good-electricity

A Better Way to Get Rid of Grit and Grain on Jumpin’ Jive

More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain

Jumpin’ Jive is one of the clearest examples of an album where it is critically important to make sure your stereo is running on good electricity before you make any attempt to play it. This is the kind of recording — bright, full of energy — that will bring most stereo systems to their knees. Of course, when you play a good copy and it really sounds good, it’s a record that rewards all the time and effort you’ve put into your system.

So much of the aggressiveness, grit and grain that we hear in immediate, high-energy recordings such as this are really the fault of the electricity feeding the stereo, not the fault primarily of the record or even the equipment used to play it.

Now it should be noted that this recording has a ton of high frequency information that will be difficult to reproduce on most systems. If you leave a lot of appliances and electronic devices plugged in around the house when you listen to your stereo, you can forget ever hearing this record right. The grit and grunge caused by polluted electricity will make this record practically unlistenable, at the levels we listen at anyway. (At lower levels most of the garbage is masked, one reason no doubt that audiophiles rarely turn their stereos up to anything approaching live levels.) 

So do as we do: unplug everything you can get your hands on before you sit down to listen. Make sure your tubes (if you have tube equipment) are nice and warm too.

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Getting the Electricity Right Made All the Difference in Our New Studio

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.

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Compounding Distortion in Analog Audio

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Compounding DISTORTION in ANALOG AUDIO

Some excerpts:

Your Hot Stampers will sound WAY better when you get your turntable set up right, isolate it properly and get the equipment you need to make the speed of your platter accurate and stable. And that’s because all of these system improvements are highly effective ways of reducing distortion and its effects on your system.

Aside from our records, our analog front end, our amp and our speakers, our electricity and its effects on our equipment represents yet one more source of distortion in our system. I’ve posted more than one article touching on this issue, and I have shared the ways in which I’ve learned to manage the electricity powering my gear.

When I posted my last article on electricity, I was convinced that improving the electricity going to my system by limiting the effects of other electrical devices in my home was absolutely essential for getting my system to sound its best. The reason being that improving my electricity seemed to greatly reduce the level of distortion in my system.

I still feel this way, but my views on why improving electricity helps have evolved. What I’ve come to understand, or at least understand better, is that back when I wrote that article and for a long time after, I had a lot more front-end distortion than I realized. That distortion was compounded in different ways, one of which was by way of the electricity.

Throwing breakers and unplugging appliances was and is an effective way of reducing compound distortion in my system and improving the way my records sound. But since revamping my turntable setup and learning to better control the platter speed, the improvements I hear by ameliorating the negative effects of my electricity are significantly less than they once were. In other words, with less front-end distortion there’s a lot less distortion to be compounded by bad electricity.

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Better Electricity Took Robert Brook’s Stereo to the Next Level

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 improvements he heard in his stereo by doing some experiments we had recommended he do, experiments which, for reasons unknown to the wider audiophile community and generally dismissed by same, managed to take his system to places he never expected it could go.

All at the cost of exactly zero dollars. It’s quite a ride, check it out:

BETTER ELECTRICITY: Small Changes Yield Some VERY BIG RESULTS!

We have written a fair amount about the benefits of feeding the system better juice ourselves:

The value of experimenting with electricity is part and parcel of tweaking and tuning your system to reveal the many levels of improved sound locked within it. As we noted in our discussion of the Pareto effect:

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play an Album Like This?

More Albums that Come Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound?

Not that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

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Power Management: Suggestions and Results from Robert Brook

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

With a bit of guidance from yours truly, Robert Brook has carried out some interesting experiments involving the electricity that feeds his stereo. These are his findings.

Power Management: Suggestions and RESULTS!

Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered in the world of audio and records by being extremely methodical and rigorous, along these three fronts:

Everyone reading this blog can learn a lot from the work he’s done in these three areas and more besides.

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is clearly not an accident.

And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.

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The Brahms Violin Concerto – Unplug or Suffer the Consequences!

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

The massed strings here, such as those found at the opening, are close-miked and immediate as befits the Mercury recording style.

Your electricity had better be good when you play this record, because it presents a test many of you will have trouble passing at even moderate levels. 

We’ve often encouraged our readers and customers to go about unplugging things in their homes in order to test the effect of clean electricity on their playback systems.

The opening of this record is a perfect example of the kind of material everyone should be testing with in order to hear these changes.

I’d be very surprised if the strings on this record don’t sound noticeably better after you’ve unplugged a few things in your house, and the more the better.

The effect should not be the least bit subtle. It’s certainly not subtle in our listening room.

The same would be true for any of the tweaks we recommend. The Townshend Seismic Platform or Hallographs would be a godsend for proper playback of this record. Hard to imagine what it would sound like without them. (To tell you the truth, we don’t really want to know.)

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