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!
Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now
More Reviews and Commentaries for Revolver
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.
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.
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.
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:
and the quality we prize most in a recording:
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.
The Story of Revolver, Dateline October 2007
(Incidentally, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.)
White Hot Stampers for Revolver are finally HERE! Let the celebrations begin! Seriously, this is a very special day for us here at Better Records. The Toughest Nut to Crack in the Beatles’ catalog has officially been cracked. Yowza!
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.
More 
Setup Advice for Turntables and Cartridges
UPDATE 2020
This commentary was written around 2010 or so. Mapleshade stopped sending me catalogs not long after this commentary, 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, the purest kind of nonsense that the audio world is currently drowning in.
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.
Here is the complete quote:
To get first rate sound and to get your money’s worth from any expensive cartridge, you MUST meticulously adjust VTA or tracking force every 3-4 months — that’s because stylus suspensions always sag with use. This lowers VTA and seriously kills dynamics and treble sparkle. Lots of people misinterpret this as a worn-out cartridge, an expensive error. Instead, raise VTA or lighten tracking force until your test record’s treble sounds too harsh, then drop VTA or lighten tracking force a hair. Your test record must not be thicker or thinner than the bulk of your record collection. Adjusting tracking force yields slightly better sonic results and longer cartridge life than adjusting VTA — and adjusting tracking force on most arms is WAY easier than adjusting VTA.
The basic idea here is that your cartridge sags over time, causing the VTA (Vertical Tracking Angle) to change, which results in less dynamics and “treble sparkle.”
(By the way, this is a term you will encounter on this blog as a criticism. Treble should never “sparkle,” but we get the point. We make fun of the sparkly sound Mobile Fidelity records are famous for, a sound which bugs the hell out of us, but which does not seem to bother some audiophiles. We assume their speakers or systems lack top end and could use a bit of a boost there. Our Townshend super tweeters allow us to hear all the top end there is on the records we play, unboosted, thank you very much.)
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Dear Sir,
You know when everything is just right? The record, the equipment, the space between your ears. The speakers disappear, the room, even yourself? And the only thing left is the music?
It doesn’t happen that often these days, but it did for me listening to side one of your UK Revolver. I was immersed. Thank you.
My Reply
Fantastic to hear, we love when that happens, to us and to anybody else of course. It’s the same high that gamblers get from winning big, and it keeps us audiophiles going until the next time it call comes together that way.
Our best to you, and thanks for your support since 2003!
TP
Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now
The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.
It’s dead-as-a-doornail sound, plain and simple.
And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the ’70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing?
But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.
So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.
But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.
The current record holder for Most Compressed Mobile Fidelity Record of All Time? This shockingly bad sounding release, a record I admit to owning and liking back in the ’80s. I had a lot of very expensive equipment back then, but it sure wasn’t helping me recognize how bad some of my records were.
How many audiophiles are where I used to be? Based on what I read on audiophile forums, and the kinds of audiophile pressings I see discussed on youtube videos, it seems that most of them are.
In practically every Hot Stamper listing on the site you will find some standard boilerplate that looks very much like what you see below. These are the qualities we want our records to have. I cannot begin to understand what audiophiles are listening for on these new reissues. Most of them do practically nothing well.
