Click on the link below and give this system a listen for a minute or two.
Have you ever heard live music that sounded like this?
Who in his right mind wants a stereo with this kind of ridiculously artificial sound?
If you’re reading this blog, I hope it’s not you, because you will never find a record on our site with sound this unnatural.
If you like the sound of an album such as Aerial Boundaries, then buy this speaker. It will make all your records sound just like it! It’s the perfect example of a pass/fail record, the way this speaker is an example of a pass/fail speaker.
Here is how we described the sound of Aerial Boundaries years ago:
It sounds as if someone went into the biggest room in the studio they could book, sat Michael Hedges down on a stool out in the middle of it, and then took all the mics and aimed them at the walls. Roll tape! (Assuming they used tape, who knows what kind of crap digital system they were using.)
And the best part is that it was nominated for an engineering Grammy!
If you think the average music lover today wouldn’t know good sound if it bit him in the ass, this album is proof that nothing has changed, not since 1984 anyway.
Some commentary I found on the web
Aerial Boundaries is the second album by guitarist Michael Hedges released on the Windham Hill label in 1984. It was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Engineered Recording.
We’ve done a number of shootouts for A Collection of Beatles Oldies over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the sound of the originals vis-a-vis the reissues:
The best of the early pressings always win our shootouts. No reissue has ever earned our top grade of A+++ and it is unlikely any reissue ever will.
The reissues can be quite good however. The best of them have earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
The worst of the early pressings also earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
Conclusion: if you have a bad original and a good reissue, you might be fooled into thinking the sound quality was comparable.
The spindle trails are the strongest evidence that this record is more than likely completely worn out and noisy as hell.
At a cost of roughly $50 to send it back, and more than $150 to buy it and have it shipped across the Atlantic in the first place, this is the kind of pain we have to be willing to accept.
We eat noisy records like this week in and week out. There is simply no way around it. If there was another way to find the well cared for pressings that we offer our customers, I think we would have found it by now. If you know of one, please drop us a line.
Once you discover that Machine Head only sounds its best on the early British pressings, and you therefore would like to acquire one for your collection, you have your work cut out for you, my friend. Ask lots of questions and hope you get honest answers.
We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.
Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:
Robert tries to remain positive when choosing the words that would best describe the award winning Impex release of Legrand Jazz. In the end he goes with the spoken word over the written one.
Years ago I wrote about how important the Legrand Jazz album was for me in my growth as a critical listener. It’s yet another example of an album that helped make me a better audiophile by showing me the errors of my tweaking and tuning ways.
Let’s watch the video and see what Robert has learned about Impex’s recent release.
Michael Fremer gives the Impex pressings an 11 for sound. He writes (emphasis added):
“This IMPEX reissue is sourced from an “analog mix-down transfer of the original 1958 work tape by Mark Wilder at Battery Studios” and cut by Chris Bellman and Bob Donnelly at Bernie Grundman Mastering on Grundman’s all-tube mastering system. I have a clean, original 6-Eye pressing that this superbly pressed reissue betters in every way. This will make both your stereo and your heart sing. Some of the greatest jazz musicians of that or any era wailing and clearly having a Legrand time. Limited to 3000 copies. Don’t miss it!”
Who are you going to believe, the Self-Appointed Vinyl Experts of the World and Bestowers of Prestigious Audio Awards (awards which you may have never heard of; I sure hadn’t), or some guy who’s just dedicated to being an Analog Audiophile and knows a good record when he hears one? (Or doesn’t hear one, as the case may be.)
Like Robert, I tried being kinder and gentler, but it didn’t take. I may resolve to try harder in 2024 2026. Then again, I may not. If we’re nicer to the people currently making Heavy Vinyl records, aren’t we running the risk, to cop a line from the late, great P.J. O’Rourke, of encouraging them?
Click on the link above to see an interesting and informative video that we think is well worth watching.
Allow me to make a few points:
As to the question posed above, my vote would of course be no. The new Beatles albums are awful sounding. Here are a few of rour eviews detailing their many shortcomings:
After playing those three, we gave up on the idea of playing the rest of the set.
The Mono Box (in analog!) was even worse. We played one record, heard truly awful sound, and that was all she wrote.
Mushy Sound Quality
Andrew Milton, the Parlogram Auctions guy, offers opinions about the sound quality of the various pressings he reviews. Naturally we are skeptical of reviewers’ opinions for reasons that should be clear to readers of this blog.
We have no idea how he cleans his records or how carefully he plays his records, or even what he listens for.
Frankly, even if we knew all those things it wouldn’t mean much to us. So many reviewers like so many bad sounding modern records that we’ve learned not to take anything they say seriously.
The comment about the 1G stampers being “mushy” that Andrew makes about 19 minutes in is one we take exception to. Part of the problem with his comment is that we can’t really be sure what he means by “mushy.” If it means smeary or thick, that has not been our experience with the best cleaned originals.
Since the later pressings tend to be thinner and less Tubey Magical, they are probably even less “mushy,” assuming I have the definition of the term right.
My guess is that he has a system with problems like those we had thirty years ago.
Our playback systems from the 80s and 90s were tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical pressings such as the reissues of A Collection of Beatles Oldies…
But to say that the 1G stampers were used for both the originals as well as the reissues with the Black and Silver labels and that therefore the sound is the same is definitely a sign that Andrew’s understanding of stampers and pressings is hopelessly incomplete.
What We Think We Know
We have done a number of shootouts for the album over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the originals versus the reissues:
On the Big Think website, Michael Strevens has outlined some ideas from his recent book about how science advances.
I stumbled upon Strevens through Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Podcast. Shermer and his professor guest discuss at length (about an hour and a half) his singular insight that trying to understand and promulgate a Big Picture of Reality is what kept the scientists of the past (they used to call themselves natural philosophers) for hundreds of years from actually making the breakthroughs necessary to come up with one.
What was needed was data, and lots of it, with no concern for theories of any kind, elegant, inelegant or otherwise.
Here is the link to the podcast, which we feel is well worth your time if a deeper understanding of how we gain knowledge is a subject that interests you.
Some of the key takeaways from the book:
Modern science requires scrutinizing the tiniest of details and an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.
Many scientists believe that theories should be “beautiful,” but such argumentation is forbidden in modern science.
Neglecting beauty would be a step too far for Aristotle.
My heart raced a bit when I read the line “an almost irrational dedication to empirical observation.”
This describes our obsession with finding the best sounding pressings of our favorite music better than any seven words I’ve ever come up with, that’s for sure. If only I were a better writer!
However, I did have some skills to bring to bear on the problems I was trying to solve, the most important of which was the fact that I was a naturally a skeptic.
Steve Westman invited me to appear again on his youtube channel chat with the Audiophile Roundtable.
At about the 39 minute mark, we discuss my picks for what I would rate as the Five Best Sounding Records I know of.
I wanted to go with more variety, so I picked two rock records, two jazz records and one classical album.
A rough transcription with corrections and additions follows:
Before I did my top five, I wanted to say something along the lines of, if you want to know where somebody’s coming from in audio, you don’t ask them what their stereo is, you don’t ask them what their room is like, and how their electricity is done, and what their history with audio is, because they’re not going to tell you, and they just don’t want to go down that road.
But you can ask them about music, and that will tell you a lot about where they’re coming from, so here are my questions for people if I wanted to know more about their understanding of records (and, by implication, audio):
One: what are the five best sounding records you’ve ever heard?
Two: what are your five favorite records of all time?
Three: what five famous recordings never sounded good to you?
Four: name five recordings that are much better than most of your friends or audiophiles in general think?
In my world, you would have to tell me what pressing you’re listening to. If you said “I love the new Rhino Cars album,” I think we would be done, but if you told me that you love the original, then I would say yes, I love that record too. I bought it in 1978 and I’ve played it about 5000 times. Never tired of hearing it.
At about the 48 minute mark I reveal the best stampers for Ry Cooder’s Jazz album.
At about the 50 minute mark someone asks about my system. This would be my answer:
All that information is on the blog., I actually do a thing about my stereo where I take it all the way from 1976 to the present, which I’m sure bores people to death, but you know, there was a lot to talk about there.
There were a lot of changes that I went through and I even talk about how my old stereo from the 90s, which I had put together after having been an audiophile for 25 years, was dark and unrevealing compared to the one I have now, so all my opinions from 25 years ago are suspect, and rightly so.
I feel the same thing is going on in the world of audiophiles when you have systems that aren’t very revealing and aren’t tonally accurate, yet are very musical and enjoyable the way Geoff would like, but they’re not good for really knowing what your records sound like because your system is doing all sorts of things to the record that you’re playing in order to keep the bad stuff from bothering you.
All the bad stuff just jumps out of the speakers, and that’s why these heavy vinyl records don’t appeal to us anymore, because we hear all the bad stuff and we don’t like it.
At 1:03 I’m asked if I like any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I can think of is Chris Bellman, because he masterered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressing I know of that sounds any good, Brothers in Arms, released in 2021. I played it when Edgers brought it by the studio when he first visited me in preparation for his article.
My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s mostly sounds right, and that surprised me because most of these modern records sound funny and weird and rarely do they sound right.
(Geoff brought over three records that day: Brothers in Arms, the remastered Zep II, and a ridiculously bad sounding Craft pressing of Lush Life, which was mastered by Bernie Grundman, and one which I have not had time to review yet. It was my introduction to the Craft series (in this case the small batch, limited to 1000), and let’s just say we got off on the wrong foot. I told Geoff it sounded like a bad CD, and that’s pretty much all I remember of it. The average price for that pressing on Discogs is roughly $210 these days. The CD is cheaper and there is very little doubt in my mind that it would be better sounding to boot.)
At 1:04 I mention the biggest snake oil salesman in the history of vinyl, the man behind The Electric Recording Company.
Patrick mentions an ERC Love record which he likes, but we played one that sounded about as bad as a bad record could sound. That Love record will never get any love from us. He says he’ll never buy another ERC pressing, but that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing someone who really likes a record would say, does it? I suppose you can ask him in the comments section why that would be.
At some point I talk about the studio we play records in, not exactly spouse-friendly but good for hearing what’s really in the grooves of the records we play:
The reason the sound room is the way it is is because you’re not there to be reading magazines and looking at your phone. You’re just in there to sit in a single chair in front of two speakers, not talking. Nobody else is in there. They have no business being in there. It’s just you and the music and that’s the way I like it.
This next section has been fleshed out quite a bit. I took the question posed and ran with it:
The Washington Post article that Geoff Edgers wrote includes a video of a little shootout we did for Tapestry, using, without my knowledge, the MoFi One-Step, a Hot Stamper pressing, and a current, modern, standard reissue of the album. Could I spot the Hot Stamper without knowing what record was playing?
First up (and of course unbeknownst to me), the MoFi. My impressions from the video:
That’s probably tonally correct for this record. It’s just missing everything that’s good about this record, which is a meaty, rich piano. And the vocal sounds very dry. There’s no Tubey Magic. It’s tonally correct. If you were playing me a CD right now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you weren’t.
Next up, the cheap ($20?), current reissue:
Piano’s better.
Voice is better!
Richer and smoother.
That’s what this is supposed to sound like.
Her voice sounds mostly correct.
This might not be a particularly good record. If I played a real one for you, you might just say, oh, my God, there’s so much more.
But this is not a wrong record. It’s not awful. It’s doing something… I don’t know if I would say most things right. I’ll just say something right.
At least the person understands what she’s supposed to sound like.
Then the Hot Stamper (a Super Hot copy as it turns out):
She sounds pretty right on this copy.
I think there’s more space.
You hear more space, more three-dimensional space.
The piano: there’s more richness to the tone of the various notes that she’s playing.
I would probably pick this one.
Jeff sums it all up as follows:
So we have a winner, and I couldn’t fool the Hot Stamper king.
Without knowing what he was listening to, he chose the hot stamper of Tapestry.
If he still had it, that copy would be sold for about $400 on the Better Records website.
When we went back and played each of the pressings again, the differences were much more pronounced. The MoFi still sounded like a CD, the current Columbia reissue was still no better than passable, and the Hot Stamper became even better sounding than it had been earlier, with sound the other two could not begin to offer.
Our grades for the three pressings would have been F, C and A, in that order.
In the video, you can see that it took me a few minutes to get deep into the sound, but once I was there, it turned out to be no contest. The Hot Stamper was the only pressing capable of showing us just how good Tapestry can sound.
Colorations Are Bad Now?
The MoFi was by far the worst sounding of the three. As I said, it sounded to me like a CD.
In the video below, Robert discusses how Tubey Magical his system is when playing an All Tube Chain recording from 1955, this without the benefit of any tubes in his system whatsoever. Quite the trick!
Everything was fine until he decided to track down a clean, quiet, good-sounding copy of Julie Is Her Name for a friend. As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished, and after buying scores of copies of Julie London’s records off the internet ourselves, we know firsthand how painful it is to have one noisy record after another arrive on our doorstep.
Advice We Think Can Help You Make More Audio Progress
Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:
Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
