brook-ideas

Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part One

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions.

Hi Tom,

I read your recent post about Sticky Fingers and the European TML reissues you included in shootouts.

It raised a question for me that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while now.

The fact that the UK TML earned an A+ to A++ grade and that, with just a one copy sample, you wouldn’t consider that pressing to have shootout winning potential, suggests to me that the US pressings you favor will grade at A++ or higher.

In other words, if 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 [redacted numbers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

All good questions! I could go on for days with this kind of inside baseball stuff. I’ve been living it full time for more than twenty years, and it obviously interests you because you are actually trying to hone your shootout skills and figure out how many of what pressings you need to get one going, etc., etc.

Not many others are doing what you are doing in a serious way, so how helpful anyone will find this information is hard to know. Under the circumstances, I should have kept my answers shorter rather than longer but I could not resist going into more detail than might have been advisable. Feel free to skim if you like.

Why not put more TML pressings into shootouts?

If they had pressed plenty of them and they’d ended up sitting in record bins all over town for twenty bucks a pop, we could get a bunch in and see if we could figure which stampers, if any, are able to reach the Super Hot stamper level.

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Robert Brook Has a Question for the Audiophile Community

Are Hot Stampers for real, or are they for the birds?

(That’s a question I see asked a lot by audiophiles. You will have no trouble guessing what the answer tends to be.)

Below you will find some of the text from an email exchange I had with Robert, one of hundreds we’ve sent to each other as we found ourselves winding through the thicket of records and audiophile equipment.

It’s one we are constantly struggling to understand, in my case even after 40 years.

In this email he recounts a personal story about a yoga friend, exploring his reaction to an incident that occurred with a fellow yoga practioner and some of the psychological lessons he learned from it. What he learned, he has now come to realize, helped him see more clearly some of the things that are going on in analog audio, especially when it comes to the credibility of yours truly.

He also points out that I am not always as tactful as I should be, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he is right about that. Not my strong suit. I’m more in favor of the “tough love” approach, but after rereading some of my old emails, it’s often shocking — even to me — how blunt I can be. I’ll try to do better.

Please to enjoy Robert’s story.

TOM PORT and Why More Audiophiles Don’t Take His Advice

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered methodically and carefully along these three fronts:

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Julie Is Her Name – Now on Youtube

More of the Music of Julie London

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Julie London

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

In the video below, Robert discusses how Tubey Magical his system is when playing an All Tube Chain recording from 1955, this without the benefit of any tubes in his system whatsoever. Quite the trick!

Everything was fine until he decided to track down a clean, quiet, good-sounding copy of the album for a friend. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished, and after buying scores of copies of Julie London’s records off the internet ourselves, we know firsthand how painful it is to have one noisy record after another arrive on our doorstep.

Years ago I was in my favorite record store in Los Angeles, Record Surplus, and Neil, the owner at the time, made what I thought was an especially perceptive remark about Julie London’s albums on vintage vinyl: “They’re either mint or beat, rarely in-between.” He’d seen a hundred times more Julie London than I had, and he knew whereof he spoke. (I would add that by now I have critically listened to an infinitely larger number of her records than he ever would, as critical listening is not what record store owners get up to all day.)

Once you’ve played one of Julie’s amazing early albums, you tend to want to keep it near the turntable. If you were given the record back in the day, perhaps because you were in the record business, you stored it on a shelf with all the rest of the albums you could not be bothered to listen to.

JULIE IS HER NAME: Worth the Effort!

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we 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 Discusses His Evolving Understanding of Bass

More from Robert Brook

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below you will find a link to Robert’s story about the famous Charlie Mingus record you see pictured.

He had a number of different pressings, each of which showed him some qualities that the others lacked. Ultimately you have to pick one to play, and he did.

“GETTING” BASS with Charles Mingus’ BLUES & ROOTS

Robert went from a $20,000 speaker with one eight inch woofer to the Legacy III’s, a speaker costing less than half as much, with three ten inch woofers, to the Legacy Focus, a speaker quite a bit less than $20k, with three twelve inch woofers.

Robert learned something about his Parsifals by playing a speaker that could do so much more down low:

But I’ve learned since that, for all their strengths, the Parsifal had at least one fatal flaw – they made just about every record sound good.

Adding:

Making every record sound good is, it turns out, not a good quality to have in a speaker, nor in any other piece of equipment you use. At least it’s not if you want the best possible sound from your analog system.

And summing it all up this way:

The short explanation for why this is, is that if your speakers make nearly every record sound good, then they’ll likely make very few of them sound great and almost none of them sound incredible. The Parsifal were always a pleasure to listen to, but, as I was to discover, they sometimes relied too heavily on not showing me what I was missing. That is, they were rather a good pair of  speakers that were also rather good at hiding the flaws of the records they played.

We’ve been banging on this drum for a very long time, perhaps as many as forty years by now. Much of the equipment audiophiles own seems good at making the typical pressing sitting on their record shelves listenable and enjoyable. These systems allow their owners to keep their record collections intact no matter how many mediocre or substandard pressings they may own. (Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound much better than average.)

Good enough is the standard. Their stereos create a floor below which only the worst records can fall.

But Robert now sees that these same systems create a ceiling that holds back their best records and keeps them from breaking through. If you want to be thrilled by your best records, you need a system very different from the ones many audiophiles own.

If you want to break through, you need big speakers, and you need to be able to turn them up.

Furthermore, you need playback accuracy to show you the faults of your bad records and the strengths of your better ones, strengths and faults you are not even aware of until your system becomes revealing enough to show them to you.

Unless you are very serious about collecting truly high quality pressings, you don’t want a stereo like ours or like Robert’s. The average record, on both or our systems, is more often than not a bore, and sometimes a positively painful one. Revealing just how good a good record can be, on the other hand, is often an absolutely glorious experience, one Robert himself has written about.

Robert and I (as well as many of my customers) have taken their systems in the direction of more revealing, because when you have exceptionally good records, more revealing is what you want. Good records want to show you just how amazing they can sound. If you want to experience an amazing recording, only the most revealing and accurate stereos will let you do that.

Judging Bass

We discussed how some audiophiles judge (or misjudge) bass in their systems in a commentary for Rickie Lee Jones’ first album.

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Curiosity and the Pursuit of Perfect Sound

One of our good customers has started a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

He invited a friend and colleague to talk about his own personal journey through the twin worlds of audio and records, and we expect you will find his story excellent reading.

This bit caught my eye:

On my new stereo, my modern pressings and reissues sound better than they did on my old stereo. But what’s improved more, FAR more, is the sound of my vintage vinyl. Not just my Hot Stampers, but many of my other vintage records as well. Here is a sampling of the titles where I’ve been able to make a direct comparison between an early (like, pre-CD-era) pressing and a recent (vinyl resurgence) pressing: Led Zeppelin 2, Willie Nelson’s Stardust, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, E. Fitzgerald’s Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie, Carmen, played by Ruggerio Ricci, Santana Abraxas, Carole King’s Tapestry, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and Mingus Ah Um.

Good company to say the least!

Please to enjoy.