beatlrubbe

How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on an Album?

More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Carrying out a carefully controlled shootout with a large number of cleaned pressings is precisely what teaches you what to listen for on an album.

One way to think about it is this: you can’t know what to listen for until you start listening.

If you’re playing enough of copies, and your playback quality is good enough, the records themselves will tell you what they are capable of. All you have to do is listen to what the best of them are doing.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

    1. First you go deep into the sound.
    2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
    3. Now, with the knowledge of what to listen for, you are in a position to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right, and you do it often enough, it has the power to change everything you will ever understand about audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes clear what they “did to it” in the mastering. Compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound, it’s obvious how far short of the mark it falls.

The critiques we write nowadays are usually quite specific about the shortcomings of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some testimonial letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are limiting yourself to buying vintage records, not remastered pressings, you are probably not wasting much of your money.

That’s because every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered more than a stopgap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally get hold of a better sounding vintage pressing in good playing condition.

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How Does the Heavy Vinyl Rubber Soul Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

This review was originally written in 2015.

We are so excited to tell you about the first of the Heavy Vinyl Beatles remasters we’ve played! As we cycle through our regular Hot Stamper shootouts for The Beatles’ albums we will be of course be reviewing more of them*. I specifically chose this one to start with, having spent a great deal of time over the last year testing the best vinyl pressings against three different CD versions of Rubber Soul.

The short version of our review of the new Rubber Soul vinyl would simply point out that it’s awful, and, unsurprisingly, it’s awful in most of the ways that practically all modern Heavy Vinyl records are: it’s opaque, airless, energy-less and just a drag.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to take Michael Fremer, the foremost champion of thicky vinyl, to task in expectation of his usual rave review, when to my surprise I found the rug had been pulled out from under me — he didn’t like it either. Damn!

MF could hear how bad it was. True to form, he thinks he knows why it doesn’t sound good:

As expected, Rubber Soul, sourced from George Martin’s 1987 16 bit, 44.1k remix sounds like a CD. Why should it sound like anything else? That’s from what it was essentially mastered. The sound is flattened against the speakers, hard, two-dimensional and generally hash on top, yet it does have a few good qualities as CDs often do: there’s good clarity and detail on some instruments. The strings are dreadful and the voices not far behind. The overall sound is dry and decay is unnaturally fast and falls into dead zone.

It strikes me as odd that the new vinyl should sound like a CD. I have listened to the newly remastered 2009 CD of Rubber Soul in stereo extensively and think it sounds quite good, clearly better than the Heavy Vinyl pressing that’s made from the very same 16 bit, 44.1k remixed digital source.

If the source makes the new vinyl sound bad, why doesn’t it make the new CD sound bad? I can tell you that the new CD sounds dramatically better than the 1987 CD I’ve owned for twenty years. They’re not even close. How could that be if, as MF seems to believe, the compromised digital source is the problem?

Lucky for me I didn’t know what the source for the new CD was when I was listening to it. I assumed it came from the carefully remastered hi-rez tapes that were being used to make the new series in its entirety, digital sources that are supposed to result in sound with more analog qualities.

Well, based on what I’ve heard, they do, and those more analog qualities obviously extend to the new Rubber Soul compact disc. At least to these ears they do.

It’s possible my ignorance of the source tape allowed me to avoid the kind of confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — that is surely one of the biggest pitfalls in all of audio and a pit that Fremer falls into regularly.

Doors Progress

He raved about the digitally remastered Doors Box Set when it came out, but now that Acoustic Sounds is doing Doors albums on 45, he is singing a different tune:

Whatever I wrote about that box then [5/1/2010 if you care to look it up], now, by comparison, the best I can say for The Doors on that set is that it sounds like you’re hearing the album played back on the best CD player ever. It’s smoooooth, laid back and pleasant but totally lacks balls, grit, detail, spaciousness and raw emotional power. The entire presentation is flat against a wall set up between the speakers. The double 45 has greater dynamics, detail, spaciousness and appropriate grit—everything the smooooth 192k/24 bit sourced version lacks.

We, on the other hand, had no trouble at all hearing how bad it was right from the start. For our last Hot Stamper shootout winner of The Soft Parade we noted:

Need I even mention how much better this copy sounds than the recent 180g version from the Rhino Box Set, digitally remastered by Bernie Grundman? That thing is just awful, possibly the worst sounding pressing I have ever heard. The Gold CD Hoffman did for Audio Fidelity would be night and day better. So much for the concept of vinyl superiority. Not with Bernie at the helm.

To his credit MF finally recognizes his mistake, but let’s stop and think about how he came by this insight.

He did it by playing a pressing that, to his mind, has every reason to sound better, being sourced from analog tapes and mastered at 45.

Now he hears that Bernie’s cutting sounds like a CD. To us it sounded worse than a CD when we played it the first time, vinyl or no vinyl. We even recommended the Hoffman-mastered DCC Gold CDs for those who didn’t want to spring for one of our Hot Stamper pressings.

As we like to say, good digital beats bad analog any day.

Real Progress

Then again, who are we to talk? Bear in mind that as recently as the early 2000s we were still recommending the DCC vinyl pressings, records that I can’t bear to listen to these days.

My system couldn’t show me how colored and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

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The Beatles – Rubber Soul

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • Boasting seriously good sound from start to finish, this vintage UK stereo pressing has the sound of Tubey Magical analog in its grooves
  • We guarantee you’ve never heard “Girl,” “I’m Looking Through You,” “In My Life,” “Wait,” “If I Needed Someone” and “Run for Your Life” sound better – and that’s just side two
  • A Must Own Folk Rock masterpiece and permanent member of our Top 100
  • 5 stars: “The lyrics represented a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness, maturity, and complex ambiguities. Musically, too, it was a substantial leap forward, with intricate folk-rock arrangements that reflected the increasing influence of Dylan and the Byrds.”
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for Rubber Soul.  Here are some of the other shootout winning stamper numbers we’ve discovered, and we did it the old fashioned way — by playing this album (and others like it) by the score

Since this is one of the best sounding Beatles recordings, this could very well be some of the BEST SOUND you will ever hear on a Beatles album.

There’s wonderful ambience and echo to be heard. Just listen to the rimshots on Michelle — you can clearly hear the room around the drum. On the best pressings, Michelle is incredibly 3-D; it’s one of the best sounding tracks on the entire album, if not THE best.

Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings, and especially from modern remasterings. 

Track Commentary

Rubber Soul is one of the most difficult Beatles records to get to sound right. The individual tracks seem to vary drastically in terms of their sound quality. Some (What Goes On) sound sweet, rich and near perfect. Others (You Won’t See Me) can be thin and midrangy. What’s a mother to do?

I think what we’re dealing with here are completely different approaches to the final mix. The Beatles were experimenting with different kinds of sounds, and their experiments produced very different results from track to track on this album more than practically any other I can think of besides The White Album (which as you know was recorded in multiple studios by multiple producers and engineers).

Nowhere Man on side one and Wait on side two are both excellent test tracks. 

Other records with track breakdowns can be found here.

A Must Own Beatles Record

Rubber Soul is a recording that should be part of any serious popular music collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

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Listening in Depth to Rubber Soul

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

After playing so many copies of this record over the last few years, all of us here at Better Records have come to appreciate just how wonderful an album Rubber Soul really is. It has 14 fairly compact, well-structured, well-arranged pop songs, each of which is a gem in its own right.

It reminds me a bit of the second album (With The Beatles) in that respect — short and to the point, get in and get out. (Having listened to With the Beatles regularly for more than twenty years, I find it to be the weakest of all the studio albums. Unlike most Beatles albums, it would not be coming to my desert island.)

But the second album does not feature acoustic guitars the way Rubber Soul does. From an audiophile point of view, the strumming of those amazingly Tubey Magical acoustic guitars is in large part what makes Rubber Soul such a special recording. (For more records that are good for testing how much Tubey Magic their acoustic guitars have, click here.)

But what we’ve noticed only recently [recently as in about 15 years ago] is how much the tambourine is used. It’s all over this album, and the good news is that most of the time it sounds great. There are other high frequency percussion instruments — shakers and the like — and between the tambourine and all the rest there’s just a lot of percussive energy on most of the songs that really carries them along.

As far as I am concerned, this could be called The Tambourine Album. No other Beatles album features that instrument so boldly in the mix and builds so many songs around it.

Side One

Drive My Car

Mobile Fidelity made a mess of this song on their Half-Speed Mastered release. They took out far too much upper midrange and top end.

What drives the energy of the song are the cow bell, the drums and other percussion. Instead of a scalpel Mobile Fidelity took a hatchet to this slightly bright track, leaving a dull, lifeless, boring mess. Some Parlophone copies may be a little bright and lack bass, but they still manage to convey the energy of the song. The purple label Capitols can also be quite good. A bit harsher and spittier, yes, but in spite of these shortcomings they communicates the music.

As much as I might like some of the MoFi Beatle records, and even what MoFi did with some of the other tracks on Rubber Soul, they sure sucked the life out of Drive My Car. We all remember how much fun that song was when it would come on the radio. Playing it on a very high quality stereo should make it more fun, not less. If you’ve got a Rubber Soul with a Drive My Car that’s no fun, it’s time to get another one.

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Driving My Car into a Ditch

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Mobile Fidelity made a mess of Drive My Car on their Half-Speed mastered release of Rubber Soul in 1982.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say Stan Ricker, MoFi’s go-to mastering engineer, did.

He equalized out far too much upper midrange and top end.

What fuels the energy of the song are the cow bell, the drums and other percussion. Instead of a scalpel, Mobile Fidelity took a hatchet to this slightly bright track, leaving a dull, lifeless, boring mess.

Some Parlophone copies may be a little bright and lack bass, but at least they manage to convey the musical momentum of the song.

Even the purple label Capitol reissues can be quite good. A bit harsher and spittier, yes, but in spite of these shortcomings they communicate the music, which ought to count for something.

As much as I might like some of the MoFi Beatles records [not so much anymore], and even what MoFi did with some of the other tracks on Rubber Soul, they sure sucked the life out of Drive My Car.

We all remember how much fun that song was when it would come on the radio. Playing it on a very high quality stereo should make it more fun, not less.

If you’ve got a Rubber Soul with a Drive My Car that’s no fun, it’s time to get another one.

By The Way

The best $250 — to the penny! — I ever spent on records is the price I paid for my brand new, still-in-the-shipping-carton MoFi Beatles Box. I ordered it in 1982 when I first learned of it, and it finally came the next year. I already owned all The Beatles albums MoFi had done to date, including the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper, which, like a fool, I got rid of once the set came out.

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Two Key Tracks for Testing Rubber Soul

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

Rubber Soul is one of the most difficult Beatles records to get to sound right. The individual tracks seem to vary drastically in terms of their tonality. Some (What Goes On) sound sweet, rich and near perfect. Others (You Won’t See Me) can be thin and midrangy. What’s a mother to do?

I think what we’re dealing with here are completely different approaches to the final mix. The Beatles were experimenting with different kinds of sounds, and their experiments produced very different results from track to track on this album more than practically any other I can think of besides The White Album (which was recorded in multiple studios by multiple producers and engineers).

Is Your Rig Up To It?

One final note: this is the kind of record that really rewards a good cartridge/ arm/ table combination. You do not want to play this record with a lean or bright sounding cartridge, or a front end that does not track sibilances well. (I could name some equipment that I would not want to play this record on, but rather than insult the owners of such equipment, let’s just say they will have a tough time with this record.)

The Toughest Test on Side One

“Nowhere Man.” Unless you have an especially good copy this song will sound VERY compressed, much too thick and congealed to be as enjoyable as we know it can be. The best copies manage to find the richness in the sound as well as the breathiness in the vocals that others barely hint at.

Play this track on whatever copies you own (more than one I hope) and see if it doesn’t sound as compressed, thick and congested as we describe.

The Toughest Test on Side Two

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Letter of the Week – “I dropped the needle on side one and started singing by the end of the first verse.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

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

Hey Tom,  

Two fantastic finds; well done once again. The After the Gold Rush you sent is incredibly revealing. The pressing removed the veil. This LP typically sounds dull and I don’t mean the songs.

I dropped the needle on side one and started singing by the end of the first verse. I had planned to have a critical listen first as I always do, so I have a reference in which to make comparisons. If an album is great I start to sing the second time thru. That should tell you what I think of this pressing.

When I played my copy it lasted one verse and one chorus before it was removed from the platter. Exceptional pressing!!! 

Re: Rubber Soul. I have 3 copies of this LP, all Parlophone and all earlier pressings than the one I purchased from you. One doesn’t really count because it is from the very first pressings that had problems.

However, the other 2 are very good pressings. One is very transparent but extremely bass shy. The other is very much the opposite. It has lots of whomp but is grainy.

The pressing from Better Records is beautifully transparent, especially in the voice, and is nowhere near as bass shy.

I believe that being closest to the source usually reveals more accuracy. That goes for most every discipline of study. This pressing, though not being the actual closest, was the winner. Go figure!

Thanks again for doing the research to find these gems.

Mark H.

Mark,

Thanks for writing, and thanks for taking the time to do your own shootout. It’s obvious you were listening critically and heard the same great sound we heard.

The early pressings are rarely the way to go for The Beatles.

“Closer to the source” might be a good rule of thumb, but in the case of Rubber Soul that rule would have prevented you from hearing the record sound the way you are now hearing it, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is much more real and correct than how you used to hear it. Quite a bit more enjoyable too no doubt.

Thanks for your business. We look forward to finding you more “gems.” There’s plenty more where that one came from.

Best, TP

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “The consistent results you’ve given me has turned this into a certifiable hobby that I can really enjoy.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

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

 Hi Tom,

I just bought a copy of Rubber Soul from you which sounds amazing. That will cover all the most important Beatles records I have to have on hand. (Beatles for Sale, Help, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Yellow Submarine) that I can afford right now anyway.

Coming across your blog and business has been such a game changer. If I hadn’t run into you, I would just not understand why some records sound amazing, and others don’t and why it matters to clean them (even if brand new), and how to clean them really well.

(Even if I had understood the importance of cleaning them, you’re the only one who cracked the system to get them cleaner than anyone else by a mile. You really figured it out then shared how to clean them. I have my VPI device just waiting on the labels and packaging so I can clean the records most important to me. )

The consistent results you’ve given me has turned this into a certifiable hobby that I can really enjoy. No more mystery as to how this all works, why some records sound amazing and why some records are mediocre despite being an original pressing that cost a lot and appear clean, yet sound mediocre. I appreciate you sharing your 20 years of research and knowledge. This whole thing wouldn’t work without you generously sharing your hard won knowledge.

Andrew,

Thanks for your letter.

Yes, it does indeed all make sense if you don’t listen to a word the self-styled experts of the record world say.

If you play enough records for long enough, eventually you learn something, and we did!

Good to hear that your musical enjoyment has benefited. That is what it is all about.

Best, TP

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How Can Anybody Not Hear What’s Wrong with Old Records Like These?

beatlrubbeoriginalRecord Collecting – A Guide to the Fundamentals

It is our strongly held belief that if your equipment (regardless of cost) or your critical listening skills do not allow you to hear the kinds of sonic differences among pressings we describe, then whether you are just getting started in audio or are a self-identified audio expert writing for the most prestigious magazines and websites, you still have a very long way to go in this hobby.

Purveyors of the old paradigms — original is better, money buys good sound — may eventually find their approach to records and equipment unsatisfactory (when it isn’t just plain wrong), but they will only do so if they start to rely more on empirical findings and less on convenient theories and received wisdom.

A reviewer most of us know well is clearly stuck in the old, mistaken paradigm, illustrated perfectly by this comment:

It’s not my pleasure to be so negative but since I have a clean UK original (signed for me by George Martin!) I’ll not be playing this one again. Yes, there are some panning mistakes and whatever else Martin “cleaned up” but really, sometimes it’s best to leave well-enough (and this album was well-enough!) alone.

We can’t imagine how anyone can have a system in this day and age that can obscure the flaws of the original Parlophone pressings of Rubber Soul (or any other Yellow and Black label Parlophone pressing for that matter, other than Yellow Submarine and Oldies but Goldies).

UPDATE 2022

Here is another exception to that “rule.”

This reviewer apparently does (as do some of our customers, truth be told), but we have something very different indeed. One might even consider it the opposite of such a system.

Our system is designed to relentlessly and ruthlessly expose the flaws of every record we play.

Only the best of the best can survive that level of scrutiny. Our system (comprising equipment, setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity) operates at the highest level of fidelity we have been able to achieve to date. We are constantly making improvements to our playback system in search of even better sound.

Real Progress

But wait a minute, who are we to talk about being fooled? Bear in mind that as recently as 2000 or so we were still recommending DCC and other Heavy Vinyl pressings. These are records that, with few exceptions, I would have a hard time sitting through nowadays.

My system couldn’t show me how colored and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

It’s amazing how far you can get in 10 years [now 20] if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough, and are also willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio. This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers. Old thinking and wrong thinking can really slow down your progress.

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Letter of the Week – “Your Rubber Soul and ELO sides are clearly better than anything I ever heard…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

“…and comparisons to Gold CDs, Legacy, MFSL, Nautilus or DCC series are pointless.”

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

Hey Tom,   

I was a DJ for 20 years and by nature of meeting demand for the newest I was always buying vinyl the day it came out.

Your A++ to A+++ Rubber Soul and ELO sides are clearly better than anything I ever heard then or now and comparisons to gold CDs, Legacy, MFSL, Nautilus or DCC series are pointless.

I look forward to replacing my favorites with your A+++.

Btw the B-52’s 1st LP early pressing, which I bought back in June of 1979, always lept out of the speakers. The entire lp (any track) filled my dance floor well into 1987. I am not surprised it is in your Top 100.

All the best,
Ben P.

Ben,

Thanks for your letter. Naturally we agree with everything you say, including how good the B-52s’ first album can sound on the orignial pressing. The reissues are a joke, but that’s what most folks who own the album are playing because the originals are too hard to find and expensive when you do.

Best, TP

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