video

The Beach Boys – Sail on, Sailor

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Beach Boys

The original record is dull on the lead vocal, but the chorus is magic.

All the other versions get is wrong as far as I can tell, and in exactly the way I describe in this commentary for Jackson Browne’s first album: Jackson Browne’s debut – smooth or detailed, which Is right?

UPDATE 2025

The youtube clip posted here has been removed, sorry!

Most of the clips posted here are so modern and phony and wrong they make my head hurt. Really boosted on the top. Who on earth wants that sound? Apparently some people do.

The real pressings never sounded that way. Although they may need some modest help in the EQ department, making wholesale changes to the sound — as was clearly done for most of these modern versions — is just wrong.

It ruins everything that is good about the recording.

Now do you see why we have so little respect for modern mastering engineers?

They ruin classic titles like Surfs Up with their “improvements.” They destroy what is good about vintage analog while promoting themselves as the protectors of vintage analog.

The only people who can be trusted to promote the sound of vintage analog are the people who sell it and write about it.

The rest of them are frauds and charlatans and, as far as I can tell, deaf as a post.

A Chat with Yours Truly

The Video That Started It All

Steve Westman graciously invited one of the most controversial members of the Audiophile Community — that would be me — to appear on his youtube channel for a half hour chat. When he couldn’t shut me up, it ended going for an hour.

I want to thank him for putting up with me while I spent the time mostly criticizing all the modern reissues he seems to favor.

Please read the comments and feel free to post your own if you have something you would like to say. I read them all.

Say whatever you like, I can take it!

Unlike the Tom Port of twenty years ago, and some rather famous reviewers still writing today, my skin has grown quite thick since I started causing trouble in the vinyl community with my crackpot ideas and uncontrolled greed. People seem to enjoy beating up on me and the snake oil they accuse me of selling, but more than a thousand years ago one of the great Stoic philosophers offered his advice on how to deal with the criticisms of one’s detractors. This is advice that I have tried to heed myself for lo these many years, not always successfully.

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday.

The secret from Marcus Aurelius for when we get flak or insults or judgment from other people? He said we should look inside their soul.

“Get inside him,” Marcus wrote. “Look at what sort of person he is. You’ll find you don’t need to strain to impress him.”

His point was that too often we blindly “accept” what haters throw at us without stopping to actually examine who these haters actually are. You wouldn’t take driving advice from a bad driver, or be guilted about your finances from someone who knows nothing about money.

Nor should you listen to people telling you you’re not good at this or that, that you’re failing here or there, whether you should act in one way or another, if you don’t respect that person and their own choices.

If you want to stop caring what other people think, take a second and actually look at those people for a second. You’ll quickly find that there isn’t much to be harried on about, that you’re doing just fine.

In response to some of my critics, I wrote a commentary entitled a kinder, gentler approach to record reviewing.

Check it out if you have time.

(more…)

The Tapestry Shootout Video Is Here!

Geoff Edgers’ Washington Post article “The Search for the Perfect Sound,” in which he talks to lots of audiophiles and music lovers about his personal journey into the world of audiophile equipment and records, is now active on their website.

NEWSFLASH! This is currently the most popular story/video on the WAPO website! Number One with a bullet, baby. [Alas, no longer.]

Don’t miss the video below of yours truly doing a shootout for Tapestry.

It’s actually not a real shootout. For Tapestry we would typically play 8-10 early pressings and grade them for sound. This was more of a test, to see if I could spot the Hot Stamper among the pretenders, more What’s My Line than a shootout.

Part of the attraction of course is that I’m the guy they love to hate. Just check out the comments.

And please add some of your own. You are the only people on the planet qualified to talk about Hot Stampers because you are the only ones who have heard them on your own stereos with your own two ears.

Why should anyone care what somebody else has to say about something that that person has never experienced? The reason we stopped posting on the Hoffman website back in 2002 was simply the fact that I was tired of arguing with people that have strong opinions about the results of experiments they have never run.

Hot Stamper Shootouts are simply our way of doing blinded experiments on various pressings of records. We eschew theories and conjecture. We prefer observations and data. We write about these issues a lot here on the blog for those who would like to learn more about records. If you already know it all, this is probably not a blog you will find of much value.

I will be posting some comments soon, mostly about all the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor. We spent most of the time with some orange label Vertigo pressings of Dire Straits’ first album, finding a White Hot Stamper LP out of the batch we played, then comparing our records to the execrable Mobile Fidelity 45 RPM 2 disc pressings, pressings so bad they defy understanding. But that is another story for another day! (The MoFi was mastered by Krieg Wunderlich, so if you see his name in the credits of a record you may be interested in, don’t waste your money. He is hopelessly incompetent and can be counted on to produce some of the worst sounding audiophile records ever made.)

I had eye surgery on my right earlier on the day of the interview, so hopefully that accounts for some of my squinty appearance.

I have also been invited to participate in a Reddit Q&A sometime next week, discussing the issues raised in the article or video anyone would like to ask about, so stay tuned for that, and I hope you will participate as well.

Our customers have plenty of their own Hot Stamper stories to tell, and I hope to hear from some of you on that Reddit panel.

You are the only audiophiles with real, first-hand knowledge of what a Hot Stamper sounds like. Perhaps you will wish to share with other audiophiles what they don’t know they are missing.

And if you have any questions of any other kind, I hope you will give me a chance to answer them.

Just email tom@better-records.com

(more…)

Should We Tell This Guy the MoFi of Kind of Blue Is a Joke?

Hot Stamper Pressing of Miles’s Albums Available Now

The MoFi of KOB may be a joke, but don’t bother telling this guy, who appears to be rather new to this whole “reviewing” thing.

He has a record store in Phoenix and a youtube channel called The “In” Groove, wherein he proffers advice to audiophiles about records. Unsurprisingly, he tends to favor audiophile pressings. No doubt he sells lots of them in his store.

To quote the man himself, “I do a review of the best sounding copy’s [sic] of Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue. What are the copy’s [sic] you should own?”

Obviously, literacy is not his strong suit, so writing about records is out, replaced by endless talking about records on another one of these insufferable content-light videos.

Everything of interest this gentleman has to say could be written on the back of a napkin and read in the span of the average TV commercial, but that would require stringing together lots of words and arranging them so that they make some kind of sense. It’s so much easier to chat about vinyl while seated in front of some very expensive and no doubt awful sounding (judging by the results of this “shootout”) McIntosh electronics. (I am on record as being opposed to this approach to audio, and have been proselytizing for the benefits of low power amps for more than twenty years.)

Regardless of what he thinks he is doing, in no way does this fellow actually review the best sounding copies, because he’s too inexperienced and ill-informed to even bother with the ’70s Red Label reissue pressings, some versions of which happen to be among the best pressings we’ve heard, a subject we discuss here.

Our Kind of Blue Obsession

KOB is an album we have been obsessed with for a very long time, along with a great many others.

(more…)

Does It Seem to You That This Guy Knows Much About Records? Any Records?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

I had posted one of his videos here under the heading “Does it seem like this guy knows anything about Dark Side of the Moon?”

That was too generous. Apparently he does not know anything about records period. Any records. Records with any titles.

That would include records with the title Led Zeppelin II, the subject of today’s commentary.

This video has to be The. Dumbest. Video. Ever.

(more…)

The Hollies Remember – On a Carousel (various session segments)

More of the Music of The Hollies

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Hollies

If only their recordings were better. Most of their early albums sound like they are playing on an AM radio.

Thanks god The Beatles were so well recorded (although I have to say With the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night are consistently thinner and brighter than they should be, and thinner and brighter than the albums that follow and Please Please Me before them).