3-2025

Fighting The Dreaded J Curve

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). 

Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could sound.

In these posts he shares some of the things he’s learned since he started buying records at the age of ten roughly sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in his collection, although it cracked a long time ago and hasn’t seen a turntable in forever.)

Perhaps you suspect the electronics of your system are not as neutral as you thought they were.

So let’s say you get rid of your euphonic tube equipment (vintage or modern, makes no difference, colorations are colorations) and switch over to something that’s less colored.

The sound is now cleaner, cleaner, more present, more alive, more “right there” the way live music is “right there,” not veiled or vague or recessed the way so many stereos (at least in my experience) tend to sound. (Hard to believe, but some audiophiles seem to like that sound.)

But perhaps the sound now lacks richness, because you no longer have the richness your tubes were adding.

Perhaps now the sound is not as smooth as you would like, because it’s not being smoothed over by the smooth-sounding tube equipment you were using.

It’s very possible that the change has caused you to be less less happy with the sound.

Welcome to the J Curve.

You started at one point on the J, you made some changes, and now you find yourself with inferior sound compared to the sound you had before.

You may decide to turn back, to restore the sound you had so that you can enjoy your records the way you did when you had euphonic equipment, tube or transistor.

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You Say the Budget Stereo Treasury Has Better Sound than the Speakers Corner?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Borodin Available Now

The Borodin album you see pictured is a decent enough Speakers Corner Decca repress.

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 simply 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?

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Letter of the Week – “Kenney Jones’ drums are absolutely ripping my listening room apart”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

My testimonial on this one is simple: Holy f@#%!

Kenney Jones’ drums are absolutely ripping my listening room apart! They’re so three-dimensional it’s almost scary. That extended riff, with just the tambourine accompanying him, is just extraordinary. It gets going like a railroad train and just keeps building in power … Jeez. Really?

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Bill P.

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I couldn’t agree more. I said as much many, many years ago.

I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with DEMO DISC SOUND. If you have BIG DYNAMIC SPEAKERS and the power to drive them to serious listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.

You know what this album is? It’s the Nirvana Nevermind of the early ’70s. It has that kind of power in the bass and drums.

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, with jump-out-of-the-speakers direct-to-disc sound quality, 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 how big well-recorded drums sound on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.

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Are Hot Stamper Pressings Quiet?

More Answers to Your Frequently Asked Questions

They’re about as quiet as vintage LPs ever are.

Some surface noise is always going to be audible on an old record. We believe we sell the quietest vintage pressings in the world, but they are certainly not silent. Lately we’ve been adding the following text to our listings to clarify our position on surface noise:

Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any original pressing will play, and since only the right originals have any hope of sounding amazing on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

We continued:

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals. If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

We do a much better job of cleaning our records than we did years ago. In fact, any record that hasn’t been cleaned recently gets recleaned and replayed in a shootout, and many of them sound better and play quieter than our original grades would indicate.

How to Find Our Quietest Records

This section has the Hot Stamper pressings that earned our highest play grades.

However, for those who like their records to play with minimal surface noise, I recommend a quiet cartridge and very high quality arm and table.

In my experience they should be good for at least one full grade of improvement in the reduction of surface noise. They should be able to take you from “Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus” — the grade a brand new record from the ’70s would play at — to “Mint Minus” or something very close to it.

I have heard many of my quietest pressings play noisy on very expensive equipment owned by friends and I’ve made an effort to help some of them fix their problems.

Some audiophiles have a bad habit of getting married to their equipment, which makes it hard for them to find solutions to their problems.

The solution is more often than not different equipment. I’ve found this especially true in the case of cartridges.

One Further Note

The record cleaning advice we offer lays out the methods and materials we use to get our records to play as quiet as possible while still sounding as good as possible.

There are some fluids on the market that may get records to play quieter than the fluids we use, but we have yet to hear such fluids make the records sound as good as they do with the Walker System that’s at the heart of our cleaning regimen.

Again, it’s a matter of tradeoffs. We want the best sound for our records, period. Apparently our customers do too, as less than 1% of the records we sell are ever returned for excessive surface noise. (more…)