milestones-in-audio-2007

We Get Letters – “That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

A customer wrote the following to us not long ago:

Recently I fired up my CD circuit, which does not happen very often. Once the system was warmed up I played some MoFi gold CDs.

Nothing special, but I did like the Yes Fragile CD. Actually enjoyed it. Guns and Roses Appetite was nasty… Supertramp Breakfast was nasty…

Then I read your blog on the Doors LA Woman DCC gold CD. Found I have it! Played the whole thing and I wanted more of it. That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.

Dear Sir,

Steve did a great job on L.A. Woman, let me be the first to say. Of course the real thing on vinyl is even better, but it’s a great way to test how good your front end is, assuming you have a killer copy of the vinyl, something that is very unlikely to be the case but something that cannot be ruled out entirely. (Tell me your stamper numbers and I will tell you if you are close.)

I worked through a lot of changes to my system in the 90s and 2000s partly because I had CDs that sounded better in some ways than my vinyl versions of them.

That never happens now, but it took me 20 years to get there!

(more…)

Our Advice Has Been Followed and the Results Are In

Proper Record Cleaning Can Help You Find Your Own Hot Stamper Pressings

One of our customers wrote to us about cleaning his collection not long ago, and we advised him how he should go about it. He seems to have taken much our advice to heart and has quieter, better sounding records as a result. He did not spring for the pricey Keith Monks style machine we use, but felt that his efforts produced excellent results regardless. Best to hear it from him:

Hey Tom,

Just did three records, in all different conditions, and this one Eddie Palmieri, the Latin Salsa pioneer. And I had been meaning to get some famous albums in that genre, and I looked through Discogs.com and this guy wanted $40 for an album called Mozambique. Even though it looked great, it had so much noise from years of build up.

It played beautifully after all the steps. There was a huge jump in fidelity, just the tiniest, tiniest surface noise between songs. You wouldn’t notice if you weren’t listening for it.

From the other two records which had different issues, I don’t think it’s very hard to understand what else a Keith Monk type machine might add to other more difficult records, in combination with the Prelude stuff and a VPI. But for this one, and I think a lot of other records I own, the Prelude and VPI are all I needed.

I know there’s going to be a huge learning curve and I don’t expect things to be so simple. But it was just cool and kind of a treat, my first time out, to know that it’s possible.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that for what it’s worth. Thanks,

Andrew

Dear Andrew,

Glad to hear you were able to get your records cleaner and make them better sounding to boot. What could be better?

Well, there actually is an answer to that rhetorical question, and we supplied it right here on the blog in a listing with step by step instructions using the Prelude Record Cleaning System and two record cleaning machines. You asked me to write it all out so that’s what I did.

It does not surprise me in the least that you got great results with your VPI. That is the very machine we had been using since the early-90s to clean all our records. Sometime later in the decade we discovered the Disc Doctor fluids and switched to them. I wrote a long piece in my paper catalog (this was in our pre-internet days) discussing how much quieter and better sounding all of our vintage classical records sounded when cleaned with DD fluids, and that I was therefore going to reclean them all and reevaluate every last one for sound and surfaces. It was that big a difference.

In 2007, when I first heard a record cleaned with the Prelude System, everything changed radically, a story I tell using the record I was testing at the time, Meddle. It was one of the biggest breakthroughs we had experienced up to that time.

This is the kind of difference you have now heard with Prelude and your 16.5. You are operating at a different level now.

But there was more to come for us when an audio friend invited me to bring a record over that he would clean with Prelude on his Keith Monks machine. I brought over a killer copy of Meddle as I recall. Imagine my shock when it sounded even better than it had when first cleaned with Prelude. I immediately ordered up a industrial-strength threaded-pickup machine, the Odyssey, made in Germany, and started offering Hot Stamper pressings that were quieter and had better sound than I had ever heard before. (We are currently on our third unit. We clean a lot of records.)

This is leap you have yet to take. It might not make as much difference as your cleaning has to date, but, once you do it, you will find that there is a clearly audible “before and after” quality to the sound of your records. No doubt you will want to reclean all your personal favorites using Prelude and whatever Keith Monks type machine you end up with.

(more…)

Trying to Get at the Truth with Transistors

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

In 2007 we did a shootout for The Four Seasons on RCA and noted the following:

For those of you with better tube gear, the string tone on this record is sublime, with that rosin-on-the-bow quality that tubes seem to bring out in a way virtually nothing else can, at least in my experience.

Our experience since 2007 has changed our view concerning the magical power of tubes to bring out the rosiny texture of bowed stringed instruments.

We have in fact changed our minds completely with respect to that rarely-questioned belief.

It’s a classic case of live and learn, and represents one of the bigger milestones in audio that we marked in 2007, a year that in hindsight turns out to have been the most important in the history of the company.

Everything changed dramatically for the better for us sometime in 2005. That’s when we discovered the transistor equipment we still use to this day.

We found a low-power integrated amp made in the 70s that was vastly superior to our custom-built tube preamp and amp. We had an EAR tube phono stage at that time, which we quite liked.

UPDATE 2025

We recently hooked up our old 834p phono stage in the system and did not like the sound at all.

Things change. Boy do they ever!

In 2007 we auditioned the EAR 324P transistor phono stage and immediately recognized it would take our analog playback to an entirely new level, one we had simply never experienced before and really had never thought could possbily exist.

(more…)

Advances in Playback Technology Are More Than Blind Faith

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

In a 2007 commentary for a Hot Stamper pressing of Blind Faith we noted that:

When it finally all comes together for such a famously compromised recording, it’s nothing less than a THRILL. More than anything else, the sound is RIGHT. Like Layla or Surrealistic Pillow, this is no Demo Disc by any stretch of the imagination, but that should hardly keep us from enjoying the music. And now we have the record that lets us do it.

The Playback Technology Umbrella

Why did it take so long? Why does it sound good now, after decades of problems? For the same reason that so many great records are only now revealing their true potential: advances in playback technology.

Audio has finally reached the point where the magic in Blind Faith’s grooves is ready to be set free.

What exactly are we referring to? Why, all the stuff we talk about endlessly around here. These are the things that really do make a difference. They change the fundamentals. They break down the barriers.

You know the drill. Things like better cleaning techniques, top quality front end equipment, Aurios, better electricity, Hallographs and other room treatments, amazing phono stages like the EAR 324p, power cables; the list goes on and on.

If you want records like Blind Faith to sound good, we don’t think it can be done without bringing to bear all of these advanced technologies to the problem at hand, the problem at hand being a recording with its full share of problems and then some.

Without these improvements, why wouldn’t Blind Faith sound as dull and distorted as it always has? The best pressings were made more than thirty years ago [thirty? make that fifty] — they’re no different.

(more…)

Listening in Depth to Little Queen

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Heart Available Now

This is a recording that I credit with taking me to the next level of sound. When I first heard a killer Hot Stamper pressing played back through the EAR 324P phono stage at a friend’s house, I immediately called the distributor and ordered one. That was a Saturday. It arrived on the following Tuesday.

Compared to the 834P tube unit I had been using, the solid state 324P simply took the recording to a level I had no idea could possibly exist. Yet there it was.

That was 2007. Looking back now, it’s clear to me that 2007 was by far the most momentous year in the history of Better Records.

Once I had reached that higher level of playback, I set about using the album for tweaking and testing, and learned a lot doing it. Along with a substantial number of other records I have come across in my forty plus years as a hobbyist and audiophile record dealer, Little Queen is one that has done a great deal to help me become a more critical listener. [1]

Side One

Barracuda

One of the little tricks I used toward the end of my marathon Little Queen tweaking session from many years ago (which lasted more than six hours one Saturday evening, leaving me euphoric but exhausted) was to listen to the ending of Barracuda. Some of the big guitar chords at the end of the song are louder than others, and the more the differences in level among them can be heard, the better the stereo and the room must be at exposing these micro-dynamic changes.

You can’t make the guitarist play some of the notes at the end louder than others, you can only reveal the fact that he indeed must have. This is what we mean by Hi-Fidelity.

(more…)