beatlrevol

“…no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

A letter and some commentary about Revolver in mono follows the comment that was left by a Mr. Doodah defending The Beatles in mono. My reply follows.

First up, Mr. Doodah.

“you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. That’s exactly the point why the mono sounds good because no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field listening to music these days.

“They are either listening on Headphones or undoubtedly hundreds of degrees off access in another room or whatever they’re doing in their car or whatever so the stereo mixes will not stand up under those kinds of conditions.

“It’s only for nuts, so it’s like you sit down with a supposedly perfect acoustically design [sic] room and perfectly aligned speakers. Not exactly real world for the masses.

“I always tell people I teach engineering to… First thing… And learn how to do a great mono mix. Then you can start with all the fakery.

“You are way out of your league even pretending to know what you’re talking about”

Dear Mr. Doodah,

I would think that anyone reading this blog would see that we are not the least bit concerned with anything the masses are up to.

The masses seem to like streaming. Why should anyone waste his time taking what they like seriously? I suppose if you’re teaching those looking for work in an industry providing music to the masses, what you are telling them may be of some value.

It is surely of no value to those of us who aspire to high quality sound. Yes, the experience we are after does indeed require special rooms and speakers and, most especially, high quality stereo records to play.

If you’ve never heard The Beatles’s music reproduced at the highest levels on a big system in a dedicated room, why would you pretend to know anything about it?

Our customers can easily access the mono mixes and the modern digital releases. They have chosen instead to spend a great deal of money on our vintage records. The abundant evidence — sales figures, letters, etc. — should make it clear that our stereo Hot Stamper pressings do in fact deliver the superior sound we promised them.

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Should We Follow George Martin’s Expert Advice?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Scroll down to the bottom and click on the lighter text for “2 Comments” to read someone’s defense of the mono mixes, followed by our reply.

One of our good customers had this to say about the new Revolver pressing and The Beatles in mono:

Hey Tom,

I think the Revolver new thing doesn’t sound terrible. It’s just what you’re comparing it with. Most people are going off original pressings maybe and the acclaimed mono and stereo box stuff that came out in the last 10 years. IF you don’t try one of those Harry Moss records or a 1970s pressing, you probably think the new Revolver is fine or even good. That’s my theory. Who knows.

And as far as mono vs. stereo… you know the answer to this but I’m not sure. Were those earliest records meant to be mono or recorded as if they would be put out as mono and later records – maybe Rubber Soul on – meant to be stereo? I don’t know the answer to that. But maybe that’s why people are so loyal to mono. They feel like “this is how it was meant to be heard by the artist.”

George Martin was very clear about that, the first two albums for sure and really, the first four are, for him, better heard in mono than stereo.

Dear Sir,

I disagree. I think George heard the playback on studio monitors stuck on a wall five feet from his head.

Who cares what that sounds like?

Nobody who isn’t mixing a record would ever listen to music that way, certainly not in this day and age.

More importantly, who are you going to believe, your lying ears or George Martin?

This is fundamental to understanding everything to do with audio and records.

Richard Feynman summed it up beautifully:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Watch the Let It Be documentary produced by Peter Jackson, especially the last part where they play the album back for everyone who was involved in the making of it.

With four crappy monitor speakers lined up left to right and shoved up against a wall.

This is how they listened to the album in order to approve Glyn Johns’ mix and the takes he chose to use?

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Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions about shootouts.

I answered most of them in Part One of this commentary. Here are the questions he posed that remain to be answered.

[I]f you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [the best stampers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

First Question

If I may paraphrase, you’re asking, “do the right stampers always get good grades?”

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Robert Brook and I Discuss His Revolver Shootout on Youtube

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

He has now started a youtube channel and he invited me to talk about records for about an hour or so.

Please to enjoy.

Quick tip: set the playback speed at 1.25, 1.5 or 1.75, the conversation will still be intelligible and a lot shorter!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7ja6gdqbk&t=54s

Robert Brook Discusses His Youtube Shootout Video

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE. 

He recently made a youtube video for his shootout for Revolver, which we wrote about here.

Now he has posted some context and talked about his journey in audio which we think you will enjoy reading. Robert and I will be doing a video next week about his shootout, so expect to see that here on The Skeptical Audiophile soon.

REVOLVER SHOOTOUT!!!

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Robert Brook Makes History with the First Shootout Video Ever Posted on Youtube

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE. You can find it by clicking the link below.

Welcome to The Broken Record!

We recently loaned Robert some copies of Revolver so that he could do the first youtube-acceptable Record Shootout video in the history of mankind. He had three copies of his own to play along with the five we loaned him, plenty to work with.

We hope to be able to discuss the experience of doing the shootout and the video with him soon, but for now, let’s just enjoy the first of its kind.

Robert now knows firsthand something few audiophiles have made the effort to learn:

Shootouts are a great deal of work if you take the time to do them right.

If you have just a few pressings on hand and don’t bother to clean them carefully, or follow rigorous testing protocols, that kind of shootout anyone can do. You can find those kinds of shootouts on youtube, but we have never seen fit to take them seriously.

The results of shootouts that are not carried out in the serious way that we do and the way that Robert did cannot be trusted, for reasons that anyone reading this blog should find obvious.

Art Dudley illustrates this approach, but you could pick any reviewer you like — none of them have ever undertaken a shootout worthy of the name to our knowledge.

Here is an especially egregious example of how to go about it all wrong.

We ourselves struggled back in the old days. in 2005, our attempted shootout for Blue could not get off the ground. Two years and scores of shootouts later, we had been able to find and clean some amazing sounding copies, which is how we were able to tell how far off the mark this pressing was.

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Listening For the Spirit and Enthusiasm of the Musicians

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

The discussion below, brought about by a Hot Stamper shootout we conducted for Revolver quite a number of years ago (2007!), touches on many issues near and dear to us here at Better Records.

Some of the things we learned about Revolver all those years ago are important to our Hot Stamper shootouts to this very day, including, but not limited to:

  • Pressing variations,
  • System upgrades,
  • Dead wax secrets,

and the quality we prize most in a recording:

  • LIFE, or, if you prefer, energy.

At the end of the commentary we of course take the opportunity to bash the MoFi pressing of the album, a regular feature of our Beatles Hot Stamper shootouts. We’re not saying the MoFi Beatles records are bad; in the overall scheme of things they are mostly pretty decent. What we are saying is that, with our help, you can do a helluva lot better.

Our help doesn’t come cheap, as anyone on our mailing list will tell you. You may have to pay a lot, but with us you get what you pay for, and we gladly back up that claim with a 100% money back guarantee for every Hot Stamper pressing we sell.

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Where Can I Find Your Hot Stamper Beatles Pressings in Mono?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

One of our good customers had a question about our Hot Stampers recently:

I notice you don’t mention whether the Beatles recordings are stereo or mono. The Rubber Soul that just arrived is stereo. I’m guessing that the one I reordered is also stereo.

Do you guys stock the mono versions? Do you say on the site when something is mono. Let me know, as I like mono versions too.

I was close with Geoff Emerick and he always stressed to me that they spent tons of time on the mono mixes and not much on the stereos (up through Revolver). So let me know if/when you have mono for Rubber Soul and Revolver and perhaps I can snatch them up.

Brian

Brian,

All our records are stereo unless we specifically mention otherwise, as are our Beatles records.

We never sell Beatles records in mono, ever.

Here is a little something I wrote about it: Revolver in disgraceful mono

They spent time on the mono mixes because getting the levels right for all the elements in a recording is ten times harder than deciding whether an instrument or voice should be placed in the left, middle or right of the soundstage.

And they didn’t even do the stereo mixes right some of the time, IMHO.

But in my book, wall to wall beats all stacked up in the middle any day of the week.

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Turntable Tweaking Advice – Try This at Home, It Worked for Us

Advice on Making Audio Progress

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written around 2010 or so. Mapleshade stopped sending me catalogs not long after this commentary was published here on the blog, probably not because of anything I’d written.

More likely it was because I never bought anything from them. And why would I? They give out some good advice, sure, but it’s mixed in with a lot of audiophile nonsense of the purest kind. The audio world was drowning in it long before I got into the hobby in the early-70s, and let me be the first to admit that I have fallen for more than my share over the years (partly because I have been doing it for so long, if that’s any excuse).

If you want to know the truth, watching videos is not the way to learn about audio.

Reading blogs is not either.

The audiophile who wants to improve his playback quality has only one option, and that is to get his hands dirty, because doing audio is the only kind of audio that works. Everyone gives out plenty of advice, including us. Testing that advice and putting it what you learn from it into practice is what separates the men from the boys, or the good stereos from the bad ones, as the case may be.

The Mapleshade website has a piece of audio advice that caught the eye of one our customers, who sent me the excerpt below.  

Like most advice, especially audio advice, we find that some of it accords well with our own experience and some of it clearly does not. The relationship of good to bad is hard to determine without making a more careful study, but let’s just say that there is plenty of both and let that suffice.

That being the case, we thought it would be of service to our customers to break it down in more detail, separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

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