unscientific-thinking

Some approaches to this audio hobby tend to produce better results than others. When your thinking about audio and records does not comport with reality, you are much less likely to achieve the improvements you seek.

Without a good stereo, it is hard to find better records. Without better records, it is hard to improve your stereo.

You need both, and thinking about them the right way, using the results of carefully run experiments — not feelings, opinions, theories, received wisdom or dogma — is surely the best way to acquire better sound.

A scientific, empirically-based audio approach leads to better quality playback. This will in turn make the job of recognizing high quality pressings — the ones you find for yourself, or the ones we find for you — much, much easier.

Dopey Record Theories – Putting Bad Ideas to the Test

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark

Below we discuss some record theories that seem to be making the rounds these days.

The discussion started with a stunning White Hot Stamper 2-pack that had just gone up on the site..

I implored the eventual purchaser to note that side two of record one has Joni sounding thin, hard and veiled. If you look at the stampers you can see it’s obviously cut by the same guy (no names please!), and we’re pretty sure both sides were stamped out at the same time of the day since it’s impossible to do it any other way.

What accounts for the amazing sound of one side and the mediocre sound of its reverse?

If your theory cannot account for these huge differences in sound, your theory is fundamentally flawed. 

Can anything be more ridiculous than the ad hoc, evidence-free theories of some audiophile record collectors desperately searching for a reason to explain why records — even the two sides of the same record — sound so different from one another?

The old adage “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” couldn’t be more apt. If you want to know if a pudding tastes good, a list of its ingredients, the temperature it was cooked at, and the name of the person stirring it on the stove is surely of limited value. To know the taste one need only take a bite.

If you want to know the sound of a record, playing it is the best way to find out, preferably against other pressings, under carefully controlled conditions, on good equipment, while listening critically and taking notes.

The alternative is to… Scratch that. There is no alternative. Nothing else will ever work. In the world of records there are no explanatory theories of any value, just as there are no record gurus with all the answers. There are only methods that will help you find the best pressings, and other methods that will not.

The good news is that these methods are explained in detail on this very site, free of charge.

We’ve made it clear to everyone how to go about finding better sounding LPs. Once you see the positive results our methods produce, we suspect you will no longer be wasting time theorizing about records.

You will have learned something about them, at least about some of them, and that hard-won knowledge is the only kind that counts for much in the world of records.

Scientific Thinking – A Short Primer

Some approaches to this audio hobby tend to produce better results than others. When your thinking about audio and records does not comport with reality, you are much less likely to achieve the improvements you seek.

Without a good stereo, it is hard to find better records. Without better records, it is hard to improve your stereo.

You need both, and thinking about them the right way, using the results of carefully run experiments — not feelings, opinions, theories, received wisdom or dogma — is surely the best way to acquire better sound.

A scientific, empirically-based audio approach leads to better quality playback. This will in turn make the job of recognizing high quality pressings — the ones you find for yourself, or the ones we find for you — much, much easier.

Further Reading

What, You’re Selling Your TAS Super Disc List LPs? Say It Isn’t So!

More of the Music of David Crosby

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Crosby

[The bulk of this listing was written more than ten years ago and updated last year. Please to enjoy!]

[Also, whatever you do, don’t buy the Super Saver pressing of David Crosby’s debut like the one you see pictured, assuming you want to hear the album sound the way it should. Original only, and the right one of course.]

We ran across a website years ago that confirmed our worst prejudices regarding audiophiles and their apparent desire to rely on gurus such as Harry Pearson to tell them which recordings sound good and which don’t.

This flies in the face of everything we stand for here at Better Records.

Since no two records sound the same, a list of so-called Super Discs is practically meaningless.

“Practically meaningless” hits the nail right on the head as far as we are concerned.

Picture yourself standing in your local record store with a record in your hands, one you happen to know is on the TAS List. This knowledge makes the record slightly more likely to sound better than any other record you might have randomly picked up in the store. Insignificantly, trivially more likely. In other words, as a practical matter, not all that much more likely.

Why is this? Three reasons:

  1. Many Super Discs are not on the TAS List;
  2. Some of the records on the TAS List are not deserving of Super Disc status; and most importantly,
  3. Most pressings of titles on the TAS List don’t sound especially good — only the right ones do. (I pictured the David Crosby album you see above with the cover you definitely don’t want in order to hammer home that point.)

But that’s not even the point. Ask yourself this:

Why on earth would anyone want to collect the records on The TAS List, when most of those records contain music that appeals to a very small group of people not named Harry Pearson?

The purpose of having an audiophile quality music system is that it allows you to hear your favorite music sound better than it would otherwise sound.

It’s not for playing someone else’s favorite records. It’s for playing your favorite records.

This is why we do our Hot Stamper shootouts for records nobody in his right mind would think of doing. Sergio Mendes? Zuma? Toulouse Street? You’ve got to be kidding.

No, we’re not. We love those albums. We sincerely want to find great sounding copies of them for our customers who love them too. It’s as simple as that.

Nobody else on the planet seems capable (or interested) in doing the kind of work it takes to find superior pressings of these albums, so if we don’t do it, who will?

But I digress. The website we ran across is no longer active.

Had you gone there back in the day, the page you would have seen first is a list of Marty’s Audiophile Vinyl Collection, which he introduces this way:

I have been a reader of The Absolute Sound since issue 33, (1982) one of the great journeys of my life. (I still have those old issues.) I was always an avid follower of the “Super disc list” that Harry Pearson had put together, a “Holy scripture” that I followed in earnest. I have amassed many of those titles knowing full well that I would be rewarded by sonic treats they lay ahead.

Thanks Harry !!

Holy scripture? Sonic treats? I think I just threw up in my mouth.

What followed was the TAS List, in all its vainglory, with Marty’s links to the copies he has been “fortunate” enough to acquire.

Just for fun you might have wanted to click on the Rock & Pop section. Here you would have found some of the worst sounding audiophile pressings ever made.

Mobile Fidelity Magical Mystery Tour?

Abbey Road and Rubber Soul on Japanese vinyl?

This is some real garbage. 

The more I browsed, the more I had the feeling that my head was going to explode. Records like these positively disgust me. They pretend to be audiophile records, when in fact they universally sound phony and wrong. They fool audiophiles easily enough, that’s pretty clear, but any music lover would recognize their junky qualities in a heartbeat.

Here’s the Kicker

If you’ve been reading our commentaries over the years, you know how mercilessly we bash musically-empty “audiophile” pressings. When you own dead-as-a-doornail-sounding audio equipment (the kind most audiophile equipment dealers have been selling as long as I have been around) or play musically inert LPs like Dafos, you have no reason to come home and turn on your stereo. Where is the enjoyment? Where is the emotional satisfaction? How much fun can it be to play somebody else’s favorite records?

So imagine my joy, my positive glee when I came to another page, which said:

“Alas, it is true… I am selling my entire collection of records!”

(That Alas is priceless, no?)

OF COURSE YOU ARE. You don’t have good records. You have what Harry and other audiophiles told you were good records. But they’re not. They are (mostly) Audiophile Bullshit records. And people into Audiophile Bullshit tend to get out of this hobby, or at least the record side of it, because there is no musical satisfaction to be had by playing these kinds of LPs.

(more…)

Audiophilia 101 – What Kind of (Audio) Fool Was I?

New to the Blog? Start Here

Thoughts on Becoming an Expert Listener

[This commentary was written in 2007 or thereabouts.]

Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding audiophile more than thirty years ago. [Make that 45+ years ago, ouch].

Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last?

Was Devo right? Is everything in audio getting worse?

Our Story Begins

One Man Dog has long been a favorite James Taylor album of mine. It didn’t catch on too well with the general public when it came out but it caught on just fine with me. I used to play it all the time. As a budding but misguided audiophile back in the early ’70s, I foolishly bought the import pressing at my local record store, The Wherehouse, assuming it would sound better and be pressed on quieter vinyl. The latter may have been true, probably was true, but the former sure wasn’t. Turns out even the average domestic original is far better sounding, but how was I to know?

Compare and Contrast? What For?

Back in those days it would never have occurred to me to buy more than one copy of a record and do a head to head comparison to see which one sounded better. I approached the subject Platonically, not scientifically: the record that should sound better would of course sound better, so what is the point of testing?

Later on in the decade a label by the name of Mobile Fidelity would come along claiming to actually make better sounding pressings than the ones the major labels put out, and — cluelessly — I bought into that nonsense too.

(To be fair, sometimes they did — Touch, Waiting for Columbus and American Beauty come to mind, but my god, Katy Lied, Year of the Cat and Sundown have to be three of the worst sounding records I’ve ever played in my life.)

[Obviously, we no longer agree with much of that except for the one MoFi record that has stood the test of time, Touch.]

The Audiophile of Today

From our point of view, today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making thirty years ago. The Audiophile Heavy Vinyl Remaster, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each burdened with an equally dismal track record?

And isn’t it every bit as true today as it was in the past that the audiophiles who buy these “special” pressings rarely seem to notice that many of them don’t actually sound any good?

The Learning Curve Is Looking Awfully Flat

Pardon my pessimism, but it seems to me the learning curve these days is looking awfully flat. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of learning going on. If such learning were actually going on, how would most of these audiophile labels still be in business?

Don’t get me wrong: some progress has been made. Reference, Chesky and Audioquest thankfully no longer burden us with their awful LPs. But is the new Blue or Fragile really any better than the average MoFi from 1979? Different yes, but better? I know one thing: I couldn’t sit through an entire side of either of them. And I love both of those albums.

Compared to the real thing, can any of these records really compete sonically? A few, I guess, but too few, and they are pretty darn far between.

Easy Answers and Quick Fixes

(more…)

John writes: “The only problem I have with my evaluations is that I never heard his records.”

More Commentaries Prompted by Forums, Videos and Comments Sections

More Letters from fans and detractors alike.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out the interview Wired conducted with me a few years back.

If you have some time on your hands, maybe too much time on your hands, go to the comments section and read the 300 plus postings that can be found there, the writers of which seem to be offended by the very idea of Hot Stampers. They also decry the obvious shortcomings of analog vinyl itself, as well as the ridiculously expensive equipment some “credulous, misguided audiophiles,” their terms, use to play vinyl records, as if you didn’t know already!

Here is one that I found to be especially interesting, from a psychological perspective if not from an audio one: 

Bad, mismatched system setup. Customer base probably has the same. Also evaluation process is questionable. Uses a mediocre solid state amp and looks for “tubey magic” because of some misplaced concept of “accuracy” as I discussed before. [Man, this guy has got our number all right, ouch!]

Yes, there is a lot of bad stuff out there, and it does give the stereo industry as a whole a bad name. I have heard some pretty crappy, expensive setups in my day.

I was listening to Phoebe Snow’s “Second Childhood” on my best system last night. Boy, I love my new turntable!

The only problem I have with my evaluations is that I never heard his records. My comments are probably correct, but it would be interesting to audition a few of his “golden” albums just to confirm he hasn’t really found anything. The reason I am confident that he probably does not have anything is because virtually every repressing I’ve heard is better than the original. Claiming otherwise hurts his credibility.

John

There is one sentence in the paragraphs above that should raise a giant red flag and help you to appreciate how reliable John’s analysis of our stereo and methods might turn out to be. If you didn’t catch it the first time through, give it another shot. Okay, here goes:

The reason I am confident that he probably does not have anything is because virtually every repressing I’ve heard is better than the original.

That’s so strange! Virtually every repressing I’ve heard is worse than the original.

What gives?

If I may paraphrase our writer: the reason I am confident that he probably does not know anything about records or audio is that he thinks repressings are always better than vintage pressings. We’ve critically auditioned tens of thousands of records, including many hundreds of repressings, admittedly on our “bad, mismatched system setup,” and I guess we must have gotten it all wrong over the 34 years we’ve been in the audiophile record business. The shame of it all!

Obviously, John knows he does not need to try one of our Hot Stampers. You can see him talking himself into the wisdom of doing nothing with each succeeding paragraph. It’s so easy for him to be right by pretending to know something he can’t possibly know.

(Knowledge that is not backed up by empirical findings [1] comes in for a lot of criticism here at Better Records, and for good reason. Guessing, speculating and assuming are poor approaches to separating good pressings from bad ones.)

And if he did ever order one, and had at least a halfway decent stereo to play it on, it would turn his world upside down so fast it would make his head hurt, and the possibility of that happening would be very, very upsetting. It makes no sense for John to risk such an outcome.

Even if our records were as cheap as the ones he is buying, even the superior sound would not justify the psychological damage that would result. He would basically have to start his collection over again, as this good customer did.  A few hundred others just like him have done the same, and they’re the ones that will be keeping us in business for years to come. To paraphrase another famous saying, “They’ve heard the future, and it works!

Better for John to follow the path he is on. It’s working for him. Why would he want to rock his own boat?

We wrote about that issue on this very blog. Here is an excerpt:

Our Hot Stampers will of course still sound quite a bit better on even a run-of-the-mill audiophile system than any Heavy Vinyl pressing you care to name, but if you’re happy with a $30 reissue, what’s your incentive to spend five or ten or twenty times that amount, based on nothing more than my say-so? Even with a 100% Money Back Guarantee, why rock your own boat?

On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile—even a novice—can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns. You don’t have to spend a dime to discover the reality underlying the concept of Hot Stampers.

But perhaps you may have noticed, as I have, that most audio skeptics do not go out of their way to prove themselves wrong. And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call Confirmation Bias practically guarantees that you can’t hear something you don’t want to hear.

Which is all well and good. At Better Records we don’t let that slow us down. Instead we happily go about our business Turning Skeptics Into Believers, taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any Heavy Vinyl LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason.

They’re usually so bad it’s actually fun to hear how screwy they sound when played back correctly.

But don’t tell John that.

[1] Pretense of Knowledge

When someone pretends to know things they cannot possibly know, or think they know things that simply are not true and are easily demonstrated to be false, such a person can said to be suffering from a “pretense of knowledge.”

Some of the theories that audiophiles believe — original pressings have the best sound, the first pressings off the earliest stampers sound better than later pressings — are best understood as articles of faith, since there is rarely much data to support them.

“Made from the master tape,” “no compression or equalization was used in the making of the recording,” “AAA, all analog mastering,” etc., etc., are all forms of pretentious knowledge that should never be accepted at face value.

Anyway, these claims and others like them are beside the point.

Records must be judged only by the way they sound, not by what may or may not be true about the processes used to make them.

Pink Floyd – “Breathe” Is a Good Check for Midrange Tonality

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Letters and Commentaries for Dark Side of the Moon

Breathe is my favorite test track for side one for any version of Dark Side Of The Moon, Half-Speed or otherwise. When the voices come in about halfway through the song, you can tell that most copies are too bright simply by listening to the vocals on this track. The cymbals might sound wonderful; lots of other instruments might sound wonderful; and there might be plenty of ambience, detail and transparency.

But all of that counts for nothing if the voices don’t sound right.

And on most copies the voices sound bright, aggressive, grainy and transitory. (This is the case with the 180 gram 30th Anniversary Edition, unfortunately. That pressing will wake up a sleepy stereo, but my stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play that recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.)

The discussion below may shed light on some of the issues involved in the remastering of Dark Side.

Of course, most audiophiles are still under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity, with their strict ‘quality control’, which they spend hundreds of words explaining on their inner sleeves, eliminates pressing variations of these kinds.

Isn’t that the reason for Limited Edition Audiophile Records in the first place? The whole idea is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Copy money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 99% of what we do around here would be a waste of time.

Everybody knows what the audiophile pressings are, and there would be nothing for us to do but find them and throw them up on the website for you to buy. Why even bother to play them if they all sound so good?

Mobile Fidelity

If you’ve spent any time on the site at all you know we are not fans of Mobile Fidelity’s mastering. There are a few potentially excellent MoFis, and certainly Dark Side Of The Moon would be included in that group.

But it’s vitally important to keep in mind that the average copy of DSOTM on MoFi is not at all good. We had a 2-Pack a while back that illustrated that point perfectly — two copies, each with one amazing side and one mediocre side, allowing the buyer to hear for himself the good and the bad side of Dark Side. We wrote:

The person who buys this two LP Package will have the opportunity to hear for himself just how bad most MoFi pressings of Dark Side are. With these two LPs, you are getting an Amazing Side One and an Amazing Side Two – just not on the same piece of vinyl. (The joke here at Better Records is that I should label which side sounds good and which side doesn’t in case the buyer has trouble telling them apart. Since so many audiophiles like so many bad sounding records – don’t get me started – this is not as ridiculous as it sounds. But the difference between the two sides is so OBVIOUS that virtually anyone will hear it. (Even those people who still think that MoFi was a great label.)

$250 is a lot to pay for the MoFi of Dark Side Of The Moon. But consider this: the UHQR sells for two to four times that amount, and doesn’t sound as good as the Hot Stampers found here. Of course, the people that buy UHQRs would never notice that, because they would have simply assumed that they had already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and wouldn’t need to try another. [More on that kind of mistake here.]

The complete text for our Mobile Fidelity shootout can be found here.

I was guilty of the same Mistaken Audiophile Record Collector Thinking myself about 40 years ago. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper in the early ’80s (right before the box set came out in ’83) and thinking how amazing it sounded and that I was so lucky to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now, I suspect that all I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice) and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard plenty of good pressings of Sgt. Peppers, like the wonderful UK reissues we regularly put on the site, I suspect that now the MoFi UHQR would sound so phony to me I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

Back to Dark Side. We’ve found that the album, along with the others linked below, is helpful for testing the following qualities:

  1. Midrange Tonality
  2. Midrange Presence

I would make one other quick point here. The bad MoFi pressings of Dark Side are veiled and recessed in the midrange on Breathe. I remember playing the record in the ’80s and thinking how muffled it sounded on that song. Looking back and thinking about those days, I realize I had a lot to learn, about a lot of things. I had no idea that MoFi’s standard operating procedure was to suck out the midrange. Here is another, equally famous MoFi with similar midrange issues.

  1. Upper Midrange Brightness

(more…)

Simon and Garfunkel – 1A, or Is 1B Better? Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Before we go any further, I have a question: Why are we guessing?

I received an email recently from a customer who had gone to great pains to do his own shootout for a record; in the end he came up short, with not a lot to show for his time and effort. It had this bit tucked in toward the end:

Some of [Better Records’] Hot Stampers are very dear in price and most often due to the fact that there are so few copies in near mint condition. I hate to think of all the great Hot Stampers that have ended up in piles on the floor night after night with beer, Coke, and seeds being ground into them.

Can you imagine all the 1A 1B or even 2A 2B masters that ended up this way or were just played to death with a stylus that would be better used as a nail than to play a record!

As it so happens, shortly thereafter I found myself on Michael Fremer’s old website of all places, where I saw something eerily similar in his review for the (no doubt awful) Sundazed vinyl. I quote below the relevant paragraphs.

So how does this Sundazed reissue hold up next to an original 1A Columbia pressing that I bought new when it originally was released (it still has the Sam Goody “C” Valley Stream sticker on it, with the $2.49 markdown written in pen)? Well, for one thing, when people say records wear out, I don’t know what they are talking about! Since it was first released more than forty years ago, I’ve played this record a hundred times at least, in Ithaca in my fraternity house, in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Hackensack and now and it still sounds fantastic. It’s quiet, it’s detailed, it’s three-dimensional and it still has extended, clean high frequencies.

No reissue could possibly touch an original 1A pressing of just about any Columbia title and that goes for this reissue, which is very good, but not as open, spacious, wideband, transparent and “tubey” as the original.

He later goes on to give this piece of advice:

If you can find a clean, reasonably priced used original 1A pressing, it’s definitely going to sound better, but if you can’t, this reissue sounds very good and you’ll not know what you’re missing.

The entire review can be found on his site for those who care to read it. If, as MF seems to believe, you won’t know what you’re missing on the Sundazed LP, you need to put a lot more effort into this hobby, or find yourself another one. If it’s anything like most of their cardboardy crap, it’s missing a great deal more than it’s finding. (more…)

The Difficulties of Being a Self-Taught Audiophile (Hint: It’s a Lot Harder than It Looks)

Advice on Making Audio Progress

Audiophilia 101 – What Kind of Audio Fool Was I?

When I was starting out in this hobby back in the ’70s, it seemed that many audiophiles preferred half-speed mastered LPs, others preferred Japanese pressings, and almost everyone thought direct to disc recordings were the ne plus ultra of sound quality.

Now audiophiles appear to prefer SACDs, Heavy Vinyl and pressings mastered at 45 RPM. Same mediocre-at-best wine, different bottle.

It is our opinion that none of these are the answer to finding and acquiring higher quality sound. They are relatively cheap and convenient temporary fixes, but as a solution to the actual problem facing the serious audiophile, they are best seen as a stopgap.

For those of us who never wavered in our commitment to radical and revolutionary progress, they can be seen most clearly in hindsight as the dead end they always were.

The path forward is exactly the path we have taken and charted for everyone.

With our approach to finding the best sounding records, cleaning them the way we do, playing them against each other the way we do, using the sound improving devices and equipment we recommend, we know you can succeed.

If we can do it, you can do it.

Who Shall Guide Them?

Most audiophiles have no one to guide them in this devilishly difficult record and audio game. They are mostly self-taught, which is precisely the heart of the problem. You can teach yourself pretty much all you need to know in this hobby, but it requires a huge expenditure of time and resources: thousands of hours and ten of thousands of dollars at a minimum. A few hours a week won’t get you very far.

I should know. I was one of those guys who put in a few hours a week for about the first twenty years I spent in audio. In the end I didn’t have much to show for it, although I sure thought I did. [1]

It was only when I seriously dedicated myself to audio and records sometime in the ’90s that I started making real progress. With more than ten years of nose-to-the-grindstone effort I was ready — eager even — to give up on audiophile vinyl with the knowledge that it was a distraction and, even worse than a distraction, an impediment to further growth. [2]

How Bad Are They, Really

How many see it that way? How many audiophiles know how mediocre their audiophile pressings really are? One per cent? Two per cent? Five? (The customers of ours who’ve done their own shootouts know exactly how bad they are.)

However many it is, it’s about the same percentage who actually take the hobby seriously and constantly work at it. That’s my guess anyway.

Just try telling that to anyone on an audio forum. You will be shouted down in no time by those who can’t abide the idea that the latest audiophile pressings on which they’ve spent their hard earned money aren’t the best of the best and way better than anything else.

Of course they’re the best! What else could they be? Everybody says so. Everybody knows it’s true. The reviewers in the magazines and the youtubers and my fellow forum posters all told me they were the best, so who the hell do you think you are to say otherwise?

Hearing Is Believing

This is the problem. Unless you can clean and play your “old” records right, and you actually have some good copies to play, none of what we say here will make any sense. You really have to hear it for yourself, but to hear it for yourself you have to do a number of things right.

You can do it anyway you like, but if you truly want to succeed, you might try doing it the way we do. It works for us and we know it can work for you. 

There is such a thing as progress. The word is getting out, slowly, but it is getting out. These things take time. Hell, people are still digging their way out of that rat hole called the Compact Disc, the one with Perfect Sound Forever, so I guess we’ll all just have to be more patient.

[1] Audio is a lot harder than I thought because I didn’t know enough to know even that much.

[2] We crossed the Rubicon in 2007. And we never looked back.

Further Reading

The Beatles / Sgt. Peppers – Practical Advice on Pressings to Avoid

beatlessgtHot Stampers of Sgt. Peppers in Stock Now

Letters and Commentaries for Sgt. Peppers

Chris, an erstwhile customer from a very long time ago, sent us a letter describing his search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading his letter is that many record collecting rules were broken in going about his search the way he did. But then I thought, What rules? Whose rules? Where exactly does one find these rules? If one wants to avoid breaking them they need to be written down someplace, don’t they?

Wikipedia maybe?

Sadly, no, not at Wikipedia, or any place else for that matter — until now. As crazy as it sounds, we are going to try to lay down a few record collecting rules for record loving audiophiles, specifically to aid these individuals in their search for better sounding vinyl pressings. And by “these individuals” we mean you.

See if you can spot the rules that were broken by Chris in his fruitless search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper. Note that this letter came to us long before the new Beatles CDs and vinyl had been remastered.

Hi Tom

A few months ago, I purchased a new UK import of Sgt Pepper. Too bad it turned out to be digitally remastered. I had been checking your site for this album over the last few months, but only saw two: a sealed MFSL UHQR for $1000, and a hot stamper for $500, both out of my price range. So then I started looking at Ebay, and recently purchased two “sealed” versions of Sgt Pepper – a USA Apple, which cost me $170, and a USA Capitol (original rainbow label) for which I paid $80.

Tonight, I wanted to copy one of the Sgt Pepper’s to Hi-rez (192/24) DVD audio. Both sealed records from Ebay were cleaned with Last RCM record cleaner on a VPI 16.5, and treated with LAST record preservative. (My usual routine)

First I tried the Capitol (rainbow). It even had “mastered by Capitol” stamped on the run-out area, usually a good sign, I thought. The sound was quite good, except for two things:

1) the sound level drops about 3 db in the first track where they sing “We’d love to take you home with us , we’d love to take you home” (3 db drop occurs) followed by “I don’t really want to…” 2) the record has thousands of audible ticks. No kidding, when I recorded it, and looked at the waveform in Adobe Audition, there are really about 20 little ticks per second. If I try to clean it up manually, one click at a time, (my usual routine), it will take an eternity to finish the job. (slight exaggeration) [sic] So I tried the $170 sealed “Apple” purchased from someone named “sealedbeatles”.

This record is a total disaster. It has no high end. It’s like someone turned the treble all the way down (if my system had a treble control). I looked at the spectrum of a few seconds of music, and the level at 8 khz is the same as the level at 60 khz, down about 90 db. (duller than poor AM radio). The record is loaded with surface noise too. The record is totally useless.

Finally I tried the UK digitally remastered Parlophone, purchased probably from Music Direct, or some place like that. It sounds harsher than hell, and oddly has a tone actually recorded on the record at about 70 Khz, which you can “see” poking up from the noise floor in its spectrum.

I’m still looking.

Chris

There is almost no chance Chris would be successful with this approach.

The following would have been my five pieces of advice had he told me in advance what he was planning to do.

1) Avoid Sealed Records

There’s a very high probability that any given sealed record won’t sound especially good. The average record has, by definition, sound that is best described as average. For this reason we do not recommend you buy any sealed record if you expect it to sound especially good; i.e., better than average.

Neither is it likely to play quietly for that matter. A sealed record should play quieter than the average used record, but there is no guarantee that it will. Our Hot Stampers are always 100% guaranteed to satisfy in every way, surfaces included, or your money back.

2) Avoid Half-Speed Mastered Records

Chris saw a UHQR of Sgt. Pepper on our site and wanted it but could not afford it. NOBODY should want that record at that price. It’s not very good, not for that kind of money anyway. {We only sell Hot Stamper pressings we have actually cleaned, played and auditioned ourselves these days, and that has been true for more than a decade. Like I say, this is an old letter.}

3) Avoid Domestic Beatles Records

So Chris went out and bought two domestic Beatles records, which turned out to be awful sounding.

Well of course they did. Have you ever heard a good sounding domestic Beatles record? There are a few out there but they are pretty rare. We know of some; they can sound good but they are not remotely in the same league as our Hot Stampers. We wouldn’t waste our time on them.

4) Avoid Record Cleaning Fluids We Don’t Recommend

We only recommend two: Walker Enzyme Treatment and The Disc Doctor. [Now only one, Walker. Now that Lloyd Walker has passed, we are the exclusive distributors of the Walker fluids and will be making them available as soon as we can get our operation set up to produce them.]

If you’ve tried either or both and still prefer another record cleaning fluid, fine by me. But if you haven’t tried either or both, stop using whatever you are using right now and order one or both. If either of them doesn’t make your records sound better than what you are currently using, send what’s left back to us and we will refund your money. You don’t have much to lose and a great deal to gain.

I am frankly astonished at how poorly most record cleaning fluids on the market today work. More often than not they actually make the records I’ve cleaned sound WORSE — quieter maybe, but worse! Disc Doctor and Walker make your records quieter and they make them sound better. It’s crazy — CRAZY — to use anything else if you haven’t tested what you are currently using against them.

What else? Oh yeah, this one:

5) Avoid Digitally Remastered… Anything

Not much more needs to be said here I’m guessing. We are not big fans of digital remastering at Better Records. We like to say “good digital beats bad analog any day,” but the goal of Better Records is to get you good analog. Bad analog is what those other guys sell.

Final Thoughts

Some approaches to this audio hobby tend to produce better results than others. When your thinking about audio and records does not comport with reality, you are much less likely to achieve the improvements you seek.

Without a good stereo, it is hard to find better records. Without better records, it is hard to improve your stereo.

You need both, and thinking about them the right way, using the results of carefully run experiments — not feelings, opinions, theories, received wisdom or dogma — is surely the best way to acquire better sound.

An empirically-based approach to audio is sure to result in notable improvements to your playback. This will in turn make the job of recognizing high quality pressings — the ones you find for yourself, or the ones we find for you — much, much easier.

I was guilty of a great deal of mistaken audiophile thinking myself starting in the ’70s. (Like many audiophiles I have met over the years, in my early days I found myself in a cult.)

I’ve learned a thing or two in the nearly fifty years I’ve been involved with audio and records, and much of what I’ve learned I’ve written about on this blog. I hope you find some of it useful on your way to better analog sound.

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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 are so drastically compromised and limited that 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 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 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.

But for those of us who actually play these records, there is little evidence to support any of this conventional wisdom.

However, the above sentence only makes sense if the following four conditions have been met by the person judging the new pressings against the old ones:

  1. He or she has a good 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 have spent much time on this blog, you have probably read by now that the first three on this list are what allow you to develop 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 high quality equipment on which to play them

The music lives and breathes on those old LPs. When playing them 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.

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Why You Won’t Hear What You Don’t Want to Hear

More Entries in Our Critical Thinking Series

It’s because of a well documented cognitive error known as Confirmation Bias.

Wikipedia sums it up this way:

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated entirely, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.

But hold on just a minute: What about us? Aren’t we as susceptible to this particular critical thinking error as anyone else?

Of course we are. But that’s where our famous Hot Stamper Shootouts come in. They are the only way we manage to (almost) always stay on the straight and narrow.

By regularly revisiting the same records over and over again under blind testing conditions, playing the best recently acquired copies against our reference pressings, and doing so sometimes more than once a year, we make sure our results are as correct as they can possibly be.

We’ve discussed this issue in depth on our site. The commentary below gets at most of it:

After doing our first shootout for this album a few years back, I can honestly say I had never heard this music sound remotely as good as it did on the best Hot Stamper pressings we played. More importantly, from an audiophile point of view, I can honestly say that I never imagined it could sound as good as I was hearing it. The sound was just OUT OF THIS WORLD.

It’s why we link the Revolutionary Changes in Audio commentary to so many of our Hot Stamper listings. The changes we discuss are precisely what make it possible for any audiophile (this means you) to hear better sound than they ever imagined on all their favorite albums.

All you have to do is do all the stuff we do.

Let’s Face Facts

Hot Stampers simply do not exist for most audiophiles.

Most audiophiles don’t have the system (power, equipment, room, tweaks) to bring them to life.

Or the listening skills to recognize a Hot Stamper pressing were they to encounter one.

The most damning evidence? Most analog-oriented audiophiles are quite happy with the sound of Heavy Vinyl LPs, the kind that we regularly trash around here. Those records set a decidedly low standard for sound quality, to our ears anyway, so if the typical audiophile is happy with them, what does that tell you about his audio chain and his critical listening skills?

Rock Your Own Boat

Our Hot Stampers will of course still sound quite a bit better on even a run-of-the-mill audiophile system than any Heavy Vinyl pressing you care to name, but if you’re happy with a $30 reissue, what’s your incentive to spend five or ten or twenty times that amount, based on nothing more than my say-so? Even with a 100% Money Back Guarantee, why rock your own boat?

On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile — even a novice — can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns. You don’t have to spend a dime to discover the reality underlying the concept of Hot Stampers.

So-Called Skeptics

But perhaps you may have noticed, as I have, that most audio skeptics do not go out of their way to prove themselves wrong. And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call Confirmation Bias practically guarantees that you can’t hear something you don’t want to hear.

Which is all well and good. At Better Records we don’t let that slow us down. Instead we happily go about our business Turning Skeptics Into Believers (one record at a time of course), taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any audiophile LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason.

(They’re usually so bad it’s actually fun to hear how screwy they sound when played back correctly. Who knows — on a ’70s-era Technics turntable running into a Japanese receiver they might sound great. When we buy old audiophile collections, that’s often the sort of table we find collecting dust along with the vinyl. Might be just the system you need to get them to sound their “best.”)

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