mistakes

Making Mistakes Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

Wise men and women throughout the ages have commented on the value of making mistakes.

Here is one of our favorite quotes on the subject.

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”   Alexander Pope, in Swift, Miscellanies

When I think of the 20 odd years (early ’70s to early ’90s) I wasted trying to figure out how audio works before I had acquired any real critical listening skills, it brings to mind that old Faces’ song, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.”

Learning how to do shootouts for your favorite albums is without a doubt the fastest and easiest way to hone your listening skills, a subject we discuss often on the site and most cogently in this commentary from way back in 2005.

We believe that the only way to really learn about records is to gather a big pile of them together, clean them up and listen to them one by one as carefully and critically as possible.

We do not recommend devoting much time to reading about them in magazines or on forums.

We also would dissuade the serious record collector from paying much attention to what the most sought after or most expensive pressings are. Records have market prices based on a host of factors that have almost nothing to do with sound quality.

And don’t think you can “logically” predict which pressings should sound the best and then just go about acquiring them.

None of these methods are likely to produce good results.

Making mistakes will though. And the more you make, the more you learn. The more you learn, the easier it is to recognize and pursue good records. It also makes it easy to part with your bad ones. The latter group we hope will include the majority of your holdings of Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered Recordings. At best those should be seen as placeholders. They’ll do until something better comes along. And considering how mediocre so many newly remastered records are, “something better’ should not be hard to find.

And the better developed your critical listening skills become, the less likely “they’ll do” at all. They’ll just get put on a shelf. It has been our experience that good records get played and bad records don’t.

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To Find Hot Stamper Pressings, Make the Same Mistakes, Only Sooner

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

Wise men and women throughout the ages have commented on the value of making mistakes.

Here is one of our favorite quotes on the subject.

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.

We can thank Tallulah Bankhead for that one.

When I think of the 20-odd years (early 70s to early 90s) I wasted trying to figure out how audio works before I had discovered how to develop my critical listening skills, it brings to mind the old Faces’ song, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.”

The more mistakes you make, the more you learn.

The more you learn, the easier it is to recognize good records.

Like many of our customers who’ve found their standards raised by our Hot Stamper pressings, you may be so exhausted and disappointed by the mediocrities churned out by one label after another these days that you finally make the pledge to swear off bad records for good.

Acquiring better sounding pressings and getting rid of those that are no longer satisfying will result in a collection that is a joy to own, a collection that will provide a great deal more satisfaction than one made up primarily of collectible records.

One Test to Rule Them All

There is only one true test for records: Which ones do you want to play?

Collect those and sell off all the rest.

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Two of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make Collecting Records

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

To be clear, it’s only a mistake if you are looking for top quality sound.

If, however, you are a record collector who doesn’t care about the sound of your records and is just looking for music to play, you may want to consider the very real possibility that you are on the wrong site. At the very least you are probably wasting your time.

Do you know many audiophiles who own multiple copies of the same album?

Some? Sure, okay. How many of them are still hunting around for more? Not many, right?

I’ve been buying duplicate copies of my favorite albums for more than three decades, but I’m not exactly your average audiophile record collector.

Fortunately for me, with the advent of Better Records in 1987, I’ve had an outlet for the second- and third-rate pressings I choose not to keep. (What’s left of my audiophile pressings are being sold on ebay these days. Good riddance!)

A few audiophile friends have multiple copies, but most audiophiles I know usually stop after one, or at most two or three.

At least they know not to make the worst mistake of them all: buying an audiophile pressing and figuring that that’s the one to keep.

Tossing out their vintage pressings, or never bothering to buy vintage pressings in the first place guarantees you will never have an especially good sounding collection of records to play.

Those of you who take the time to read our Hot Stamper commentary, whether you buy any of our special pressings or not, no doubt know better. At least I hope you do.

Hearing Is Believing

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo.

Nobody, and we mean nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are on about.

If that’s too much trouble, you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world, the ones who don’t know just how dramatic pressing variations for records and CDs can be. Probably a fairly large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much — this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything — you know the kind — and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even their own two ears.

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Finding Good Companies to Invest In Is a Lot Like Finding Good Sounding Records to Play

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

Which of the copies pictured below sound good and which ones don’t?

If you turn over enough of these “rocks,” you — and you alone — will know.

There are some amazing sounding winners in this pile. If you conduct your shootouts following the  tried and true methods we lay out here on the blog, you will be able to hear One Man Dog and every other album you love sound better than you ever dreamed possible.

Pictured below are just a small fraction of the rocks we’ve turned over in the 20 years since we began doing shootouts.

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A Guide to Finding Hot Stampers – Make More Mistakes

mistakes_stevensx20Want to get better at audio and record collecting?

Try making more mistakes.

I was reading an article on the web recently when I came across an old joke Red Skelton used to tell:

All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner.

Now if you’re like me and you play, think and write (hopefully in that order) about records all day, everything sooner or later relates back to records, even a modestly amusing old joke such as the one above.

Making mistakes is fundamental to learning about records, especially if you, like us, believe that most of the received wisdom handed down to record lovers of all kinds is more likely to be wrong than right.

If you don’t believe that to be true, then it’s high time you really started making mistakes.

And the faster you make them, the more you will learn the truths (uncountable in number) about records.

And those truths will set you free.

Yes, We Admit It. We Sell the “Wrong” Pressings

Think about it: perhaps as many as a third of the Hot Stamper pressings on our website are what would commonly be understood to be the “wrong” pressings — or, worse, records that should not have any hope of sounding good at all. 

  • Reissues of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin from the wrong country?
  • 60s and 70s Living Stereo reissue pressings?
  • Original Jazz Classics from the 80s?
  • Beatles records reissued in the 70s, in stereo no less!
  • Kind of Blue on the 70s Red Label?
  • Jazz “Two-Fers“?
  • Budget reissue classical LPs?

The list goes on and on. We’ve reviewed 178 reissues to date worthy of the Hot Stamper designation. Some budget reissues are so good, they actually win shootouts.

Can we be serious?

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Making Mistakes and Other Advice from Better Records

New to the Blog? Start Here

Record shootouts are the fastest and easiest way to hone your listening skills. We believe that the only way to really learn about records is to gather a big pile of them together, clean them up and listen to them one by one, as critically as you can.

Wise men and women throughout the ages have commented on the value of making mistakes. Here is one of our favorite quotes on the subject.

“Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress.” Robert Brault

If you have twenty copies of Bridge of Sighs, and most of them are British, you are definitely going to find a Hot Stamper pressing or two, assuming you clean them right and listen to them critically.

Keep in mind that having British pressings in your shootout is absolutely crucial to your success, because those are the only ones that ever win our shootouts, for obvious reasons: they’re made from the master tapes.

The domestic pressings are made from dubs, and yes, I suppose you could shootout twenty of those, but you would only be trying to find the best second-rate pressing of the album out of your twenty, since practically any British pressing will beat even the best domestic pressing.

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Facing Some Hard Truths in Phoenix

Advice on Making Audio Progress

Or kicking them while they’re down. Pick whichever one you like best, they both work for me.

For those of you who have not been following this story, here is the best place to start.

Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough. (In September there will be a long-form video of me going about a Hot Stamper shootout and discussing the world of audiophile records, which you do not want to miss!)

Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.

Before we start talking about where the blame lies in this mess — with Esposito, Fremer, Jim Davis, or the so-called “engineers” who work for Mobile Fidelity — I would like bring up a couple of ideas that you have no doubt seen before, mostly because they are discussed endlessly on this blog.

We Make Mistakes

The first is that anyone who has been on an audio journey for very long has made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when we were wrong. You might say we are even proud of the fact that we used to get so many things wrong about records and audio.

Our experimental, evidence-based approach, requiring that we not only make mistakes but that we embrace them, is surely key to the progress we have made in understanding recordings and home audio. One of our favorite quotes on the subject is attributed to Alexander Pope.

“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

To say that few audiophiles have followed our approach is not to admit defeat. Rather it is simply to say that the approach we use to find better sounding pressings involves a great deal of tedious, sometimes expensive, always time-consuming work, work that few audiophiles seem interested in doing.

Instead, the approach that most audiophiles these days take is to buy ready-made audiophile pressings. They convince themselves — how, I cannot begin to imagine — that these pressings are superior to all others because of the exceptional skills and superior methods of those tasked with mastering and pressing them. Also I think I remember reading that their hearts were in the right place or something to that effect.

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If You Are At All Serious About Audio, You Cop to Your Mistakes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

And to think I used to swear by this pressing of Katy Lied — specifically the 2000 Yen reissue, not the 1500 Yen original, which sounded dull, more like the average domestic original I was trying to better.

This one is brighter and cleaner, but at the cost of more distortion, more congestion and, now that I have a better understanding of records and their variations, an incorrect tonal balance. The Japanese tried to fix the smooth sound of the dubbed tape they were given and, in so doing, ruined what was good about the sound. 

Another example of just how wrong one can be — one, in this case, being me circa 1995.

Let’s Talk About Us

We happily admit to our mistakes because we know that all this audio stuff and especially the search for Hot Stampers is a matter of trial and error.

We do the trials; we run the experiments,

That’s the only way to avoid the kinds of errors most audiophiles make in their quest to find the best sounding pressings of their favorite albums,.

Being skeptical of every claim you have not tested for yourself is key to getting good results from this kind of work.

Of course, being human we can’t help but make our share of mistakes. More than our share; we’ve made them by the hundreds.

The difference is that we learn from them. We report the facts to the best of our ability for every shootout we do.

Every record gets a chance to show us what it’s made of, regardless of where it was made, who made it or why they made it. 

If we used to like it and now we don’t, that’s what you will read in our commentary. Our obligation is to only one person: you, the listener. (Even better: you, the customer. Buy something already and see what you have been missing.)

On every shootout we do now, if the notes are more than six months old, we toss them out. They mean nothing. Things have changed, radically, and that’s the way it should be.

With each passing year you should be hearing more of everything on your favorite LPs.

That’s the thrill of this hobby — those silly old records just keep getting better. I wish someone could figure out how to make digital get better. They’ve had forty years and it still leaves me wanting more. You too, I’m guessing.

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The More Mistakes the Better, Part Three

Advice on Making More Mistakes

It’s the secret to success – ours, yours and everybody else’s.

“The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.” ~Aubrey Menen

Indeed, if only that were possible. Our approach to Hot Stampers and how to find them is certainly a revolutionary new idea, and undoubtedly the only way of discovering records with proven superior sound quality.

But even if we were to publish all of our secrets — the stamper numbers and labels and countries of origin of all the best pressings we’ve ever played, every last one — that would still not be the answer, for the simple reason that no two records sound the same.

As long as that’s true, either we have to play a pile of records to find the best sounding ones, or you do. There is no other way to do it.

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