TML

Presenting a smattering of titles mastered at one of the greatest mastering houses of all time, The Mastering Lab.

If you know of any remastered pressings that improve upon their TML counterparts, please email your list to me at tom@better-records.com.

Bella Donna – Speculate Shmeculate

Hot Stamper Pressings of Stevie Nicks’ Music Available Now

The sound of the typical copy can best be summed up in three words: thin, hard and bright.

When the sound is thin or hard or bright, the fun factor of this mainstream rock, at least for us audiophiles, drops to zero.

Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around and Leather And Lace both sound great on the radio, why not on Warners vinyl?

We sure can’t blame Sheffield Labs, the original cutting house: all the copies we played — good, bad and otherwise — were originals and mastered by them.

Could it be the vinyl?

It could. It could be a lot of things, but speculating about them doesn’t really get us (or you) anywhere, so I’m going to stop doing it and just say we played a big pile of records and heard a lot of unpleasant sound. If you own the record you probably know what I’m talking about.

Our Approach

In order to do the work we do, our approach to audio has to be fundamentally different from that of the audiophile who listens for enjoyment. Critical listening and listening for enjoyment go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

The first — developing and applying your critical listening skills — allows you to achieve good audio and find the best pressings of the music you love.

Once you have a good stereo and a good record to play on it, your enjoyment of recorded music should increase dramatically.

A great sounding record on a killer system is a thrill.

A Heavy Vinyl mediocrity, played back on what passes for so many audiophile systems these days — regardless of cost — is, to these ears, an intolerable bore.

If this sounds arrogant and elitist, so be it.

We set a higher standard. Holding our records to that higher standard allows us to price our records commensurate with their superior sound and please the hell out of the people who buy them.

For those who appreciate the difference, and have resources sufficient to afford them, the cost is reasonable. If it were not we would not grown to have a staff of ten doing the work we do. We would have gone out of business years ago. Businesses that do not satisfy the needs of their customers do not stay in business for long.*

Hot Stampers are not cheap. If the price wasn’t more than justified by the better sound quality and quieter surfaces, who in his right mind would buy them? We can’t really be fooling that many audiophiles, can we?

Some folks think the whole Hot Stamper thing is hogwash, a case of mass hysteria, a psychological syndrome that does exist and cannot be ruled out as a possibility. Maybe our customers are as delusional as most forum posters think they are.

Keep in mind that virtually none of the folks who write about us have ever heard one of our records, so that should help you decide how much confidence you should put in whatever explanations they might have to offer.

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How Novel Patterns Emerge During Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

When you sit down to play ten or twelve copies of an album, one right after the other, patterns in the sound are going to emerge from that experience, patterns which would be very likely to pass unnoticed when playing one copy against another or two over the course of the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to do it.

In the case of this album, the pattern we perceived was simply this: About one or two out of that dozen or so will have punchy, solid, rich, deep bass. (There is a huge amount of bass on the recording, so recognizing those special copies is not the least bit difficult if you have a full-range speaker and a properly treated room.)

About one or two copies really get the top end right, which is easily heard when the cymbals splash dynamically, with their harmonics intact, and they extend high about the rest of the soundfield (precisely the way they do in live music).

(Fewer copies have an extended top end compared to those with tight punchy bass by the way.)

Like so many Mastering Lab tube-mastered records from the era, most copies tend to be somewhat smooth.

Only one copy had both the best bass and the best highs.

All the other copies fell short in one or both of these areas.

Think about it: if you do your home shootouts with three or four or even five copies of an album, what are the chances that:

1. You will detect this pattern? Or,
2. That you will run into the one copy that does it all?

This is precisely the reason we have taken the concept of doing comparisons between pressings to an entirely new level.

It’s the only way to find the outliers in the group, the “thin tails” as the statisticians like to call them. (More on outliers here.)

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Letter of the Week – ““…that look,” you know, the one you see when audiophiles are utterly captivated.”

More of the Music of Toto

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Toto

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

Bought myself a Super Hot copy of Toto for Christmas. Couldn’t wait that long to play it though. For such a familiar record with so many hits heard so many times I sure don’t remember it ever sounding like this!

It is so true what you say about certain records really being meant to be played loud. This record positively BEGS to be played loud! The sound is so clear and dynamic and open, from the top to the bottom, it hard to believe. There is no edge or glare like you would get on CD. There really is no comparison.

This is my 24th Hot Stamper. I have a lot of really good pressings, that would impress anyone. Good enough it is easy to think, “This is as good as it gets.” At least, until I put on a Hot Stamper. Then immediately it hits me, “What were you thinking?!” The beauty of it is I now have enough to do a full evening listening to Hot Stampers.

I had a group of audiophiles over one time. Some of them came from out of state. After the usual demagnetizing and warmup with some of my good “regular” records I went to Hot Stampers. You should have seen the reaction. They were already listening, but now leaning in, every one of them with “that look,” you know, the one you see when audiophiles are utterly captivated.

Thanks, Tom, and Merry Christmas!

Fantastic letter, thanks so much.

So true about Toto – when a record has a naturally smooth EQ, then the louder it gets the more correct it gets. These audiophile records with their peaky sound and boosted extreme highs can’t be played loud because all that fake EQ hurts your ears when loud.

Thanks all your support and hope to find you more good records in the coming year!

Best, TP

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The Sheffield Drum Record

More Direct-to-Disc Recordings

Reviews and Commentaries for Direct to Disc Recordings

This Minty looking Sheffield Direct-to-Disc LP has AMAZING SOUND. We played it against other pressings we had and this was clearly the winner. It’s lively, with a wonderfully extended top and bottom. We rate it about A++ – A+++ on both sides. 

The record features improvisations from Jim Keltner (one of the all-time great session drummers) and Ron Tutt (Elvis Presley’s studio drummer). The album is a member of the famous TAS list.

Ambrosia – The First Four Plus Copy We’d Ever Heard, Going All the Way Back to 2008

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This White Hot Stamper original LP goes BEYOND DEMO DISC sound. What that means exactly I’m not sure, but I know it when I hear it, and this record has THAT SOUND.

We had no choice but to award this side one the very rare A with FOUR pluses A++++. Side one of this copy has ENERGY and LIFE we have never heard before.

No other copy had this kind of OFF THE CHARTS sound on either side, which means we feel no compunction awarding this side one our Ultimate Rating of A Quadruple Plus (A++++). Only a handful of records over the course of the last few years have earned such a grade, certainly no more than ten, and if memory serves there has never been a record with Four Pluses on both sides; that would be just too extraordinary, the Black Swan incarnate.

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we often place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

This Side One

Going back to our best Hot Stamper Triple Plus contenders for the final shootout round, we dropped the needle on this one and it could not have taken three seconds to know that this copy was BEYOND amazing, truly in a league of its own.

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Santana’s Guitar Solos Soar on Inner Secrets

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums with Especially Dynamic Guitar Solos Available Now

On side two the final guitar solo Santana takes on Well All Right gets as loud in the mix as any guitar solo on any rock record that I know of (off the top of my head).

This link will take you to some of the other records with especially dynamic guitar solos we have auditioned to date.

The sound gets louder after the first chorus, then louder still right before the second solo, and then the solo itself gets even louder until it seems to be as loud as live music. (Operative word: seems.)

Does it seem odd to you that the only audiophiles writing about the amazing sound of this recording are those who happen to work for Better Records?

Oh, we’ve gotten pretty used to it by now. It’s mostly a function of two things: cleaning and playing lots of copies of the same album to find the ones with the incredible dynamics we’re discussing here, and playing them on big speakers at loud levels so that the power of the music gets reproduced in all its glory.

Two points to keep in mind:

  • Some copies get loud and some do not.
  • Some stereos are dynamic and some are not.

If you have the right stereo, set at the right volume, and the hottest of our Hot Stamper copies, you will hear something that not one out of one hundred audiophiles (or music lovers) have ever heard on a record — LIVE ROCK SOUND.

What makes it possible to play this record so loud and still enjoy it? Simple. Just like Nirvana, 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.) 

One reason the turn up your volume test is such a great test — the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

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