sibilant-sound

Sterling Cut By Far the Best Sounding Pressings of I’m Ready

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

Forget the reissue copies that come in the cover you see to the left, the one with a thin black border.

If you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper early domestic pressing is the only way to go.

And take it from us, you need to see the Sterling mark in the dead wax of your pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.

As you can see from the notes above, the two reissue non-Sterling copies we played had hopelessly bad sound.

One was smeary, hard and hot.

The other was the brightest and most spitty.

Note that we didn’t deem it necessary to play side two of either copy. A one plus side one rules out the possibility of it being a Hot Stamper pressing.

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.

Based on our experience, I’m Ready sounds its best:

(more…)

Super Session Is the Poster Boy for Gritty, Spitty Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Kooper Available Now

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album, Child Is Father to the Man), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.

Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals can be a real problem on this album.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, the music on this album — like any rock and pop album — pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes.

On the better copies, the ones with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can crank the volume and let Super Session rock.

Testing with Super Session

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and grain
  2. Midrange tonality
  3. Sibilance (it’s a bitch) 
  4. Upper midrange brightness

Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, three or four times a year.

Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.

Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and think we know well.

(more…)

What to Listen For on The Best of Friends

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Loggins and Messina Available Now

The best news we have to report concerning this compilation is that it does not sound at all like a compilation, and by that we mean that the best copies don’t sound “dubby”, flat, small or compressed. The best copies, in fact, ROCK, with all the energy that the band is capable of.

You may have noticed that we do very few Greatest Hits albums here at Better Records, for the simple reason that most greatest hits albums don’t sound very good. This is one of the few exceptions to that rule that we’ve come across in our record playing travels over the years.

The best originals may be better, but the difference between our Hot Stampers of this album and whatever original pressing you own should be pronounced, in our favor of course.

What to listen for on side one.

Angry Eyes

If you have good weight on your side one, the place you can hear it most clearly is in the toms on Angry Eyes, the first track. They are big and solid and really punch through the mix, staying in the lower part of the soundfield below the vocals.

The lightweight pressings make the toms sound anemic. The copies with poorly defined bass will make the toms sound fat and blobby.

No two copies of the record should have the toms sounding the same; they don’t on our system and they shouldn’t on yours.

What to listen for on side two.

Danny’s Song

You want Kenny Loggins to be front and center. Ideally his voice will be both sweet and breathy (and heartfelt of course). If your copy has its high end intact, and is cut clean, the sibilance from the master tape will be much less gritty on your side two than it is on other copies.

This is where you can hear how present, tonally correct and distortion-free your copy is.

(more…)

Ridiculously Phony and Compressed Sound – The White Album on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found seriously wanting. The phony sound here is perfectly suited to the stone age stereos of the past. I should know. I had a stereo like that back in 1982 when this record came out, and I thought it sounded great.

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi, I could not believe how ridiculously bright, phony and compressed it was.

As sibilant as any Beatles record they ever did. Cry Baby Cry spits like crazy!

And to think I used to like their version when it came out back in the 80s.

A good example: on Yer Blues, the MFSL pressing positively wreaks havoc with all the added bass and top end The Beatles put on this track. The MoFi version is already too bright, and has sloppy bass to start with, so the result on this track is way too much BAD bass and way too much BAD spitty 10k-boosted treble. The MoFi is nothing like the good imports, which have way too much GOOD bass and treble.

Yer Blues ROCKS! Listen to the big jam at the end of the song, where John’s vocal mic is turned off but his performance is still caught by a room or overheard mic. They obviously did this on purpose, killing his vocal track so that the “leaked” vocal could be heard. (We have since learned from Ken Scott that it was mistake, but one they liked and left in.)

Those crazy Beatles! It’s more than just a cool “effect.” It actually seems to kick the energy and power of the song up a notch. It’s clearly an accident, but an accident that works. I rather doubt George Martin approved. That kind of “throw the rule book out” approach is what makes Beatles recordings so fascinating, and The White Album the most fascinating of them all.

The EQ for this song is also a good example of something The Beatles were experimenting with, as detailed in their recording sessions and later interviews with the engineers. They were pushing the boundaries of normal EQ, of how much bass and treble a track could have. This track has seriously boosted bass, way too much, but somehow it works.
(more…)

Surfer Girl Takes MoFi Spit to a New Level

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.

I played the MoFi pressing of this record many years ago, some time back in the early 90s if memory serves, and at the time I could hardly believe that the good people of MoFi would release a record that was so ridiculously SPITTY. The sibilance is positively out of control, the result of their wacky cutting system and phony EQ and who knows what else.

But then I remembered that there has never been a title produced by these people with sound so bad that they would have cancelled its release. {This is a classic case of begging the question. I really have no idea why some of their titles that exist only on test pressing — Pearl for one — never saw the light of day. It is possible that it was cancelled because it sounded worse than even the hard-of-hearing Powers That Be at MoFi could tolerate. Doubtful, but possible.)

(more…)

Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 – Another Spitty and Thin MoFi

More of the Music of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

Sonic Grade: D

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.

So spitty and thin! Why, in God’s name, why would you want to ruin such a wonderful recording?

When you have a recording that is already plenty bright, adding top end and taking out more lower midrange is the last thing in the world you should be doing. Since that was the standard operating procedure for MoFi and other Half-Speed mastering outfits around this time, that’s exactly the approach they ended up taking.

Those of you who have had the opportunity to play the Mobile Fidelity pressing of this record should know what a disaster it is.

Is brighter better? Apparently Mobile Fidelity thinks so. It sounds like a bad CD.

But it’s not a bad CD. It’s an expensive audiophile record!

If you’ve spent any time on this site, you should know by now that many audiophile records sound WORSE than the typical CD.

The typical CD does not have an equalization curve resembling a smile. The classic smile curve starts up high on the left, gets low in the middle, and rises again at the end, resulting in boosted bass, boosted top end, and a sucked out midrange — the Mobile Fidelity formula in a nutshell.

But they forgot to boost the bass on this album, so it’s closer to a half-smile I suppose.

More letters, reviews and commentaries for the debut album by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66

There’s a Riot Goin’ On – From the Analog Master!

More of the Music of Sly and the Family Stone

Sonic Grade: F

Ouch this record sounds bad. Some of the worst sound I have ever heard on Heavy Vinyl. The average cassette sounds better than this piece of crap.

My notes:

Side one: track one is thin and hard. Track two is not very tubey and the sibilance is harsh.

Side two: track two is full and tubey but track three shows that the sound may be tubey but it is very compressed.

But some people think that records that were made from the analog master tapes should sound good. 

Especially when those records were pressed on virgin vinyl.

But do they?

This one sure doesn’t. What could possibly have gone wrong?

We have no idea. We just play the records and listen to them. We let them tell us if they are wrong or right.

This one told us it may have been made from good tapes — may have been, the good folks at Columbia records might be lying to us about that, it wouldn’t be the first time and I certainly would not put it past them — but it sure wasn’t made very well.

(more…)

Sibilance Can Be a Bitch (and a Good Test for Table Setup Too)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

On side two the tonal balance is key. If there is any boost to the top end, the vocals on track two will SPIT LIKE CRAZY.

This is also a good test for how well your cartridge and arm are doing their jobs. Sibilance is a bitch. The best pressings, with the most extension up top and the least amount of aggressive grit and grain mixed into the sound, played using the best front ends, will keep it to a minimum. VTA, tracking weight, azimuth and anti-skate adjustments are critical to reducing the spit in your records.

We discuss the sibilance problems of MoFi records all over the site. Have you ever read Word One about this problem elsewhere? Of course not. Audiophiles and audiophile reviewers just seem to put up with these problems, or ignore them, or — even worse — simply fail to recognize them at all.

Play around with your table setup for a few hours and you will no doubt be able to reduce the sibilance problems on your favorite test and demo discs. All your other records will thank you for it too. 

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and grain
  2. Sibilance (it’s a bitch) 

Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, about every three to four months.

Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar.

Once broken in (50 hours min.), we then proceed to the fine setup work required to get it to sound its best, adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity.

(more…)

Deja Vu – A Tale of Two MoFi’s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

Sonic Grade: F (or not!)

Just for fun about 10 years ago [make that 20] I pulled out a MoFi pressing of Deja Vu I had laying around. I hadn’t played their version in a long time. I could have gone a lot longer without playing it, because what I heard was pretty disappointing. Playing their record confirmed all my prejudices. The highs sizzled and spit. The heart of the midrange was recessed and sour.

Know what it reminded me of? A bad Japanese pressing.

(Since most of them are pretty bad I could have just said a typical Japanese pressing, but that’s another story for another day.)

And if that’s not bad enough, the bass definition disappeared. Bass notes and bass parts that were clearly audible and easily followed on our Hot Stamper copies were murky, ill-defined mud on the MoFi.

If you own the MoFi you owe it to yourself to hear a better sounding version. You really don’t know what you’re missing.

But Then, A Few Years Later We Played This Copy…

Here is what we had to say at the time:

Hot Stamper Sound on the MoFi pressing of Deja Vu, can it be possible? I have NEVER heard the MoFi sound this good, not even close. This just KILLS the other copies I’ve heard. I wrote a scathing review of their badly mastered pressing which you can read below, and I still stand behind every word, because this copy is not your average MoFi. The average one still sucks. What we are selling here is a FLUKE. Here is the story from our Hot Stamper shootout we just did.

This week we picked up a very clean looking MoFi pressing and decided to throw it in the shootout just for fun. We were shocked — this one actually sounded good! Not as amazing as our best Hot Stampers, but much better than we had expected. We checked our old copy and heard the same bad sound described above. 

Pressing variations exist for audiophile records as well, and here was another example. It just goes to show that nothing short of playing a record will tell you how it sounds — except for reading our website. Who besides us could spend so much time playing so many bad records? It’s a dirty job, but we’re happy to do it. Hearing one amazing record makes up for playing 10 bad ones, so we’ll keep at it.

Keep in mind that the only way you can never be wrong about your records is to simply avoid playing them. If you have better equipment than you did, say, five or ten years ago, try playing some of your MoFi’s, 180 gram LPs, Japanese pressings, 45 RPM remasters and the like. You might be in for quite a shock.

It’s all good — until the needle hits the groove. Then you might find yourself in need of actual Better Records, not the ones you just hoped were better.

(more…)