old-school

Better audio stops hiding and starts revealing the shortcomings of the average record. At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths and beauty of the best records.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an “old school audio system” you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled twenty and thirty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and audiophile-oriented pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re probably missing. We would love to help you find it.

Bad Benson and Bad Audio – It’s a Match

More of the Music of George Benson

More Recordings Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder

Some notes about this shootout from years back may be instructive.

White Hot Stamper sound on side two, which means this copy has the power to show you just how well-recorded the album really is, and how much energy and drive there is to both the sound and the music.

No other side of any copy earned the full Three Plus White Hot grade, so this is a very special side indeed. [Now that we are much better at our jobs — see the advice at the end of this review — this happens only a few times a year.]

We didn’t run into any awful CTI originals the way we do with the typical rock record from the 70s, but it’s the rare copy that has a real top end, or much in the way of transparency, or freedom from smear. This copy has all three, without any sacrifice in richness or Tubey Magic.

Rich, full-bodied sound is not hard to find on Bad Benson; most copies had the goods in the bass and lower midrange.

Your Old Stereo (If You Had One in the Seventies)

On the other hand, clarity, top end, transparency and freedom from smear were hard to come by on all but a few copies. Most copies sound pretty much like your old ’70s stereo system — you know, the one you had with the three-way box speakers sitting on concrete blocks.

Fat, blurry down low, thick, opaque and smeary, that sound was everywhere. Pleasant, but not much more than that.

[This seems like an apt description for the records currently being pressed on Heavy Vinyl, wouldn’t you say?]

We’ve come a long way since then. Some pressings still have that sound to a degree, but with so many audio revolutions taking place over the last twenty years, now we can get dramatically more out of even the sub-optimal copies.

My Stereo from the 70s and the Audio Cult I Was In

Basic Audio Advice – These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

A somewhat strange coincidence occurred not long ago. I found an old commentary describing the speakers I used to own, part of a discussion explaining why I have never wanted to settle for small speakers.

At the same time, I saw that a fellow on Audiogon was selling the electrostatic tweeter array for the very same speaker I owned, the RTR 280DR.

Let me tell you, it really took me back; I haven’t seen a pair in over twenty years. The RTR 280DR you see pictured below plays full range, but there is an optional electrostatic tweeter array that is designed to sit on top of it, which provides a radical improvement in the mids and highs. 

The sound of the 280DR with the electrostatic array was dramatically better than any speaker I had ever heard up to that time.

Here is the story from the old listing talking about the RTRs, sparked by a discussion of Demo Discs.

Fooled Again

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I desperately wanted sound that incredibly real in my playback system, and so I agreed to buy them then and there.

It was only later when I got home with them that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording. To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in; it really was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280DR’s. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic array for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

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What Recordings Are Audiophile Writers Reviewing Now I Wonder?

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Female Vocal Albums

In the early seventies, when I was first becoming seriously interested in audiophile equipment, this was a well-known Demo Disc at some high-end audio salons.

Five years later I would have speakers larger and more expensive in real dollars than the speakers I now own. At a tender age I acquired Stereophile’s cost no object, state-of-the-art speaker system from the mid-’70s, the Fulton J. I was the youngest person ever to own a pair of the behemoths, a record that has never and will never be broken I suspect.

The other monster speaker from that time was the Infinity Servo-Static 1A, which I auditioned before buying the Fultons. During the audition the electrostatic drivers kept blowing if the level got up too high, so that was the end of that. Who wants a speaker that can’t play at realistic sound levels?

Of course, many of you may never have heard of Carmen McRae’s The Great American Songbook album, because the heyday for this record was probably 30-40 years ago, back when the audiophile magazines were actually writing about exceptionally natural, realistic recordings such as this one.

I don’t know what they write about now; I stopped reading them years ago. But I doubt very much that they are still writing about recordings of this quality.

What’s striking about this album is how immediate and unprocessed everything sounds. It really gives you the feeling of being at a live show in a club. It helps that the performance was captured directly onto analog tape with minimal miking. Michael Cuscuna was the remix supervisor, by the way.

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The ARC SP3A-1 Tube Preamp – A Giant Leap Forward for Me, Circa 1975

Our Playback System (and Why You Shouldn’t Care)

Here’s a stereo blast from the past.

In the commentary below I talk about buying the Audio Research SP3A-1 tube preamp (with built-in phono stage, as was the rule in those days) and what a difference it made in the ability of my system to reproduce music at a much higher level.

Naturally, my ability to enjoy music increased dramatically as well.

I was running Crown gear at the time, the DC-300 amp and the IC-150 preamp, so you can imagine that this tube preamp was a real game changer for me.

We talk a lot about Tubey Magic on the site and on this blog. This preamp is the very definition of that sound.

You could call my old Crown system BTM (Before Tubey Magic) and my new Audio Research-based system WTM (With Tubey Magic), if you wanted to be cute about it.

The improvement in the sound was far greater than anything I could have imagined.

Now we provide the same effect to the audiophiles of the world through our Hot Stamper pressings. Better sound than you can imagine. It’s practically our credo.

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