TML-thoughts

Reviews and commentaries for titles that were mastered at one of the greatest mastering houses of all time, The Mastering Lab.

Yet Another James Taylor Desert Island Disc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Musically this is one of Taylor’s best. Every track is good and many are wonderful. (More on that here.)

There are five or six James Taylor records that are Desert Island Discs for me. I know they probably wouldn’t let me take six of the same artists’ records to my island, but I would hope they would make an exception for James Taylor’s LPs, because they really do set a standard that few other popular performers can meet.

JT is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Avoid the Tan Labels and Non-TML Pressings for Nilsson Schmilsson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Not that we would ever claim that TML in the dead wax guarantees good sound.

Side two of our tan label copy below was passable, but that’s sonically a very long way from the top copies we played, which of course were all TML, with lots of different stampers, none of which we are likely to reveal, now or in the future, for reasons we are sure you understand.

Anyone who buys one of our White Hot Stamper copies will definitely know, but we only find a couple of those every few years, as this is not a shootout that’s been easy to do for a very long time.

Make sure your equipment is tuned up and the electricity is good before you get anywhere near a pressing of this album.

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies I played this week and the scores I’ve suffered through before.

Nilsson Schmilsson is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Thoughts on a Direct to Disc Recording, Its Strengths and Weaknesses

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

In a shootout we conducted more than ten years ago, two White Hot Stamper pressings tied for the best side two we had ever heard.

In the final round it simply came down to the fact that the other copy was a little more clear, this one is a little richer.

They were both so amazing we couldn’t decide which we preferred so we gave them both White Hot Stamper grades.

In our experience this rarely happens.

Most of the time one side of one of the records in the shootout will show itself to be the clear winner, doing everything — or almost everything; there is no such thing as a perfect record — right.

When you play enough copies, eventually you run into the one that shows you how the music wants to be heard, what kind of sound seems to work for it the best. The two side twos we liked were variations, and fairly subtle ones at that, on a theme — a little richer here, a little clearer there, but both so good.

To be honest, most copies of this title were quite good. Few didn’t do most things at least well enough to earn a Hot Stamper grade. This has not been the case with many of the Sheffield pressings we’ve done shootouts for in the past. Often the weaker copies have little going for them. They don’t even sound like Direct Discs.

Some copies lack energy, some lack presence, most suffer from some amount of smear on the transients.

But wait a minute. This is a direct disc. How can it be compressed, or lack transients? Aren’t those tape recorder problems that are supposed to be eliminated by the direct to disc process?

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Listening in Depth to Ambrosia

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

AMBROSIA is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it. It’s also part of our extensive Listening in Depth series. There is no question that this band, their producers and their engineers sweated every detail of this remarkable recording. They went the distance. In the end they brought in Alan Parsons to mix it, and Doug Sax to master it. The result is a masterpiece, an album that stands above all others.

It’s not prog. It’s not pop. It’s not rock. It’s Ambrosia — the food of the gods.

The one album that I would say it most resembles is Dark Side of the Moon. (Note the Parsons connection.) Like DSOTM, Ambrosia is neither Pop nor Prog but a wonderful mix of both and more. 

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back on it over the last thirty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with a handful of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile, and managed to stick with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music like this sound so good?

Although I didn’t discover the album until some time later in the 90s, I recognized the challenge it presented to my system, setup and room immediately, a subject I write about here.

The band’s first album is yet another record the deserves a great deal of credit for helping me become a better listener.

Side One

Nice, Nice, Very Nice

Once you know this record well, you can easily tell if you have a good side one within the first minute of this song. Side one has a tendency to be somewhat bright and even aggressive in places. This problem is further exacerbated by the typical copy’s lack of bass. The best copies have incredibly tight, punchy bass at the beginning of this song, and plenty of it. Phenomenal bass. Demo Disc quality bass.

If that’s not what you hear, you know you will soon be in for more problems. The vocals need to start out smooth, because they get brighter later on. Missing bass or added brightness are sure signs of trouble ahead. The lines “I wanted all things to make sense/ so we’d be happy instead of tense” will be aggressive on copies that are not tonally correct. And copies without tons of bass are not tonally correct, because the recording has tons of bass. It’s essential to the music. Any stereo incapable of providing the power in the lower octaves demanded by this recording is going to make a real mess of this one.

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Inner Secrets Is One of the Best Sounding Rock Records We’ve Ever Played

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

In our most recent shootout (11/2023), the first we’ve done in quite a few years, my main listening guy was blown away by the sound of the Shootout Winning copy. This warmed my heart no end, as I have been raving about the sound of this album for fifteen years or more.

We created a section for phenomenally good sounding records like Inner Secrets, and this link will take you to it.

His notes from the session can be seen below.

And he’s not wrong about much of the album being “blah.” There are really only about four top quality songs out of the nine on the album, but three of those four are killer, and, even at our prices, make the album a Must Own for those of you with big speakers that can play good and loud.

Phase One and Phase Two of a Shootout

Like other Hot Stampers you may have read about, sometimes the instruments and voices just jump out of the speakers. When that happens I usually write “It’s Alive!” on the post-it, and I know exactly what to do with it. I put it right in the Contender pile, to be compared with the other top contender copies at some point.

It’s definitely a crazy-good Hot Stamper; just how hot we still need to find out.

Which is what happens in Phase Two of these affairs. We go back through all the best copies to see in what areas they really shine and in what areas they may fall a bit short of the best.

Of course there’s no way to know what accounts for any of the sound we hear. Not for sure anyway. It’s just interesting to ponder what makes one record sound one way and the next record, with stampers as little as one letter off in the alphabet — sometimes with exactly the same stampers! — sound so different from one another.

Doug Sax Is The Man

All the originals (the only ones with the potential for good sound in our experience) are cut by The Mastering Lab, one of the greatest cutting houses to ever master records.

Doug Sax may or may not have had anything to do with the making of this record, but one thing we can be sure of: he knew how to keep his lathes and amplifiers working at state-of-the-art levels. The sound quality is unsurpassed.

And he did it all with tubes.

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Santana – Inner Secrets

More Santana

More of Our Hardest Rockin’ Records

  • A big, bold, exciting and hard-rocking pressing with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish -exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Power and energy are what make this album a true Demo Disc in the world of rock, and this copy has both
  • A sleeper in the Santana canon that boasts some of the best sound the band ever put to vinyl
  • As a matter of fact, the notes for this copy mentioned that it was one of the best sounding rock records we have ever played – and who plays more amazing sounding rock records than we do?
  • Top tracks here include three of their biggest barnburners: “Dealer” (Traffic), “Stormy” and “Well…All Right” (Blind Faith)

I know exactly the kind of sound I like on this album. When the background vocals come in, on the Tubey Magical copies they are wall to wall and sweet as honey, with no trace of grain or edge. Big as life too. The guitars have plenty of bite, but no matter how loud they get, they never seem to strain. The louder they get the more I like it. That’s the ticket as far as I’m concerned.

Turn It Up

Like Abraxas, when you play a Hot Stamper copy good and loud, you find yourself marvelling at the musicianship of the group — because the Hot Stamper pressings, communicating all the energy and clarity the recording has to offer, let you hear what a great band they were.

If you’ve got the the big room, big speakers, and the kind of power it takes to drive them, you can have a live rock and roll concert in your very own house.

When Santana lets loose with some of those legendary monster power chords — which incidentally do get good and loud in the mix, unlike most rock records which suffer from compression and “safe” mixes — I like to say that there is no stereo system on the planet that can play loud enough for me. (Horns maybe, but I don’t like the sound of horns, so there you go.) Here are some other records that have especially dynamic guitar solos.

What makes it possible to play this record so loud and still enjoy it? Simple. When the sound is smooth and sweet, completely free of aggressive mids and highs, records get better as they get louder. (This, of course, assumes low distortion and all the rest, but the main factor is correct tonality from top to bottom, and this record has it.)

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Ambrosia Is Right at the Top of Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

You can play hard-to-reproduce records all day long if your system is tuned up and working fine.

Ours has to be, all day, every day. Our shootouts require that everything is working properly or we wouldn’t be able to trust the results.

But you can’t play this record on such a system without testing everything, because this is the Single Most Difficult to Reproduce Recording I know of.

This is what makes it such a great test disc; to call it a challenge doesn’t begin to convey the difficulty of playing a record that places such heavy demands on a system.

Which means I had to retweak a lot of my table setup to make sure it was 100% right, by ear. Getting the VTA right on this record was fundamentally critical to hearing it sound its best.

(None of those silly setup tools for us here at Better Records. You can hear when it’s right and if you can’t then you need to keep at it until you can.)

Detail Freaks Beware

This is the kind of record that will eat the detail freaks alive. If your system has any extra presence, or boost in the top end — the kind that some audiophiles mistake for “detail” — this record with beat you over the head with it until blood runs out of your ears.

You need balance to get the most out of this album.

The more your system is out of whack, the more this album will make those shortcomings evident.

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Toto – Copy Number Three Finally Showed Us the Magic We Were Looking For

More of the Music of Toto

Our first shootout from way back when [2010?] got off to a very rocky start; we were on the verge of giving up after playing two very bad, sub-generation side ones, cut at The Mastering Lab just like all the rest, but so bad even the CD might be better. If you have an awful copy, we feel your pain.

But Copy Number Three showed us the real Toto sound: the kind of sweetness and warmth we had been hoping to hear and fearing might not exist.

Sure, Toto IV has killer sound, but that’s no guarantee that the first album would be recorded (or mastered or pressed) as well.

In the world of audio — vinyl, equipment, what have you — there are no guarantees. The average 180 gram remastered audiophile pressing should be all the proof you need.

Good intentions don’t count for much in this business, or anywhere else for that matter.

Enough about bad audiophile records.

Copy number three also had jump-out-of-the-speakers presence without being aggressive, gritty or strident, no mean feat for a pop record from this era. Like all the best rock records, the good ones make you want to turn up the volume; the louder they get the better they sound.

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Dynamic Vocals Like Thelma Houston’s Require Really Big Speakers

houstivego

Hot Stamper Pressings of Direct-to-Disc Recordings Available Now

Unlike most Direct to Disc recordings, this album actually contains real music worth listening to — but only when the pressing lets the energy of the musicians through, accompanied, of course, by fidelity to the sound of their instruments.

Brass without bite is boring.

Drummers who drum too delicately will put you to sleep.

But the focus of this commentary is on dynamic vocals.

To Know You Is to Love You has the potential to come right at you in a shockingly powerful way. This lady can sing as loud as the best of all the greats.

It sounds like there is virtually no compression on Ms Houston’s vocals whatsoever. There has to be a limiter of some kind, but when she starts to really belt it out, you will not believe how powerfully she can sing. Might just give you goosebumps.

Don’t Misunderstand on side two has an equally dynamic vocal. It’s probably my favorite track on the album.

The loudest choruses of Got to Get You into My Life / I’ve Got the Music in Me are a tough test for any system as well.

This could easily be the most dynamic vocal album you have ever heard. It’s right up there at the top for us too.

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Letter of the Week – “All I can say about that one is wow!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

One of our good customers wrote to tell us about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Good evening!

My 4 recent Hot Stamper purchases are all outstanding, particularly Ambrosia’s debut album. All I can say about that one is wow! I have a lot of great audiophile LPs, and this one is one of the best sounding in my collection of around 750 LP’s.

Sonically it is outstanding and every bit as good as you describe. I had never heard anything off of the album, other than “Holding on to Yesterday,” and I agree with you that it’s a killer album! Thanks!
Randy

Randy,

So glad to hear you liked my favorite album of all time! Thanks for taking a chance of it.

I created this group of recordings to throw some light on titles audiophiles may not know well but should, and Ambrosia is one of those:

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Ambrosia’s debut is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should.

Thanks again for your business and we hope to find you lots of Better Records in 2023!

TP