12-2024

Neil Young and the Limits of Expert Advice

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Richard Feynman gave a series of lectures concerning the workings of the scientific method. Here is an excerpt from one of them that I would like you to keep in mind as you read the discussion that follows. [Bolding added by me.]

Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

Back in 2015, a mastering engineer by the name of Phil Brown contacted me in reference to a Hot Stamper pressing of Neil Young’s  Zuma he had seen in our mailer. (Apologies in advance for not giving out the stamper numbers; we tend to frown on that sort of thing around here.) He wrote:

  Hey Tom,   

I see it’s a featured disc in the newsletter. I’m curious what the matrix numbers are since I mastered it.

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Rich, Rosiny Lower Strings in Living Stereo Like These Are to Die For

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Franz Liszt Available Now

Find me a modern record with rich, rosiny lower strings and I will eat it.

And by “modern record” we hasten to include both modern recordings and modern remasterings of older recordings. No one alive today can make a record that sounds as good as this one.

To call it a lost art is to understand something that few vinyl-loving audiophiles appear to have fully grasped since the advent of the Modern Reissue, which is simply this: head to head they are simply not competitive.

After twenty years of trying and literally hundreds of failed examples, both the boutique and major labels of today have yet to make a record that sounds as powerful and lifelike as this RCA from the old days. 

Fortunately for record lovers and record collectors alike, we here at Better Records are not trying to make a record sound the way these sides do.

Our job is much easier than that. We’re just trying to find ones that do. When we find sides as good sounding as these, we call them Hot Stampers and charge a lot of money for them.

But you get what you pay for when you buy a record from us. And if you disagree, for any reason, you get your money back.

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The Early London Pressings Of Schubert’s 9th Are Awful

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

There are plenty of Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played over the years that were disappointing, and some of them can be found here.

What was most striking about this shootout was how poorly the original London Bluebacks (CS 6061) fared when going head to head with the best vintage reissues. In fact, they were so obviously inferior I doubt we would have even needed another pressing to know that they could not possibly be considered Hot Stampers.

The two we had were crude, flat, full of harmonic distortion, and both had clearly restricted frequency extremes.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

But I remember liking the Blueback pressings I played ten or twenty years ago.

Did I have better copies, or was my system not capable of showing me the shortcomings I so clearly heard this time around? Since this is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty, we’ll have to leave it there.

Our favorite performance of the work is this one with Krips and the LSO, but on a much later reissue pressing produced by Decca in the 70s. Imagine that!

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Letter of the Week – “This has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

Picked up your SHS of “Ziggy” last week–my daughter is 13 and starting to get into Mick Ronson, and I got this to show her what I think is his best work, not just on guitar, but in essentially creating the overall sound for the “Ziggy Stardust” album.

What I didn’t expect was how fantastic this album sounds. I’ve had other copies and they sound like I’m wearing a blanket over my head. Alongside my HS copy of “Freak Out” (first record I ever bought from you guys, I think), this has to be the most dramatic improvement over a typical recording I’ve ever heard!

Records like this justify Better Records in spades–wow!!

Stephen F.

Stephen, thanks for your letter.

Let’s face it: the average copy is pretty average. We wouldn’t even bother to play the average copy. Who needs it? Audiophiles want something that sounds good and record collectors can find records like these on ebay for under $10 or thereabouts, so no one in either group needs to come to our site to get some run-of-the-mill pressing of a title as common as this one.

Audiophiles come to us for the best, the copies that beat the Remastered Heavy Vinyl Con Jobs, the Half-Speeds, the whatever Audiophile BS pressing may be out there. We take them all on and beat them with ease.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to get a great record from us. It helps — don’t get me wrong, our Top Dollar copies are OUT OF THIS WORLD. But for the price of a good dinner (maybe an especially good dinner), you can have a record that will give you joy and pleasure far out of proportion to its cost.

UPDATE 2023

The bit about the record costing the price of a dinner is no longer true, unless you are in the habit of spending $1000 or more at dinner. Rarely are Hot Stamper pressings of Ziggy priced under that nowadays. Trying to balance the small supply with the high demand has resulted in the price getting somewhat out of hand, at least for those of us in the middle class.

If we could find more of the good pressings and sell them for cheaper, believe me, we would. At under $1000 the record would probably not last a day on the site. At $1500 and up, it’s there for those who love the album enough to pay the admittedly premium price we’re asking.

Stephen, we look forward to finding you more better sounding pressings of your favorite music.

TP

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Put Us to the Test! We Can Tell a Good Record from a Bad One, Digital or No Digital

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

And we don’t need to know anything about how it was made in order to judge it!

For those of you who did not follow this story from a few years back, you may want to catch up here.

Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough.

Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.

Back in August of 2022, I wrote what you see below to Geoff Edgers, the reporter who exposed this ridiculous mess. (I toned it down quite a bit. The original version was not suitable for publication.)

Earlier that same year he had visited me at my studio, where I played him the awful Dire Straits first album that MoFi remastered, one of the worst half speeds ever made (review coming, but you can get a good idea of my take on it here).

By August of 2022 he was starting to see just how crazy the world of audiophiles actually is, and the more he learned about some of these people, the crazier they seemed. And he was not wrong about that.

My letter (with a few additions):

Jim Davis (of MoFi) is not one to be trusted and would have loved to cover up this whole thing if he could have figured out how to do it. It got away from him, and as far as I’m concerned, good.

And you heard how shitty their Dire Straits record is. Who cares if it’s digital? The sound is bad. Why bother trying to figure out the reasons this crappy label doesn’t know how to make good records? It’s just a fact. Accept it.

Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums.

Of course they were. I defy you to find me two “audiophile experts” who are wrong more often than these guys!

From the article:

One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.

These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.

The best ears? Are you kidding me? In their dreams. These guys give every indication that they are virtually devoid of critical listening skills. The evidence supporting this reality has been laid out in this very blog in scores of commentaries over the course of more than twenty years.

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Chris Kimsey Engineered Two of My All Time My Favorite Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Chris Kimsey Engineered Albums Available Now

I have two personal favorites among his many excellent recordings.

Both are Must Own records in my book. Masterpieces even.

Ten Years After – A Space in Time and Peter Frampton – Wind of Change.

If you have not heard one or both of these classics, check them out. They are the very definition of the kind of Big Production Rock I have been listening to since I first fell in love with them back in the early Seventies. That was about fifty years ago and I still play them regularly for enjoyment. I have never tired of either of them in all that time and I doubt I ever will.

I’m sure you have plenty of records you feel the same way about in your collection. These are two of mine.

They are the very definition of big speaker albums. The better pressings have the kind of energy in their grooves that is sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is the Audio Challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic firepower, don’t expect to hear them the way Chris Kimsey wanted you to.

Both albums want to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at doing.

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Another 30th Street Studio Knockout – This One’s from Tony Bennett

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tony Bennett Available Now

UPDATE 2018

This review was written many years ago, circa 2010 I would guess, right about the time we first started doing shootouts for the album. (Here is what we have to say about I Left My Heart in San Francisco these days, suspiciously similar to what we had to say in 2010. As the song says, ‘”The fundamental things apply…”)

Everything that’s good about All Tube vocal recordings from the 50s and 60s is precisely what’s good about the sound of this record.

The huge studio the music was recorded in is captured faithfully on this pressing. The height, width and depth of the staging are extraordinary, a true Demo Disc in that regard.

We are not big soundstage guys here at Better Records, but we can’t deny the appeal of the space to be found on a record that sounds as good as this one does.

Transparency and Tubey Magic are key to the sound of the orchestra and you will find both in abundance on these two sides.

(Other records that are good for testing those two qualities can be found here and here.)

Albums such as this live and die by the quality of their vocal reproduction. On this record Mr. Tony Bennett himself will appear to be standing right in your listening room, along with the 38 other musicians from the session. (Actually, come to think of it, they’re probably sitting.)

On the best pressings, the space of your stereo room will seem to expand in all directions to accommodate them — an illusion of course, but nevertheless a remarkably convincing one.

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Every Picture Tells a Story Is a Big Speaker Recording Par Excellence

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with Demo Disc sound.

If you have a system with big dynamic speakers and can drive them to seriously loud listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.

You know what album this one has the most in common with? Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Every Pictures Tells a Story is the Nevermind of its day, twenty years earlier.

It has that kind of power in the bass and drums. Off the charts energy too.

But it also has beautifully realized acoustic guitars and mandolins, something that virtually no recording for the last twenty years can claim. In that sense it towers over Nevermind, an album I hold in very high esteem. 

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers, live-in-the-studio sound, this is the album for you.

The opening track on side one has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded. The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. Got big dynamic speakers? A concrete foundation under your listening room? You are going to have a great time playing this one for your audiophile friends who have screens or little box speakers. Once they hear what big well-recorded drums can sound like on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.

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