hp-thoughts

Where on The TAS Super Disc List Is This Amazing Recording?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

This commentary is from about 2008 or thereabouts. At the time we wrote:

The fact that entries such as Reiner’s Pines of Rome make the cut, and an amazing recording such as this doesn’t, should tell you everything you need to know concerning the value of such an incomplete list.

UPDATE 2024

Woops, we sure got that wrong. We happen to love the Reiner Pines of Rome now.

Be that as it may, this pressing of Ansermets’ recording of Iberia has truly Demo Disc quality sound.

Records simply do not get any more spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet.

No need to update any of that. It’s all still true. What a recording!

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What Did Harry Really Know About this Chet Atkins Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Atkins Available Now

You can feel the cool air of the studio the minute the needle hits the groove on this killer copy.

What we are offering here is the superior sounding re-recording from 1961, produced by Dick Peirce.

Chet took the orchestra tapes back to his home studio in 1961 and re-recorded his parts over them, and we think he managed to do a much better job the second time around.

This TAS list recording will have you asking why so few Living Stereo pressings actually do what this one does. The more critical listeners among you will recognize that this is a very special copy indeed.

I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Harry Pearson for pointing out to us with his TAS List what a great record this is, although I’m pretty sure anybody playing this album would have no trouble telling after a minute or two that this copy is very special indeed.

The pressing that Harry seems to have preferred — it’s the one recommended on his list, along with the Classic Records repress — is the inferior-sounding original recording, the one with the cover showing a guitar superimposed over the cityscape.

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Was It Even Possible for Harry Pearson to Create a Meaningful Super Disc List?

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS Super Disc Recordings Available Now

A customer brought up Harry Pearson in a discussion we were having about the best sounding records, which went a little something like this:

“You’re as much a pioneer as Harry Pearson ever was, and your authenticity is unchallengeable…”

Even I wouldn’t go that far! We make plenty of mistakes, and we learn new things about records all the time, so calling us “unchallengable” is a bit off the mark. However, we are always up for the challenge, and are happy to put our records up against any and all comers.

As far as Harry Pearson, I had this to say about the man:

Very kind of you to say. I think Harry could have been much better at his job if he had had access to modern record cleaning technology, better playback, and a staff of people playing thousands of records every year to help him discover the best sounding pressings.

No one can succeed as a one man show in audio. Audio is too complicated. It takes a team of dedicated professionals with expertise in every area of audio and record collecting to do it right.

He never understood stampers and the like because he didn’t have the research staff to get the data he would have needed to test all the stamper variations and learn from them.

He was stuck at the level of labels, and also not nearly skeptical enough of the idea that “the original is better,” a myth audiophiles cling to to this very day. That, and the superiority of the Heavy Vinyl remaster, which we both know is a crock of sh*t.

TP

Our comments for The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann have something to say about these same issues.

Decca Versus London

There’s a reason this record is on the TAS List of Super Discs — if any LP should be called a Super Disc, this one should. (With Phase Four sound you might even call it a Super-Duper-Disc.)

But Harry is, not atypically, rather misinformed about the catalog number and country of manufacture. He exclusively admits the Decca pressing to his list, and that is clearly contrary to our experience in general as well as our findings for this shootout. The best Decca pressing we played rated no better than a B+ for either side. That’s five — count them, five — sonic grades lower than the A Triple Plus sides of our best London copy.

If you are one of those audiophiles who’s been following Harry down the rabbit hole for years, discovering a little site called Better Records may just turn out to be a life-changing event. Here you can find records that live up to the hype, ours and his.

Selling the Hype

Record dealers that sell records based on their reputation — and that means pretty much all of them — are selling the hype.

If they haven’t played the record, they can’t tell you what it sounds like, TAS List or no TAS List.

The catalog number may be right, but finding the sound that lives up to the description can only be done one way: by playing the record.

Most copies of The Fantasy Film World, whether they have a Decca label or a London one (all of the ones we are selling are mastered and pressed by Decca; some get one label and some get the other) leave much to be desired.

If This Is Your Idea of a Reference Record, You Are in Real Trouble

Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums Available Now

An astoundingly bad Sound Show!!

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Half-Speed mastered disaster if there ever was one. If this Reference LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be. It is just awful.

Mastered by none other than Stan Ricker. RR-7 also appears to still be on Harry Pearson’s TAS List.

My recent notes can be seen below. (The 1 in the upper left hand corner is my abbreviation for side one, which seems to be the worst side of the two here.)

Track two, the Red Norvo selection, is a real mess, highlighting the problems typically caused by Half Speed Mastering, especially at the hands of one of the most notorious “Audiophile” Mastering Engineers of All Time, the late Stan Ricker. Who cut as many bad sounding records as SR/2 himself? No one I can think of comes close.

His records, with few exceptions, suffer from bad bass (probably bloated and poorly defined in this case, my notes don’t say but after playing these records for thirty years I doubt I’m very off with this guess) and phony, boosted highs, which cause the striking of the mallets to be emphasized in an especially unnatural and unpleasant way.

Arthur Lyman had dramatically better sound in the 50s.

How come none of the audiophiles at Reference Records bothered to figure out how he did it?

Can anybody take sound like this seriously?

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Teaser and the Firecat on Mobile Fidelity and Thoughts on the TAS List

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

We here at Better Records would like to give a shout out to The Man, Harry Pearson, for putting one of the worst MoFis of all time on his so-called Super Disc list.

Many many years ago we wrote:

In case you don’t already know, one of the worst sounding, if not THE WORST SOUNDING VERSION OF ALL TIME, is the Mobile Fidelity Anadisq pressing that came out in the ’90s. If you own that record, you really owe it to yourself to pull it out and play it. It’s just a mess and it should sound like a mess, whether you have anything else to compare it to or not.

Further Reading

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.

It’s dead as a doornail sound, plain and simple.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s and 80s. The average Heavy Vinyl LP I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? But there are scores of companies turning out this crap; somebody must be buying it.

If you are still buying these modern pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered records.

People have been known to ask us: How come you guys don’t like Half-Speed Mastered records?

That’s an easy one. We’ve played them by the hundreds over the years, and we’ve found that as our ability to reproduce the sound of these records improved (better equipment, table setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity and the like), the gap between the better non-Half-Speed mastered pressings and the Half-Speeds got bigger and bigger, leaving the Half-Speeds further and further behind, in the dust you might say, again and again, with so few exceptions that they could easily be counted on the fingers of one hand.

We’ve been playing Half-Speed mastered records since I bought my first Mobile Fidelity in 1978 or 1979. That’s forty years of experience with the sonic characteristics of this mastering approach, an approach we have found to have consistent shortcomings.

These shortcomings have somehow eluded the devotees of these records, how, we cannot imagine.

(That’s really not true, of course. Fans of Half-Speed mastered records are as clueless as I was starting out. Many of the records I used to swear by were Half-Speeds.

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TAS List Thoughts on Stardust

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Willie Nelson Available Now

There’s a reason Willie Nelson’s Stardust is on HP’s TAS List of Super Discs, but you’d never know it by playing the average Columbia pressing. Most copies of this record just sound like an old Willie Nelson record. You wouldn’t have a clue how magical this recording can be if you dropped the needle on the average copy, a copy that for all intents and purposes appears to be exactly the pressing that Harry Pearson recommends on his Super Disc list. The catalog number may be the same, but the sound won’t even hint at Super disc status. (Which, sad to say, most audiophiles don’t seem to notice.)

Get real. Unless you have at least a dozen copies of this record (and we had more than double that) you have very little chance of finding even one side with truly exceptional sound.

This has always been the problem with the TAS list. The pressing variations on a record like this are HUGE and DRAMATIC. There is a world of difference between this copy and what the typical audiophile owns based on HP’s list. I’ve been complaining for years that the catalog number that Harry supplies has very little benefit to the typical audiophile record lover.

Without at least the right stampers, the amount of work required to find a copy that deserves a Super Disc ranking is daunting, requiring the kind of time and effort that few audiophiles are in a position to devote to such a difficult and frustrating project.

The average copy of Stardust just plain sounds wrong, and finding one that sounds right is no mean feat. 

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, guaranteed. And if for some reason you disagree with us about how good they sound, we will be happy to give you your money back.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

TAS List Thoughts about Festival – Harry, This One Is Out of Polarity, Man!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Harry Pearson put this on his list of the best Classic Records RCAs. It may be. I don’t recall ever playing one.

If you can reverse your absolute phase, this original pressings of this record actually sound fairly decent. Do you think Harry knew to do that, or even how to do it? I have my doubts.

He’s gone now so the point is moot, but I maintain it’s the rare reviewer who grasps these kinds of issues with anything approaching the depth and understanding that are required in order to be informative and accurate.

This is an older classical/orchestral review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

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