More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66
Soren has some questions about shootouts and our White Hot Stamper pressing of Stillness. His questions are indented, our answers are not.
Tom,
Does it ever bug you to realize, maybe one or two years down the road and with (as Tom mentions) better playback/cleaning technology, that stampers which you dismissed in a shootout turn out to win the next one, meaning that you could have let many possible hot stampers go?
Soren,
We talk about that a bit here: which is better: Phil DeLancie digital or George Horn analog?
But being bugged by it does no good. It is a reality that must be accepted.
Because we know how easy it is to be wrong, or, more precisely, to not know everything we would like to know, we never stop doing research and development for the titles we sell.
We tell people all the time, go play your Heavy Vinyls and Half-Speeds that you haven’t played recently. If you’ve made improvements to your system, they will often start to show themselves to be not nearly as good sounding as you remember, and that means you are making progress.
I was actually reaching out to you to inquire whether the super hot Sergio Mendes Stillness that I bought from you a couple of years ago is the version with the phase reversed on side 2?
I ask because I don’t recall a phase issue on this specific title was ever mentioned on your site back when I bought it (i would have remembered, I think) so maybe you only found out recently?
Side 1 on the record sounds better to me than side 2. The matrix on this side 2 ends in “M3”.
Both M2 and M3 are in correct polarity.
M3 used to win shootouts by the way. For the longest time, at least ten years, I thought M3 was the ultimate side two.