A Brothers In Arms like you’ve never heard, with a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
Tonally correct from start to finish, with a solid bottom and fairly natural vocals (for this particular recording of course), here is the sound they were going for in the studio
After doing a comparison between our top copy and the Chris Bellman 45 RPM remaster, at very loud levels mind you, I now have much more respect for this recording than ever before – it’s truly a Demo Disc on the right Robert-Ludwig-mastered copy
Drop the needle on “So Far Away” – it’s airy, open, and spacious, yet still rich and full-bodied
4 stars: “One of their most focused and accomplished albums … Dire Straits had never been so concise or pop-oriented, and it wore well on them.”
We admit that the sound may be too processed and lacking in Tubey Magic for some
When it comes to Tubey Magic, there simply is none — that’s not the sound Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who won the Grammy for this album, was going for
We find that the best properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, when played at good loud levels on our system, give us sound that was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, glorious, powerful and exciting — just not Tubey Magical
Fully extended from top to bottom with a wide-open soundstage, this is the sound you need for this music. There’s plenty of richness and fullness here as well — traits that are really crucial to getting the most out of a mid-’80s recording like this.
The bottom end on “So Far Away” really delivers the goods — it’s punchy and meaty with healthy amounts of tight, deep bass.
We try to be upfront with our customers that the Hot Stamper pressings of Brothers in Arms on our site have many nice qualities, but some of the best qualities of analog recordings from the 50s, 60s and 70s are not among them.
It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. We want our customers to know what to expect when they buy a modern recording, and, having played copies of this album (as well as Love Over Gold) by the score, we are qualified to tell them what even the best pressings do not do as well as we might like. In a recent listing we introduced one of the best sounding pressings from our last shootout this way:
Tonally correct from start to finish, with a solid bottom and fairly natural vocals (for this particular recording of course), here is the sound they were going for in the studio
Drop the needle on “So Far Away” – it’s airy, open, and spacious, yet still rich and full-bodied
We admit that the sound may be too processed and lacking in Tubey Magic for some
When it comes to Tubey Magic, there simply is none — that’s not the sound Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who won the Grammy for this album, was going for
We find that the best properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, when played at good loud levels on our system, give us sound that was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, glorious, powerful and exciting — just not Tubey Magical
The notes you see below catalog the qualities of our 2025 Shootout Winner.
Side One
Track One (So Far Away)
Meaty guitar and bass
Big, weighty and present
Track Two (Money for Nothing)
Wide, full and weighty
Lots of punch
Side Two
Track One (Ride Across the River)
Tight, deep and weighty [bass]
Vocals are sweet and present
Most space yet
Rich too
Note that the person doing the listening confined himself to what the record was doing right. In the case of this Shootout Winning Top Shelf 3/3 pressing, there really wasn’t any aspect of the sound to find fault with. As far as we were concerned, the record was doing what the record was trying to do, and doing it better than any of the other copies we played, hence the high grades.
If you have five or ten early domestic pressings of Brothers in Arms, you can judge them accurately by limiting yourself to the qualities the best of them have. For any copy you might play, you could ask:
How big is it?
How weighty is it?
How present is it?
How wide is the soundstage?
How full-bodied is the sound?
How punchy is it?
How tight, deep and weighty is the bass?
How sweet and present are the vocals?
How much space does the recording have?
How rich is the sound?
If your equipment, room, electricity, etc. are good enough, and your front end is properly set up, all these questions can be answered with relatively little effort. You could even create a checklist of them after playing a few copies and hearing what the best of them did well.
I found out recently that the MoFi is now on the TAS Super Disc list. You can find it along with the domestic — yes, you read that right — domestic pressing of the first album.
Now just how hard of hearing do you have to be to think that the domestic pressing of Dire Straits’ first album is a Super Disc? A nice record, sure, but nice records aren’t really Super Discs, are they?
Not when there are UK pressings that trounce it. We should know, we’ve played them by the dozens. How the writers for The Absolute Sound can be this far off the mark is a question we cannot begin to answer.
The most obvious answer — and therefore the most likely one — is reviewer malpractice.
What else could it be?
What We Think We Know
We have written quite a number of reviews and commentaries for the first album and we encourage you to read some of them.
Speaking of Super Discs, the good British pressings are so good we put them on our Top Ten Most Tubey Magical Rock and Pop Recordings List. No domestic pressing we have ever played would qualify as anything other than a minimally-acceptable Hot Stamper.
We would never bother to put such a pressing in a shootout, when even the average run-of-the-mill UK copy is better.
We Get Letters
A few years ago we received this email from a customer.
“How would you compare the Brothers in Arms SHS to the Mobile Fidelity 45 rpm copy?”
Dear Sir,
We have never bothered to play their remaster, and why would we? Every MoFi pressing made by the current regime has had major sound problems when compared head to head with the “real” records we sell, and it’s simply not worth our time to find out exactly what is wrong with the sound of any of these new reissues, theirs included.
[I will be reviewing their unbelievably awful Dire Straits first album on 45 one of these days. Rarely have I heard such a good recording, a brilliant recording, turned into such a piece of crap. Robert Brook didn’t like it either.]
However, we have been known to make an exception to that rule from time to time. Recently we did so in the case of the Tea for the Tillerman George Marino cut at 45 RPM for Analogue Productions.
Many copies suffer from harsh, digital-sounding highs.
Pull out your old copy and listen to the beginning of side two and you should have no trouble hearing what we’re on about.
Compare that to the silkier, sweeter top end on even the lowest-graded Hot Stamper pressing you may have picked up from your friends at Better Records and it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself going back to listening to whatever pressing you had been playing.
Steve Westman invited me to appear again on his youtube channel chat with the Audiophile Roundtable.
At about the 39 minute mark, we discuss my picks for what I would rate as the Five Best Sounding Records I know of.
I wanted to go with more variety, so I picked two rock records, two jazz records and one classical album.
A rough transcription with corrections and additions follows:
Before I did my top five, I wanted to say something along the lines of, if you want to know where somebody’s coming from in audio, you don’t ask them what their stereo is, you don’t ask them what their room is like, and how their electricity is done, and what their history with audio is, because they’re not going to tell you, and they just don’t want to go down that road.
But you can ask them about music, and that will tell you a lot about where they’re coming from, so here are my questions for people if I wanted to know more about their understanding of records (and, by implication, audio):
One: what are the five best sounding records you’ve ever heard?
Two: what are your five favorite records of all time?
Three: what five famous recordings never sounded good to you?
Four: name five recordings that are much better than most of your friends or audiophiles in general think?
In my world, you would have to tell me what pressing you’re listening to. If you said “I love the new Rhino Cars album,” I think we would be done, but if you told me that you love the original, then I would say yes, I love that record too. I bought it in 1978 and I’ve played it about 5000 times. Never tired of hearing it.
At about the 48 minute mark I reveal the best stampers for Ry Cooder’s Jazz album.
At about the 50 minute mark someone asks about my system. This would be my answer:
All that information is on the blog., I actually do a thing about my stereo where I take it all the way from 1976 to the present, which I’m sure bores people to death, but you know, there was a lot to talk about there.
There were a lot of changes that I went through and I even talk about how my old stereo from the 90s, which I had put together after having been an audiophile for 25 years, was dark and unrevealing compared to the one I have now, so all my opinions from 25 years ago are suspect, and rightly so.
I feel the same thing is going on in the world of audiophiles when you have systems that aren’t very revealing and aren’t tonally accurate, yet are very musical and enjoyable the way Geoff would like, but they’re not good for really knowing what your records sound like because your system is doing all sorts of things to the record that you’re playing in order to keep the bad stuff from bothering you.
All the bad stuff just jumps out of the speakers, and that’s why these heavy vinyl records don’t appeal to us anymore, because we hear all the bad stuff and we don’t like it.
At 1:03 I’m asked if I like any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I can think of is Chris Bellman, because he masterered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressing I know of that sounds any good, Brothers in Arms, released in 2021. I played it when Edgers brought it by the studio when he first visited me in preparation for his article.
My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s mostly sounds right, and that surprised me because most of these modern records sound funny and weird and rarely do they sound right.
(Geoff brought over three records that day: Brothers in Arms, the remastered Zep II, and a ridiculously bad sounding Craft pressing of Lush Life, which was mastered by Bernie Grundman, and one which I have not had time to review yet. It was my introduction to the Craft series (in this case the small batch, limited to 1000), and let’s just say we got off on the wrong foot. I told Geoff it sounded like a bad CD, and that’s pretty much all I remember of it. The average price for that pressing on Discogs is roughly $210 these days. The CD is cheaper and there is very little doubt in my mind that it would be better sounding to boot.)
At 1:04 I mention the biggest snake oil salesman in the history of vinyl, the man behind The Electric Recording Company.
Patrick mentions an ERC Love record which he likes, but we played one that sounded about as bad as a bad record could sound. That Love record will never get any love from us. He says he’ll never buy another ERC pressing, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing someone who really likes a record would say, does it? I suppose you can ask him in the comments section why that would be.
At some point I talk about the studio we play records in, not exactly spouse-friendly but good for hearing what’s really in the grooves of the records we play:
The reason the sound room is the way it is is because you’re not there to be reading magazines and looking at your phone. You’re just in there to sit in a single chair in front of two speakers, not talking. Nobody else is in there. They have no business being in there. It’s just you and the music and that’s the way I like it.
This next section has been fleshed out quite a bit. I took the question posed and ran with it:
The Warner Brothers 180g Double LP pictured above was mastered by Stan Ricker at Half-Speed.
Most of the time Stan Ricker’s approach to Half-Speed mastering results in a record that is too bright, with sloppy bass.
And what do you know, this pressing IS too bright and the bass IS sloppy. Imagine that!
We often discuss the unpredictability of records, but when it comes to Half-Speed Mastered pressings their faults are fairly consistent and easy to spot, once you know what to listen for.
This older Simply Vinyl pressing (with the gold SVLP sticker) actually sounds pretty good. It certainly is one of the most ANALOG sounding versions I’ve heard, high praise in my book.
We’ve recommended it in the past. It’s a nice record (if you can get your hands on one) but it’s not really a match for our Hot Stamper pressings. The multiple copies we auditioned did darn good for a Heavy Vinyl reissue and substantially better than the average pressing, hence the “B” grade. Simply Vinyl seems to have done a good job here.
Correction: an unnamed mastering engineer at the label did a superb job. Simply Vinyl isn’t in the business of mastering ANYTHING. They leave that up to the pros at the record labels. Sometimes those guys screw it up and sometimes they get it right.
