d be out of business. It is in fact the very foundation of our business. We wrote a commentary with that idea firmly in mind under the heading identical stampers + new vinyl = different sound?, which goes into that subject in more detail.

axiom-definition-screenshot

And it’s equally true for Half-Speeds — they’re records, right? — so we have a few entries in our we was wrong. section about those rare copies that actually have sounded good to us over the years.

For example, the chances of there being exceptionally good sounding CBS Half-Speed Mastered pressings of Tapestry may be vanishingly small, but we can’t say the number is zero. There could be some, but considering how bad the idea of Half-Speed mastering is, would they have much chance of beating our Hot Stampers? As a practical matter I would have to say the chances are zero.

They can’t beat the best originals, properly cleaned. They can beat uncleaned originals and reissues. There might be some copies that sound better than the mediocre Classic Records pressing, which is tonally fine but suffers from the basic issues most of Bernie Grundman’s remastered records suffer from.

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A Reviewer Liked this London a Whole Lot More Than I Did – A Cautionary Tale

This group of superb Decca/London LPs are available on our site

240+ Reviews of Decca/London/Argo Recordings

While digging around the web I ran into a site called From Miles to Mozart, which purports to be “An exploration of the incredible world of classical and jazz recordings”

Fair enough. Here is what the reviewer had to say about a London we did not think sounded very good, CS 6357. At the time, he was most of the way through a fairly complete survey of London Bluebacks, and when those were done he went on to review a Whiteback pressing of this London, which appears to be the only pressing he had on hand. (We of course had only the one as well.)

I’d run out of blue so next up was CS 6357 with its retro FFSS label, a white back FFSS. Clifford Curzon scores a knockout with the Dvorak Quintet with a very refined late Blueback sound; truly transcendental sound of the highest order. Another white back FFSS followed in CS 6379 Mozart Clarinet Quintet with a magical clarinet but some edginess at times with some of the instruments. Overall the Clarinet Quintet had very strong sound to rival most any Blueback. Unfortunately, the Mozart Divertimenti on side 2 was not as assured with quite a few signs of strain in the highs indicative some early transistor changing the precious Blueback sound. CS 6379 was recorded by Smith and Parry October, 1963 at Sofiensaal, Vienna with the LP coming out in May of 1964. CS 6357 was recorded in Sofiensaal, Vienna by Culshaw and Parry in October 1962 with the LP in October 1963. Overall two strong LP’s without a Blueback! (Well, CS 6357 does exist with a Blueback.)

He has some ideas about “precious Blueback sound” and the half-speed mastering setup used to achieve them. I will leave that for others to discuss, mostly because I could not seriously entertain this fellow’s writing once I found out what he had to say about one of Mobile Fidelity’s earliest half-speed mastered releases:

Zubin Mehta Conducts Music from Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (MFSL 1-008)

Comments: If you want to hear what audiophile vinyl sounds like, this is a great way to start. Whether you like science fiction movies or not, this record is a must hear … and try to turn up the volume if you can. This Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab pressing of Decca SXL 6885 (London ZM 1001) is one of the most incredible sounding orchestral recordings I have ever heard. It may not be the recording used for the movies (John Williams conducted those himself), but it sounds significantly better in terms of recording quality. Talk about lifelike presence, huge dynamic range, bass depth with real visceral impact — this record has DEMONSTRATION written all over it. Even the Cantina Band track gives you the impression of an alien jazz/pop band playing right before you. I was fortunate enough to get my copy for free from a friend, and only recently did I realize that this album sells for some money. Looking for a change from the same old EMI, Decca, RCA, Mercury, DG, or Philips? Try this one.

If this is your idea of an audiophile Demo Disc, you are setting the bar awfully low, about even with the height of the carpeting. I consider it a piece of Audiophile trash, one that I never bothered to discuss on the blog. Were I to grade it today I would probably give it a D for sound and an F for music. I remember playing it back in the late-’70 or early-’80s and wondering what on earth was the appeal of such a cheesy, lowest-common-denominator schlockfest.

If this London LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.

We Know the Record Well

Years ago, I did a little shootout with a few of the early London pressings of the album — which were also mastered by Stan Ricker, not sure if many of you out there knew that — as well as some later pressings not cut by SR, and of course the MoFi.

The MoFi was clearly better than any of the three regular London pressings, as they were just not very good sounding at all, suffering from a problem which makes most later Londons hard to enjoy. That problem is opacity.

For classical and orchestral music, it’s the kiss of death.  It is also one of the main reasons we like so few orchestral recordings pressed on Heavy Vinyl. Most of them badly lack transparency, a sonic issue we wrote about more than a decade ago.

If I were to review this MoFi today, I would no doubt end up putting it in a little section I like to call Stone Age Audio Records, comprising records that sounded good on modest stereos in the Seventies and Eighties, the ones with loudness controls and speakers sitting on milk crates.

On today’s modern, dramatically more revealing equipment, these records show themselves to be intolerably phony, with not much in the way of fidelity.

If your stereo is bad enough to make playback of these records tolerable, you are definitely on the wrong site. Unless of course you want to get rid of all the equipment you own and start over, which is probably the best advice I could give you.

With a fresh start you may just find yourself getting a lot more out of this hobby than you ever thought possible. But you would need to rethink your approach to audio, and so does Mr Miles to Mozart.

To sum up, if this MoFi is your idea of an audiophile Demo Disc — if it is in fact “one of the most incredible sounding orchestral recordings [you] have ever heard” — then your evaluations of the records you review on your blog — audiophile or otherwise — are clearly not to be trusted.

We have a section for reviewers who appear to lack competence — the only kind we know of these days, to tell you the awful truth — and you can find it here.

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Strauss – The Right Hall Creates the Right Sound

More of the Music of Johann Strauss

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London

Wow, what a find! Dances of Old Vienna is a WONDERFUL sounding record with vintage Decca / London sound. Even as late as 1968 Decca was still able to produce recordings that are tonally correct from top to bottom and full of Tubey Magic.

There is not a trace of hyped-up sound to be found on this record. It’s unbelievably spacious and three-dimensional, with depth to rival any recording you may own.

One reason the recording is as spacious as it is is that this is a fairly small ensemble, not a huge orchestra, playing in a lively hall, exactly the kind of hall in which this music was meant to be heard.

The reason everything on this disc sounds right is that both the sound and the music are authentic to these works in practically every detail.

And the performances are vivid and lively as well, with Boskovsky himself playing the violin as well as directing the other players. It should be noted that the solo violin parts are especially lovely sounding. There is a transparency and ease to the sound that is not often heard in vintage recordings, and that, coupled with the tubey magic, richness and sweetness found throughout, make this a very special record indeed. (more…)