More of the Music of Cat Stevens
Bob and Ray is my favorite test disc, the most important test that every change to the system must pass.
The danger in making the bulk of your sonic judgments using only one record is that you never want to optimize your system for a single record only to find out later that it sounds good but others you play don’t. Here is the story of how I made that mistake long ago (and apparently did not learn my lesson): In 2005, I fell into a common audiophile trap.
So the right way to go about it is to get all your hardest test records out and start playing them and making notes as you tweak and tune your system, setup, room and whatever else you can think of. This may take a long time, but it is time well spent when you consider that, once you are done, all — or nearly all — of your records will sound better than they used to.
In my review of the 45 RPM Tillerman, I noted the following:
Recently I was able to borrow a copy of the new 45 cutting from a customer who had rather liked it. I would have never spent my own money to hear a record put out on the Analogue Productions label, a label that has an unmitigated string of failures to its name. But for free? Count me in!
The offer of the new 45 could not have been more fortuitous. I had just spent a number of weeks playing a White Hot Stamper pink label original UK pressing in an attempt to get our new playback studio sounding right.
We had a lot of problems.
We needed to work on electrical issues.
We needed to work on our room treatments.
We needed to work on speaker placement.
We initially thought the room was doing everything right, because our go-to setup disc, Bob and Ray, sounded super spacious and clear, bigger and more lively than we’d ever heard it. That’s what a 12 foot high ceiling can do for a large group of musicians playing live in a huge studio, in 1959, on an all tube chain Living Stereo recording. The sound just soared.
But Cat Stevens wasn’t sounding right, and if Cat Stevens isn’t sounding right, we knew we had a very big problem on our hands, one that we had no choice but to solve.
Some stereos play some kinds of records well and others not so well. Our stereo has to play every kind of record well because we sell every kind of record there is. You name the kind of music, we probably sell it.
And if we offer it for sale, we had to have played it and liked the sound, because no record makes it to our site without being auditioned and found to have relatively good sound.