Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now
In response to a customer’s letter, I wrote the following a few years back:
The vast majority of audiophiles never get to the higher levels of audio because of the compromises they make at every step in their rooms, speakers, wires and practically everything else.
For example:
- Speakers too small,
- Shoved up against a wall,
- In an untreated room that
- The family uses to watch TV in?
You can’t get very far that way.
Some of the worst off of these folks end up with a collection of crap Heavy Vinyl because their systems simply will not let them hear how much better their vintage pressings sound.
Better Electricity Made All the Difference
When we moved the business into an industrial park a few years ago, I took the opportunity to build the largest playback studio I could fit on the premises. It was 17 by 22 with a 12 foot high ceiling, with a concrete slab floor and six inch thick double drywall for walls, as well as a complicated system of dedicated electrical circuitry.
It took a surprising amount of work carried out over months to get it to sound right. Day after day we ran experiments. Most of the time it was just me. I actually like working alone. It’s not hard for me to stay focussed.
Oddly enough, what made the biggest difference was getting the electricity right: computers and cleaning machines on isolation transformers, stuff unplugged, stuff left plugged in that made the sound better, lights hooked up to batteries rather than plugged in to the main circuits, etc.
Over the course of about two months, the sound became night and day better.
More on unplugging here.
Also, Robert Brook has done a great deal of work along these same lines, which he explains in detail here.
This kind of work is not hard for me. We’ve been doing it for decades, but we have a very big advantage over everyone else: we have good sounding records to test with.
We have Hot Stampers! The records are correct. If they sound wrong, it’s not their fault. They are almost never the problem.
I used But I Might Die Tonight from Tea for the Tillerman for weeks and weeks. It was very difficult to get all the parts right, but in the end it was more glorious than I had ever heard it. I wrote an extensive commentary on the experience I went through which you can read all about here.