pretense

When someone pretends to know things they cannot possibly know, such a person can be said to be suffering from a “pretense of knowledge.”

Many of the precepts that audiophiles willingly believe — that original pressings have the best sound, or that modern engineers doing their best to carefully remaster recordings to the highest standards produce records with superior quality — are best seen as articles of faith. The empirical data to support them is lacking, if it exists at all.

Either way, any such claims are beside the point. Records must be judged by the way they sound, not by how they were made or by whom.

Songs in the Key of Life – Is This a Well-Engineered Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Wonder Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written more than ten years ago and probably updated a bit here and there since then.

Fremer is here as reliably mistaken as ever about the sound of the records he reviews, in this case Songs in the Key of Life, but even worse, he thinks he knows things about master tapes and the qualities of specific recordings that he can’t possibly know. We simply wanted to call him out for the pernicious ideas he’s made a career out of spreading.

These ideas may comfort the mid-fi crowd who accept the mediocrities produced by this guy and all those who compete with him, but they will positively impede the progress of any audiophile who wants to reach the highest levels of playback in the home.

I’ve just gone to Fremer’s website to make sure the quote below is accurate, and everything you need to see is still up and as misguided as ever.

Some audiophiles never learn, and a great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles avoid the errors this reviewer and others like him have been making for decades. In the mid-90s I wrote my first commentary about the awful audiophile records this person had raved about in his review in one of the audiophile rags.

In the years since it seems that nothing has changed. Bad sounding audiophile pressings make up the bulk of this person’s favorable reviews to this day. Here are 157 of them.

How it is possible to spend so much time doing something, yet learn so little in the process? It is frankly beyond me.

I put the question to you again:

Is this a well-engineered album?

The first question that comes to mind is:

How on Earth could anyone possibly know such a thing?

(more…)

Turning Skeptics into Believers, One Hot Stamper at a Time

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

About 15 20 years ago we received a letter from a fellow on our email list who found our prices for vinyl curious, as he considered vinyl a bygone technology. (You may have noticed that it has since made quite the comeback.)

Bygone technology? Can’t say I agree with that assessment. It sure would be nice to demonstrate for him how much better records sound than the supposedly superior technologies that have — for most people, perhaps even for this gentleman — replaced them.

Wait, there is a way!

A Hot Stamper, 100% Guaranteed to Satisfy or Your Money Back. One click is all it takes. Which is pretty much what I said in my reply to his letter below.

Tom,

I receive your HTML email regularly. Along with the curious prices of your offerings, I occasionally wonder about the opinions expressed in your e-missives. A Roman senator once said that all mortal things are ‘only perfect in death.’ Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust aside: vinyl (of which I own a considerable library) is merely a bygone technology at this point in time. The opinions expressed on your website rarely credit the writer. Whose words are these? And why should I accept the opinions of someone who only stands to profit from their fanaticism?

Cheers, 
Bruce R. 

Bruce, most of us write the commentary, there are five of us fanatics here. (Six if you count our record cleaning person, but I’m not sure how fanatical she is, so let’s go with five.)

(more…)

How Does the Heavy Vinyl Rubber Soul Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now

This review was originally written in 2015.

We are so excited to tell you about the first of the Heavy Vinyl Beatles remasters we’ve played! As we cycle through our regular Hot Stamper shootouts for The Beatles’ albums we will be of course be reviewing more of them*. I specifically chose this one to start with, having spent a great deal of time over the last year testing the best vinyl pressings against three different CD versions of Rubber Soul.

The short version of our review of the new Rubber Soul vinyl would simply point out that it’s awful, and, unsurprisingly, it’s awful in most of the ways that practically all modern Heavy Vinyl records are: it’s opaque, airless, energy-less and just a drag.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to take Michael Fremer, the foremost champion of thicky vinyl, to task in expectation of his usual rave review, when to my surprise I found the rug had been pulled out from under me — he didn’t like it either. Damn!

MF could hear how bad it was. True to form, he thinks he knows why it doesn’t sound good:

As expected, Rubber Soul, sourced from George Martin’s 1987 16 bit, 44.1k remix sounds like a CD. Why should it sound like anything else? That’s from what it was essentially mastered. The sound is flattened against the speakers, hard, two-dimensional and generally hash on top, yet it does have a few good qualities as CDs often do: there’s good clarity and detail on some instruments. The strings are dreadful and the voices not far behind. The overall sound is dry and decay is unnaturally fast and falls into dead zone.

It strikes me as odd that the new vinyl should sound like a CD. I have listened to the newly remastered 2009 CD of Rubber Soul in stereo extensively and think it sounds quite good, clearly better than the Heavy Vinyl pressing that’s made from the very same 16 bit, 44.1k remixed digital source.

If the source makes the new vinyl sound bad, why doesn’t it make the new CD sound bad? I can tell you that the new CD sounds dramatically better than the 1987 CD I’ve owned for twenty years. They’re not even close. How could that be if, as MF seems to believe, the compromised digital source is the problem?

Lucky for me I didn’t know what the source for the new CD was when I was listening to it. I assumed it came from the carefully remastered hi-rez tapes that were being used to make the new series in its entirety, digital sources that are supposed to result in sound with more analog qualities.

Well, based on what I’ve heard, they do, and those more analog qualities obviously extend to the new Rubber Soul compact disc. At least to these ears they do.

It’s possible my ignorance of the source tape allowed me to avoid the kind of confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — that is surely one of the biggest pitfalls in all of audio and a pit that Fremer falls into regularly.

(more…)

“…no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

A letter and some commentary about Revolver in mono follows the comment that was left by a Mr. Doodah defending The Beatles in mono. My reply follows.

First up, Mr. Doodah.

“you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. That’s exactly the point why the mono sounds good because no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field listening to music these days.

“They are either listening on Headphones or undoubtedly hundreds of degrees off access in another room or whatever they’re doing in their car or whatever so the stereo mixes will not stand up under those kinds of conditions.

“It’s only for nuts, so it’s like you sit down with a supposedly perfect acoustically design [sic] room and perfectly aligned speakers. Not exactly real world for the masses.

“I always tell people I teach engineering to… First thing… And learn how to do a great mono mix. Then you can start with all the fakery.

“You are way out of your league even pretending to know what you’re talking about”

Dear Mr. Doodah,

I would think that anyone reading this blog would see that we are not the least bit concerned with anything the masses are up to.

The masses seem to like streaming. Why should anyone waste his time taking what they like seriously? I suppose if you’re teaching those looking for work in an industry providing music to the masses, what you are telling them may be of some value.

It is surely of no value to those of us who aspire to high quality sound. Yes, the experience we are after does indeed require special rooms and speakers and, most especially, high quality stereo records to play.

If you’ve never heard The Beatles’s music reproduced at the highest levels on a big system in a dedicated room, why would you pretend to know anything about it?

Our customers can easily access the mono mixes and the modern digital releases. They have chosen instead to spend a great deal of money on our vintage records. The abundant evidence — sales figures, letters, etc. — should make it clear that our stereo Hot Stamper pressings do in fact deliver the superior sound we promised them.

(more…)

Hot Stamper Sharing Can’t Get Off the Ground, How Come?

Basic Concepts and Record Realities Explained 

The above link takes you to our blog. Normally such a link would take you to our in-stock Hot Stamper pressings on the site for the band in question, but we rarely have any Traffic albums to sell these days, which is the case as of this writing.

Finding just the right Traffic pressings, with audiophile-quality vinyl no less, requires effort and resources that we just haven’t been committing to lately. We hope to do better in 2025.

In 2014 somebody on the Hoffman forum tried to get a Hot Stamper thread going under this heading: cheap Hot Stampers revealed.

The thread:

“If you have a “hot stamper” record – one that smokes and takes no prisoners, I mean a BADASS pressing, show it here with matrix info, label or other identifying features so we can all hunt with a bit of a head-start.

“I know these records are out there, just looking for a place to show off their analog glory.

“Here is a recent find that fits the bill and then some:

“Traffic: Best Of Traffic UK.

“Matrix # ILPS 9112 A-1/B-1”

OK, let’s talk about this Island reissue. We know the record well. If it sounds the way the copies we played over the years have sounded, we would say it can be good, not great, and if it qualified for Hot Stamper status, it might — might — earn a plus and a half at best. (1.5+.)

We don’t even bother to pick them up at any price these days, if that tells you anything.

He got very little support in his endeavor. The thread closed after a while with practically nothing in it.

Could it be that the folks on the Hoffman forum have a poor grasp of the amount of effort, time and money it takes to find Hot Stampers?

And, having committed to neither the effort, the time nor the money, find that they have nothing of any value to contribute to such a list?  

Yes, that could be. That definitely could be. Thank god it doesn’t keep them from criticizing those of us who, working in concert with a staff of ten or so, have devoted ourselves to the task and found them by the thousands.

By the way, we know that Traffic title very well. The Pink Label original is by far the best pressing in our experience. No copy we have ever heard on the label promoted by this poster would qualify as much more than a bargain Hot Stamper in comparison to the Pink Label and Pink Rim label pressings that we sell, although of course, not having heard his copy, we can’t say it’s not fabulous. 

It’s just not very likely to be fabulous. 

(more…)

The Million Dollar Stereo (Updated)

He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.

Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — “the world’s greatest hi-fi”.

What would it mean in the end?

Geoff Edgers has written a highly entertaining story about an extremely misguided audiophile who went “searching for perfect sound” in ways that practically guaranteed he would never find it.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this fellow’s mistakes.

Just to take one obvious example, this picture of some of the records in his collection speaks volumes, at least it does to me.

He built a million dollar stereo to play records like these?

No amount of money spent on equipment can make most of these titles sound good, and failure to appreciate that fact is just one of the many fatal errors the late Mr. Fritz made in his approach to both records and audio.

He mistakenly thought he was at the “I know everything” stage, but that is just the prelude to the stages of knowledge where real understanding and progress begin, not end.

My own stereo history may be of some value in helping to shed light on these issues. Like everyone else, I started at the bottom. Thank god I didn’t have a million dollars to waste back then because I clearly didn’t understand audio any better than the late Mr. Fritz did.

Like him and practically every audiophile I’ve ever come in contact with, I sure thought I did. Having suffered myself from a serious case of pretentious-knowledge syndrome, it’s easy for me to spot the signs in others. (My understanding is that you can’t sign up on the Hoffman Forum without first proving your know-it-all bona fides.)

Why So Uncomfortable?

In a recent letter I received about the Dynavector 17dx cartridge we use, this question was posed:

Why is it that audiophiles are so uncomfortable with the idea that they might be wrong? I mean, you can’t improve if you think you are already right.

I answered as follows:

I was no different back when I started. For about my first ten years in high-end audio, roughly 1975-85, I bought the most expensive equipment that I could afford, as long as it sounded good to me and was well-liked by those whose ears I trusted.

Is the audiophile of today doing anything different?

What would you be doing if you hadn’t stumbled on a guy with some credibility — he sold you some records that sounded amazing, so he must know something — who turned you on to some audio stuff that sounds great and, better yet, didn’t cost that much?

And how did this guy — me — come to find out about all this stuff in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you.

(more…)

Is Digital Really the Problem on this Cowboy Junkies Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Sound 

The RCA domestic pressings cut at Sterling are not worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

Don’t be one of those die-hard analog types who point fingers at the fact that there was digital in the recording chain when their pressing doesn’t sound good.

It’s got nothing to do with digital. It has everything to do with Sterling doing a bad job mastering the domestic vinyl.

(Keep in mind that a very large group of audiophiles, including some well-known reviewers, had no idea there was a digital step used in the process of making some of the records they had raved about. Apparently the only way to hear it is when you already know it’s there.)

Our notes for the domestic pressing below read:

  • Flat and dry vox.
  • Shifted up [tonally]
  • A bit scooped [or “sucked out” in the midrange, meaning the middle of the midrange is missing to some degree]

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart from each other and you can get that sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Why Defend the Indefensible?

When good mastering houses like Kendun and Sterling and Artisan make bad sounding records, we offer no excuses for their shoddy work. The same would be true for the better-known cutting engineers who’ve done work for them, as well as other cutting operations.

Individuals working for generally good companies sometimes produce substandard work product.

How is this news to anyone outside of the sycophantic thread posters, youtubers, and self-identified record experts who write for the audiophile community?

(more…)

Cognitive Dissonance, or, I Just Paid $600 for This LP – Was That Too Much?

New to the Blog? Start Here

This letter came to us when we first started selling Hot Stamper pressings on our website way back in 2004-2005. Since that time we have received many other letters like it. Apparently, charging a lot of money for used records upsets people. Who knew?

Don, who wrote us the following letter, applauds us for being able to convince our customers to pay forty times the going rate for some of the records we sell — and like it!

The subject line of Don’s letter is Music.

What a great example of free market capitalism at it’s [sic] finest. Your web site is truly a unique example of marketing. You’ve taken a medium that [sic] completely relative and you can convince someone to pay upwards of 40X the going rate because….well, you said so. That doesn’t mean that the record will sound the same to them or that their experience of music is the same as yours as a reviewer. I guess if someone decides to spend $600 on a record they damn well better find a reason why it’s worth it even if they’re not completely convinced. (I took the time to read some of the other comments on your site.)

Don’t understand why someone would be upset about that or how they could argue that the records aren’t worth the price. They’re worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them as I see it. Maybe because they didn’t think of it first or they have some misplaced sense of ethics….who knows. I know it’s not worth it to me and thankfully there are plenty of other resources available for buying music. Another great example of capitalism…..

Sincerely,

Don L.

Don, honestly, I’m positively blushing at the thought that my “say so” is what gets people to pay the ridiculously high prices we charge for what appear to be fairly common rock records, the kind that might be worth roughly, oh, I don’t know, 1/40th of what we are asking? (Truth be told, probably even less.)

Ah, but here’s the kicker: there’s actually a scientific explanation for it!

It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it works like this. Let’s say someone decides to spend $600 on a record — sound familiar? — yet for some reason they’re not completely convinced it’s worth it — ring any bells? — so they find a way to justify the purchase to themselves by rationalizing one of two things: their actions or their perceptions.

In this case, although the actual record may not sound all that good when they get it home, because it costs so much they must find a way to make it somehow seem better than it really is. Failing to do so, this person, demonstrably $600 poorer, would have to conclude that he, like an idiot, has just let himself get ripped off, in this case by us.

Twisted Logic

The logic at work here is pretty straightforward. The buyer says to himself: I am not an idiot. Only an idiot would pay $600 for a record that doesn’t sound amazingly good, especially one that can easily be had for one-fortieth the amount of money I have paid, therefore the record must sound better than my ears tell me it does.

Which — let’s be honest here — may in fact be happening. I don’t know what these records sound like in my customer’s homes. How could I? They live all over the world. I have certainly taken some of my best sounding pressings with me while visiting customers, and they sure sounded good on their systems. But I can’t vouch for systems I have never heard and people I have never met. That would be silly.

You Are Correct Sir

You are certainly correct in pointing out that musical values are relative. The famous Latin proverb “De gustibus non est disputandum,” roughly translated “There’s no accounting for taste,” is one with which I am very familiar. (When somebody pays $600 for The Hunter on vinyl, you don’t have to tell me there’s no accounting for taste.)

As a skeptic I require evidence for what I believe in order to believe it. Although it’s certainly possible that our customers are willing to pay our admittedly high prices on nothing more than our say so, I see no evidence that this is in fact the case. All things being equal I think they must really like our records. They tell us so all the time, and they keep buying them week after week, so if they really are just fooling themselves, they apparently can’t stop doing it.

Occam’s Razor

The scientist’s and skeptic’s best friend, Occam’s razor, comes into play here. It holds that “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.” It’s often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions…”

Why assume people who buy expensive records are crazy? Why assume that the records they buy aren’t every bit as good as advertised, if not better? Why assume that the “other resources available for buying music” are even remotely as good, absent any evidence?

People assumed that the CD was going to be a cheap and easy resource for their music, and look where that got them.

Assumptions? Us?

(more…)

Hearing Is All It Should Take, Right?

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

Some person on some audiophile forum might feel obligated at some point to explain to you, benighted soul that you are, that the old classical records you — and other audiophiles like you — revere so highly have to be recognized these days for what they are: drastically compromised by the limits of their old technology.

Simply put, there’s just no way they can sound good.

It’s just a fact. It’s science. Technology marches on and those old records belong on the ash heap of history collecting dust, not sitting on the platter of a modern turntable.

That’s why the audio world was crying out for Bernie Grundman to recut those Living Stereo recordings from the 50s and 60s on his modern transistorized cutting equipment and have RTI press them on quiet, flat, high-resolution 180 gram vinyl, following the best practices of an industry that everybody knows has been constantly improving for decades.

Right?

For those of us who actually play these records, there is little evidence to support this narrative.

It’s a story made up mostly of assertions, along with an unhealthy amount of faith in so-called experts. [1]

Note that Bernie had no experience cutting classical music. He was a rock, pop and jazz guy. Robert Ludwig was the classical guy, cutting hundreds of albums for labels like Nonesuch in the 60s. What a different world it would be if he was the guy who cut for Classic Records! This review gets to the heart of the matter.

However, the contrarian view outlined above only really holds true for a very small minority of audiophiles of the analog persuasion: those given to empirical testing of such propositions. [2]

For an audiophile to compare the new pressings to the old ones, proper testing requires that the following four conditions can are met:

  1. He or she has a revealing, accurate stereo,
  2. A good record cleaning system, and
  3. Knows how to do shootouts using his or her
  4. Well-developed critical listening skills

If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you’ve probably read by now that the first three on this list are what allow you to achieve the fourth.

Compromises?

The best classical recordings of the 50s, 60s and 70s were compromised in every imaginable way, yet still they sound amazing.

(more…)

Paraphrasing Hayek – Our Curious Task

F. A. Hayek summarized his views well when he noted that:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Our curious task has been to demonstrate to audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them how mistaken they are to think that they can understand the sound of a recording by playing a small number of pressings of it.

Similarly, the modern mastering engineer operates with the understanding that he can design and operate a cutting system that produces sound superior to that which was produced by the engineers of the past.

Based on the hundreds of remastered records we have auditioned, this is clearly a case of overpromising and underdelivering.

These assumptions, and the mistaken approach to record collecting that flows from them, are clearly unsupportable.

The scores of commentaries we have written on both subjects provide all the evidence required to falsify them, and — with a fair amount of effort, sorry for the trouble — can be found among the 5000+ postings on this blog.

The Hot Stamper pressings we offer, so much bigger, livelier, and more engaging than anything produced by these so-called audiophile mastering houses, are simply the physical evidence of our deeper and more correct understanding of the true nature of records and their mysterious and confounding properties.

Digging Deep

Everything we think we know about records is based on strictly empirical findings, findings that resulted from critically auditioning thousands and thousands of albums. Many of these albums we have played by the score. For some titles, such as the more popular Beatles’ albums, we have played more than a hundred copies.

No one else has ever dug as deep as we have into the mysteries of pressing variations, for the simple reasons that no individual or group would be motivated to do so and have the resources required to accomplish such a feat.

(more…)